Your Party hopes new commission will produce disability policies based on real life

Disabled members of Your Party, the troubled new grassroots socialist party, are hoping a commission will develop a series of disability policies based on the “real life experience” of “normal, day-to-day people”.

Your Party, which has been hit by in-fighting and defections in recent months, has told members it will use the commission to build its disability policies “from scratch”.

By early this week, more than 450 members had signed up to take part in the launch of the party’s Disability Rights Commission, which is due to take place online this evening (Thursday).

It is the first in a series of commissions that will feed policy suggestions back to the party, before being voted on by members.

Today’s launch event will set up working groups to produce policy ideas – aiming to find three priority areas for policy development – with a majority of their members likely to be disabled people.

Disabled activist Hannah Hawkins, from Middlesbrough, who will be chairing the launch and facilitating the commission, said the working groups would be full of “grassroots, normal, day-to-day people” who are disabled people, carers and professionals who work with disabled people, and will all “draw from real-life experience”.

She said that Jeremy Corbyn (pictured with Hawkins), the party’s co-founder and Westminster leader, was “hell-bent on the Disability Rights Commission being a success”.

The party had told Disability News Service that Corbyn, who is due to speak to the launch event this evening, would comment on the importance of the commission, but he had failed to do so by noon today.

Hawkins said: “What we want to do is to stop getting a bunch of people in a room who aren’t disabled to write policy about disabled people’s lives.

“I personally am very sick of policymakers telling me how and when and how and what I should be disabled and what I should think about my disability.

“One of our lines is we’ll be trying to do politics differently, and this is where it starts, by having policy written by real people, not people in suits, not fancy people who do this for a career.

“Obviously, it will be put through the more formal channels in its final stages to ensure it’s coherent, watertight, and well-written.”

She said she wanted the policies to be based on an understanding of the social model of disability and the need for disabled people to have equal access to society.

She said: “Equal access should never be something that we have to fight for.”

Hawkins, who has a disabled son, particularly hopes the commission will produce policy on special educational needs (SEN) – her son was left “absolutely traumatised” by the failure to provide him with the support he needed in a mainstream school – and ensure that “no-one feels left out”.

She is an elected member of the party’s central executive committee – one of two representatives for the north-east of England – which runs the party and is answerable to members.

She is full of praise for how Your Party has enabled her to take part as a disabled member of the CEC, for example by paying for hotel accommodation both before and after an event it asked her to speak at in London.

She hopes the commission will have policies to present to next year’s annual conference in autumn 2027, so they can be voted on by members.

She said it was “vitally important that no voices are missed” by the commission because “disabled people want to be heard”.

Hawkins said: “That is fundamentally the issue. We are so often talked about instead of to, and that needs to change. We need to be in the room.”

Another disabled member, Joann Taylor, from Salford, said the contrast with the Labour government – which has so far failed to produce a long-term disability strategy, two years after its general election victory – “couldn’t be sharper”.

She is hoping the party will develop policy around her campaign on flaws in the disabled facilities grant system which have allowed housing associations to “delay, restrict and deny adaptations” and leave many disabled tenants “trapped in unsafe conditions”.

She said the member-led commission was a “gamechanger” and would “give campaigns like mine the political platform we were denied”, and that the party was “building a structure to ensure our voices cannot be ignored”.