Activist tells conference meeting: Hostile rhetoric under Labour has left me feeling hounded and unsafe

One of the only disabled activists to speak at Labour’s annual conference has delivered a powerful rebuke to ministers who have failed to do anything to curb the rising levels of disability-related hostility.

Fingers, a disabled RAF veteran who campaigns with Crips Against Cuts and the new group Disabled Resistance, told a fringe event on Monday how her car had been attacked and she had been called a “scrounger” after a young man saw her blue parking badge on the dashboard.

She told an Amnesty International UK fringe event on fixing the broken social security system: “What the language of the last 18 months has done to me is, for the first time in my life… I feel hounded, I feel unsafe.”

She said she felt as though the hostile rhetoric directed at disabled people had turned her into “a non-person”.

She said: “You’re looking at someone who is unsustainable. Why do I have to be a unit of productivity in this country?

“The words we use are fundamentally important. Not one newspaper has run an editorial or article about how these words are making us feel.

“I fought for the country, I worked for the NHS, and now I am effectively a ‘useless eater’.”

Fingers, who also used to chair a mental health charity, told Disability News Service (DNS) after the meeting that four young men had walked past her car as she was waiting at traffic lights in Loughborough about a month ago.

They had seen her blue badge and one of them then bounced on the bonnet of her car and shouted: “Bloody scrounger!”.

She wound down the window and gave them a “stream of obscenities and invective”, but later her anger turned to fear for her safety and that of other disabled people.

She told DNS: “The rhetoric surrounding people who require support because of ill-health has become positively threatening.

“It has been encouraged tacitly by the government.

“It dehumanises people who can’t work and there has been not one shred of fightback by the government about the knock-on effects of their rhetoric.

“It has given a licence for anybody at all to pick on and say hateful things about disabled people, and it’s everywhere, and that makes me feel unsafe.”

The former Labour member, who joined the party to vote for Jeremy Corbyn as party leader and left when he was replaced by Sir Keir Starmer, said she had expected this kind of rhetoric from a Conservative government, but it was “shocking” that it had continued under a Labour government, which had even made the situation worse.

She was also critical that the fringe event had been held on an inaccessible stage without a ramp, as highlighted by Daily Mirror columnist Susie Boniface, who chaired an event in the same location within ACC Liverpool.

Although she is not a wheelchair-user, Fingers has a physical impairment and struggled with the inaccessible stage, which she said was “shameful for Labour”.

Because of the lack of chairs in the conference centre, she had already been forced to resort to sitting in the accessible toilet to prepare for her presentation at the fringe event.

She said: “I was in quite a bit of pain when I left that conference. It would have been alleviated if I had had anything other than a disabled loo to sit on.”

DNS reports elsewhere this week that Disability Labour – which often provides free access advice to the party at its annual conference – was priced out of attending this year’s event by the party.

Meanwhile, disabled Labour MP Nadia Whittome told the Amnesty fringe event that she was “really proud” to have played a small part in the backbench rebellion that led to the government withdrawing its planned cuts of billions of pounds to spending on personal independence payment.

But she pointed out that cuts to the health element of universal credit for most new claimants are still going ahead next spring.

She said campaigners must continue to fight against further government cuts to disability benefits, and against disability discrimination, and for investment in public services.

She echoed Fingers’ comments on the political rhetoric and told the fringe event: “People’s worth is not determined by their economic contribution.”

Pictured: (From left to right) Fingers, housing activist Kwajo Tweneboa, and journalist and author Owen Jones, who chaired the meeting

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