Disabled election candidates: Labour’s Marsha de Cordova

Despite her party’s decision to drop its pledge to implement the UN’s disability convention into UK law, disabled Labour candidate Marsha de Cordova has this week confirmed her own long-standing commitment to the policy.

She describes herself as a “lifelong campaigner for disability rights” and has made it her “mission” to campaign for the rights of disabled people since first being elected to parliament in 2017.

She says it was injustice in education and the labour market that first politicised her as a disabled person.

One of the policies she believes would improve the lives of disabled people would be to incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) into UK law, a policy she has backed for many years.

She repeated that backing this week, despite her party dropping its pledge to implement the convention last year, and failing to include any mention of the UNCRPD in its election manifesto.

De Cordova says she would also like to see more accessible and inclusive public spaces, services and transport, and improve funding for health and social care.

She says she has always been determined to help create a “fairer and more equal society”, with her own lived experience guiding the “two central pillars of my life… making a difference and being a voice for the voiceless”.

She says that “representation matters”, but not just in politics.

“Being who you are should never hold you back,” she says. “I am standing again for re-election as it is important that all people have a voice.

“Our motto is ‘nothing about us without us’ and we can only do that if we are represented in parliament.”

She says there are still “shockingly” few disabled MPs, possibly as few as five in the last parliament, which would have meant disabled people making up less than one per cent of the total number of MPs.

She points out that successive Conservative-led governments set up and then scrapped two schemes that were supposed to help candidates for elected office with their extra disability-related costs.

This, she says, “demonstrates their disdain for our participation in politics”.

De Cordova grew up in Bristol and then moved to London to study and work.

“My career and purpose in life have been interlinked,” she says. “I have always been a lifelong campaigner for disability rights and issues affecting blind and partially-sighted people.”

She worked in the charity sector for more than two decades, including setting up a small charity, South East London Vision, which supported blind and partially-sighted people across south-east London, and as a director at the Thomas Pocklington Trust.

She says: “While the work done by charities is essential, my decision to pursue elected office was informed by the increasing realisation that this work requires representatives in the central institutions of power – whether on a local or national level – to truly realise lasting change.”

She was elected as a Labour councillor in Lambeth in 2014, and then stood as a general election candidate in Battersea in 2017 and overturned a Conservative majority of nearly 8,000, defeating a government minister.

She has served as shadow women and equalities secretary, and as shadow minister for disabled people, where she helped draw up the party’s Breaking Down Barriers disability manifesto for the 2019 general election, which she says would have “delivered transformative change for disabled people in education, employment and health”.

De Cordova says the current government’s record on disability is “woeful” and that the Conservatives have “waged a full-on assault on disabled people”.

She points to the government’s green paper on further cuts and reforms to personal independence payment (PIP), which was published shortly before the election was called, and the “cruel” decision to change the criteria for qualifying for the Warm Home Discount.

But she also highlights how the government downgraded the role of the minister for disabled people from minister of state to a junior ministerial position in October 2022, a move that was only reversed in April this year.

She says Labour “is and has always been the party of equality”.

She highlights its decision to replace the National Disability Council with the much stronger Disability Rights Commission in 1999, the Labour government’s ratification of UNCRPD in 2009, and the passing of the Equality Act, shortly before the 2010 general election, which “enforces, protects and promotes the rights of disabled people”.

Asked why disabled people should vote for her party, she says Labour is “committed to championing the rights of disabled people and to the principle of working with them, so that their views and voices will be at the heart of all we do”.

She points to its manifesto commitments to a new right to equal pay for disabled people, disability and ethnicity pay gap reporting for large employers, improved employment support and access to reasonable adjustments, and reducing the Access to Work backlog.

De Cordova says there is no question that life is far worse for disabled people than when the Conservatives first won power as part of the coalition with the Liberal Democrats in 2010.

“Successive Tory-led governments have implemented an austerity regime which has caused needless suffering to so many, but has disproportionately affected disabled people,” she says.

This regime has included their “cruel and inhumane” benefit sanctions regime, abolishing working-age disability living allowance and replacing it with personal independence payment, cuts to employment and support allowance, the scrapping of the Independent Living Fund, and cutting funding to Deaf and disabled people’s organisations.

She says the post-2010 programme of austerity “has demonised disabled people, harmed our livelihoods, and in some cases resulted in death”, as well as creating a “hostile environment” for disabled people over the last 14 years.

This led to the UK becoming the first country to be investigated for breaches of UNCRPD by the UN’s committee on the rights of disabled people, and being found guilty in 2016 of grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s rights.

She says this was a “stark illustration of the Tory government’s contempt for disabled people”, while a follow-up report by the committee earlier this year found no significant progress and even “signs of regression”.

But still the Conservative government “committed to further entrenchment of their disastrous austerity regime” in this year’s spring budget, she says, while the party has now pledged further social security cuts in its manifesto.

“A further Tory term will be disastrous for disabled people,” says de Cordova.

*This is part of a pre-election series of articles that will give some of the disabled people standing as candidates at the general election a chance to describe why they wanted to stand, how they became politicised, and the kind of barriers they have faced as disabled people. The aim is to raise the profile of some of the disabled people seeking elected office. Disability News Service has analysed party manifesto commitments separately. It has asked two disabled Conservative candidates to take part, but neither of them has responded

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