FOURTEEN years of the Tories in power have led to disabled people being pushed further and further into poverty, and the actions of the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) led to thousands of unnecessary deaths.

On top of this, the loss of the Independent Living Fund (ILF) in Britain (with the exception of Scotland which has retained it) has led to disabled people losing their social care funding and becoming trapped at home without the support they need to join in with society.

In addition to this, for most people now, including disabled people, it is often impossible to get a GP appointment and hospital waiting lists have never been so long, as our NHS has been ground into crisis.

Dental services too in most parts of Britain are no longer existent and certainly don’t meet our needs, with many people forced to pull out their own teeth.

Back in 2010, there weren’t thousands and thousands of foodbanks which so many disabled people have also been forced to use due to the ever-increasing poverty levels. Serious cases of malnutrition were few and far between then, but are now rife.

The wait for assessments for social care is now months and months, the wait for aids and adaptations and essential wheelchairs can stretch to years. Accessible housing is still rare and almost impossible to obtain — especially at an affordable price.

I could go on and on about the many failures to meet disabled people’s needs but hopefully, this gives a brief oversight as to why the UN Disability Committee found the British government guilty of the grave and systematic violation of disabled people’s human rights and why they are continuing to monitor the new Labour government.

Given all of those factors, you might imagine that we’d be delighted to have a new government but ...

Obviously, getting rid of so many Tories was great to watch although I don’t remember the voter turnout for a general election ever being quite so low — overall around 60 per cent but in many places just over 50 per cent.

I can’t imagine this was simply due to the need for voter ID now and know huge numbers of people were planning not to vote due to their disillusionment with all parties and the fact that a Starmer-led Labour Party was seen as being little different to the Tories.

While many voters made tactical choices to get rid of the Tories, the results showed a large swing to the right, for Reform UK, in too many areas — which is hugely scary. In this most recent election, Starmer’s Labour courted the Tory vote and it is quite possible that the election results and support for Reform will drag them further to the right than they already are.

Indeed, the fact that in the first week after the election they have committed £3 billion a year to support the war in Ukraine — at the same time as they claim there is no money for disability-related needs, or to allow the odious two-child limit in universal credit to be scrapped, allowing over 400,000 children to be lifted out of abject poverty — would seem to indicate such a move to the right is not a figment of my imagination, but likely to be a reality.

Labour could easily scrap plans to push disabled people into work or to scrap plans for entitlement to an enhanced amount for disability-related needs in universal credit to not just be reliant on having Personal Independence Payments (PIP).

They could scrap the plans to remove PIP from many disabled people and it seems that those with a mental health condition or neuro-diverse condition will be most affected by that in spite of people needing a large amount of help to qualify for this payment.

Disabled people are also terrified about plans, which Labour have not agreed to scrap, to make PIP payments some sort of voucher as it is hard to imagine how vouchers would be helpful to people.

Of course, it is true that for people who need social care and who are not in work, PIP is given to them by central government and then taken away from them to pay towards care charges by local authorities.

And what of the election itself? We had Starmer’s Labour Party telling the Labour candidate in Clacton to stop campaigning against Farage, and worse — handing Chingford and Woodford Green literally on a platter to the despised and despicable Iain Duncan Smith, otherwise known as the Butcher of Benefits, by removing Faiza Shaheen as the Labour candidate, although she had been selected by the CLP.

Numerous independent candidates, mainly supporters of Palestine, who stood against Labour candidates, either won or came close second. Jeremy Corbyn also won by a large majority, after being forced to stand as an independent when Starmer removed the whip from him.

The new government was sworn in yesterday and then goes into recess tomorrow, so today, on July 18, DPAC and others will be gathering together at Parliament to enjoy entertainment and make decisions with supporters on the way forward.

Whatever we decide on, that we know that we can’t sit back and rest with a Starmer-led government which seems to have no interest in offering better outcomes to disabled people. #DisabledPeopleDemand real change and better outcomes.