‘Two-Tier Kier’ is no longer a smear following the compromise made with his back benchers to only do over one section of disabled people in the UK.
Like some inverse promo for loan deals or Internet packages, the government will lay off existing disability claims in exchange for duffing up people with the new ones. ‘Get it while it lasts – new customers only.’ *Although a relevant change of circumstances such as a change in your condition classes you as a “new claim” and therefore under the new rules.
Despite it being only five years since the worst global pandemic in a century affected half the UK population killing quarter of 1 million, the government proclaimed its surprise that the numbers of people with long-term health issues have increased at all since 2020. Another example of them paying zero attention to people they would rather clap than pay during the pandemic.
That fatigue, respiratory issues and depression are running riot apparently has no link to what an ill-prepared society and our class had to survive under their watch.
That the scale of benefits is so high, if nothing else, tells us what an unhealthy ‘shitpit’ surviving capitalism is. Ironically, maybe only a Labour government masquerading as the people’s friend could carry out such an assault on such vulnerable groups and hope to get away with it.
The financial reasoning of such decisions is of no interest to us as revolutionists. The well-being of our class versus the protection of the interests of the rich and their wars is always a political decision and, as such, we find no justification ever in the latter outcome. Democracy serves us no better than dictatorship on this.
It is however another irony that a decision driven by the desire to send us to war and increase the manufacture of disability is to be funded by the starving of the existing disabled communities.
We saw such a strategy fail already in the plan to cut winter fuel payments. While at first glance significantly different demographics, there are some striking similarities: Both ‘passive’ recipients of hard fought for state benefits – though now deemed less entitled; both largely seen as passive politically – physically limited and without economic muscle. Consequently, both are not just seen as vulnerable but beatable.
What the state failed to notice is that elder people and people with disabilities are not discreet entities like trans people, migrants, or asylum seekers, but diversely dispersed throughout every house and community in the country. Embedded enough for every sinew of our class to scream no!
That such opposition to injustice can be seen and shared on such a widespread level needs extension to those truly vulnerable communities made invisible by prejudice. The lesson of the response to disability and the elder community should be extended to every section of our class because we are all targets for elimination to facilitate and finance the coming war.
Division is diversion! Labour didn’t invent that. The state requires all its political representatives to divide our class in whatever way it can to divert us from seeing the importance of our unity in our struggle against it.
At times it tries to get us to participate in this by ‘othering’ the other dispossessed of our class, on race, gender, origin, sexuality etc. Each time we fall for this ruse we widen the opening of the avenue of attack back to the main targets of class and vulnerability in all its diverse forms again.
Racism breeds attack on disability, disability discrimination breeds attack on our class made workless by capitalism, et cetera. The cycle of division and defeat begins and ends with the ‘isms’ and the targeting of difference.
The partial defeat of Labour in power was led by activist mobilisation and opposition of our class. The scale was small but indicative of potential. To upscale we need to link struggles of one community with another and identify the ultimate challenges that confront us – growing austerity and impoverishment to meet the war aims of the state’s imperial ambition.
Hunger and austerity are about war and our opposition must oppose war with the energy it refuses division and poverty. Resistance, survival and victory are both the right and obligation of our class. It is our necessity not just to survive from day to day but to abolish an economic class system that offers us no better way of survival.
The class struggle is the peace movement, and victory on the Homefront is its defeat of their plans for war!
AnarCom Network 