Today's budget should have offered hope and a lifeline for the 16 million Disabled people across the UK. Over the past 15 years, we've time and again had governments espouse so-called tough choices when they have always just led to our lives getting worse.
From the devastating effects of austerity with massive cuts to social security levels, social care and education, the COVID pandemic, and now the seemingly never-ending cost-of-living crisis, which has resulted in spiralling bills for housing, food and energy.
Today's budget is yet another failure. A failure to make real change. A failure to recognise that Disabled people and those with long-term health conditions should be treated as valued members of society whose lives are equal to all other citizens and who should not be viewed as burdens or cheats whose needs don't deserve to be met. The chancellor is chalking up gains from cutting the social security budget and giving us nothing on the social care system and less than a quarter of what we need to fill the SEND funding gap.
Despite the minimal uplift in spending to fund our crumbling public services, the budget doesn't give Disabled people the confidence that the services we rely on every day will tangibly get better. At the end of the day, the biggest announcement was one our community had been expecting: more Disabled and working-class people seeing their benefits cut whilst there will be no real difference in our local services.