Disability rights

Activist Agenda: campaigns and info

A list of many campaigns that Workers' Liberty activists are involved with and support, plus info about other organising and resources.

Tories assault disabled benefits

The government Autumn Statement announced changes to benefits which are cruel, vindictive and won’t help people return to work. The government claims to be addressing long term economic inactivity as 2.55 million people are off work due to chronic illness. The changes announced are to the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) starting from 2025. The WCA is a test in which disabled claimants, if assessed as unable to work, are put in the category of LCW or LCWRA — Limited Capacity to Work or Limited Capacity for Work Related Activity. People in the LCWRA group receive an extra £390.06 a month and...

DWP cover-up fails

For the best part of a decade disability rights activists have been battling the management of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to prevent the burying of information about deaths of benefit claimants.

Strike to save the NHS!

The past few months have seen the biggest strikes by nurses in the history of the NHS. The RCN began its action in December, though has (at the time of writing) suspended action around negotiations. Unison, GMB and Unite have called out paramedics. Meanwhile, the BMA’s thumping victory in its national ballot has brought Junior Doctors into the dispute. As in the broader strike wave, pay is the core issue of the dispute. With inflation soaring, and after more than a decade of pay cuts, nurses were awarded a miserable £1,400 for 2022-23. This situation, combined with the wider crisis in the NHS...

Kino Eye: The Lost Prince

Most “royal” films are dross, but an exception is Stephen Poliakoff’s The Lost Prince (BBC, 2003), which recounts the short life of John, the youngest son of George V and Mary of Teck (the present Queen’s grandparents). John was discovered to be epileptic. He may also have been autistic. Regarded as an embarrassment, he was hidden from public view in a corner of the Sandringham Estate. In the last two years of life he was visited only twice by his mother. His elder brother, later Edward VIII (the one who abdicated), once described him as “more of an animal than anything else”. John was deleted...

Momentum Internationalists Labour conference briefing

Thanks to Momentum Internationalists for this briefing on Labour Party conference (25-29 September, in Brighton) Who are Momentum Internationalists? Momentum Internationalists was formed by activists from the left anti-Brexit campaign Labour for a Socialist Europe, L4SE , in early 2020 to continue the fight for left-wing and internationalist politics after the Tories finally forced through Brexit. We ran candidates in the Momentum NCG elections of 2020 and promoted motions in the Momentum policy priorities ballot of 2021. We are not just a caucus within Momentum. We have been active on the...

Labour activists demand neurodiversity policy - support the reference back!

Labour Party policy is a set of measures that the Party campaigns for in society and would implement in government to better the lives of working class and oppressed people. A good example of this would be actions to end discrimination against neurologically atypical people. So it is shocking and disappointing that despite a comprehensive and popular submission to the National Policy Forum (NPF) on this issue, the NPF report contains not a word about it. Millions of people are autistic, dyslexic, dyspraxic, dyscalculic or otherwise neurodivergent. We experience systematic discrimination and...

The reason I fight

I don’t watch many documentaries about autism, and on the rare occasion when I sit down to watch one, I am overwhelmed with a sense of dread. So much rubbish is said on the subject, even by people who want to be on the right side. So many patronising tropes, so much pity, not enough solidarity. In preparation for watching The Reason I Jump , I speed-read the book on which it is based. In 2007, thirteen-year-old Japanese boy Naoki Higashida wrote about how he experienced the world as a non-speaking autistic person. Particularly since its translation into English in 2013, the book has enabled...

Osime Brown: how we stopped a deportation

From Neurodivergent Labour On 15 June, the Home Office decided that it would not proceed with their barbaric intention to deport autistic, learning-disabled man Osime Brown to a place he has no knowledge of. The victory comes after more than a year of campaigning by a coalition of activists and organisations, under the instrumental guidance of Osime’s mum, Joan. When ND Labour came into the campaign about a year ago, awareness about the case was limited to a layer of autistic and neurodivergent activists and migrants’ rights groups. It was a campaign typical of the classic style: a petition...

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