Three Threats, One Story: A Statement on the State’s War on Disabled People

A Warning Fulfilled

Thirty years ago, Professor Mike Oliver issued a warning to the Disabled People’s Movement:

The assisted dying Bill fell in April, when it ran out of time in the House of Lords. In June it was reintroduced, unchanged. In that same first week of June, two further stories broke within days of each other. Taken together, all three are not separate stories. They are one story. Oliver named it thirty years ago.

The Political Climate: Crisis, Scapegoating, and the Rise of the Right

These three threats do not arise in a vacuum. They emerge from a specific political moment in the UK: deep economic insecurity, a fracturing of political consensus, and the rapid growth of right-wing political movements. Students of history will recognise the pattern. Economic crisis can produce greater working-class solidarity. It can also produce the conditions in which scapegoating flourishes and marginalised groups become targets.

The UK has seen this dynamic play out in recent years. The riots that erupted following the Southport attacks in the summer of 2024, the surge of Reform UK, the persistent media framing of asylum seekers and benefit claimants as threats to national prosperity. These are not isolated incidents. They are expressions of a wider cultural shift in which the language of burden, dependency, and drain on resources is being normalised across public life. Disabled People are not immune to that language. We are among its primary targets.

Economic crisis. The scapegoating of marginalised groups. A weakened Disabled People’s Movement. Large charities that have absorbed the language of the movement without its politics. Government policies rooted in the medical model of disability. When these combine, the conditions are set for something much worse than policy failure. History does not need to guess where this road leads. Disabled People have been taken down it before.

The Historical Parallel We Cannot Ignore

In 1930s Germany, Disabled People were among the first to be targeted. Nazi propaganda portrayed Disabled People as “useless eaters” and “lives unworthy of living.” It circulated detailed calculations of how much it cost to feed and support a Disabled Person over a lifetime. It framed the existence of Disabled People as a drain on a struggling nation. This propaganda did not begin with mass murder. It began with words: with the slow, incremental normalisation of the idea that Disabled People’s lives were worth less, cost too much, and placed an unfair burden on the healthy majority.

Nobody woke up one morning and announced a programme of mass murder. The process was gradual: language first, policy second, and the worst of it only once public opinion had been softened sufficiently to accept each incremental step. By 1939, Aktion T4, the systematic murder of Disabled People, had begun. Combined with unstructured so-called “wild euthanasia,” it led to the deaths of a quarter of a million Disabled People.

We are not suggesting that the UK in 2026 is Nazi Germany. We are suggesting that the values underpinning what is happening now are recognisable. Then, the pejoratives were “useless eaters” and “lives unworthy of life.” Today, they are “scroungers,” “dependents,” “a burden on the taxpayer,” and “lives not worth living.” Then, the legislative framing was “mercy death” and “the right to death.” Today, it is “dying with dignity” and “assisted dying.” The words have changed. The logic has not.

The large disability charities have been silent on the assisted dying Bill. These are the very organisations that displaced Disabled People’s own organisations and now claim to speak on our behalf. In this context, their silence is not merely disappointing. It is dangerous. Oliver and Barnes asked whether we could rely on the big charities to fight for our right to exist. The answer, in the face of the most significant threat to Disabled People’s lives in a generation, appears to be no.

The DWP’s Deadly Benefits System

John Pring’s book The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence (Pluto Press, 2024) documents over a decade of investigative journalism. It shows how the Department for Work and Pensions ignored repeated warnings about fatal flaws in the disability benefits system, then covered up its role in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of Disabled People. Suicide notes, coroners’ reports, and the testimony of bereaved families form the evidence base for a charge of bureaucratic violence sustained over thirty years.

This week, the Disability News Service reported that the DWP is now secretly testing a sweeping new PIP assessment system, described by experts as a “recipe for disaster”, that would reduce the influence of healthcare professionals and hand greater decision-making power to civil servants. The pattern is consistent: a department that has already overseen the deaths of hundreds of Disabled People is quietly redesigning the system that caused those deaths, without transparency and without accountability.

The DWP was never established as a guardian of Disabled People’s right to exist, and it owes us no such mission. But it administers a system with life-or-death consequences. It has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it will let those consequences fall on Disabled People rather than disturb political and economic imperatives. The big charities are silent on this sustained campaign of bureaucratic violence, just as they are silent on the assisted dying Bill. That silence confirms what Oliver and Barnes were already telling us: we cannot rely on others, whoever they are and whatever their motives.

The Supreme Court DoLS Ruling

On 2 June 2026, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned its own landmark 2014 Cheshire West ruling. Cheshire West established the “acid test” for deciding when a Disabled Person lacking mental capacity was being deprived of their liberty. Under that test, continuous supervision and control, combined with no freedom to leave permanently, meant legal deprivation of liberty. The protections of the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) applied automatically.

The Supreme Court has now abolished that test. It has ruled that a person who “appears happy” with their living and care arrangements may be deemed to have consented, even where they lack the mental capacity to give genuine consent. The result is that hundreds of thousands of Disabled People currently protected by DoLS risk losing those protections entirely.

This ruling hands institutional care providers, local authorities, and the state the power to decide, without independent scrutiny or accountability, when a Disabled Person’s liberty need not be safeguarded. Winterbourne View, where Disabled People were systematically abused behind closed doors, is the historical lesson the Supreme Court appears to have forgotten. The safeguards that followed that scandal existed to ensure that isolation from scrutiny could never again become a cover for abuse and neglect. That floor has now been removed.

The Assisted Dying Bill

The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill passed the House of Commons in June 2025, by 314 votes to 291. It then met the House of Lords, where it received the scrutiny it had been spared elsewhere. Peers tabled more than 1,200 amendments. Among the Bill’s most effective opponents were disabled peers, including Baroness Campbell and Baroness Grey-Thompson, who exposed gap after gap in its so-called safeguards. Baroness Campbell has described assisted suicide and euthanasia as “deadly forms of disability discrimination,” warning that “there will be mistakes and people will die, whom if they’d had the right support could have lived a good life.”

In April 2026 the Bill ran out of parliamentary time and fell. That should have been the end of it. It was not. The peers who had scrutinised the Bill were publicly branded obstructors of democracy. Accusations of filibustering were repeated across the media. And in June the Bill was reintroduced, unchanged, by Lauren Edwards MP, accompanied by the open suggestion that the Parliament Acts could be used to force it past the Lords if peers dare to examine it closely again.

Consider what that means. The strongest opposition to this Bill came from Disabled People and from disabled parliamentarians. Of the MPs who publicly describe themselves as Disabled People, a clear majority voted against it. Every significant Disabled People’s Organisation opposes it. When that opposition succeeded, the response was not to fix the Bill. It was to look for a way around the people who had exposed it.

And the Bill does not return in isolation. The DWP has been exposed testing a new PIP assessment system in secret. The Supreme Court has just removed a key layer of protection from Disabled People in institutional care. A state that kills through benefit cuts, strips safeguards from those in institutional care, and is simultaneously legislating for assisted dying is not a state that can be trusted to draw the line.

One Story

These three developments are not separate policy areas. They are convergent expressions of a single logic: that Disabled People’s lives are expendable when they become inconvenient or expensive. The DWP kills through destitution and bureaucratic violence. The DoLS ruling removes the safeguards that protect Disabled People from institutional abuse. The assisted dying Bill creates the legislative infrastructure for Disabled People to be supported towards death rather than towards a good life. Together, they represent a structural devaluation of Disabled People’s lives at every stage: from the benefit system, through institutional care, to end of life.

Set against the backdrop of a resurgent right, economic insecurity, and the scapegoating of marginalised groups, this convergence is not accidental. It reflects the kind of incremental normalisation that history has shown us leads, step by step, somewhere none of us should be willing to go.

This is what Oliver meant. Not metaphorically. Literally.

The Social Model Response

The social model of disability locates the problem not in Disabled People’s bodies or minds, but in the barriers and power structures society erects. Each of these three threats is a power structure. None of them is inevitable. All of them can be challenged. But only if Disabled People have organisations that are genuinely ours: controlled by us, accountable to us, and free from the financial dependency on the state that silences political resistance.

Organisations that have been incorporated by the state, that depend on local authority contracts for their survival, and that have adopted the language of the movement without its politics, cannot be relied upon to challenge the state when the state is killing Disabled People. The dilution of disability politics over the last three decades has left us without the strong, independent movement we urgently need.

The VDPM’s Position and Demands

The Virtual Disabled People’s Movement calls on the UK Government to:

1. 1Issue urgent interim guidance for local authorities, NHS bodies, and care providers on the implications of the DoLS ruling for Disabled People currently protected by the existing system.
2. 2Bring forward primary legislation as a priority to restore and strengthen Disabled People’s protections from unlawful deprivation of liberty.
3. 3Commission an independent public inquiry into deaths linked to DWP actions, as called for by John Pring and the families of those who have died.
4. 4Halt the secret testing of the new PIP assessment system until it has been subject to full public consultation with Disabled People’s Organisations.
5. 5Refuse government time or support for the reintroduced Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, and rule out any use of the Parliament Acts to force assisted dying legislation past the House of Lords. The VDPM stands with Not Dead Yet UK and the wider Disabled People’s Movement in opposing the legalisation of assisted suicide outright, as a deadly form of disability discrimination. A Bill this dangerous cannot be made safe by safeguards. The right we demand is not the right to die. It is the right to live: with palliative care, independent living support, and an income that does not drive people towards death.

The Virtual Disabled People’s Movement was established to build what has been steadily dismantled: a Disabled People’s Movement that is genuinely controlled by Disabled People, financially independent of the state, and politically free to say what needs to be said, including when it is uncomfortable, historically grounded, and urgent.