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:

This week, two major stories broke simultaneously. They arrive alongside a third — the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, which has been progressing through Parliament for months — and together they are not three separate stories. They are one. 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 — one characterised by deep economic insecurity, a fracturing of political consensus, and the rapid growth of right-wing political movements. Students of history will recognise the pattern: acute economic crisis has always had the potential to produce not only greater working-class solidarity but also 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.

When economic crisis combines with the scapegoating of marginalised groups, a weakened Disabled People’s Movement, the increasing power of large charities that have absorbed the language of the movement without its politics, and government policies rooted in the medical model of disability — the conditions are set for something much worse than policy failure. History tells us where this road leads, and it does not lead somewhere we have not been 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,” circulating detailed calculations of how much it cost to feed and support a Disabled Person over a lifetime, and framing 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 silence of the large disability charities on the assisted dying Bill — the very organisations that have displaced Disabled People’s own organisations and now claim to speak on our behalf — is in this context 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 into how the Department for Work and Pensions ignored repeated warnings about fatal flaws in the disability benefits system and 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.

That question has been answered. The DWP has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it will not protect Disabled People’s right to exist when doing so conflicts with political and economic imperatives. The silence of the big charities on this sustained campaign of bureaucratic violence — and their silence on the assisted dying Bill — confirms that 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, which had established the “acid test” for determining when a Disabled Person lacking mental capacity was being deprived of their liberty. Under Cheshire West, continuous supervision and control combined with no freedom to leave permanently meant legal deprivation of liberty — and 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 — even where they lack the mental capacity to give genuine consent — may be deemed to have consented. 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 determine — 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 has completed its passage through the House of Commons and is now proceeding through the House of Lords. 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.”

The assisted dying Bill does not arrive in isolation. It arrives in a context in which the DWP has already demonstrated a willingness to allow Disabled People to die rather than provide adequate support, in which the Supreme Court has just removed a key layer of protection from Disabled People in institutional care, and in which the media and political discourse are actively framing Disabled People’s lives as burdensome and costly. A state that kills through benefit cuts, strips safeguards from those in institutional care, and then legislates for assisted dying is not a state that can be trusted to draw the line.

One Story

These three developments — two breaking this week, one progressing through Parliament — 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. 5Ensure that any assisted dying legislation includes robust, independently assessed safeguards developed in genuine collaboration with Disabled People’s Organisations — not large charities acting in our name.

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 what needs to be said is uncomfortable, historically grounded, and urgent.