Public Participation at CYC Full Council 27/03/25

Four of our members took part in the public participation section of the City of York full council meeting on 27th March 2025. Below is a text copy of their speeches.*

You can also watch the speeches from 09:25 on the council’s webcast of the meeting. You can watch the council debate on the motion from 2:48:10.

The Executive members have already heard me speak about the impacts of a mere 1.7 per cent rise to benefits from next week against the massive rise in prices of all life’s essentials. I’m still waiting on my written response by the way.

The crisis is already here and the greater burden on costs to this authority inevitable, long before this Labour Government takes its machete to the safety net that is social security.

Disabled people are variously angry, terrified and despairing knowing that we are now in under existential threat, fighting for our literal survival. Within the disabled community nationally, already two people are known to have taken their own lives as a result.

And it’s not a fair fight. Many sick and disabled people would have liked to have been here demonstrating today, but the barriers to doing so were too great. This pair of purple shoes represents them.

This Labour government’s rhetoric is directly contributing to the exponential rise in disability hate crime. Disabled people now report being afraid to go out, being afraid to use their blue badge, as people are spat at & have abuse hurled at them accused of scrounging off the state.

 And this isn’t really about work at all.

Rather an attempt to balance the books on the backs of society’s already most disadvantaged by an economically illiterate govt that doesn’t understand poor people spend all their income in the local economy not salt it away in the Camen islands.

Across the country we see Labour Councillors resigning the whip and sitting as Independents. Be thankful you could not persuade me to stand in a safe Labour ward because your majority would now be gone.

I find the Labour amendment to the Lib Dem motion a rather cynical attempt to claw back the moral high ground having failed to use either of your 2 motions to address these issues. I suggest members go read The Politics of Disablement by Mike Oliver.

But I haven’t heard any of you speaking out against the Government’s declaration of war on disabled people.  Silence is complicity with what your party does in your name.

So proud of proclaiming Labour holds the city, the mayoralty, and both parliamentary seats, now the cracks begin to show. The combined Authority Inactivity Trailblazer, short on detail, will like all the welfare to work schemes before it, fail, beyond moving a couple of percentage points into precarious work. The DWPs own reports only measure those still in work eight weeks after, not beyond.  Why is that?

The Sunday Politics exposed the diametrically opposed views of the city’s two MPs, one who fears the consequences of growing inequality and throwing another 50,000 plus children into poverty and one who has joined the backbench Arbeit Macht Frei Tory tribute band, who says taxing wealth doesn’t work. Good to know he thinks all our problems stem from lack of self respect.

It’s time to pick a side.

These announcements have caused profound distress to disabled people in this country.

The Labour gov expects us to believe that they are supporting disabled ppl back into work.  An obvious first step would have been a commitment to clear the backlog on the access to work scheme. Instead, the proposals appear punitive and do nothing to assuage the years of mistrust of the DWP caused during Tory austerity.

This has been handled in a way that maximises distress. The drip of leaks on Fridays. Then it turns out the government has not produced the green paper in accessible formats. The impact assessment not published on release either.

The same day as this green paper was announced, Labour MP Naz Shah had an access failure when the committee for the assisted dying bill refused to accommodate her need to charge her hearing aids meaning she was forced to leave the committee early. If this is how Labour treats their own colleagues, how are we supposed to believe they will do anything to support disabled people into work by insisting employers provide access accommodations.

Research into many chronic conditions has been underfunded. The long awaited announcement from the governments ME delivery group doesn’t include funding. And a study in Science Norway published on 21st March states that very few ME/CFS patients return to work after diagnosis. Ignoring and dismissing chronic conditions and leaving people without
any effective treatment for years is the real scandal here.

The whole argument Is based on the deeply flawed and insidious idea that worth comes only from work.  It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of disability. The Social model of disability – adopted by this council – states we are disabled by society so, need accessible, housing,  transport and public realm. Paralympian and peer Tanni Grey Thompson has been left on trains multiple times this week and she is an active member of the workforce still being treated as a second class citizen.

But there will always be some people whose impairments prevent them from working. They also have worth and deserve to have a decent standard of living.

This Labour council benefits from the work of many disabled people who give up their time to volunteer to be on the York Access Forum and other committees. According to the government our contribution is worthless unless we are in employment. The council should consider paying for our expertise.

Motion 17 ii  is the minimum response required. These cuts should be opposed because they are inhumane. Any supposed savings made will be short lived and look set to backfire on local councils. I commend York Central MP Rachael Maskell for taking a stand against the cuts and welcome the council’s actions to do the same.

I will conclude with the historic words of Labour MP Nye Bevan. “Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.”

The government’s own figures say that nationwide, the cuts to PIP will drive at least a quarter of a million people into poverty. They have admitted these cuts are ideological, not financial, driven by a desire to “get people back to work”, despite the fact that PIP is unrelated to employment status.

Which people are going to be targeted to have their independence payments reduced or removed? Where are the jobs that they’re meant to step into so easily? Can you find me the employer who will keep someone who’s been signed off with suicidal depression for the last three months? Will my friend with paranoid schizophrenia be asked to take on a regular schedule and trigger her terror that people are following her? Will my friend with fibromyalgia have to sacrifice three days of his life bedridden to recover after every day in the office? Will the teenagers I’m sheltering, with their neurodivergence, memory issues, suicide attempts and episodes of psychosis have to find a part time job that can accommodate them when the floor is melting beneath them or just getting out of bed triggers a screaming panic attack? What employer will take on the risk of having my friend with ME in the office given how often she faints?

When you cut PIP, the expenses it covers don’t magically go away. The financial burden is just shifted onto disabled people, punishing them for surviving with conditions and circumstances they didn’t choose. It shifts to their friends and families, most already struggling with the cost of living crisis. Many of these people are already doing unpaid care work for their disabled friends and family, which will now only increase. No one who voted for Labour voted for this.

The council’s move to review local financial aid for people is urgently necessary but very far from enough. These cuts must be fought at every level, and I urge the council to condemn this discriminatory budget and take every action possible to pressure the government to reverse their decision.

I struggled with what to say here today. I could list all the statistics, I could tell you the stories of my terrified friends, I could read to you from John Pring’s book The Department, I could just sit here and cry for three minutes and hope that my embodied emotions would stir some empathy.

I decided instead to focus on the root of these issues, which is the societal belief that disabled people should get better or die, put up or shut up. Every conversation about benefits scroungers is dripping with this belief, that disabled people are too inconvenient, too demanding, too needy, too expensive to exist at all. This individualised neoliberal ideology harms us all, but disabled people are being targeted constantly and directly, told to get to work or starve trying.

The worst part is, we all internalise this belief. I have spoken to disabled people in work who will not disclose their disability or request their legally protected rights to reasonable adjustments to make their work more accessible to them because they have internalised this belief that they are not worth anything if they are not ‘fully functioning members of society’.

This belief is a poison stripping people of their humanity, their empathy and a foundation of care within our society. It is fed to us from birth – ‘as long as the baby is healthy, that’s all that matters’, right? – and we are constantly ingesting this poison from our various forms of billionaire owned media telling us that disabled people should be doubted, that we lie, that we cheat, that we are never contributing enough, that we deserve to starve, that our lives should be ended so this society does not have to ‘bear the burden’ of our existence.

Rob Nixon describes the concept of slow violence as: “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”.

That is what ableism is and what it is doing all day every day. When bus drivers leave wheelchair users at the side of the road, when BSL interpreters are not provided, when neurodivergent people are not given access to diagnosis and medication, when the NHS refuses to provide wheelchairs for chronically ill people with fluctuating mobility, when you do not feel able to ask for support when you need it, when you do not feel able to take a sick day lest you be considered ‘less capable’ or god forbid ‘needy’, we are all complicit and suffering in this toxic ableist culture.

This has never been about money. This is about who we believe is valuable in our society and the attitudes of those in power both nationally and locally. This council signed up to the social model of disability back in 2022. I would like you to think about what tangible changes have been made as a result of this declaration? How might this council show its support for disabled people not just in a motion later tonight, but in more practical ways going forward?

* Please note: none of these speakers were officially representing YDRF as an organisation. They spoke of their personal experiences without claiming to speak for YDRF or the entire disability community.