“I get the feeling that Keir Starmer sees disabled people as a real threat,” says disability campaigner Ellen Clifford. “We live outside the narrative of individualism and competition. 

“Some of us don’t have the option to fit into the exploitative workplace, but that sort of frees us up to have different lives, where we’re more interconnected and able to see things from a different perspective. We have more time to think, I suppose, and that’s dangerous. It poses a threat to the status quo.” 

Clifford is speaking to me from her home in southeast London. She’s running slightly behind because her five cats needed their dinner. The wall behind her has a number of mounted perches for the moggies to survey their domain from, but during our conversation the cats clearly have better things to do. 

A veteran activist and author of The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe, Clifford is, at the time of our interview, preparing for a legal challenge that will pit her against the UK government over two days at the high court. 

In April of this year, she was granted permission to bring a judicial review over plans to cut disability benefits that would see the work capability assessment (WCA) tightened to exclude more people from accessing the highest levels of support. 

The basis of Clifford’s legal challenge is the eight-week public consultation process for these plans, launched by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in autumn 2023 under Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government. She argues the consultation process was “disingenuous and unlawful”. Clifford’s action is backed by the Public and Commercial Services Union which represents DWP workers, Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), Disability Rights UK, the Black Triangle Campaign and anti-poverty trust Z2K. 

“It was an inadequate consultation,” Clifford says. “They had a different motivation to the one that was presented – and we’re suggesting that motivation might have been cost savings in the budget. 

“The consultation didn’t mention anything about money being saved, didn’t mention anything about cuts or what it would entail in terms of the reduction in benefit levels, and it was framed entirely in terms of supporting disabled people into employment.”

In October, the DWP was forced to admit it launched the consultation having made no estimate of how many disabled people would actually find work as a result of the proposed changes. 

After the eight-week consultation, the DWP opted for measures that mean approximately 457,000 new applicants who are currently classed as being unable to work – having limited capacity for work and work-related activity (LCWRA) – will instead be judged ready to prepare for work. These claimants will lose around £400 a month (£4,900 per year) in universal credit. 

The three measures chosen by the DWP mean mobility problems will no longer be enough to qualify as LCWRA, with difficulty getting between two places scoring lower on the new work capability assessment. People at substantial risk of self-injury and suicide by undertaking work will only qualify as LCWRA in exceptional cases.

Clifford is very clear about what this will mean in practice for disabled people. “People can’t live on what they get already,” she says. “I have a friend – a fellow campaigner – who was only found eligible for ESA [Employment Support Allowance] and not Pip [Personal Independence Payment], and he couldn’t afford to live. It just got him down so much to the point that last year, he tried to kill himself. He was very nearly successful.

“We’re always told the only way out of poverty is through work. And yet the systems can’t support us to be able to do that. I don’t know how they think people can survive.”

Not only do we know that work and poverty aren’t mutually exclusive and in-work poverty is on the rise, but the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has estimated that the proposed changes would only help 15,400 more people find paid work by 2029 – around 3% of those affected.   

And the current Labour government is doubling down on the Tories’ plans, estimating it will save the exchequer £3bn over the next four years and £1.3bn a year by 2028-29.

“As Rachel Reeves said in the budget, Labour is committed to finding savings,” Clifford says. “And if this doesn’t go ahead, they’re going to have to find another way to deliver those savings. It doesn’t sit comfortably with me that if we win this legal challenge, then they will go after a different group of people.”

After 14 years of austerity under the Tories and disabled people losing benefit payments of around £1,200 on average each year since 2008, Labour’s “loveless landslide” victory in July hasn’t exactly filled campaigners like Clifford with hope for a new political dawn.  

“Labour will still come after disabled people, but just package it in a different way,” she tells me bluntly. “The Tories were totally shameless, whereas I think Labour is more worried about how it looks. But they still want to solve the low productivity, low growth issue and they might not call it austerity but we’re still talking about cuts, we’re still talking about welfare reform targeted at disabled people. 

“Reeves wants to show she can competently manage austerity in a way the Tories didn’t and I don’t see any difference in terms of what they’re trying to do.

“It’s just about trying to shore up business confidence. To square that circle of labour shortages and having blocked freedom of movement, the idea is that you’re going to fill labour shortages with disabled people. 

“It’s very difficult for deaf and disabled people’s organisations to speak out against this, because you don’t want to be seen to be saying we’re incapable. Grassroots activists take more of a position that we can’t be exploited and screwed over for profit. So we kind of celebrate the way that we don’t fit into the labour market, and point to the problems with bad jobs.”

As anyone who’s had contact with DWP services over the last decade or so knows, there’s very little interest on the part of the state in helping people into appropriate jobs that work for them. If you’re expected to look for work, you should take any available role. If the job turns out to be inappropriate and unsustainable, the claimant will have lost their entitlements and be right back at the start of the Kafkaesque snakes and ladders board of navigating the benefits system in Britain. What’s more, the process of attending a job centre and engaging with work coaches can be a deeply distressing and dehumanising experience.

“In a practical sense, it is easier to do things like sex work or shoplifting – there’s lots of opportunities where I live,” Clifford says. “I know lots of people who aren’t able to fulfill the demands from the job centers and the work coaches because they live chaotic lives, because they carry trauma, because they can’t get mental health support and outreach doesn’t exist anymore.”

Clifford is deeply embedded in her London borough and loves the local community. She spends time talking to people who are regular street drinkers, hearing how the routes they previously took to get any semblance of care have gradually been closed off. “They tell me that going to prison for a while was a way to get their head straight,” she says, “and that isn’t an option anymore. People here cannot get sectioned and cannot get arrested now.”

While she doesn’t see acute mental health settings or incarceration as appropriate for people who are struggling, Clifford emphasises the lack of spaces where people can “clear their heads for a while” before they are able to re-engage with society. 

“It feels like a huge social experiment going on around me,” she continues. “If I walk out my door and go to the local shop, I’ll encounter probably one or two people asking for my advice on benefits or accessing mental health support. I really don’t think that people in Westminster understand how bad things have become.

“It’s not inevitable that humans should live like this. We wouldn’t need support for mental distress if we lived in a different way. And yet, the model of mental health that’s dominant in society is one that blames the individual.”

Clifford is a proponent of the social model of mental health and disability, which cites our environments as the ‘disabling’ factor. It challenges the dominant ‘biomedical’ or medical diagnostic model, which puts the onus on the ‘disordered’ and medically labelled individual. The social model is the basis of the Power Threat Meaning Framework, which positions emotional distress and troubling behaviour as intelligible responses to one’s history and circumstances.

As an activist, she is concerned about the next generation. “We have so many young people now experiencing mental distress,” Clifford says, “and we just don’t have the capacity to support more of those young people to find out about the social model and to learn to see things in a different way.” 

The capacity of the disability movement has been tragically reduced coming out of the pandemic, which Clifford believes has impacted the efficacy of its activism. She tells me that bereavement has been a feature of the disabled people’s movement as long as it’s been in existence; there’s burnout and early death – but it’s now coupled with austerity and welfare reform and then Covid-19.

“We’ve had all that grief to deal with, but it also means that we’ve been really, really stretched at a time when we need to bring in the younger disabled campaigners,” she says. 

Clifford explains that there wasn’t the time or capacity for disability rights groups like Not Dead Yet to mobilise strongly enough against the recent assisted dying legislation. The bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults in England and Wales was voted through by MPs last month. “The Dignity in Dying lobby has so much money and huge amounts of privilege and power – we just can’t compete,” she says. 

I ask Clifford whether we can ever ensure that the lives of adults who exist outside of the labour market are considered equally important when all humans under capitalism are valued primarily for the labour potential they represent. 

She’s unequivocal: “We’ll never be free of any form of oppression until we get rid of capitalism. We’ll have a constant struggle to defend our living standards while we live under capitalism – and now we’re defending our very right to life. 

“It’s become much more of an existential threat. The Nazis gave eugenics a bad enough name that it kept us safer for a while, but it’s creeping back in discourse around benefits – and then Covid, where we had the idea that disabled people were stopping other people from being allowed to go out and because of treatment rationing, there’s the message that disabled people’s lives are valued less. 

“With the rise of social media, you’ve got a space where people are able to express hostility more openly. A lot of disabled people with visible impairments have always experienced being told by people in the street that if they were like them, they’d rather be dead. 

“But it’s more frightening when you hear those messages suddenly being voiced without consequence in the media – and also not by the right or the far-right, where you would expect that kind of betrayal, but by people who would consider themselves to be in the centre, or even on the centre-left.”

As for the future of disability activism under Keir Starmer’s Labour, she has this to say: “If they’re not able to have learned anything from the past 14 years, then I think the way that we can try and make a difference is from the outside.”

And one of those outside methods for affecting change is the legal system. Although Clifford believes its function is “primarily to protect the interests of the rich”, it gives her and other activists a tool to be used along with other forms of outsider campaigning.

She laughs softly: “We’ll keep trying to shame them, trying to raise awareness where we can – you know, the hard slog.” 

Labour’s health and disability benefits reforms are expected to be detailed fully in early 2025. The outcome of Ellen Clifford’s judicial review has yet to be announced.