Hello Comrades, I’m Sean McGovern, Unite member and Chair of the TUC Disabled Workers Committee.
Comrades we march together today to demand a new deal and social justice for our class.
Yet we are confronted by a government clinging onto a failed austerity programme.
A government that stumbles and blunders through the Brexit negotiations while growth in the economy goes south.
We have a Prime Minister in May who has such a shaky control over her Jenga-like cabinet an edifice that would collapse if a vital piece was removed.
Can Theresa May hang on to 2022 or will one of her cabinet or back-benchers make the challenge, thus putting her, and us, out of her misery.
Comrades, working people in the UK deserve a new deal from governments who have presided over the most draconian cuts to our public services, jobs and benefits for the past eight years.
An austerity programme that has only succeeded in the growth of food banks, a disgraceful increase in child hunger and record levels of homelessness and rough sleeping.
A government that with no hesitation reduces the income of disabled people by slashing their benefits.
A government that has presided over and allows the continuation of the fatally flawed Work Capability Assessment.
An assessment system that has led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands.
An administration that has pushed social care and support into chaos; to the point of collapse.
As we enjoy the freedom of today’s event there are hundreds of thousands of disabled and elderly people imprisoned in their own homes.
Disabled people further punished when they are punitively hit by social care charges, an unfair taxation.
Let us call for social care and support system free at the point of need and funded through general taxation.
This Tory regime and its predecessor, the Coalition, despite insisting that work pays have done nothing to close the employment gap for disabled people who are still massively disadvantaged when seeking employment.
And rather than promoting and extending Access to Work, instead they place greater barriers in front of disabled workers making our employment precarious and even putting us into debt.
Comrades, we need change in the form of a government that looks to governing on behalf of the many, not pandering to the greed of the few.
We need a government that will close the employment gap experienced by disabled people seeking work by placing severe sanctions on employers who discriminate against us; by extending Access to Work to more disabled people and scrapping financial capping of funding.
Let’s elect a government who replace a punitive welfare benefits system with real social security.
A system that gives disabled people who cannot work the dignity of a decent income.
No more food banks.
No more sanctioning of benefits.
No more our children go to school hungry.
Indeed, let’s demand the harmonisation of educational opportunities by properly funding schools to allow disabled children into mainstream schools.
Comrades, let’s build a trade union movement that will fight for decent pay, terms and conditions in both the public and private sectors.
A movement that works with its communities and strives for social justice for all our class.
Comrades, Solidarity.
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