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While pensioners dominate the headlines, sick and disabled people face a looming £5 billion assault — and nobody’s listening.

The Labour government has reportedly been “rethinking” its deeply unpopular cut to Winter Fuel Payments after its disastrous local election results, but new signs suggest the leadership is resisting even that small concession.

Meanwhile, it remains fully committed to even harsher cuts to disability benefits like Personal Independence Payment (PIP) — and the contrast speaks volumes about political calculation, media failure, and a shameful silence around the rights of disabled people.

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Coverage from the BBC, The Guardian, and others has highlighted the fury over the Winter Fuel Payment change.

That’s understandable: it hurt millions of pensioners.

But it already happened.

It already saved the government money last winter — and already impoverished pensioners in the process.

In other words, the damage is done.

The PIP cuts, on the other hand, haven’t even happened yet.

But they’re coming — and they’re set to hit some of the most vulnerable people in the UK in ways that will be deeper, longer-lasting, and far more devastating than any result of Winter Fuel Payment cuts.

Why, then, was Labour even considering only a U-turn on the pensioner policy?

The answer appears to be brutally cynical: pensioners vote in large numbers and lean Conservative, but they also swing.

The local elections proved that Labour can lose those voters.

Meanwhile, sick and disabled people are more likely to vote Labour — if they vote at all — and are too often seen as a ‘safe’ group to target when looking to save cash.

I’ve said it before: it’s austerity by stealth, with a red rosette.

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Labour’s own Welsh First Minister, Eluned Morgan, is now publicly calling out her party’s Westminster leadership for getting it wrong on both counts — yet even her sharpest lines are being boiled down in the press to concern over Winter Fuel Payments alone.

The BBC’s Politics Live programme barely touched the PIP issue, while the Guardian’s otherwise detailed coverage framed the £5bn in planned benefit cuts as a backdrop — not the main event.

This is despite the fact that stage one of the welfare cuts will go to a vote in June, and stage two — including PIP freezes — is planned for the autumn.

So here’s the brutal truth: Labour seems unwilling to reverse a policy that has already done its fiscal work and caused a voter backlash – and it is holding firm on a policy that hasn’t even been implemented yet — meaning there’s still time to stop it — because party leaders think they can get away with it.

This is not just political cowardice; it’s media complicity.

• It is failing to foreground the fact that hundreds of thousands of – perhaps more than a million – disabled people will be disproportionately harmed.
• It is failing to interrogate the human cost of cuts that ministers themselves admit will be “even more painful.”
• And it is failing to heed the warnings from disability rights groups, Labour backbenchers, and even Welsh Labour’s leadership.

The sick and disabled are being left out of the headlines again — just as they were under the Tories. And unless that changes now, they’ll pay the price again too.

If you’d like to support disabled people fighting back against these cuts, sign the petition calling for the cuts to be abandoned and a new National Disability Strategy to be designed instead.

Also follow and share updates from disability rights groups like DPAC (@Dis_PPL_Protest) and Inclusion London (@InclusionLondon).

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