Even the Tories know when to back a winner!

Ben Golightly, Swansea and West Wales Socialist Party and DPAC Cymru co-coordinator

“I fully support Disabled People Against Cuts Cymru (DPAC Cymru)”.

That was quite an incredible thing to read, coming as it did from the Conservative shadow cabinet secretary for equalities and social justice in the Senedd (Welsh Parliament). It was not that long ago DPAC was campaigning against Tory-Lib Dem cuts.

We lobbied the Senedd, handing in 700 signatures calling for the review of the PIP disability benefit to be taken out of the hands of the UK disability minister Stephen Timms and instead for it to be run independently and democratically by disabled people’s organisations.

DPAC Cymru has certainly never pulled any punches, or run a tame campaign.

Earlier this year, we sharply criticised the Welsh Government and city councils for not holding Welsh Labour MPs to account as they voted for disability cuts, or in the case of Swansea West MP Torsten Bell, helped design them in the first place.

We told the Senedd if they weren’t going to put up the necessary fight, then we would. All they would have to do is lift a finger and give us some resources.

We have won cross-party support for this demand.

But even more significantly than this, our call also includes the demand that the review, in a process led by disabled people, must also involve trade unions as democratic organisations of 1.4 million disabled workers and millions of non-disabled allies, including the workers that carry out the day-to-day delivery of the services that we all rely on.

This points to the potential for service users and workers to democratically plan a socialist welfare and employment system where everyone can live, meeting a basic demand from disabled people: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

And crucially, with the involvement of the trade unions, linked into other industrial and social struggles, amid wide discussion on working-class political representation, is the potential strength and organisation to carry through those changes.

Even before the launch of Your Party, DPAC Cymru had made calls for an urgent debate in the trade unions on the need for a new workers’ party that puts disabled people at the heart of everything it does.

DPAC Cymru’s coordinators unanimously voted to endorse, and send observers to, the Wales trade union conference on the crisis of working-class political representation.