WHEN the exit polls were announced on the night of July 4, I felt hollow. By that point, it wasn’t a surprise to see the map turn red, but after everything we’d heard from Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, the knowledge that the voice of the opposition in Scotland would be so small was deflating.

Still, I felt I should be celebrating the fact that the Tories were out. After 14 years watching every marginalised group under the sun be demonised and penalised while the rich got richer, a Labour Government had to be an improvement.

Yes, Starmer had taken Labour further to the right than they had ever been, but maybe he was just saying some of that to get elected. Maybe the Labour supporters urging us to give the party a chance were right. I had to hold onto hope because the alternative was too bleak.

Yet here we are, on the day of the Labour Government’s first Budget announcement, and hope feels like an increasingly naïve notion.

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It is often said that the truest measure of a society’s humanity is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens. With this in mind, I awaited any sign that the new government would set themselves apart from their predecessors in their approach to those who need support – in particular, disabled people and those experiencing mental illness.

Instead, what I have seen and heard over Starmer’s first four months as Prime Minister has shocked me.

If reports are accurate, Labour plans to push ahead with the Tories’ plans to cut £1.3 billion from the disability benefits budget over the next few years by making changes to the Work Capability Assessment.

The Conservative government estimated that the proposed changes would make nearly half a million people who are currently entitled to the benefit ineligible.

Understandably, this is a frightening prospect for disabled people who currently rely on this financial support to get by. For many, social security is a lifeline, but for the new government – just like the old government – it seems it’s all about the bottom line.

Time and again, we are reminded that the value of our lives – our health, our very being – is nothing more than the numbers after the pound sign that we can contribute to the gross domestic product.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting said it loudly and clearly in a statement published on the Labour government’s website just five days after the election: “The NHS and social care … should be engines of economic growth.”

If you’ve heard of a “wellbeing economy”, this is basically that idea flipped on its head, where wellbeing only matters if it’s making money, and making money matters just because.

Streeting insisted that he wants to “end the begging bowl culture”, where the NHS only takes money rather than contributing to the economy. If that’s how the health secretary thinks of the doctors and nurses (and administrative workers, cleaners, and many others) who ensure we all have access to life-saving treatment when we need it, imagine what he thinks about the patients. We’ll soon find out.

Speaking to the BBC earlier this month, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall made clear her government would make cuts to social security, including “radically” reforming the system for those on disability benefits.

Part of this, she confirmed, would mean some people losing their benefits altogether, because the “benefit system can have a real impact on whether you incentivise or disincentivise work”.

You wouldn’t know it to hear all the talk of the money wasted on those who are out of work, but the Tories’ treatment of disabled people was one of the most damning aspects of their destructive legacy.

In 2013, an academic study identified a link between the Tories’ introduction of a stricter assessment process for disability benefits in 2010 and an increase in the national suicide rate, which amounted to 590 additional suicides over the three-year period.

Official statistics from 2021 found that disabled men are three times as likely to take their own lives, and disabled women are four times as likely to their own lives than their non-disabled counterparts.

The financial stress inflicted by welfare cuts and an increasingly hostile system has pushed many disabled people into an impossible situation.

Disabled people and their families face additional costs associated with their care and support needs, and between 2019 and 2022, 51% of people in relative poverty after housing costs were in a household where someone is disabled.

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According to the Trussell Trust, three-quarters of people referred to their foodbanks say that either they or a member of their household are disabled.

Yet right-wing tabloids and too many politicians would have you believe that disability benefit claimants are living in the lap of luxury or choosing not to work because they can’t be bothered.

Surely one of the first points of order for a new Labour government should have been to address those misrepresentations and make clear that their Department of Work and Pensions would be about supporting people, not penalising them.

Sadly, it seems that is but a fantasy of a Labour Party that no longer exists.

What the upcoming welfare reforms will entail remains to be been, but one announcement already made by Streeting is that weight loss jabs will be offered to people on benefits to get them back into work.

This plan seems to be a gross oversimplification of the reasons why a person might be both unemployed and overweight, and only adds to the stigma already faced by those who are unable to work due to their health.

It’s the natural destination of a train of thought which is so distinctly big-C Conservative that you have to wonder why these people even bothered running against them.

Within days of this announcement, the BBC ran a story that Kendall had said job coaches should be sent into mental health wards. The Government has since denied that Kendall announced any such plans, but the fact that this could sound so plausible says a lot about the rock-bottom level of trust disabled people have in a party that has only been in office for a few months.

And why should anyone trust them when they’ve done nothing to challenge or move on from the dehumanising rhetoric which treats people who are disabled and unwell like burdens, and which equates our worth with productivity?

I didn’t expect much from this Labour Government, but I did expect them to demonstrate more humanity than the Tories, and I certainly didn’t expect them to be even worse.

I’d still love to be proven wrong, but as the party prepares to deliver its first Budget in nearly 15 years, I’m more pessimistic than ever.