Is it just me or is it feeling a lot like the 1930s all of a sudden? I’m giving myself permission to ask big questions like this in part because I’m not working at the moment. The reason why I’m not doing the job I love is because of the sudden and unexpected cuts to my Access to Work support.

Instead of running my company and employing a support worker to help me, I’m having to find ad hoc ways to fill a 45-hour gap in my care every week. This is putting pressure on my friends, my colleagues, my family, and on me. As a company, we’ve already lost work because of the decision made by a case worker at the Department for Work and Pensions who I have never met.

This situation coincides with a lot of rhetoric from Keir Stamer’s Labour government about getting disabled people back to work. On the surface this sounds like a reasonable objective, but you don’t have to dig very deep before you’re covered in a thick toxic layer of old-fashioned ableism, laced fascism and eugenics.

After more than a decade spent building my company, it’s taken a Labour government less than a year to force me out of my job, with no notice or time to plan. If this situation isn’t resolved soon I may well lose my job. And if that happens, the support that Access to Work was providing will have to come from social care or the NHS instead. If that happens, it’s possible that I may be forced into residential care and have to sell my home to pay for it. It’s not just my job on the line – it’s my entire future.

So, what’s actually happening here? Starmer’s clearly lurching dangerously to the right, trying desperately to appease Reform voters, and singlehandedly losing credibility and respect from everyone no matter what their political allegiance – not least from within his own party. All this to avoid pointing the finger at the super-rich whose corporations are sucking the wealth out of the country by not paying their taxes.

Saying you want disabled people to get back to work while at the same time forcing us out of our jobs makes no sense at all. Unless that is you think about the Assisted Dying Bill that’s just passed in Parliament by 23 votes as I write this. Then the agenda becomes much clearer – tell disabled people to work, make it impossible for them to work, offer them death. Sound familiar?

Under Starmer, our humanity is measured solely on our economic productivity. With our intrinsic value obliterated, we must now prove our financial viability to faceless bureaucracies who’ve become far too comfortable with the idea that disabled people are a burden on society. Sound familiar?

Even if we accept the idea that human beings are only worth what they can produce economically, Labour’s position deliberately skews the truth by creating a false binary between people who ‘depend on the welfare system’ and ‘taxpayers’. Until I was forced from my job, I was both. Creating this subtle linguistic division and reinforcing it over and over again serves one purpose – to forge a link in the minds of the public between disabled people and untrustworthy scroungers that’s so strong it cannot be broken. Sound familiar?

On my way to run some errands this morning I watched an older disabled woman in a wheelchair attempt to get on a bus. A passenger with a buggy was refusing to make space for her, so instead of asking them to move (as they’re supposed to), the driver closed the door and drove off. For disabled people these instances of abuse are too numerous to count, but they add up. Sound familiar?

We’re not second-class citizens, and we have the right to exist just as we are. The fact that I’m even having to assert this basic truth in this day and age is staggering.

I hate the fact that I’m having to justify my right to work, to ask peers in the organisations we’ve worked with over the years to advocate for me and tell the government why I matter. It’s humiliating and it has extremely dangerous implications for the future.

For the last few weeks, instead of working I’ve been dividing my time between raising awareness about this issue, scrabbling to stabilise my support, and crying tears of frustration and rage. And from the moment we made the announcement I’ve been contacted by many other disabled people in similar or worse situations than me.

This is an issue that affects us all, so where’s the outrage?

It might feel easier to turn the other cheek for now, but if we ignore what’s happening to disabled people here and across the world, the consequences will be disastrous for us all. Whether you agree with me or not, from where I’m sitting, it seems alarmingly clear that Starmer and those supporting him, are deliberately attacking disabled people with a pincer movement, forcing us out of work and demoralising us to the extent that we’d rather choose to end our own lives than continue living in such a hostile society.

The fact that the DWP’s ‘Get disabled people back to work’ video opens with a shot of a job centre that looks suspiciously like a concentration camp should be enough to alert even the most politically disengaged among us. Watch the DWP’s video here.

I for one am furiously waving a red flag right now and it’s definitely not a Labour party banner.