What I’d Ask David Cameron

The brilliant Mike Sivier informs us today that Ed Miliband would like to see a Public Prime Minister’s Questions.

Mike asks his readers what we would ask David Cameron at such an event.

My top three questions would be:

1. Why are you, the father of a disabled child, betraying disabled people and carers by hitting us hardest with your welfare reform policies?

2. Why are you, once a parent carer, not doing anything to raise Carers’ Allowance? You say your party is for Hard Working People yet you don’t pay the hardest working people in the world the National Minimum Wage.

3. Why do you think there is a ‘bias’ towards the inclusion of disabled children in mainstream schools? My parents, or the parents of any one of my friends, can and will happily tell you that the exact opposite is true. Your claims hurt us because they suggest you are trying to reverse all our hard work for inclusion. We struggled, our parents battled, we left each other and moved schools. We didn’t do all this so that anyone could come and reverse it all.

I would tell him that many disabled people voted for him because we thought he understood, since his own son was one of us. I would tell him that many of our parents voted for him because they thought that having a son like us made him one of them. They, too, thought he understood.

I would tell him that now we feel he has betrayed his son’s community, and his own community. I would tell him how very strong and special that community is. I would tell him how very, very much it hurts us that we have been betrayed by one of our own- one of our own who had the power to do the very opposite of everything he has used that power to do to us.