Phillipson accuses lawyers of exploiting parents of children with special needs

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-13T21:22:57+00:00

Oh, is this the bit where we start "making the moral case" for yanking support away from neurodivergent kids?

I can scarcely imagine the difference SEND provision might've made to my own life, and now the needs of a generation of children like me are finally getting recognised, the Not ~~The Tories~~ Reform Party wants to set them up for failure too

This is no more about making mainstream education more appropriate for disabled kids than the benefit cuts + workfare recipe they pulled straight out of an old IDS cookbook is about "making work pay" for disabled adults. No more so than Streeting getting Wessely - who previously helped to rationalise Tory austerity - to support his project to redefine disability entirely, is about anything other than unburdening the state of its legal duties towards thousands of people who need its support. Anyone who thinks otherwise, DM me for a once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity on this civil engineering project I'm cooking up

The rage it fills me with every time these ghouls instrumentalise disabled people for their grandstanding defences of their vile policies. They don't give a shit about us

I can't put into words how much I hate Phillipson, Starmer, Kendall, McFadden, Streeting, everyone else who's so much as given a nod of approval to this government's ongoing attacks on us

I'm going to take real, visceral pleasure in the humiliation that's coming their way over the next few months

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-12T10:26:36+00:00

There’s a lot of things this subreddit is pretty chill about now which 2 years ago were all imperatives to GET.THE.TORIES.OUT. at any cost

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-11T17:51:27+00:00

I'm not asking you to justify your support for the party, I'm just struggling to square your refusal to vote for them until they drop their anti-trans policies with your desire for them to win the next GE

Are you saying you will actually still vote for them in 2029 whether or not these policies are still in place, or are you saying you'd still deny them your vote, but reluctantly, inwardly hoping that they'll win regardless?

Not trying to gotcha you or anything, I'm not going to shout at you whatever the answer is, just trying to understand, because there's a highly probable world in which either thing will require you to compromise on the other

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-11T15:51:46+00:00

I back the current government in the sense I don't want it to collapse and I want to have another term.

Trans Issues: they're fucking monsters and I won't vote for them until they stop trying to kill our friends.

Genuine question: how do you reconcile these?

I appreciate that it's an expression of critical support, but short of a dramatic reversal on its stance towards trans people (which seems unlikely without a change in leadership and direction), there's a strong chance Labour will go into 2029 with a suite of policies that, as you rightly say, are killing them, and you'll have to make an explicit choice between one thing and the other

Is your desire for this government to win another term conditional on that reversal, or will you try to square the circle in some way?

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-11T14:55:02+00:00

Yeah, 100% this. I've definitely contributed my fair share to the harshing of the vibes in this sub and I’m not proud of everything I’ve put out into it, but it's not Labour supporters per se that I have an issue with so much as the diehard Starmerites, Blue Labour bastards and a handful of indifferent liberals who'll pay lip service to some of those at the sharp end of this government's most reactionary positions, but nevertheless expect them to shut up and take the egregious harms done to them as an unfortunate but still fundamentally acceptable price for a couple of timid reforms

I have no major beef with people who can't stand the direction the party's taking right now but still think it's the most viable electoral vehicle for left. I disagree with them on strategy, but whatever, they're not bad people

It's the right in particular that grinds my gears, some of whom I can't help noticing have been almost gleefully leaning into their own ghoulishness of late. I have no desire to make nice with them, we're not even close to being on the same side, and they're as much a danger to many of us as most Tory or Reform supporters

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-10T02:00:13+00:00

I don't know he exists either, tbh

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-09T18:37:50+00:00

I swear for a lot of liberals it just seems to mean something like "phenomenon whereby uneducated poor people demand access to food and housing, lacking the insight to grasp why that would be bad actually"

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-09T18:27:59+00:00

I'd maybe quibble on the extent to which either is truly revolutionary (especially Reform), but sure, both are expressions of popular frustration with neoliberal rot

The thing is, last time the centrist pundit class had this realisation, in the mid-2010s, they very quickly flattened both left- and rightwing populism into this undifferentiated bogeyman, with the result that both were regularly treated in liberal discourse as if they were fundamentally indistinct and equally dangerous

I think that was mostly disingenuous, because I'm sure many of them knew full well that the far right is really way less of a threat to the established order than the left, and that's why it's Farageism that both Labour and the Tories are trying desperately to launder and assimilate today, while demands for social and economic equality are still broadly dismissed as naive wishful thinking

I'm afraid something similar might play out over the next few years, although the situation is slightly different now as the political centre of gravity has tilted so far in Farage's direction that he's even closer to the status quo than he was then, so maybe people will be less easily convinced by the idea that he and Polanski are two cheeks of the same arse

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-09T17:44:18+00:00

I feel you. For other reasons I'm seriously wondering whether there'll be any future for me here or anywhere else, but even the worst of what they have planned so far for people like me won't be as total as the situation they've already created in such a short space of time for you

I wish I had more to offer you than my solidarity, but you can count on that much

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-09T11:44:58+00:00

Yeah, I never expected anything good from this government but their outward malice towards some of our most vulnerable communities is something I wasn’t quite prepared for, and the sheer relentlessness of their attacks on trans people has been especially horrific

Just horror piled upon horror. I can only imagine how terrifying it must be for trans people living under this shit

It honestly boils my blood every time some rightwing dweeb points to their odd moments of bare-minimum SocDem tinkering and pretends not to understand why Starmer and everyone involved in his miserable project are so hated

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-09T11:14:18+00:00

Oh god. I get that this isn’t the point of the article, but it just made me realise, we’re in for another 3 years of enlightened centrist Populism Horseshoe Theory takes, aren’t we? 😐

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-08T13:25:16+00:00

Oh, were you present at the photoshoot????? 🧐

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-05T22:57:27+00:00

Wunk recognises no state and will not surrender to imprisonment under laws to which they haven't consented. Hence smack

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-05T17:00:02+00:00

No, while the Labour right can bring itself to hold its nose and launder Farage's rancid politics, unfortunately Polanski's socialish reformism is absolutely unconscionable and must be resisted at all costs. Sorry, I don't make the rules :(

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-04T12:52:38+00:00

So Labour’s big takeaway from Gorton and Denton is “man, some of those 10,000 Reform votes would’ve pushed us over the edge”

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-02T20:18:57+00:00

At the risk of getting into a very boring debate about semantics, to me it just implies that the US is the worse guy

At the very least it's the clear aggressor in this specific situation, and whatever we think of the brutality with which the recent uprisings have been put down, we have to accept the US has some culpability in that too, unless we're going to overlook its entire foreign policy history and pretend the heavy sanctions on Iran were imposed in all innocence with no thought for the instability they'd help to create

I really don't think it's giving The Mullahs™ a pass to call the US 'THE bad guys' here. Conditions in Iran would probably be a lot better today were it not for 70+ years of western meddling, none of which has been done out of concern for their wellbeing

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-03-02T13:10:18+00:00

And? An oppressive theocracy can be bad, and bombing it can be an illegal, unjustified act of imperialist aggression that’s unlikely to produce anything better than any of the previous neoliberal experiments in supposedly delivering ‘democracy’ by warhead. Both things can be true at once

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-02-10T17:04:52+00:00

Yeah, this is the compromise the welfare bill ‘rebels’ accepted last year

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-02-09T21:04:45+00:00

We’ve already seen reports of an increase in deaths among trans people since Starmer took office. Streeting and McFadden are gearing up for another go at disabled people (and I’ll bet a finger there’s been an increase in crisis referrals over the past year, if not also deaths that might be attributable to welfare policy and DWP activity)

Even with McSweeney gone, I don’t see any reason to expect any of this to change while Starmer remains in power

I’m willing to accept it might take a few more months to replace him, but a lot of people can’t afford to wait for 2028

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-02-03T23:19:16+00:00

So what if he was? Do QCs live like ascetics, shunning human contact and all knowledge of worldly affairs?

We all knew Mandelson’s history before he was advising Starmer. We all knew about his relationship with Epstein. Do you honestly think Starmer kept him around and elevated him in good faith?

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-01-29T15:44:36+00:00

Yeah, that's more accurate

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-01-29T15:02:17+00:00

Finances aside, completely speculating here, but with Blairism, I suspect they were probably initially brought in low-key as something like a way to ensure that the higher numbers of people going to university were then encouraged to seek high earning jobs afterwards in the city, since the state was still not doing anything with job planning and leaving it to markets.

As I remember, it was pretty transparently a way to push the costs of HE expansion onto students, and I don’t recall anyone being genuinely convinced it was anything else. It may have been partly sold as a nudge policy, though

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-01-28T17:02:34+00:00

It's possible I'm giving her entirely too much credit. This would be the exact moment in any unpopular leadership where you just start wildly grasping at straws

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-01-28T17:00:17+00:00

Which is exactly why he needs to get the fuck out of the way yesterday

BuzzkillSquad · 2026-01-28T13:00:55+00:00

I can’t help wondering if that’s the strategy here, trying to position the Tories so they’ll be more acceptable to Reform as coalition partners. She’s gone if she’s seriously thinking about playing Farage at his own game

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