RAIL workers are to step up their joint work with disabled activists in their campaign against cuts — especially attacks on transport services and making access by disabled people ever more difficult.

The RMT annual conference voted unanimously to re-affiliate to Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC).

And delegates gave high praise to DPAC’s growing campaign of direct action.

Janine Booth said that for five years under the coalition government disabled people had suffered “awful attacks.”

“The Remploy factories were closed, the independent living fund attacked, services to disabled people cut, work capacity assessments introduced, sanctions on benefits.”

She read out a series of genuine newspaper headlines: a father who received a letter saying his son’s benefit sanction was being lifted — five weeks after the son killed himself; an Asperger’s sufferer who starved to death after losing his benefits, a disabled woman who committed suicide after being sanctioned.

“There are Tory politicians who say disabled people should be exempt from the minimum wage and paid £2 an hour,” she said.

But, she said, disabled people fought back with a campaign which made the sanctions assessment firm Atos “toxic,” forcing the government to dump it.

RMT assistant general secretary Steve Hedley said the new Tory government was again putting disabled people in the firing line in its next £12 billion cuts package, with a £1bn cut in carers’ allowance, and £1.5bn in disability benefits.