NATIONAL Education Union (NEU) president Sarah Kilpatrick slammed Labour’s renewed austerity today, telling the NEU annual conference that Tory welfare cuts had killed her disabled father.

She accused ministers of “perpetuating and repeating the shameful pattern of punching-down and finger-pointing” by “balancing the books on the backs of the poor.”

On the first day of the conference in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, she described how her father had died at the age of 56 after being stripped of his disability benefits under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

She said that she had experienced poverty as a working-class child in Newcastle upon Tyne and was his carer for a number of years.

“As Iain Duncan Smith gleefully applauded the welfare cuts, I represented my father in a tribunal against the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] decision to remove his disability benefits,” she told delegates.

“He’d had his gas cut off. Couldn’t afford groceries. His elderly mother was adding tins of food to her shopping to bulk up what I was buying for him, but he isolated himself further still.

“He lost a lot of weight during that time and never really recovered.”

In 2013, her father became one of an estimated 120,000 people who died as a result of the Tories’ austerity programme, she said.

“When Wes Streeting brags to the Tories across the benches that Labour have done what they never could and slashed the welfare bill, this is what they mean,” said Ms Kilpatrick.

“Let’s be clear. Nearly two decades of economic permacrisis has not been caused by disabled people.”

Nor has it been caused by the elderly, refugees, the trans community or children in poverty, she said.

Warning of the rise of the far-right and misogyny, which has been the subject of national debate following the Netflix drama Adolescence, she added: “We won’t abdicate our responsibility to Netflix.

“We will be the ones who repair the damage done by the last 15 years of budget cuts, privatisation and lies told to keep us from fighting back. 

“When they tell us there’s no funding, but our buildings are crumbling and they’re laying off support staff, we fight back. 
 
“When they tell us they can’t fund a pay rise, but they’ll fund arms built in the UK and used to kill children in Palestine and Yemen while simultaneously cutting the overseas aid budget.

“We are the trade union who take a stand, who raise our voices.”

Ms Kilpatrick paid tribute to her predecessor Phil Clarke, who gave up his presidency early to become the union’s south-east regional secretary.