Video: disabled protestors block the entrance to the Royal Courts of Justice today in protest at the government’s proposal to close the Independent Living Fund:

This morning, two severely disabled Independent Living Fund users lost their court attempt to overturn the government’s decision to close the ILF in June 2015.

The ILF is a fund that disabled people with high support needs (they’re sometimes people who need round-the-clock care support) use to pay for the extra care hours that they need to get to work, to study, to socialise and generally to live independent lives like everyone else.

In this short video, ILF recipients Mark Williams and Daphne Branchflower talk about the full and independent lives they’ve lived with ILF support:

We’re all in it together – aren’t we? from Moore Lavan Films on Vimeo.

I’ve said it a thousand times – the government’s plan to close the ILF is repulsive. People will have to rely on local councils for care and that will not go well for them. I know and you know and everyone knows that cash-strapped councils can’t meet demand for care as it is. That state of affairs will not improve as Osborne continues with his slaughter of social security. Without the ILF to topup council care funding and without ringfencing of any devolved ILF money, disabled people with high support needs will be excluded from society. People won’t be able to leave their homes if they can’t pay for the personal assistants who help them get dressed, eat, travel and so on. “You get a choice between neglect at home, or residential care abuse,” ILF recipient Penny Pepper told me last year. That will go for anyone who isn’t rich. Which is most people. You might be under the impression that if you do become disabled, you’ll get money for carers and enough of it. Forget that. This government plans to stop anyone who is or becomes disabled from living. In every way.

“I know this will come as a great disappointment to you,” Mrs Justice Andrews told ILF recipients in court this morning as she dismissed the challenge to the ILF closure this morning. I’m not sure this comment helped particularly (I was there to hear it), but on she went: “The issue before me was a narrow one. It was whether the minister had enough information to lawfully make the [closure] decision. I found he did.”

Lawyers Deighton Pierce Glynn on this: the justice ruled that an earlier government decision to close the ILF was based on over-optimistic information about the impact the closure would have on ILF recipients (that earlier closure decision was overturned last year). For this latest closure decision, the then-minister for disabled people (Mike Penning) was made fully aware of “the inevitable and considerable adverse effect” that closure would have on disabled people.

So. You could – can – take from that the view that decisionmakers understand perfectly the impact that the ILF closure will have on people who rely on the fund. ILF recipient John Kelly, who was at court this morning, certainly read things that way: “The minister had enough evidence to make a decision to lose the Independent Living Fund and take away the independence of over 18,000 disabled people. You can double that in terms of their personal assistants, and their families and friends who are also associated with those 18,000 people. This is an attack on the way that we want to live in our society. The government has made a decision that will have a detrimental impact on disabled people and they’re okay with that. I’m very angry.”

Many people are very angry. This photo shows ILF recipients and disabled campaigners blocking the entrance to the Royal Courts this morning in protest at the closure decision:

And here.

As many people said today – this decision doesn’t mean the end of the fight to save the ILF. No way.