Concern grows over legality of government’s approach as new figures show more than 150,000 carers facing huge penalties

• A hero – then sacked. The carer’s allowance whistleblower

New figures show more than 150,000 unpaid carers are now facing huge fines for minor rule breaches, as MPs, charities and campaigners demanded an immediate amnesty.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, joined calls to write off the vast debts incurred by tens of thousands of people who care for sick, disabled and elderly relatives after experts raised concerns about the legality of the government’s approach.

And They Lived … Ever After is a south Asian book of reworked European classics written by women with disabilities

A deaf Snow White, a blind Cinderella, a neurodivergent ugly duckling and a wheelchair-using Rapunzel: classic European fairytales have been reimagined in a new anthropology of stories written by south Asian women with disabilities.

“ When disabled people don’t see themselves in the world, it tells us that we don’t deserve to exist, that these stories are not for us, that stories of love and friendship are not for us, and certainly not happy endings,” says Nidhi Ashok Goyal, the founder of Rising Flame, a feminist disability rights group that has produced the book, called And They Lived … Ever After.

“I can’t. There is no ramp from the room to the garden.”

“We will find a way. I can carry you down,” says the prince.

Charities say high rates of people signed off work are caused by crumbling public services after years of underinvestment

Rishi Sunak has been accused of making mental ill health “another front in the culture wars”, as critics warned his plan to curb benefits for some with anxiety and depression was an assault on disabled people.

In a speech on welfare , the prime minister said he wanted to explore withdrawing a major cash benefit claimed by people living with mental health problems and replacing it with treatment.

Shifting responsibility for issuing fit notes, formerly known as sicknotes, away from GPs to other “work and health professionals” in order to encourage more people to return to work.

Confirming plans to legislate “in the next parliament” to close benefit claims for anyone who has been claiming for 12 months but is not complying with conditions on accepting available work.

Asking more people on universal credit working part-time to look for more work by increasing the earnings threshold from £743 a month to £892 a month, so people paid below this amount have to seek extra hours.

Confirming plans to tighten the work capability assessment to require more people with “less severe conditions” to seek some form of employment.

The prime minister’s speech on cracking down on ‘sicknote culture’ was heavy on rhetoric but light on evidence and detail

Rishi Sunak’s big speech on reforming disability benefits was intended to show that the government had a grip on the economic and health challenges of the UK’s rising levels of long-term sickness. Instead, it came over as an administration running out of ideas, high on strident rhetoric, and desperate to cut welfare bills at all costs.

It was a “moral mission”, Sunak declared, to overhaul the current welfare system, which was “unfit for purpose”. Disability benefits were too easy to cheat, too cushy, too easily claimed. The speech was a clear appeal to the notion, in vogue on the right, that “mental health culture” has “gone too far”.

The pandemic showed that remote learning is effective. It’s absurd that universities are going back to processes that exclude us

• Rosie Anfilogoff is the winner of the 2024 Hugo Young Award (19-25 age category) recognising young talent in political opinion writing

My route to university was never going to be simple. While my friends were flicking through university brochures and choosing Ucas options, I was signing chemotherapy consent forms in the teenage cancer unit at Addenbrooke’s hospital and throwing up in its weirdly tropical island-themed bathrooms. Even before then, my severe chronic illness made attending traditional university unthinkable – until the pandemic happened.

In 2020, for the first time, it became possible to attend a brick-and-mortar university online. Universities became accessible – or at least, more accessible than they had ever been – practically overnight. Accommodations that disabled students had been requesting for years, such as lecture recordings and software that would allow them to take exams from home, were slotted into place so that students could learn remotely. Suddenly, friends at university were having the kind of experience that would have enabled me to join them. But since the “end” of the pandemic, online learning has withered away. and thousands of students have been left without sufficient access. By returning to the pre-pandemic state of affairs, universities are failing current and prospective disabled students like me.

Rosie Anfilogoff is a writer and journalist

Seven years after a terrible fall, I teamed up with two other disabled sportsmen to scale Iceland’s highest peak. With each drive of my poles into the snow, I came closer to the man I’d once been

The view from the top was breathtaking. It was 2023 and I had just climbed the Hvannadals Peak in Iceland, almost seven years after becoming paralysed from the chest down after a climbing fall. Raging winds had been replaced by crystal clear blue skies. My two teammates and I were on our way to becoming the first all-disabled team to cross Europe’s largest ice cap, the mighty Vatnajökull glacier, unsupported and unassisted.

A year before, when Niall McCann first suggested making the 100-mile trip, I was excited by the prospect of returning to this lost world of crevasses, mountains and ice, but apprehensive and anxious about whether I’d struggle. A small part of me thought about how much easier it would be if I could still walk. Back then, I often put a positive spin on my situation, but I still would have given anything for my legs to work and to be able to walk again.

As his coming-of-age rollercoaster hits the stage, the novelist talks about the boredom of hospitals, how Britain has changed since Buddha – and why shouting at his kids is a great way to write blogs

It’s been an unfathomably difficult 18 months for Hanif Kureishi. In 2022, the esteemed British writer went to Rome with his wife for Christmas, where he fainted and fell. When he woke up in a pool of blood he had lost the use of his hands, arms and legs. For more than a year, he was confined to hospital beds, questioned and prodded by doctors and nurses. He couldn’t sit, he couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t pick up a pen to write.

So I’m struck by the optimism and humour of the man speaking to me over Zoom this morning. When I join the call, Kureishi is sitting erectly in his kitchen and joking with theatre director Emma Rice about their new stage adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia, which opens at the RSC’s Swan theatre this week. It turns out the long months of convalescence – Kureishi has spent time in five hospitals, undergone spinal surgery, and only returned to his home last December – haven’t dampened his creative spirit.

Single people with long-term disability that stops them working will be much poorer after rollout, Resolution Foundation says

The rollout of universal credit is on course to make thousands of working-age disabled people significantly poorer, according to a report showing that more than 7 million people will be covered by the six-into-one benefit change before the end of the next parliament.

A single person with a long-term disability that prevents them from working is £2,800 a year worse off when they transfer to universal credit (UC), the Resolution Foundation said, adding that all single people with long-term disabilities will suffer this loss of income when the rollout of UC is completed by 2030.

Hundreds of thousands could lose out in England and Wales under disability benefit reforms after general election

Hundreds of thousands fewer disabled people could receive cold weather payments under the Conservatives’ planned post-election disability benefit reforms, according to an internal government report seen by the Observer .

The briefing, by civil servants at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), says that under the plans, new applicants for disability benefits in England and Wales would only qualify for cold weather payments if they passed a much harsher assessment than exists at present.