their responsibilities. News media covered the suicide of Jane Kavangh, a mother who was given no respite care, social care or housing adaptations for her 15-year-old daughter, in 2018. Austerity caused the number of disabled children segregated into specialist schools to rise, while 10% of specialist deaf teachers were cut. Half of students excluded from school have special educational needs and disabilities. To conclude, Ryan calls for a "solidarity politics" that recognises the value of disabled people to society and calls for the strengthening of the welfare state. An afterword in the second edition comments that the 2019 United Kingdom general election saw the success of a Conservative party signalling further defunding of the welfare state, while the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately killed disabled people and led many to remain housebound ("shield") for months. However, the government's support packages showed that large-scale investment is possible, and local mutual aid groups supported people who were forced into isolation. Reception The book was one of the six nominees for the 2020 Bread and Roses Award by the Alliance of Radical Booksellers, which celebrates political non-fiction. Ryan was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022, due in combination to her authorship of Crippled and her writing for The Guardian. Critical reception In The Observer, Yvonne Roberts reviewed Crippled as "an admirably comprehensive charge sheet of the scale of state abuse", praising Ryan's argument that the demonisation of disabled people was designed to distract from the human rights violations they faced. Alex Clark of Financial Times compared it favourably to Darren McGarvey's Poverty Safari, finding it "sobering, but fundamentally necessary" information. Clark was most surprised by how the impact of austerity on disabled people "is so frequently hidden" from those unaffected by it and praised Ryan for her "wide-ranging research". Reviewing for The Guardian, Alice O'Keeffe called the book a "blistering polemic" with "a devastating case to make", but suggested that organising the book as a collection of case studies may have "dialled down the polemic and encouraged more empathy". Contrastingly, Learning Disability Wales' policy officer Grace Krause reviewed that Ryan's interleaving of research and personal stories is "devastatingly efficient in giving disabled people themselves a voice... while making readers aware of the extent of suffering that has been caused by austerity policies". Krause praised Ryan's "passionate defence of every person's right to live a dignified life" and "rejection of