Unsuppressed
Jul. 4th, 2024 04:25 pm* Mainland UK reliably gets a grand total of 1 or 2 cases of personation** in a general election (vs about 31m voters) , so the Tories brought in a requirement for photo-ID, which many young, elderly or disabled people simply don't have. The estimate was it stopped at least 14,000 people from voting at the local elections at the polling stations, and many more who just didn't turn up, and local elections only cover about a third of the country at a time. Jacob Rees-Mogg actually admitted at the Tory Party Conference that it was a deliberate attempt to exclude non-Tory voters.
** Pretending to be someone else to vote, contrary to Section 60 of The Representation Of The People Act, 1983.
We Can Erase It For You Wholesale
Mar. 29th, 2024 08:41 pm A company that does school photographs offered two versions of the class pictures taken for a primary class in Aberdeenshire, one with the disabled kids included, one without. Including splitting a pair of twins.
Aberdeenshire pupils with complex needs* ‘erased’ from school photo
The council's apology and claim the school didn't know two sets of photos had been taken doesn't ring true, the only way that could have happened would have been for the staff to leave the kids alone with the photographer. Much more likely is they didn't think it through. Two different versions of what happened are in the reports across various TV and newspaper sources, one saying the set without the disabled kids was taken first, before they arrived, and the second saying afterwards. In either case the staff would have known.
The company's tweeted media response - "one of our photographers took additional images of the class group which omitted some members of the class photograph" - is a good example of how to turn a crisis into a disaster, being unable to bring itself to admit it was the disabled kids excluded, and also being an inaccessible gif of text, without, as far as I can see, any alt text. And while the apology is also on their website, the only way to get to it there is via a link in the tweet.
The Daily Mail's version of the story is particularly 'special', making the story about the company's owner, not the kids.
* C'mon Guardian, you can say the damned d-word!
Rewriting the Rules
Mar. 29th, 2024 03:35 pmThe Scottish Parliament is considering a bill to legalise assisted suicide.
Bill's author: "It only covers people with terminal illnesses, not disability"
Hidden in the small print:
"For the purposes of this Act, a person is terminally ill if they have an advanced and progressive disease, illness or condition from which they are unable to recover and that can reasonably be expected to cause their premature death."
A huge percentage of disabilities come with a reduced life-expectancy for one reason for another, so the bill that supposedly doesn't include people with disability covers:
Anyone with an intellectual disability
Anyone with a spinal injury
Anyone with epilepsy
Anyone with continence issues
Anyone with swallowing issues
Anyone whose disability, or medication, results in weight gain.
And for a really disturbing twist, it's potentially going to be affected by socio-economic status, both individually and regionally.
Access *headdesk*
Jan. 23rd, 2024 09:58 pmIt's not entirely abled short-sightedness here, they really are stuffed WRT accessible routes into town. The Maidstone Road is the main road into town and runs down a steep ridge, the only alternatives are almost as steep and funnel into the Maidstone Road, and can only be reached down even steeper roads (steep enough my car struggles, never mind my chair!). None of the 15 minute city theorists have ever really accounted for cities that aren't remotely flat and how disabled people are meant to manage them.
Tories gonna tory....
Dec. 14th, 2023 08:31 pmAnger as Sunak scraps dedicated minister for disabled people.
TLDR: previous Minister of State swapped over to Immigration (he was already clearly a law enforcement wannabee) and not replaced, disability role given to an existing Under Secretary of State).
(kaberett, check out the chair pictured, looks familiar!)
Disabled people don't need a minister, thinks Sunak - they just need to try harder (caution, may contain sarcasm)
I actually wish they'd axed it entirely, because then we could make the case for reinstating it in the Government Equalities Office, rather than the Department of Work and Pensions where it is now, and separate it from the benefits enforcement role. Obviously we'd first want rid of Kemi Badenough from GEO so it can actually start working for equality instead of against it.
Politicians playing with our lives ....
Nov. 23rd, 2023 03:51 am ... that's the only logic I can find for the Chancellor's Autumn Statement.
The Guardian reports in this article that under Jeremy Hunt's proposed changes to disability benefit 370,000 disabled people will lose £5000 a year, but only 10,000 are expected to be able to find work as a result. On top of which there's a handy implicit demonising of all disabled people as benefit scrounging scum (which used to be the name of a friend's blog the Tories were indulging in it so often).
But the changes will only apply from April 2025, by which time the Conservatives will have been out of power for a minimum of six months.
The real object here isn't to force disabled people into destitution, though I've no doubt that will please plenty of Tories if it happens, it's to force Labour to either implement it, or axe it. If the implement it, they'll take tremendous flak from their own supporters, if they axe it, the Tory press will hound them for 'going easy on benefit scroungers'.
It's cynical to the point of being actively evil.
Here we go again....
Nov. 21st, 2023 07:05 pmTory junior finance minister Laura Trott has been out today chumming the water for her boss (Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt) in advance of his Autumn Statement and telling anyone who'll listen that disabled people who are unable to work in the workplace and therefore are in receipt of disability benefits have "a duty" to work from home.
The cohort of disabled people she's talking about here are those judged to have 'limited capability to work'. Which basically means "In an ideal world we might be able to find them jobs, but in practise we can't get employers to even look at them" and for a good chunk of them "Working would actually probably be damaging to their health". And in many cases they should actually be in the next cohort up from Limited Capability, with no capability for work related activity, but the assessments have been fixed by the Tories since forever.
Of course the idea of DWP providing useful support for disabled people to work from home is risible, DWP doesn't see us as capable of anything beyond shelf-stacking, so the likely assumption driving this is everyone can get a zero hours contract doing remote call centre work. It's actually going to move disability employment backwards, because why should the government invest in schemes like Access to Work to make workplaces accessible, when they can just throw us all at remote minimum wage call centre jobs? And the employers will know it, and that there's no political will to drive Equality Act enforcement.
I think the language Trott was using is revealing. By talking about us having 'a duty', rather than the normal Tory waffle about 'work being good for you' - based on some extremely dubious 'science' that looked at abled workers, not disabled, Trott is tacitly acknowledging that they can't make the 'work is good for you' argument for the people affected, and if that's the case, then she's really acknowledging that work will be bad for them.
Over and above the direct damage that's likely to accrue from forcing disabled people to work when they're medically unfit, we know from every other time DWP have been let loose to sanction disabled people on a whim that it will lead to despair, destitution, and all too likely cases of suicide. The Tories know this as well as anyone else, they fought long and hard to stop the DWP's internal inquiries into the deaths being released, but they clearly think they can get a few positive headlines in the Tory rags and/or find a few extra pounds for Hunt to give away to party donors in tax cuts. The Nasty Party is back.
In more positive news, the Court of Appeal has ruled that people are perfectly entitled to call Iain Duncan Smith "Tory Scum".
"As a word, ‘neurodiversity’ describes the whole of humanity. But the neurodiversity movement is a political movement for people who want their human rights."
The mother of neurodiversity: how Judy Singer changed the world
Just downloading some light reading for while I'm away: "An Independent Review of Sickness Absence in Great Britain" and the government response - which I'm assuming elaborates on "That's exactly the take on the skiving bastards we were looking for" since it was commissioned by the ConDems in the first place, one of the co-authors was ex-boss of the British Chambers of Commerce and his co-author's job title was National Director for Health and Work.
(How exactly is it 'an independent review' if the co-author is a government employee?)
You rang the wrong number, chum
May. 4th, 2023 02:33 pm"DWP admits culpability in the deaths of 53 disabled people through implementing Tory austerity policy"
"Over how many years?" (Seriously?!?)
"Those are just the ones they've admitted".
"Um, ah, well at least they admitted it"
"Only because they were forced to by the Freedom of Information process, and the reports are redacted to hell."
"We raised disability benefits this year!"
"Not the legacy disability benefits though"
"Well, they're legacy"
"Not to the people still trying to live on them!"
*Headdesk*
I'm too angry to be really effective at this, but he'll remember this call. (I suppose kudos to him for sticking it out as long as he did).
Here we go again
Mar. 15th, 2023 10:05 pmToday's budget, beyond its massive pensions freebie for the 1%, basically axes the entire existing disability benefits system. It's branded as doing away with the hated Work Capability Assessment, but my immediate reaction "They'll just have renamed it", turned out to be almost exactly right - they're going to use the Personal Independence Payment assessment instead, only that's not fit for purpose if it also has to cover whether you're fit for work or not. I've already been approached to be part of the team taking the white paper apart to find out how it won't work - probably for another Spartacus Report, though I'm not sure I'm up to it. My immediate concern is that it may have completely erased the idea of being unfit for any work.
The whole thing, with its emphasis on how everyone 'needs' 'fulfilling work' just reeks of Talcott Parsons and his categorisation of the 'sick role', aka disability, as deviant.
Bonfire of the Accessibilities
Sep. 6th, 2022 03:59 pmOh god, I've been poking at Jacob Rees-Mogg's 'dashboard' of Retained EU Legislation which is on some woowoo 'visualization' tool called Tableau Public, or possibly Public Tableau, it can't seem to decide. This is the set of several thousand pieces of EU legislation still in force in the UK that our new Glorious Leaderene* is proposing to consign to a bonfire by the end of 2023 - and if she leaves Rees-Mogg in charge it'll be an auto-da-fe, not a bonfire. Rees-Mogg, often called the Minister for the 17th Century, clearly missed his calling, he'd have been completely at home in the Spanish Inquisition.
So anyway, this 'dashboard' has a search function that only does exact matches and doesn't allow combined search terms. In 2022? I have games I bought in beta that have better search functionality. Which effectively means you can only find which retained EU laws affect disability if you actually know exactly what they're called already, and if you don't know they're out there, you're stuffed. Just searching for 'disability' got me four matches, two about copyright and two about where benefits can be paid. So that's bugger all use if you want to poke it for a list of every retained law related to disability rights and accessibility.
I was doing this poking because I knew from the Civil Aviation Authority's website that EC 1107/2006, the PRM** legislation that covers disabled people's right to fly on the same terms and conditions as non-disabled folk, plus passenger assistance, plus compensation etc is retained legislation and therefore up for replacement/burning at the stake, and wondered if the same was true for the rest of public transport. At least EC 1300/2014 the PRM-TSI legislation that does the same thing as EC 1107/2006 for trains is listed as replaced by the EU Withdrawal Act (but if they replaced the trains legislation, why not the planes?), but mindbogglingly the other set of trains accessibility legislation (EC 1371/2007) wasn't replaced at the same time and is still retained legislation.
On top of the whole set of conceptual idiocy that makes up Brexit, I'm beginning to think the whole thing is an utter shambles at the detail level.
As Rees-Mog was virulently opposed to reasonable adjustments in Parliament during Covid, the idea of our accessibility rights in his hands sends a cold shudder down my spine.
And if that thing is accessible to people with visual impairments I'll eat my wheelchair cushion (lots of 'hover the cursor over the visualization for further information')
* God, I haven't used that one in thirty years
** Passengers with Reduced Mobility
Aargh Ableds* *headdesk*
Jun. 14th, 2022 04:42 pmTwice in five minutes twitter has had me not just *facepalm*ing, but full-on head-in-hands over abled attitudes to disability access.
First up were a bunch of pedestrianisation/sustainable transportation advocates arguing public transport meant no one needed cars. Someone had already made a point about public transport not meeting their needs that was probably disability related, so I pointed out mass transport fails as an access solution for disabled people because it doesn't address the mobility barriers between stop and destination. Not the built environment, but the physical environment of how far is it and how steep is the slope that determine accessibility if you have very limited ambulant mobility or are a wheelchair user. Not only did I get a general denial that it's an issue, but I had someone arguing that the solution to disability access was e-scooters (I really, really, really wish I was kidding).
And I just read the twitter profile of the main guy (not e-scooter guy), and he's not some random green, he's a senior transportation specialist at the World Bank. FFS!
Then I noticed a thread about the latest edition of the 'D&D Combat Wheelchair' rules. Yes, it's a thing, there are even figures available, and it's a thing that an ungodly number of ableds seem to find threatening in some way. So threatening that someone has actually spent several hours drawing an annoyingly well illustrated cartoon with character 1, in wooden wheelchair saying "Thank god, an accessible dungeon", and character 2 promptly magicking them them into an abled. So the first post in the thread was "Hey, new version is now out," and the second was the cartoon. After which it degenerated into D&D nerds who don't get the point saying but what about Spell X, and people who don't just get the point but know rather more about disability and why the D&D spells are a very limited solution. But seriously, what kind of a abled arsehole posts that cartoon as an immediate response?
Aargh, Ableds*
* Obviously not all ableds, but far too many of them.
Sigh, environmentalists
Apr. 8th, 2022 02:17 pmSo an environmentalist group called Replanet has decided the Ukraine war is the perfect opportunity for advancing their agenda (I have some doubts about their ethics here) and has put out a report advocating #SwitchOffPutin (or #switchoffputin as they had it because they're completely unaware Camel Case is better for accessibility*).
Their plan calls for cutting European dependence on Russian fuel immediately by banning intra-European flights**, switching on all the mothballed nuke plants, limiting all households to a fixed amount of gas usage, and banning cars from city centres.
You can probably imagined I immediately spotted a problem with the last two from the disability standpoint. For the first one with disabled people in general having higher energy usage, especially in Northern European countries, and with some disabled people being absolutely dependent on having their house at a fixed temperature because they can't thermoregulate, and for the second one because it assumes public transport is 1) accessible and 2) can get you close enough to your destination, which is optimistic even in the most access-friendly European cities because for some disabled people close enough to your destination is going to be within 100m, while if it's up a hill and you can't park outside, forget it.
So I tweeted, and I got a response, which was basically "Whoops, good point. This is an emergency, we hoped governments would regulate and make exceptions, just like with Covid***"
Me: So why doesn't your report say that? It would only need a sentence. You forgot about us didn't you?
Them: You're very passionate, why not join us as a volunteer and make sure our next report has a clue about disability
Me: Bugger off, I'm not doing your accessibility audits for free.
* I admit I needed reminding, I tend to do Camel Case more often than not, but do forget when I'm annoyed
** You can tell here that it's an environmental agenda rather than an anti-Putin agenda because it took me 30 seconds to confirm from multiple sources that European AvGas consumption is mainly fueled from the Middle East and India.
*** Another disabled person hopped in on that, pointing out the Covid regs often threw disabled people to the wolves, or were deliberately mis-used to limit access (they're from York, which used the Covid regs to ban disabled parking in the city centre).
Disturbing* report from Inside Housing that I only came across via disabled twitter, with the government's Minister of State for Building Safety and Fire (only qualification, he's run a few medical businesses) U-turning on a promise to implement the Grenfell Inquiry recommendation that disabled residents in tower blocks should have Personal Emergency Evac Plans (PEEPs). And it's the way he justified that that makes it far, far worse:
"“On practicality, how can you evacuate a mobility-impaired person from a tall building before the professionals from the fire and rescue service arrive?
“On proportionality, how much is it reasonable to spend to do this at the same time as we seek to protect residents and taxpayers from excessive costs?
“On safety, how can you ensure that an evacuation of mobility-impaired people is carried out in a way that does not hinder others in evacuating or the fire service in fighting the fire.”
So that's "it might be hard", "it might cost money", and besides "they're only crips, not real people". And apparently it's more important to fight the fire than save disabled people - typical Tory, "never mind the bodies, think of the property damage!"
His whole argument falls apart because I've had a (unofficial**) PEEP that said "If the alarm goes, David should wait 'til last to go down the stairs" - so zero costs to implement and no chance I'd 'hinder' anyone. That's possibly something of an extreme and not really what you'd want in a PEEP (though consistent with existing PEEP guidance), but a very sizeable percentage of the people who might need help evacuating probably don't need much more help than someone walking down with them to ensure they don't get knocked over on the stairs, which is also going to be true of a sizeable chunk of non-disabled but elderly residents. (And most of the rest could be covered by spending £200 on an evac chair and training volunteers from their neighbours to use it).
Note also that his argument distinguishes between able people / taxpayers (worth protecting) and disabled people (not worth protecting), effectively creating two classes of residents. Of course disabled people also being taxpayers is clearly too difficult a point for his delicate Tory sensibilities.
Another article from Inside Housing I noticed while reading that one covers the Grenfell Inquiry's cross-examination of the senior Civil Servant responsible for the fire safety regs for builders, mostly focusing on why he did bugger all after the Lakanal House fire (six dead) showed the risk of cladding fires.
Gems from his email history include "We only have to respond to the coroner, not kiss her backside" (after the Lakanal House coroner raised it through the mechanism intended to let coroners flag systematic risks to government and which legally requires a response) and over concerns from MPs via a fire safety All Party Political Group "he will not listen to reason, so I just ignore him".
But the creme de la creme has to be him telling an architect who had raised the risk of a cladding fire causing ten times the deaths of Lakanal House "Show me the bodies". That would be the six dead at Lakanal House then? And now the 71 dead of Grenfell Tower.
And it turns out the government's insistence immediately post-Grenfell that combustible cladding was already banned results from him telling the minister the regs said that, which relies on you interpreting "filler material", a phrase he'd put into the regs, as meaning that, even though he'd never told anyone else that that was what he meant it to mean, and industry bodies had told him they didn't know what it meant and he'd agreed it should be changed.
I have a horrible feeling he's just granted the defendants in any post-Grenfell trial the perfect get-out-of-jail-free card.
When asked what he might have done differently he commented "What I will say is that the approach the government − the successive governments had to regulation had had an impact on the way we worked, the resources that we had available, and perhaps the mindset that we’d adopted as a team, and myself in particular."
Which is effectively an admission that the government's demands for a bonfire of regulation meant that no fire-safety change could be adopted unless it resulted in lower costs to industry. It's like the regulatory capture that happens when industry gains charge of a regulator through a revolving door recruitment policy, but in this case industry didn't need to exert itself because the Tories were executing an ideological capture and gutting of the fire safety regs on their behalf.
Which the former minister for fire safety, Brandon Lewis effectively admitted in his evidence, which the Guardian did cover.
* Also disturbing that the major papers such as the Guardian, which has otherwise been doing good coverage of the Grenfell Inquiry, didn't seem to think this was worth reporting, not even when it involves yet another a government u-turn, and that after an explicit promise to the Grenfell victims. I tagged the reporter who's been doing their Grenfell coverage in a tweet about it in the hope it might prompt them to mention it (or let him convince his editor it's worth reporting in the event he already tried).
** Thinking about it recently, I realised the reason it was unofficial was probably because they didn't want any documentation to lead to the Fire Brigade asking about it in their fire safety inspections.Dual Standards
Mar. 29th, 2022 12:05 amSeeing a lot of disabled people commenting on twitter about how everyone seems to be condemning Will Smith, but no one seems to be discussing Chris Rock using a world-wide bully-pulpit to punch down at a woman with an auto-immune disease. (And everyone else with a visible difference).
As a friend noted, that just an hour on from an actually disabled actor getting an Oscar for a film about disabled people.
Academic writing guide?
Feb. 28th, 2022 01:03 amDoes anyone have any recommendations for a guide on how to academic writing?
My sister, as her school's SENCO*, has to do a masters level Postgraduate Certificate in SEND* (it's a legal requirement of the job), but the guidance she's had is pretty poor, roughly "Academic writing is very different, don't use first or second person and reference everything". Sadly I'm not exaggerating how skimpy it is - I read through it on Sunday morning in under 10 minutes, though it takes a couple of pages to say what I've reduced to a sentence. (I suspect they just haven't taken account of how unsupported people are when everything's being done remotely - three online days to date - and they haven't done academic work in several decades).
Obviously a slightly more useful guide might help her get a better idea of what's expected of her. So is there anything out there? It doesn't have to be subject specific, just cover academic writing in a more useful format.
* Special Educational Needs Coordinator
** Special Educational Needs and Development
The Hidden Costs of Disability ...
Jan. 24th, 2022 07:21 pm£110 for a new battery for the car because the current one had died due to underuse when I went to start the car yesterday. The AA guy took one look at the milometer and asked me if it was worth keeping the car on the road given I'm only doing about 1000miles/.year. I pointed out that as a wheelchair user it's sort of essential to have a car to get anywhere at all.
Which reminds me of the story in yesterday's Observer about cities planning to tax businesses for providing parking for their employees:
Tax on parking: UK cities to impose levy on cars in bid to cut pollution
£550/year seems to be the amount being suggested, which would have cost Evil Aerospace several million per annum for my site alone. The intention seems to be to try to force workers to rely on public transport to get to work. No one seems to have realised (or is it to care?) that this will have an inevitably chilling effect on the employment of disabled people, because the inevitable result will be that many employers will give up on providing car parks entirely, or limit them only to senior managers. Then when a disabled person dependent on their car looks for a job they'll have to write-those employers off as somewhere they just can't get to, or if they've kept a few spaces face arguing that some manager has to give their space up for them, which is sure to be wonderful for their continuing career prospects.
Public transport just can't substitute for people with severe mobility issues. There was a bus-stop at almost the closest point on a public road outside Evil Aerospace, and I would still have had a 600m walk to get to the office. By the end of the working day I was frequently struggling just to get from my desk to my car in the nearest disabled parking bay to the door. And even in a massive car park we actually had fewer disabled bays by the building than disabled drivers in the building. Taxing companies for providing employee parking will end up pushing disabled people out of the workforce.
And a story I'd have seen much sooner if living in a time of plague hadn't pushed my tweetdeck disability columns far to the right of where my screen ends:
https://domesticemployers.org/hand-in-hand-grieves-the-loss-of-engracia-figueroa/
The TLDR is that United Airlines destroyed the powerchair of a disability activist with a custom seating solution, she developed a pressure sore while sitting in an inappropriate 'loaner' chair* for five hours at the airport trying to get them to understand the issue, and three months later she died of complications from that pressure sore. It's basically the nightmare scenario for wheelchair users, and it's precisely the scenario we've been trying to get the airlines to understand for years, that a general loaner chair is not an appropriate or safe solution for someone with specialist seating needs.
* If a picture I came across on line was of the loaner in question, I'm flabbergasted, because it was basically a glorified evac chair, not even a transit chair, and would have been inappropriate for anyone to sit in for more than a few minutes, never mind someone with specialist seating needs.