Minor Triumph

I've been waging a largely solo campaign against a government initiative called Disability Confident, which may sound strange for a disability rights activist, but there are some fairly major problems with Disability Confident. The campaign is targeted at getting more disabled people into work, but it's run by the Department of Work and Pensions and, like most DWP disability campaigns, is based around a perception of disability as a problem, a heavy use of inspiration porn (they keep inviting ex-Paralympians, and the well known disabled war veteran Simon Weston - he was mates with the last Minister for Disabled People), and an absolute refusal to use the d-word (discrimination). Apparently the reason disabled people are employed at two thirds the rate of non-disabled (to the tune of two million of us who should have jobs but don't) isn't discrimination, it's that managers are embarrassed by disability *headdesk*.

So every time something appears on twitter under the #disabilityconfident hashtag, I offer positive opinion on where it goes wrong, and refer them to various blogs I've written analysing the failures. There was a Disability Confident event in London yesterday with the Minister speaking and I did my usual thing, such as pointing out that when he says 238,000 disabled people found work last year, that the number out of work only went down by 20-odd thousand and at this rate it will take 80 years to fix the problem. I checked twitter this morning and there was a link to an article on the event in Personnel Today. Not my usual reading, but I went to check it, and while they may have opened with the minister I was delighted to find that they had quoted me - “If you pander to the perception of disability as a problem, then it will remain a problem,” and linked to my latest blog. Result!

Major Triumph

While I was busy annoying the Minister for Disabled People, other disabled activists were busy storming Parliament. Well, storming may be an exaggeration as most of them were in wheelchairs, but it was the one the press went with, as a bunch of activists campaigning against the shutting down of the Independent Living Fund* managed to get all the way to the doors of the chamber before they were slammed in their faces. In a double irony all the major news stations seem to have been reduced to using the activists video (produced by activist-journalist Kate Belgrave) because even though they had cameras on scene they actually listened when Commons officials started screaming "stop filming". A couple of PAs were manhandled by cops and a few wheelchairs dragged about, but the police seem to have managed not to injure anyone for once.

Disability fund protest at Prime Minister's Questions (BBC)


Disability Protesters Blocked From Commons Chamber (C4)



* The Independent Living Fund shuts down in 5 days time, it was designed to fund the support needs of those with the most complex disabilities and allow them to live independently in the community. The government claims that the funding is being transferred to local government, but the transfer is a one-off, the money isn't ring-fenced and several councils have made clear they have no intention of using it to support its current recipients, while other councils haven't even gotten around to doing a needs assessment on those transferring as yet. DWP claim we're scaremongering (and Channel 4 found an excellent voice-over guy to quote them - just the right level of unbearable superciliousness), but people are genuinely scared they won't be able to fund their PAs and will end up being forced into residential care (which doesn't really exist for disabled people, so they'll end up in old folks homes - this actually happened to a friend of mine for six months a few years ago, they were in their early 20s at the time) and the refusal of some councils to ringfence funding shows the fears are based in reality. The continued refusal of DWP to accept there are any risks shows every sign of this being as big a clusterfuck as ESA (think Atos) and PIP, only this time with people's direct care at risk.