Disability Linkspam: Mental health treatment in the Job Centre etc

[davidgillon]

Mental health treatment in the Job Centre – what could possibly go wrong?

Pretty good summary from a friend of mine. I'd make a couple of additional points, that it could drive people away from seeking help anywhere, not just at the Job Centre, and that it may be actively stigmatising with JCP staff (I saw a story of one screaming at someone with learning disabilities just this week), G4S (or whoever) security staff - who have such a fine record on this kind of thing, and fellow claimants.

I'd ask how Nick Clegg and the Lib-Dems could get this so wrong, but Nick Clegg....

Osborne’s budget silence on disability ‘is ominous’

Most things about Osbourne are pretty ominous, but there's about £12bn of undeclared cuts in the budget and you just know who the target will be if they're re-elected.

Labour’s commitment to disabled people

Labour's Kate Green on what Labour will do for disabled people. Unfortunately it comprehensively fails to address the real issues and we don't actually trust Labour's attitude towards disabled people, for reasons I discuss in the comments. And then of course there was the monumental faux pas by Rachel Reeves, Green's boss, earlier in the week, which let her real attitude to benefit claimants shine through. Disabled people's reactions here: Anger after Reeves tells benefit claimants: ‘Labour is not for you'

Meanwhile it turns out that not only is the Minister for Disabled People's constituency office still inaccessible (this has been a story since before Christmas, so clearly fixing it is a priority with him), but his staff are using an unsafe ramp to try and get around the issue. Harper stays silent over his “totally unacceptable” office access measures

And in hate-crime, the law continues to fail to enforce Disability Hate Crime legislation: Trio who ‘avoided hate crime sentence for second time’ show law ‘is a joke’

*Headdesk*

Comments

[cxcvi]

And all of this means that I still have no fucking idea how to vote...

[davidgillon]

I'm working on principle of Labour as least worst, but whoever will keep UKIP out is also a viable choice.

[kaberett]

Please please please please please don't refer to George Osborne as "Gideon". It's not his name. Referring to people with names they were given rather than names they have chosen is always vile; there is no argument in support of it that doesn't also argue it's okay to use the wrong name for me; and at least from here it looks like it has really nasty anti-Semitic implications.

[davidgillon]

Interesting point, and I genuinely hadn't thought of that aspect.

(For people not aware of the background, George Osbourne, the much-reviled Chancellor, the high priest of austerity, was christened Gideon Oliver Osbourne, but chose to become George Gideon Oliver Osbourne at 13 - it's common for him to be referred to as Gideon by his political opponents).

I utterly despise the man, but you have a point.

And to make it doubly a point, my novel-in-progress, which I really need to get back to, has as one of its three leads someone who fought a battle to change her name (or at least it's diminutive) in her teens (ironically for this conversation she changed it to Aleks)

[kaberett]

Oh believe me, I despise him too - a large part of the reason I make the request is that it sticks in my craw to defend him, but I can't in good conscience engage in critique of his politics couched in those terms. (You will perhaps be unsurprised to learn I've lost friends over this.)

[davidgillon]

I've run into enough left-wingers who haven't responded well to requests not to be disablist to well believe it about other things. And at root renaming Osbourne is classist at best, but the applicability to self-identification, especially wrt trans issues wasn't one that had occurred to me, and it's a telling point.

[sunflowerinrain]

It's part of a wider lack of civilised behaviour, of aggression and selfishness caused by fear. I don't know if it's really worse than it was, but I notice the differences between England and France on my rare trips to England. There is little financial help for the disabled here, and you can't be registered disabled unless you are tetraplegic or more (even though I can't walk at all, I'm not eligible!). However, people are so helpful and I never feel the fear that comes over me sometimes when in England. Nobody without a badge parks in spaces allocated for blue-badges even when everywhere else is full. In London, I've had my wheelchair knocked over (with me in it) by someone in too much of a hurry to go around it; then he swore at me for getting in his way. He seemed to think that was reasonable.

[davidgillon]

Yeah, we don't have a healthy attitude to disability as a society and the right-wing have deliberately set out to make that worse in order to justify targeting us for the worst of the austerity cuts. I've not yet had anyone collide with my wheelchair, which is still so new ' my wheelchair' sounds strange, but I've had plenty of people try to walk through me while I'm on crutches. I usually try to arrange it so they come off worst :)