Don’t read this… read that

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Mik Scarlet

I did plan to write a blog about the various proposed changes in what assistance disabled people get via benefits and care packages, but I actually feel that everyone would do better to visit the Disability Now website, or read the current issue of the magazine. The team there have put together a series of fantastic articles that really explain the planned changes.

Disability Now

I must congratulate Ian Macrae and his team at DN for their superb work helping anyone who might be effected by the proposals to understand what is ahead. Well done.

"Scapegoat – Part 2"

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Mik Scarlet

Further to my last blog, I recently attended an event where I met a fellow disabled person who was the card to hold when playing disability Top Trumps. Not only was he a wheelchair user who had a weakened right arm, but he also was loosing his sight due to Macular Degeneration, and his hearing too, and he was also Dyslexic and Dyspraxic. So he was Physically & Mobility Impaired, Hearing Impaired, Sight Impaired and had a Learning Disability… and he had just had his Disability Living Allowance stopped, and he didn’t even get the full amount in the first place!. Now if this guy is considered to not be disabled enough to fulfil the criteria for DLA then who the hell is?

It’s plain that there is a plan behind this new policy on disability benefits. Many years ago I worked as a Fresh Claims Clerk in Luton dole office. There was a kind of unwritten policy there that every now and again a group of claims would be stopped and then we would see who could spare the time to come in a spend all day sorting out their benefits. Yeah it did weed out some fraud, but it caused a great deal of upset for the majority of legal claimants. This policy looks like is being applied to disability benefits. Surely only those who are in real need will battle to ensure they keep their benefits? But what about those people who are too disabled or sick to be able to spend time on the phone, attending offices and filling in forms? Or what about those who have a disability that means they can’t understand what is happening?

The thing that makes me most angry about this new Tory policy is while they are hammering the disabled they don’t seem to care if their members act like Barnet council has recently. Brian Coleman and his fellow Conservative councillors on Barnet council have awarded themselves huge increases in the allowances, some of nearly 40%. Now whatever your views on this bonanza pay day, I feel that the fact that this they are members of the same party that is telling us we all have to tighten our belts and prepare for job losses and massive cuts in services does have an element of hypocrisy. If a disabled person get the highest rate of Incapacity Benefit and DLA their annual income is around £11000, but Mr Coleman is now earning an annual wage of £113,735 (plus the pay from any private sector jobs he holds of course). Both is from the public purse, yet who is more deserving? Let’s not mention the massive pay packets and bonuses of company bosses and bankers. So this government really is attacking the poorest while ignoring those who could easily afford to put more into the public purse.

But what really upsets me is this attitude that if a disabled person is not working or fighting to find work they are a useless drain on society when society isn’t exactly an equal playing field. I recently spent a day with a fantastic group of young disabled people at a charity called HertsPASS. They help disabled people get ready to try to go into the work place, and are staffed almost entirely by disabled people. It was a real eye opener to see how much these young people wanted to work, and an inspiration too. Especially as they knew the barriers they would be facing as they as they tried to become independent and employed. One of the guys there worked as an advisor to companies on issues of access, yet he had been waiting for 6 years to find a flat where he could live with his PA. So since he left college he had been forced to live with his parents. He had finally found somewhere and was going to be moving in soon. We also discussed how few clubs and bars and other places a young man who had just left home might want to visit were accessible to him where he was going to live. So even though he had managed to find work, and was now doing what the government says all disabled people should do, he still didn’t have access to the same experience of living able bodied people have. Surely the way to get disabled people into work is to move towards making all of society accessible. If the policy was to create fully integrated education, make the built environment out there fully accessible and change in attitudes towards disability and difference then everyone would be playing on a equal playing field, and would get the same chance to work and the same rewards from it.

This week it was brought home to me when I attended an event at Shape in Kentish Town that examined the portrayal of disabled people in the past. We looked at paintings and engravings of disabled people from the 18th & 19th centuries and discussed what the portrayal might mean. Most of the people who looked at made a living as side show exhibit. Some made a good living showing their amazing abilities despite their disabilities to Royalty and Nobility while others appeared in Freak Show style events. Some where event the property of the people who ran the event. Yet if we examine how they lived they could almost fall into the hoped for future of disabled people that this government is championing. They all worked, and paid their way. So what if hey had no dignity and had to live off the attitude towards their disability? So what if they had no security? Could it be that this government is forgetting the Tories old love of Victorian Values and going for Dickensian Values instead?

Whatever, I worry that if these changes are being put in place by our government after such a short time in office will we end up with a situation that means we look back on the past, and the discrimination we faced, as a golden Utopia?

http://www.times-series.co.uk/news/topstories/8270489.Coleman_defends_new_council_allowance_pay_packets/

http://colemansgottogo.blogspot.com/

http://www.hertspass.com/

We’re for the Chop… or "My Life as a Scapegoat"

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Mik Scarlet

If I’m honest the subject of this blog has me shaking with a mixture of anger and sadness that is making it a little hard to know what to type into my keyboard. However, I feel it is so important that I challenge the hypocrisy of the current scapegoating of disabled people that I have to write something. I just apologise if it is a little ranty and rambling. Whatever, here goes…

The last government started the process of changing the mind set of the British public towards disabled people. We went from being valid members of society, who were given certain benefits to offset the way we were disabled by both our medical conditions and the way our environment does not cater for our needs, to work shy scroungers who were defrauding the state of huge sums of money when we should have been out there working no matter how difficult that might be for us, like all the salt of the earth able bodied voters. That or being whisked off to a clinic to be assisted in suicide. The saddest thing was that this change in the way we were talked about worked too. People in the street stopped seeing disabled people as people they should have compassion for and we became some kind of useless waste of space.

Blue Badges are a perfect example. Once they were seen as something given to people who had a medical need for them and were a kind of benefit that was deserved. Now they are seen as an unfair freebie that have become the target of thieves. There is even a website for people wanting to buy stolen Blue Badges, that gives advice on how to gain one illegally.

The new Con-Dem government has really taken the gloves off on disabled people. It seems those of us with disabilities are to be the target for many of the deficit busting savings our new chancellor outlined in the recent budget. Not only is Incapacity Benefit, or Employment Support Allowance as it is to become, in their sights even though we live in a society where the workplace is not accessible to many disabled people so working is out of the reach for many of us, but also Disability Living Allowance is also now under the knife.

Lets just examine those benefits shall we? Incapacity Benefit was where all people with any medical problem was placed under the Thatcherite Tory government to massage the unemployment figures during the last recession. Many disabled people were told that they were “unemployable” due to their disabilities and so this was the benefit for them. Huge numbers of disabled people began a life on benefits. Invalidity Benefit, as it was then called, was slightly more than Unemployment Benefit, mainly due to it being a dumping ground payment, but still wasn’t an amount that meant those claiming it were on easy street.

Disability Living Allowance came into being when Attendance Allowance and Mobility Allowance were combined. These were payments towards the extra costs incurred by disabled and sick people when living day to day. Mobility Allowance, or the mobility component of DLA, is there to pay towards travel costs, and as we still live in a society where our public transport is barely accessible to many disabled people, cabs and specially adapted cars are still the only means of getting around open to many. Many people like me who get the Mobility component, give the entire amount towards paying for our Motability car. (no we do NOT get a free car!) As Motability is one of the largest buyers of cars in this country, cutting this benefit will impact on our struggling car industry. Attendance Allowance, or the care component of DLA, covers other costs. Anything from paying to have someone to accompany a disabled person when going out, to paying for things like gloves that I use when wheeling about are meant to be covered by this benefit. Neither benefit is enough to make any recipient rich, and due to the way entitlement is assessed they are not open to fraud.

But it is not benefits being targeted that most annoy me. It is the fact that disabled people still do not have real equal rights legislation. The Disability Discrimination Act is a toothless piece of law that anyone can get round, as long as they can prove that to bar disabled people from the same treatment as the rest of society is “reasonable”. This wonderful word, included in our equality law only, means that you can pretty much do as you like when it comes to disabled people, as we are the only group who faces discrimination due to the environment. The changes we need for equality are structural changes to the world we live in, they cost money and so during this time of recession is it reasonable to ask struggling businesses to implement a program of expensive works to their premises? Most would claim not, and they would win in court. The other reason why the DDA is a useless law is that all other minority groups, when they face discrimination it is an act against the crown. For disabled people, discrimination is an act against the person and so we have to take out private prosecutions using our own money. This why so few cases have gone to court, and another reason why the changes we need to make the UK a more equal place have been so slow in happening.

Even if the British Isles was a wonderful world of accessibility, the last problem with focusing on the benefits disabled people are entitled to is the recession itself. As the numbers of unemployed are going up, in a repeat of the era of Thatcher, who exactly is going to be rushing to employ all these terrible scrounging cripples? I can’t see many employers rushing to take on someone who not only has no work experience as they been on benefit for years due to a disability, but who also needs them to possibly change their building’s access and change their work practises? Don’t forget that someone with a disability will need to have the fire escape procedures changed to ensure the business complies with Health and Safety and fire regulations. And that’s just one little problem. In a time where millions of able bodied people are searching for work, the idea that disabled people are going find joining the work place any easier than they did in the past is a joke.

So now we are rushing towards a new dawn for disabled people, where we are to all be reassessed for all our benefits, whatever the cost of that procedure is to the tax payer, and some will be expected to battle to get a job in a hostile work environment and thus end up on a different and lower form of benefit, and the rest will be scarred by the fear that this scapegoating of disabled people causes. For all of us, it spells the end of the feelings of pity and sadness that we once caused in the general public, and that we hated, to have them replaced by much worse feelings, deep resentment and mistrust. Personally I think this government should hang their heads in shame. If they were going to give us real equal rights laws then maybe, just maybe these changes could be justified. As it stands they are picking on the members of society that have the least ability to fight and protest. It smacks a little of the early policies of Nazi Germany, and we all know where that led.