Report of March 26 Demo

The TUC Disability Committee agreed that the TUC ‘March for the Alternative...’ should be an event that highlighted the severity of cuts experienced and to be experienced by disabled people in the UK. Without claiming a hierarchy of cuts, disabled people can look forward to the following:

1. A reduction of 20% of claimants when Disability Living Allowance changes to a Personal Independence Payment

2. Possibility of 80,000 living in residential homes losing Disability Living Allowance Mobility Component;

3. Migration from Incapacity Benefit to JobSeekers Allowance will find scores of thousands of disabled people financially worse off;

4. Contributory ESA, paid only to those with sufficient NI contributions, is to be time limited to 12 months;

5. A Work Capacity Assessment that is viewed by all except the nasty right as draconian;

6. If migrated to JSA people losing disability status; thus, unable to access extra resources given to disabled jobseekers;

7. The Independent Living Fund being scrapped – this will cause thousands of disabled people to be trapped in their homes;

8. Housing benefit cuts;

9. The removal of security of tenure from social housing tenants, this disproportionately impact on disabled people;

10. Eligibility criteria dropped for all but critical care support. This will mean people with substantial care needs not being able to bathe themselves; being unable to clean themselves after voiding their bowels; not being able to shop or cook...

11. Care packages cut; whereby disabled people will receive the most rudimentary of care and support; maybe just enough to fend of hunger and illness. No provision for poverty of the soul; or social starvation;

12. Access to Work is cutting back on items it will fund. Thus employers becoming more loathe than they already are to employ disabled people;

13. Supported employment schemes, including Remploy, threatened with closure, by fair means and foul;

14. Cuts to community transport systems;

15. Removal of eligibility for Freedom Passes to people with mental health disabilities – experts in this field of disability are predicting a rise in suicides as a direct result of isolating people with mental health disabilities from families, friends and support networks;

16. Reductions in the TaxiCard’s subsidy; the contribution made by the user doubling; and, the two-swipe system being abolished. So, limiting the resource to around about a one-mile journey.

17. Cuts in police budgets will see setbacks in their response to disability hate crimes.

As can be seen, disabled people are really under the cosh. But then, we’re an easy target. The wheel that can’t turn won’t squeak; so, no grease for us. Except, our small voice and near-invisibility was noted by the TUC; and accordingly we were told we could have a presence at the front of the march. This wasn’t an act of charity; no, it was a political decision made in order that people watching this march would see that the movement has disability at its heart; not some bolt-on remembered after the event.

http://vimeo.com/21652229

As the Chair of the TUC Disability Committee, and due to my profile within the wider disability movement, I was chosen to speak on behalf of disabled people. When chosen it was agreed that my speech should reach out to disabled people in and out of work; people with visible and invisible disabilities; those with physical and sensory as well as those with learning and mental health disabilities.

This was no easy task. On the one hand I was presented with a lengthy list of cuts and a plethora of different organisations and impairment specific groups all hoping to get a mention. In the end I decided to be impairment non-specific. Disability is disability and can be a distraction, divisive even, when people try to force their particular area of disability, or more usually impairment, up the agenda.

The one concession to disability organisations I did make within the speech was to mention ‘Remploy’ by name – my 16-years of, first working for Remploy; then organising and representing members holds a special place in my heart. Other than that, it was disability-organisation-free.

It’s probably no boast to state that the 26^th March protest attracted more disabled demonstrators than any single event, probably ever. We turned up in our thousands in chairs, on crutches, with sticks. We came with friends, with carers/PAs, trade union branches, disability organisations and alone. We marched, hobbled and wobbled, were pushed and pushed ourselves along. With or without vision we wended our way along the route drinking in the sights, sounds, smells as well as feeling the frisson of electricity, of hope, generated by hundreds of thousands of people with a common cause.

The feedback I’ve had from both disabled marchers and rally-goers is positive, mainly.

Demo Outside Daily 'Heil' HQ in Kensington on 14 April

Held up a bit in traffic around Chelsea I arrived outside the Daily Heil bunker at around 3.50 pm. At the time, an hour+ after its start time, there were about forty people clustered quite tightly around the front of the building, which was dressed in scaffold.

A line of around 15-18 Old Bill, resplendent in Met yellow day-glo jackets, stood guarding the portal of the Daily Heil. Guarding what exactly? Are they fearful for the freedom of the press; scared that we might confiscate it from them on the grounds of misuse. Or, are the police deployed to ensure that truth doesn’t somehow manage to break into the Heil and inveigle its way into print.

Somehow, today’s anti-hated Heil protest lacked some conviction. Since disability comes in all shapes and sizes, visible and invisible, the protest today wasn’t obviously about disabled people.

There were some wheelchair users, three or four. A smattering of vision impaired people, or so the long white sticks suggested. And, a banner from an autistic group.

The slogan’s shouted, especially the sing-along ones, could have related to any cuts demo. In fact, possibly due to the lateness, some of the slogans used against the Heil, ATOS and the police were quite crude, totally out of context to the demo.

Making puerile and offensive comments, totally unrelated to the issue, doesn’t, in my view, progress our argument. No, it serves to reinforce stereotypes; protestors held up as caricatures, ‘renta leftie’ types.

If we’re to progress our cause we need to control what goes on. I didn’t feel in control of today’s event, a feeling shared by a couple of other disabled demonstrators to whom I gave a lift home.

Let’s see if we can raise the profile of disabled people for the demo on 11 May. While I’m happy to work with anyone to make the day a success, I do hope it is we, disabled people, who will be running the show. The others are welcome; but please, let us lead.

The Start of the march

Shan’t attempt to give a broad canvas of Saturday’s march, as the day didn’t pan out that way for me. No, the event was a veritable whirligig of wonderful snapshots; a kaleidoscope of different activities fused together to create one of the most successful labour movement demos ever!

After several incidents on the way to the event we were led out by the march stewards and invited to take up positions behind the lead banner – you know, the one held at about chest height. The TUC had allocated me a steward for the march, Wayne a Unite organiser and good Comrade; and, Wayne spotting the last remaining place along the banner’s length pushed me towards it.

There had been an agreement that, due to the disproportionate punishment we were receiving by these cuts, disabled people should visible at the front of the march.

So far so good; however, as I put my arm forward to hold the banner, as if from nowhere an elderly woman rushed past me and hopping over my legs and footplate gripped onto the remaining section of banner.

Not very comradely; and, of course now there was no visible representation of disabled people at the very front of the march; something we’d been promised. The banner snatcher being taller blocked me from view.

For the sake of solidarity, I won’t name the sprightly 76-year old General Secretary, and London Region secretary, of the National Pensioners Convention; but may I ask next time, please pick on someone your own size!

The Doubting Solipsist

A solipsist took himself to task

The day he deigned to ask

All those living within his midst

Who they were; did they exist.

His life had been, until today

Preordained in such a way

That there could be no doubt

‘He’ was what life was all about.

With seeds of doubt now sown

Our solipsist began to bemoan

That his thinking wasn’t exclusive

Others thoughts might be intrusive.

Since knowledge is not confined

To within the limits of one mind

How do you ascertain what’s truth

Who holds the burden of proof.

The ‘self alone’ does have a place

But, not for all the human race;

Yet, there are people out there

Who need solipsism’s rarefied air.

Our War Against the Media

Forever we’ve fought for inclusion. Once-upon-a-time we were largely invisible to the general public. Indeed, plaster representations of us stood outside shops with begging boxes. That was about as close as many people felt comfortable to us.

The pace of change, though slow, was beginning to gather speed; and in the last 20+ years we’ve seen legislation such as the NHS and Community Care Act; the introduction of DLA; the DDA in 1995; and Direct Payments.

Though there were still mountains to climb in the form of societal and economic barriers; our lives were beginning to improve; and we were gaining more freedom. With this freedom came greater visibility; which for the most part was a positive. No longer where we confined to the shadows; society’s mistakes hidden behind walls.

Visibility came with a price.

Stories about Incapacity Benefit began appearing towards the end of the Tories 18-year reign of despair. And, as a last act spite the Tory’s established the Benefits’ Integrity Project. The BIP was, ostensibly, put in place to clean up fraud amongst disabled claimants. Of 55,000 cases investigated the BIP unearthed only 50 potential cases of fraud – 0.09%!

You’ll note ’50 potential cases’. As I recall the overwhelming majority of these were not prosecuted, because it’s hardly fraud if you fail to report an improvement in your condition, especially when you don’t actually feel any improvement, or benefit of improvement.

The newshounds of the Heil and other such rags soon got onto the scent, deliberately, laid by the Tories and refreshed by New Labour. The scummy sensationalist-end of TV joined in the hue and cry; and before long disabled people were seen as cheats and parasites.

It’s probably no co-incidence that disability hate crime began to feature more frequently on the radar at this time. With media overexposure we became easy targets for those who allow newspapers to do their thinking. The kind of people who need to refer to the Sun or Heil in order to find out who today’s scapegoats are.

In some ways ATOS is the final manifestation of the process of our demonization. First, governments use us to massage their criminally high unemployment figures. Then, we outgrow our usefulness as ideology is re-twisted to shape the next desperate election manifesto. The media is then given licence to invent, or more properly re-invent, disabled people as lead-swinging cheats who have brought the country to its knees economically with their profligate ways.

The government knows the true extent of fraud amongst disabled claimants; but, in keeping silent it is in tacit agreement with scummy lazy journalists who regard us as legitimate targets to smear across the column inches of their rags.

Incensed by what they read people feel it is their public duty to abuse disabled people. So much so that recently a disabled woman collapsed outside a neighbour’s house. As she lay dying her neighbour felt it his civic duty to piss upon her while his friends laughed and recorded the incident on a mobile phone. Nobody deserves to spend their dying moments subjected to such inhumanity – what have we become!

Thus demonised it is easy for companies like ATOS to carry out the government’s bidding. Doubtlessly many of these ATOS assessors allow scummy newspapers to form their opinions for them. Why wouldn’t they, seeing as they’ve sold their professional integrity to the DWP for a pittance.

Lambeth Pan Disability Forum Thursday 14th April

Hello Everyone

You'll be pleased to hear that the Lambeth Pan Disability Forum is holding its next monthly meeting on Thursday 14^th April. The meeting begins at one o’clock in the afternoon and we hope to finish two hours later at three o’clock. We meet, usually on the first floor meeting room, of the Lambeth Accord building, which is at 336 Brixton Road, London SW9 7AA.

Please, try to come along. There are a number of important issues under discussion; these include the government cuts, transport, the Lambeth CIL and the Lambeth Country Show.

I look forward to meeting you all on Thursday.

Seán

Disabled People to Lobby Parliament and Take Part in a Rally on 11 May

Join us for a March, Lobby of Parliament and Rally on 11 May.

The March

Thousands of disabled people as well as family and friends will be marching to express solidarity and anger at the cuts threatening our benefits, services, jobs and rights. The march will take us past the Houses of Parliament and we will make sure that MPs and Peers hear our collective voice and understand our message.

The Lobby

After the march many of us will be lobbying our MPs as the Welfare Reform Bill reaches a critical stage in the House of Commons. We will be sharing our stories, making sure that Parliamentarians understand the combined impact of the cuts on our lives and futures. Crucially, we will be challenging MPs to vote against policies that will push us further into poverty and isolation.

The Rally

On the afternoon of the march we will meet in Methodist Central Hall to hear from disabled people about the deep unfairness of the cuts for their lives and futures. We will also listen to politicians from the main Parties to find out how they plan to uphold the rights, equality and participation of disabled people as promised in the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities.

Where and when

We will gather for the march from 11.30 on the Embankment by Horseguards Avenue. It will start at 12.30 and take in Victoria Embankment, Bridge Street, Parliament Square, Millbank and finish in Dean Stanley Street at around 13.30. We expect the lobby to take place in Westminster Hall and to run between 14.30 and 17.30. Everyone hoping to see their MP during the afternoon is encouraged to write in advance to get an appointment. The rally will take place in Methodist Central Hall (close to the Houses of Parliament) with speeches between 15.00 and 15.30.

What do you need to do?

· Come along on 11 May and bring your family and friends! We hope for at least 10,000 people on the march.

· Visit the UK Disabled People’s Council website (www.ukdpc.net) or the DBC’s campaigns website (www.hardesthit.org.uk) for more information.

· Register via the websites to let us know that you’re coming and what access needs you have.

· If you’re planning to lobby your MP, write to request a meeting. You’re much more likely to get to see them if you do.

· If you want to come to the rally, book a place. Space is limited – sign up on one of these websites.