Archive for the 'Disability' Category

You Will Answer My Questions!

Published on March 25, 2009 in Bureaucracy and Disability. 0 Comments

A dear friend, who has suffered from neurological damage since her teens, is now almost housebound. She has just called me in distress. A short while ago she had a bad fall, and her doctors recommended she has house visits from “carers”. These are employed by the local authority, and allegedly work with the NHS. Apparently, in the management-speak of our bureaucracy, they are called “The Caring Services.”

She’s just had her seventh visit, and although not as frenetic as the day she had six different carers arrive, it contained the same absurd situation: another form. “Why should I undergo what now feels like an intense grilling each time one of these people arrives?” she asks me.

“What’s my name? What’s my address? What’s my date of birth? Who is my doctor? When did I last see him? And on, and on it goes. Every time they want to know all about my medical history. That takes up far more than they’ve space for on their bloody form.”

She asks, “What are they playing at? They have all this information stored on computers. They must have filed these paper details somewhere too, so why do they not look them up before they come? How come they are quite unable to coordinate between the departments? Why should I go through this each time, and why do I never see the same carers twice?”

Like far too much of our 21st Century public “service” it’s the capturing of data that’s important, not actually supplying the services required. The people involved are not given the opportunity to work with the same “clients” each time. Isn’t this stupid obsession with pretendie-marketing just sick? We are now undoubtedly in the world of Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ where the meaning of words is distorted into that which some Higher Being decides is politically correct.

“Caring Services” should be just that. “Caring” according to my OED is “involving the care of the sick, elderly, or disabled.“ Whilst “Services,” mean “assistance or benefit given to someone“. But the dictionary has a second, with a hint of a something more sinister, definition… “Services: “a public or Crown department or organisation employing officials working for the state (civil) service; secret service and employment in this.”

Tragically, my friend’s local authority and Health Board have gone for the second definition. “Services” are about a local government department’s importance, the obsession with finding out irrelevancies about individuals, the meticulous recording of these details, and not much about the delivery of “Caring”.

And who cares anyway, if that’s their attitude? It’s only about a group of ill, often lonely, and mainly helpless people who will do as we say, and who will answer our questions. Is there any MP or MSP prepared to take this unpleasant nonsense on? Is there a Health Minister lurking behind the filing cabinets, who has the guts to sort out this awful system? Will anybody in council chambers ask how they propose to change these chronic disablist attitudes in their local so-called “services”?

Please, dear reader, don’t get me wrong. I have a massive respect for the six million carers who look after their unfortunate relatives or friends. I know too that there are many thousands of decent people who work in this field. It is the dreadful system that is disablist…and it has been allowed to grow like an insidious cancer. This disablism has invaded attitudes, until the principal objective of its organisation’s very existence has almost vanished.

Remember those words “Caring Services“, and beware in case they get their hands on you, and start asking the questions. Life’s rotten enough being fragile and unable to do everyday things, without such treatment from the State. Please, Take Care! You could be next.

Win, Win Fred!

Published on March 25, 2009 in Disability and Politics. 0 Comments

St Helena’s quite nice at this time of year, with merely gentle autumn gales. The future for Scotland’s banking Napoleon looks as bleak as the island’s most famous resident enjoyed, in his sojourn at the southern edges of the British Empire. But Sir Fred could enjoy a comeback. He’d savour public favour instead of opprobrium, as a benefactor of the underside of our society. How?

It’s relatively simple Sir Fred. Many of our disabled charities struggle to survive with a serious squeeze on donations. The admirable Disability Income Group folded recently. Wealthy donors are about as obvious as a Celtic fan in green and white at Ibrox.

But when you make a donation to a charity, and fill in the “Gift Aid” form, the government pays the tax on that sum to your given charity. So let’s look at the situation facing the former most powerful man in the Scottish financial establishment. On one hand…St Helena in disgrace, but with £700,00 a year to spend, and nae shops, or… GIFT AID.

If Fred, (excuse me for quietly dropping the knighthood), if he were to gift aid 75% of his pension, then government would have to top that up. And that’s by the standard income tax of the day. In other words, the man facing humiliation could quietly retain a pension of around £175,000; yet the selected charities would win about…quickly please with the sums now readers… yes £700,000! 

Now, I suspect that on a gross pension of £3,365 a week the former RBS man could get by. After all an OAP has to manage on £90.70, whilst the lower rate of Incapacity Benefit is £61.35. That sum is almost 55 times lower than this suggested Goodwin take home, yet Fred could enjoy it all. He could bask in the glory (that’s too Jeffrey Archer like) of his rehabilitation. Just think of what Capability Scotland and the Leonard Cheshire organisations could do for Scotland’s disabled, with an additional £700,000 each year.

OK Fred, how about it? Acclaim, financial comfort for your family, and great help for the disabled, or St Helena? Your choice.

ABILITY, NOT DIS-ABILITY

Published on March 17, 2009 in Disability. 1 Comment

It’s not all about being Disabled. We must remember that each person so categorised has a degree of Ability. Arthur Bell briefly profiles ten people of genius and determination who overcame severe Disabilities to achieve great things. These Able and quite different sufferers are giants of the human race, and have contributed hugely to our world.

Julius Caesar (100  – 44 BC)

As a young man North African pirates kidnapped Caesar, who had suffered epilepsy since childhood. When no ransom money came to release him he escaped, and some years later returned to his captors, with a troop of soldiers. The pirates didn’t escape.  Rising through the political ranks as a superb orator, in 59BC he became Consul then a general of brilliance, one of the greatest in history. He helped build the Roman Empire by conquering Gaul, and in 54 BC invaded Britain, but did not stay to enforce Roman ways. Back in Rome he became dictator before being assassinated by jealous fellow politicians plunging knives into his back.

John Milton (1608 – 1674)

One of England’s greatest poets, a revolutionary republican who wrote “Paradise Lost” in 1665 and “Paradise Regained”, suffered blindness. The vast classical knowledge, biblical understanding, and English language he knew were put to wonderful use. Too few today could understand his amazing verse, as modern teaching of English has moved onwards and upwards, to embrace “East Enders”.

Admiral Lord Nelson   (1758 – 1805)

Horatio Nelson from Norfolk went from midshipman to Admiral of the Fleet, and Britain’s greatest naval hero. He lost his right eye in battle in 1794 and two years later his right arm. Despite these drawbacks, and suffering what we now call “phantom pains”, his strategic and tactical genius was put to the final test of sea battle at Trafalgar, just off Southern Spain. Fatally wounded, he lived long enough to know his ships had destroyed the French navy of dictator Bonaparte, and ended any chance of an invasion of Britain.

Lord Byron (1788 -1823)


“Mad bad and dangerous to know” was Lady Caroline Lamb’s view of George Gordon, Lord Byron. He was a radical and revolutionary romantic poet, whose masterpieces include the humorous “Don Juan” and the sombre “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. Born with a club-foot, and mocked at school, he crusaded for both political and moral freedom. Under the belief he could help liberate Greece, the home of democracy from Ottoman Turkish military rule, aged thirty-five years, he died of fever on his way there.

Ludwig van Beethoven  (1770 – 1827)


Despite the steady erosion of his hearing, ending in stone deafness, the Bonn born German composer reached extraordinary heights of artistry. Probably only Johan Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart match him. Never to have heard his huge 9th symphony is akin to Shakespeare not seeing Hamlet, or Leonardo his Mona Lisa. No wonder he became a ‘grumpy old man’ whilst quite young. 

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)


“Treasure Island”, “Kidnapped”, “Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde” are but a fraction of the works of Edinburgh’s greatest ever writer. Stevenson, who  gave up his training as an engineer, after studying law, was crippled with chronic bronchial and lung problems from early childhood. Seeking a dry climate for his condition he first settled in California, then sailed for Samoa in the South Pacific. He died there, but was revered by the populace as ‘Tusitala’ – the teller of tales.

Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910)

“The Lady with the lamp”, who started in the battlefields of Crimea and their bloody hospitals, went on through much campaigning, to found the modern profession of nursing; and radically altered hospital design. It has been recently discovered she was a sufferer from bi-polar disorder (or manic depression). A new study finds that 60% of modern British employers would not employ someone with mental health problems, so Miss Nightingale might have had difficulty getting into today’s healthcare system!

Frederick Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945)

Elected four times as President of The United States, ‘FDR’ helped drag them out of the deep ‘Depression’ of the 1930s, and brought them into World War II. Without his leadership it would have been almost impossible to defeat Nazi German and Imperial Japanese fascism. Polio stricken as a young man, and ever after in a wheelchair, it is alleged he had his secret servicemen lift him into bed – with his mistress. To FDR, as much as to Winston Churchill a (serious sufferer from depression), we owe our freedom. He died only three weeks before the Nazis surrendered.

Kathleen Ferrier (1912 – 1953)

A Danish music critic recently remarked that of all the 20thC’s greatest classical performers “Klever Kaff”, as her young sister called her, would be the longest remembered. Going from headlines like “Local typist wins singing competition”, to star of the world’s great concert halls and opera houses, happened within a very few years. She suffered dreadfully from cancer, and whilst on stage at Covent Garden in scene 2 of an opera, she felt a bone in her leg snap. She hung on, standing, to the scenery and the other performers all moved around her, singing until the end. Then she was stretchered off to hospital, from which she never re-emerged. Thankfully through recordings her heavenly voice will live on.

Stephen Hawking  (b. 1942)

Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are two of the genius physicists to whom this Cambridge professor is compared. Author of the huge selling “A Brief History of Time” he is one of the world’s best-known sufferers of a disability. With his tinny computerised ‘voice’, and his hi-tech wheelchair, this MND patient has done more than anyone to inspire young people to study science. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1989.

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The report mentioned in Florence Nightingale also queried whether Abraham Lincoln as well as Churchill, would have been elected to the highest offices today, because of their mental health histories. Is it not time for a serious rethink of our disablist attitudes? Readers who are particularly concerned with mental health discrimination in the UK should visit: 
www.mind.org.uk/timetochange