Death

I've lost 2 friends in the past couple of weeks. First there was Tracey, and then Stella this weekend.

I knew Stella long before she was famous. Before she was a comedian. Before she was a writer. When she was someone who hung about on disability messageboards like the (now closed) BBC Ouch boards. In fact, years before she started doing stand up she said to me "I plan to come to England one day and seeing you perform is one of the things I want to do."

Though I knew her for a decade online, I've actually only met her twice; and they were both while she was here covering the Paralympics 2 years ago for the Aussie press. First at a protest outside Atos's HQ, then at a rugby match. She never saw me do stand up, I had to quit due to illness in 2007. Five years before she came over here.

Felicity Ward, Tiernan Douieb, Stella and me
One of the first things I noticed about Stella when I met her was that she sits on the front edge of her wheelchair seat, and sticks everything like her phone in the space behind her - between her butt and her wheelchair's backrest. I noticed because my mum did exactly the same thing: Her handbag, usually a tape measure, and all other kinds of junk were stuffed between mum's back, and the backrest of her chair. Even me when I was small enough to fit. On Saturday it'll be the 6th anniversary of my mum's death.

Tracey's death was sad, but not surprising. When I first met her 20 years ago she'd already lost a younger sister to the same condition she had. I knew she wasn't going to be around forever. Stella's death was an utter shock. I read about it on Twitter on my phone and my hands started shaking. She seemed so vibrant and healthy. Just a couple of weeks ago she wrote a letter to her future self.

When people with OI die; everyone breaks out the snowflakes. It's become a motif. Stella hated it. When a mutual Facebook friend of ours died in October; Stella posted the following status update:

This weekend a young woman with OI that I only knew from Facebook died. I was really sad to hear it. I didn't know her well at all, but she seemed like an interesting person and someone who was highly regarded in the OI and LGBT community.

Within hours, my facebook feed was flooded with pictures of snowflakes. And poems about snowflakes. And analogies about snowflakes melting as a symbol of death. Apparently at some point a parent of a kid with OI decided that their kid was like a snowflake. Presumably because having Osteogenesis Imperfecta make you small, fragile, delicate, unique, blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Call your own child whatever nickname floats your boat. They may grow up loving it, or they may grow up rolling their eyes. Who knows. But this snowflake business seems to have caught on in the OI community and it makes me pretty uncomfortable.

I understand why it may resonate with some people, and having a symbol like that can be comforting when you lose someone from a community you feel a part of. It does remind us of our own mortality. And I know there's no real harm in just letting people have their thing.

But in case I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I want to make something clear.

I am not a snowflake. I am not a sweet, infantilising symbol of the fragility of life. I am a strong, fierce, flawed adult woman. I plan to remain that way in life, and in death.

The second I read about her death I remembered she'd written that and had to dig out that status from 2 months ago and share it on Twitter and Facebook before everyone started changing their userpics to snowflakes.

And people have respected her wishes. I haven't seen a single snowflake.

But BuzzFeed are dicks.

In 2012, Stella wrote this:

It doesn't matter how we got like this. Really. Are you asking because you want to know or because you need to?

So I can just imagine how she'd feel about an article Brad Esposito wrote. I'm not going to link to it, I don't want to reward their clickbait with clicks. But here are snippets in the context of a review.

These are almost certainly not Stella's x-ray's. They'll just be random ones found from a google image search. But for fuck's sake; you can make out the genitalia of the people involved even if they are anonymous.

I'm disgusted that someone would use a person's death for an excuse to break out the x-rays to give the public a good gawp at what our freaky skeletons look like. As Stella had discussed; the public want to know, they don't need to know. A disabled person's medical history, such as x-ray's of what someone will have vaguely looked like under the skin, are not in the public interest. The name of her condition, sure. Her cause of death if that comes to light, yes. But anatomical images of her insides? No.

Stella was fortunate that she'd made her wishes about snowflakes clear before she died so wasn't subjected to them. I know I'm not going to be memorialised in the same way: I'm not famous, I'm not popular, I'm just benefit scrounging scum. I won't be remembered by former Prime Ministers, news outlets won't write articles about me. I'll be lucky if more than 5 people show up to my funeral and 3 people write blog posts about me.

But I feel I need to make the following quite clear:

• No snowflakes either. I'm not small and delicate. I weigh 75kg: You would not want a snowflake my size landing on you. I'd crush you and the imprint left in the snow after I'd squished you would not look like the traditional snow angel.
• No bullshit clickbait fetishising my deformed bones. My innards are my innards. Porn is about seeing the normally unseeable, like getting a good view up someone's cunt. When I was doing my MA in Cult TV I read CSI described as "the porn of death" because with the autopsies, and "the CSI shot" where you get to see a bullet smashing it's way through someone's chest, that's about seeing the normally unseeable too. This kind of article is basically impairment porn: Where you get a have a bloody good look at all someone's unusual bits, both inside and out.
• Do not use the word "RIP" in reference to me. Seriously. If you care that I'm gone you can either type the three whole words "rest in peace" or just not bother.
• Can someone please play Raise Your Glass by P!nk at my funeral. I may be wrong, but it's in all the right ways.

If someone does write that kind of impairment gawp fodder about me, please direct them to this post. These next 5 words are for them:

Fuck you, you creepy arsehole.

In the same article as "It doesn't matter how we got like this. Really. Are you asking because you want to know or because you need to?" She carried on that paragraph with:

If you're just sitting next to one of us on the train, or taking our order at a cafe, you don't actually need to know. If we've actually met and had a conversation beyond "Do you want honey with your chai?" then perhaps it gets a little more relevant. It might come up in conversation, and when it does, we'll be happy to tell you. It's just not a very good opening line.

TV and articles like that one by BuzzFeed just feed into the public notion that a disabled person's medical history is public property that absolute strangers feel they have a right to demand from you. As well as the examples Stella listed, I've been asked by strangers on the bus if I have phantom limb pain, despite the fact that I've had nothing amputated. I once had a woman on the High Street ask what happened to me... and then carry on walking without waiting to hear my answer (which would have been expletives, obviously). She just asked and carried on walking like "did you have an accident?" is some kind of cripple's alternative to the nod and "alright?" that you generally offer when you acknowledge someone's presence in the street.

I was sad when I woke up this morning. But now I'm angry. Angry that Buzzfeed would exploit the death of a popular comedian and activist to get people to click and stare at what her skeleton looked roughly like. Despite it being the kind of thing she publicly railed against.

♫...What else should I be? All apologies. What else should I say? Everyone is gay...♫

Both the mainstream media and the gay press have been writing vast amounts of articles over the last couple of days about Uganda's new homophobic law, punishing gays with up to life imprisonment for having the audacity to love. Rightly so; it's an outrageous law that needs to be condemned internationally.

But there's been one remarkable fact omitted from all the write ups I've read in the pink press, and that's the disablism written into the law.

First-time offenders will be sentenced to 14 years. But people found guilty of "aggravated homosexuality" which means 'repeated gay sex between consenting adults and acts involving a minor, a disabled person or where one partner was infected with HIV' will be sentenced to life. The mainstream media will write about it - that link takes you to The Guardian - but not the gay press.

(Note I said "all the write ups I have read". If you've seen an article in the gay press that I've missed, please post a link in the comments.)

As David pointed out in a post on my Facebook wall with regards to the law itself:

the Ugandan law considers gay sex with a disabled person to be equivalent to sex with a child, so it's simultaneously equating being gay with being a paedophile, and being disabled with being a child. Absolutely massive bigotry fail for the Ugandans.

I'm sure the press don't think it's worth reporting the extra sentencing for shagging a disabled person because disabled people are seen as so disgusting that the authors of the articles themselves would never dream of doing one of us. You have to remember that 70% of people would never have sex with a disabled person, and I've never seen any evidence to suggest that gay people are less disablist. I'm sure that journalists writing for gay publications can imagine themselves going on assignment to Uganda and winding up spending 14 years in jail, but they just can't envisage hooking up with a hot crip; because they refuse to see disabled people as sexual beings.

So I'm an aggravated homosexual alright.

The weirdest thing is that it's not the gay disabled person that's going to get the increased sentence; it's their partner. The press usually suddenly give a crap about disability issues when they start to affect non-disabled people. Like how the papers didn't give a damn about disability hate crime until the death of Fiona Pilkington. But once a non-disabled person had taken her own life because of the disablist harassment her family faced; the press were all over it. Most people still call it "the Pilkington case", despite the fact that she murdered her disabled daughter Francecca Hardwick who'd been on the receiving end of the hate crime.

This isn't the first time the gay press have ignored issues where gayness and disabledness intersect. When disabled gay teenager Steven Simpson was first killed, the gay press wouldn't touch the story. That particular news story for Huff Post's Gay Voices was written when his killer was sentenced nearly a year later (and several other gay outlets did deign to report it at that point too).

The one place that reported the story at the time of Simpson's death was The Daily Mail. Remarkable considering they usually hate both gay people and disabled people in equal measure.

At the time I did Email a gay website drawing their attention to Simpson's death and the reply I got was:

I wasn't quite sure we could draw the connection clearly enough to warrant a story

Because an openly gay kid getting set on fire suddenly can't be connected to anything gay if he also has an impairment. Disability is like the ultimate gay remover. (But no-one tell Museveni that or he'll go around snapping the spines of suspected homos to sanitise the gay away.)

This same website that doesn't think that there's a gay enough connection when a gay kid gets killed is the same website that once devoted an entire article to the fact that the toilet above Ben Bradshaw's Parliamentary office was leaking.

It wasn't gay urine leaking from a gay toilet dripping through a gay ceiling. It wasn't a gay interest news story. Gay kids getting immolated? That's a gay interest news story.

Unsurprisingly I had a bit of a Twitter rant about this yesterday morning. And I got a reply from a gay website. At the risk of sounding like Upworthy: You'll never believe what they said.

You'd think that anyone with a modicum of nous would either ignore my rant or say "you know what: We could do better." Instead the reply was a link to an article. The article was a write-up of a wheelchair user's experience of bad access at a Pride festival.

One article. One. And they expect a fucking commendation cookie for being inclusive?

As a disabled lesbian, the gay press's determined ignorance of topics where gayness meets disability is a personal matter. But I'm not some unique special snowflake. Around 18% of the population have some kind of impairment and that's going to be higher among the gay community due to the increased incidence of mental health problems and rates of HIV. By sticking their heads in the sand where the two issues intersect the gay press are snubbing probably at least a fifth of their audience. The gay press is mostly an online business, and that means they need pageviews to make money from advertisers. By failing to cater to such a sizeable chunk of their prospective readership they're pissing away ad revenue. You'd think the economic benefits of including the whole gay community in their content would be enough to convince them to stop ignoring us.

♫...And I shouldn't be here, without permission. I shouldn't be here...♫

"I wish you'd never been born."

I remember the Sunday morning a couple of years ago when a well-known pro-eugenics tweeter was banging on about how babies with genetic conditions shouldn't be born. Despite claiming he was not disablist towards disabled people once they'd done the getting-into-the-world thing, all I could see in those tweets was that he wished I'd never been born because I have a genetic condition. He might have blocked me on Twitter so he can't see me; but I still see him RTed into my timeline frequently (something he said is actually 4th from the top in my timeline as I type). I'm constantly reminded that someone that thinks the world would be a better place without me in it is so well liked among the people I respect enough to follow on Twitter.

I remember all the times I've read that "parents on benefits shouldn't have kids. They shouldn't have kids other people will have to pay for." That includes my parents. So these people are saying that I should never have been born because my dad was forced out of work and onto benefits by impairment not long before I came along (my mum became a housewife when she married my dad because that's what women did in the 70s). I haven't just read it in the right-wing press. I've heard it from people I know. I've even heard it from other disabled people.

They may not have directly used the words "Lisa Egan should not be here," but it was what I inferred from their statements.

I remember the times my father said it to me when I was growing up. He was, and still is, someone that demands to be the centre of attention at all times. When I was a child my mum prioritised me over him and he resented the little brat getting more of his wife's attention that he did.

It's a powerful statement that haunts you; knowing that people think you shouldn't be here.

I remember a very long time ago seeing a mother on the news with her young child saying that if she'd known her daughter was going to have Spina Bifida she'd have had a termination. That child knows that not only is she unwanted, but she's so unwanted that her mother desired to tell the country about it. Her main passion was dancing to pop music; and at her age (IIRC she was about 4) that should have been all she had to worry about. She shouldn't have had to have heard from the people closest to her that they'd prefer her not to be around.

This week there have been 11 living children hearing all about how they shouldn't have been born. In the unlikely event that there is an afterlife where you look down on the world you left behind; there are a further 6 children hearing the same words.

The press is full of stories about how Mick Philpott's children were only born to milk the welfare state. Right wing commentators are queueing up to appear on the news to talk about how families shouldn't have so many children. There are, of course, plenty of people claiming that people living on benefits shouldn't be having children at all.

The most hurtful thing has got to be that these 17 children have been singled out by someone at the heart of government, the Chancellor, as being "a lifestyle" that needs to be "handled". Not human beings deserving of respect. Not people that have lost siblings. Not lives that have been cut short. But a problem that needs to be "handled" by government.

When I've read in the press that parents on benefits shouldn't have kids I knew they weren't talking about me directly, they were talking non-specifically about a group of people I happen to belong to. The same when I read tweets about how babies with genetic conditions shouldn't be born. But this week, all week, there have been 11 children hearing very loudly and clearly every time they turn on their TV that they - those children whose father is Mick Philpott - should not have been born.

I can't even imagine how it feels to be told on the front page of every paper, and on every news bulletin, that you - specifically you - should not exist because of someone you happen to be related to. Someone you didn't choose to be related to. And at a time when you're grieving for the loss of your siblings to boot.

♫...Pretty in pink. Isn't she?...♫

I want to say "thank you" to those of you who put me on this year's Independent on Sunday Pink List: Their annual list of the most influential LGBT people in the country. There are a couple of people I need to give extra special thanks to.

Firstly to Eleanor for asking the question "How do we get a crip on the list?" after reading last year's and noticing how very non-disabled it was. Extra thanks also need to go to Goldfish and DavidG for actually asking people to vote for me. It was such an honour that people felt so convinced that I should be on the list that they not only filled in the nomination form themselves but actually said to other people "look: Lisa should be on that list so vote for her. Got it?"

The blurb describing me is quite hilarious. "Bravery and experience"? I've been known to phone my parents just to scream at them because my cat had given me a dead mouse. And "experienced" makes me sound like the town tart. But it's genuinely nice to be described as "popular" because so many people felt I should be on the list. It's the only time in my life I will ever get called that. Ordinarily "popular" would be the last word that'd come to mind when describing me. "Weird girl who sits in the corner on her own staring at her shoes" is usually more apt.

In the end it turned out that I was amongst company: Not only am I on the list but there are Paralympians at number 4 (Lee Pearson) and 100 (Claire Harvey). This is still, of course, not representative of society as a whole. Around 18% of the total population have some kind of impairment and that's likely to be slightly higher among the gay community because of the increased incidence of mental health problems and the rates of HIV. With that in mind, there being 3 disabled people on the list is a start, but it's not enough.

Of course, it's highly likely that a couple of the other 98 do have some kind of impairment like dyslexia or bipolar disorder but aren't out about that and/or don't identify as "disabled". That's absolutely their right to identify how they choose to and to be in control of what information they put into the public domain. But it's also important to be out. That piece by Stella Duffy is about the importance of being out as gay - just like the list is about the importance of being out as gay, bi or trans - but the need to be out about belonging to a certain group is an issue that spans all minorities.

On the other hand you could make the case that there shouldn't be any disabled people on the list because we have such a low social status and it is supposed to be the most "influential" queers in Britain. I'm listed as a disability rights activist but if I seriously had any kind of influence in our society then the Welfare Reform Bill would never have become the Welfare Reform Act because the public would have given a crap. But then you end up with a circular situation where disabled people lack influence because we're ignored by the media because we lack influence. Putting some disabled people on the Pink List is an important way of breaking that circle and acknowledging that disabled people exist.

Another reason it's so specifically important to acknowledge the existence of disabled LGBT people is because of the common misconception that we don't or shouldn't exist and the double discrimination we face. For the most part disabled people are viewed as being asexual or it's believed that we should be asexual. In 2008 70% of people asked told The Observer that they wouldn't shag a cripple and I've never seen any indication that gay people think any differently. If you visit a lesbian dating website you'll see that almost every profile states "no crazies". I even saw one "no strange limps" before deciding it was just futile and that I'd be better off watching CSI and wishing Sara Sidle were mine.

I think LGBT people with learning difficulties are probably the most oppressed of all. We live in a culture that likes to infantilise intellectual impairment ("he has a mental age of 6...") despite the fact that an adult with learning difficulties is just that: An adult. People who have the capacity for consent should be able to have consenting sexual relationships. Many straight people with learning difficulties encounter barriers with getting people the people in their lives to understand that; the process of coming out as gay can be nigh on impossible. Last year a court banned a man from having sex because he had a low IQ because he might get a girl pregnant. I'm pretty sure that that wasn't going to be a problem for the man he was in a relationship with.

Another very specific issue affecting LGBT disabled and older people is the problem of homophobic carers. If you're dependent on someone to get you out of bed and put you in your wheelchair, to feed you and to give you fluids and medication then your life can be endangered by being out. Direct Payments and Personal Budgets allow one the opportunity to choose who you employ to assist you, but not everybody has that as an option and some people still have agency carers inflicted upon them and they get no say in who is being sent into their home.

Such grave issues make the lack of physical access to gay bars and clubs seem to pale into insignificance. But improving visibility of LGBT disabled people, by letting us get onto the dancefloor with our peers, we can start to break down these barriers. Improving visibility of gay people improves attitudes towards gay people; it's a logical extension to accept that improving visibility of gay disabled people will improve attitudes to the minority within a minority. Those of us who are in a position where it's safe to be out need to do so to improve social attitudes and make the world safer for those who would be endangered by being out.

I know I've gotten a bit too old and boring for clubbing until 5am but I still can't think of any gay bars/clubs in London that are fully accessible. I can think of one or 2 with a bar area that's step free, but with no such thing as accessible toilets. Which is really just want you need when you're drinking alcohol. My local gay bar is under threat of closure. I probably should give a shit about the closure of a beloved community hangout but I really can't muster up concern given the flight of stairs to get into the place.

Three disabled people on the Pink List is such an important step towards dealing with these double discrimination issues, but it is only one small step. There's still so much more change we need to see. Hopefully next year we'll see further strides towards towards equality in both the list itself and the year building up to it. For now I'll just smile about the fact that Paralympic dressage gold medallist Lee Pearson came one spot on the list above Olympic dressage gold medallist Carl Hester. And about being the 78th most influential gay.

Should He Stay or Should He Go Now?

Sometimes a news story is so big people use the expression "you'd have to be living under a rock" in order to have not heard about it. In the case of the Jimmy Savile story that has exploded this month; I'm pretty sure that even the woodlouse living under that large pebble in my garden has a basic understanding of the case.

The BBC is holding two inquiries into what happened. Obviously the first is in to how such a sex offender was able to carry out his crimes right under the BBC's noses. The second is into why 11 months ago Newsnight canned an investigation into these crimes.

Peter Rippon, who was responsible for cutting the Newsnight exposé, has stepped aside. Over the last 36 hours I've read several things along the lines of:

Rippon shouldn't fall on his sword. All he did was can a Newsnight investigation after Savile's death. He had nothing to do with the perpetration of the crimes.

.

The thing is: He unwittingly might have done.

When Savile's victims started coming forward the police undertook an assessment of Savile's crimes. They couldn't launch a criminal investigation because they couldn't prosecute someone that'd been dead almost a year.

But almost 3 weeks after the allegation floodgates opened the police turned the assessment into an actual criminal investigation because the allegations implicated Savile's fellow paedophiles that are still alive.

We don't know who the co-accused are. The police aren't releasing that information because it would jeopardise their inquiries. All we know is that they're still alive and so potentially still raping children. If Newsnight had aired the film 11 months ago then these allegations would've come to light nearly a year earlier and his co-accused could've been caught that much sooner, potentially protecting any of their victims this past year.

Rippon's disgusting attitude towards women and belief that paedophilia isn't "the worst kind of sexual offence" are quite evidence enough that he shouldn't be responsible for a news show. Because news does happen to women and children too; you know. But the fact that he could have blown open this news story a year earlier and in the process potentially protected victims of paedophiles proves that there's really no place for someone like him in investigative journalism.

♫...When I look at the television, I want to see me staring right back at me...♫

Been doing some media whoring the last few days talking about the blue badge reforms that came into effect yesterday.

First there was BBC Breakfast on the tellybox. This was followed about 15 minutes later by Five Live (the beeb getting the most from the money spent on having a car take me to Television Centre):



BBC Sussex/Surrey (they were both broadcasting the same show today) heard Five Live and subsequently wanted me on their show this morning. What I didn't know in advance was that I'd be debating with transport minister Norman Baker MP. Here's what happened:



Gutted I didn't get to rebut his final speech. C'est la vie I suppose.

Thanks to @uwitness and @goldfish for tech help with making audio happen.

Pride and St George

If you've been hiding under a rock and not seen the flags everywhere, it might have escaped your attention that Saturday was St George's day; a day that's typically associated with racists and bigots, the EDL and the BNP.

This year I've seen several attempts from decent people to reclaim the day from the fascists, to take pride in England being the diverse place it is. After all, St George was Palestinian so he seems a bit of an odd role model for the EDL to revere.

The trouble is that I couldn't be less proud of being English.

• Universities in England are charging ever increasing fees, this is not true for all other parts of the UK. The exorbitant amounts are a major disincentive for people from a background like mine to get an education.
• English older and disabled people are having to pay more for less home care. This isn't true of all of the UK, Scottish older people get free care.
• People living in care homes are facing bigger bills for less safe care homes and DLA recipients living in care homes will be losing their mobility component from 2013.
• The government are completely dismantling the welfare state. Disabled people are killing themselves because they can't afford to live.
• The government is planning to completely dismantle the NHS in England. I had one experience of NHS outsourcing to private healthcare providers; I waited a year to have my bust ankle MRIed.
• Stories of police violence seem almost daily while hate crimes against disabled people are frequent and rarely appropriately handled by the authorities.
• It's the 21st century and gay people can't get married.
• The government is considering scrapping our anti-discrimination legislation.
• We have misogynists, homophobes and disablists in parliament.
• Our newspapers tell daily lies about benefits claimants, which results in an increase in the aforementioned disablist hate crime.

And that list barely scratches the surface.

You could argue that the decisions made by the government don't necessarily reflect those of the populace as a whole, that the lies printed in the press aren't emblematic of the opinions of the nation. Except they are. We're a democracy, we voted for this government. Look at the sea of blue across England. It's the English that voted Tory rather than other parts of the UK. As for the press? If people stopped buying the lies, the papers would stop printing them.

So could someone, please, tell me why I should be proud of England when England so clearly isn't proud of me?

♫... Pull up to the bumper, get out of the car...♫

Our ever so delightful Mayor of London has come up with another plan to make the nation despise people who don't "look disabled" just that little bit more.

Writing in The Torygraph 2 months ago he proclaimed that the only people who really deserve Blue Badges are wheelchair users, which will no doubt pour further fuel on existing fires around who should be eligible for what.

If you spend much time hanging out in crippy areas of the web you'll come across debates around who it is that needs spaz parking spaces the most: In the red corner you'll have the walkies who need to park near to the door of a store because their ability to walk is extremely limited and if they can't park near the door they can't manage to do their shopping. While over in the green corner you'll have wheelies who need the wider bays to get their chair alongside their car to transfer into it.

In fact the walkies vs wheelies parking debate was even the B story in an episode of House a few years ago when a wheelchair-using researcher got a job at the hospital and Cuddy re-allocated House's parking space to her.

I should make clear that not all disabled people are so selfish that they think that only people with their flavour of impairment are genuine and everyone else is on the take; but sadly there are sufficient people so blinkered that they can't see someone else's perspective that it's a debate that'll go on for years to come. And BoJo just put his PomPoms on to encourage that battle. Presumably so disabled people will keep fighting amongst themselves rather than uniting and turning their energies against him around issues like all the tube accessibility upgrades he cancelled.

I see both sides of the debate: I use a wheelchair but I also walk a bit. Ordinarily when parking I need room behind my car to get my wheelchair out of the boot and assemble it. But there are occasions when I walk away from my car, like a couple of months ago when I had to go to the supermarket shortly after dislocating my shoulder. Walking is excruciatingly painful for every joint in my feet and legs - hence the usual wheelchair usage - but given the state my shoulder was in on that occasion, pushing my wheelchair would've hurt even more. To make the supermarket doable at all I needed to be able to park right by the door to minimise the distance walked.

However, even when I walk I'm still visibly disabled. I have an extremely pronounced limp, I'm of restricted growth and just one glance at my ankles will tell you that ankles aren't supposed to be shaped like that. But there are genuinely disabled people who are invisibly impaired who are no doubt who Mr J has in mind when he says:

the driver reverses into your spot and bounds out, whistling, remote-locking with a backwards squirt of electrons.

I don't remember him, he died when I was 2, but my granddad had an Orange Badge (this was long before they became Blue Badges in 2000) because his lung problems caused him to struggle to walk. Apparently for the first few steps after getting out of the car he looked quite sprightly. It was only after a few steps that the war veteran began struggling to breathe. But he would've been "looking normal" long enough to press the central locking button (if they'd had central locking in his lifetime) thus be the recipient of Johnson's suspicions.

Gardner and Johnson propose that wheelchair users get an extra badge and "special" bays that can't be used by non-wheelchair using disabled people. Would I need 2 badges, one for the days when I'm using my chair and one for the days when I'm not? Because I can walk a little bit would I be ineligible for the "W badge"? If so, then Gardner would be ineligible too; we've all seen him using a zimmer on the telly rather than his chair:

Boris also seems to have some trouble understanding who is actually eligible for a Blue Badge. He constantly refers to Blue Badge holders as "disabled drivers" and, yes, drivers do make up a significant number of BB users. But there are also a great number of BB holders who don't or can't drive. I think I was 5 when I got my first badge. The general minimum age has since been lowered to 2 but children younger than two can still get a badge if the child either:

• must always be accompanied by bulky medical equipment which cannot be carried around without great difficulty, or;
• needs to be kept near a vehicle at all times to get treatment for a condition when necessary

And obviously children that young can't drive! Then there are people who are old enough to drive but can't. My dad can't even push his wheelchair in a straight line at less than one mph, you wouldn't want him driving a vehicle that can do 100mph. Despite being driven everywhere by other people he still needs to park in Blue Badge bays because of the space needed to deploy the lift on his wheelchair accessible van. The argument of "but the driver could drop him off and then park the vehicle elsewhere," doesn't really work when someone takes as long to get out of the vehicle as my dad. Then of course there's people who can't be left alone while the driver parks the car somewhere else because they need constant assistance/supervision.

I do agree with Johnson that Blue Badge fraud is a huge problem. 6 years ago I blogged when I fell victim to Blue Badge theft for the first time. A year later I got a phone call from the police telling me that the badge had been found during a routine 'stop and search'. This was around about when I fell victim to Blue Badge theft for the second time. My car was broken into a third time later that year, but this was after my parents had bought me a Blue Badge lock for my birthday so the prospective thieves couldn't actually get the badge. I'd be thrilled if there was a clampdown on fraudulent BB use because if it were harder to get away with using a badge that isn't yours then I'd have to pay my insurance excess a little less often.

Parking can be incredibly difficult. Take my local Sainsbury's as an example. They have 7 Blue Badge bays on the surface and 296 regular bays in their underground car park. The Department for Transport recommends that at least 6% of the spaces for shopping be Blue Badge bays (plus one more BB bay for each disabled employee). Obviously my local supermarket falls far, far short of that 6%. I couldn't use the underground car park if I wanted to because there is no lift down to it. I can only shop in my nearest supermarket if one of the measly 7 bays is empty. And they rarely are. The store has such a half-arsed attitude to patrolling the bays; at any given time there are on average 3 or 4 bays occupied by cars not displaying badges and the remaining 3 or 4 bays are occupied by Blue Badge holders, whether the badge is being used legitimately or fraudulently. Which means that I usually drive into the car park, discover I can't park and take my custom to the Morrison's a little bit further away. I've tried queueing for a bay but this usually results in me being subjected to harassment because being only 31 people assume I can't actually be disabled until they see me in my wheelchair or limping.

If Sainsbury's put in the effort to clamp down on people parking in those pitiful 7 bays either without a Blue Badge or using a Blue Badge that was issued to someone not present then they'd get more custom from local disabled people. I know of other disabled people in Camden who don't bother with the store at all, they just go straight to supermarkets with adequate parking.

All Blue Badges have a photo of its owner on the back. The following are allowed to check Blue Badges to see if the person the badge is issued to is present:

• police officers
• traffic wardens
• local authority parking attendants
• civil enforcement officers

If you're asked to show your badge and refuse you can be subjected to a fine. I've been the holder of a badge (blue since 2000, orange before that) for 26 years and I've never, not even once, been asked to present it for inspection to prove that I'm the rightful owner. As I've said before, it's pretty obvious that I'm disabled when I get out of the car and either get in my wheelchair or limp away. But as I've also said already, you can't see my impairment whilst I'm still seated in the car. I recall one occasion when I parked on a single yellow line right in front of a traffic warden. His face lit up and he held his little computer thingum ready to issue a ticket. I put my Blue Badge and clock on the dashboard and he looked disappointed and walked away. He had a perfect opportunity to check that my badge was being used by the person it's issued to, but didn't bother.

The day before BoJo wrote his piece The Sunday Telegraph wrote that around half the Blue Badges currently in use are being used fraudulently. The fab Full Fact investigated but could neither confirm or deny the claim. Based on my own experience of Blue Badge theft the stat isn't surprising at all. After all, at one point there were 3 Blue Badges floating around with my name on; the one in my possession and the 2 that had been stolen from my car.

Johnson twisted the wording in his article to make the 50% stat mean something very different. What he said was:

According to yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, ministers think that as many as half of all blue badges could be going to people who don’t need them.

It's the use of "going to" rather than "being used by" which utterly changes the meaning. Those two stolen badges of mine were being used fraudulently, but they weren't issued to someone that didn't need one, they were issued to me. This trick of language reiterates my earlier point that BoJo is trying to stir up tensions amongst disabled people to keep us divided.

The government keeps on with this rhetoric about how benefit reform is to "weed out the scroungers" whilst "protecting the most vulnerable". It's utter bull of course, they're planning to cut the DLA bill by 20% despite the fact that only 0.5% of claims are fraudulent. But there are many, many, disabled people who think that they'll be OK because they're genuinely disabled (despite there being a 1 in 5 chance they'll lose their DLA) and they constantly moan about the (almost non-existent) fakers. On Facebook and so on I've seen many people with my own impairment moaning about people that don't look disabled getting benefits because that's the kind of bile this government is encouraging. And with BoJo's ideologically driven article he's pushing that Tory agenda even further in encouraging wheelchair users to be (even more) hateful of ambulant disabled people, while paying almost no attention to the real problem: That of theft and fraudulent use. A problem that could be dramatically reduced if only traffic wardens used their powers to check badges were being rightfully used.

Johnson actually had the gall to say:

We are a warm-hearted species, and we like to confer benefits on as many people as possible,

Oh the irony...

Thoughts on the student protests, policing and the media

I'm so proud of British students right now. I'm especially proud of Britain's schoolchildren and sixth formers who protested yesterday. I was especially pleased when BBC News reported on sixth formers from Cambridge protesting, though I felt a slight pang of jealousy: When I was an oppressed¹ and politically aware sixth former in Cambridge I'd have loved nothing more than to march through the streets to protect my future.

Of course, the media portrayal has mostly been of the tiny number of students who committed acts of damage to property, especially that police van. What most of the mainstream media isn't reporting (in fact I think only The Guardian has) is the number of protesters who tried to protect the van. In this video you can see some of them, and there's this iconic image from The Guardian:

At one point the BBC reporter in the Commons explained why politicians and the media are so keen to report on the poorly behaved few rather than the well behaved majority. He was reporting to the camera what a politician had told him (but I'm afraid I didn't catch who, the trouble with live TV). I'm paraphrasing him, but not much (and only because I didn't get to write/type down his exact words):

If the protests get violent the public will lose sympathy with the protesters and support our plans for higher fees.

On one hand on our TV screens we're seeing looped footage of a few protesters smashing up an unoccupied police van (which some speculate was put there as bait) in the hope that it'll make the majority think "hmm, fees are good! Let's teach these brutal young things a lesson!" On the other hand what we're not seeing is the brutality from the other side.

Thanks to camera phones and the internet incidents of police brutality are harder to hide. And yesterday saw some unforgivable behaviour. Throughout the day there were many tweets being rapidly retweeted with content along the lines of "Officer abc123 kicked a 15 year old girl."

Some actual examples:

• Cambridge student demo: policeman punched student in the face
  
• Police violence at Student Protest London 24 November
  
• Laurie Penny on the children trapped inside the Whitehall kettle until late at night when the temperature had dropped to freezing
  

Why is the right-wing media barely reporting on that? Oh, yes; wouldn't want to garner support for the protesters, would we? Cruelty to children is far less important.

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¹ The Disability Discrimination Act was written while I was in my first year of sixth form. However it didn't come into effect until years later.

Where's the Benefit?

A bunch of us made a new blog all about the War on Welfare Claimants called Where's the Benefit?. Go on, have a look.

The lowest of the low

Being female, gay and disabled¹ you'd think I'd experience 3 times as much discrimination as a disabled but otherwise socially privileged bloke, right?

Wrong. All the discrimination I ever experience is disablism.

Not only is experiencing daily disablist acts (like not being able to get into a brand new café) frustrating, there's also the constant reminders that discrimination against disabled people provokes the least outrage among society at large out of all the isms.

Easter weekend 2009 there was the amazonfail brouhaha. It doesn't matter if someone from amazon.fr pressed the wrong button which "accidentally" meant rankings were stripped from any books to do with homosexuality or sex and disability. Where the conscious and deliberate disablism occurred was in the web/media frenzy. Everyone on the planet cried "homophobia" in their tweets, blog posts and news articles. Only a tiny, tiny smattering of people gave a crap that books on disability and sexuality had been affected too.

A couple of months ago the LGBT Labour party conference were refused drinks in a London pub. The story of homophobic discrimination spread across the internet like wildfire and was global news within a couple of hours. My gut reaction upon reading the story was to tweet Greencoat Boy: The gay in me is horrified. The disabled in me says "so what? Disabled people get refused service DAILY and it's not news.".

Two hours later my point got illustrated perfectly. I read this story of a wheelchair-using woman being refused service in a restaurant on the very same day. Naturally I tweeted the link. The story of a homophobic bar manager was tweeted and retweeted thousands and thousands of times. How many people retweeted the tale of a disablist restaurant manager? Two. Not two thousand; just two.

Yesterday it was news that a niqab-wearing young Muslim woman and her friend were refused entry onto a bus for "being a threat". I'm refused entry to roughly one in 5 of the buses I try to board because I'm a wheelchair user. Very often the driver doesn't even have the balls to tell me he's going to refuse me access, he just pulls up at the stop, doesn't get the ramp out, allows able-bodied² passengers to board and then drives off.

Where's my news story in the top 10 on the BBC News website? Where's my "urgent investigation" into the discrimination I faced?

Superaleja once referred to "multiple layers of discrimination, like a crip-fail onion," which I think perfectly describes the 3 situations I've written about here. First disabled people get discriminated against, then there's the second layer of discrimination where we're denied the public outcry of horror that would be extended to the same discrimination being committed against any other minority group.

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¹ I have been told on many an occasion that it's a shame I'm not black too. During my stand up days (before I became too ill to carry on) I had an 'anti-fan' in Brighton who came to see me every time I gigged in the city to accuse me of being racist for telling the story of how daft people sometimes say "it's a shame you're not black." Being so hated really made me feel like I was doing the job properly.
² I'm deliberately using the phrase "able-bodied" as the opposite of "physically impaired". There's a chance that some of the people boarding the bus are both disabled and able-bodied.