I have just nominated Sue Marsh (@suey2y) to be a torchbearer at the London Paralympic Games in 2012. When I first heard that LOCOG were looking for “people who have made a difference in their community and inspired or supported disabled people”, Sue was the first person who came to mind.
I first found Sue the way I find anything these days: on Twitter. Somebody linked to one of her blog posts, I can’t remember which. I found her writing sensitive, eloquent, thought-provoking. I followed her. A few months later, I helped her out with some research on disability benefits in Germany (short version: some things are better, some things are worse). Through Twitter, we have stayed in touch, and while I don’t read her blog religiously, chances are that if I see a link from her in my timeline I will click on it.
Sue suffers from a rare form of Crohn’s disease, a debilitating illness which can leave her incapable to move or eat, vomiting for hours, in unbearable pain for days. Strong painkillers take a lot of her energy but help her manage the pain; surgery can provide temporary relief – until it gets worse again.
Over the past 18 months, as budget cuts have begun to hit the most vulnerable, as the disabled have been demonised as “benefit scroungers”, as people on death’s door have been declared “fit for work”, Sue has been at the centre of The Broken of Britain campaign fighting for disabled rights. Her writing has touched thousands of disabled people, raised awareness of disability issues among those of us lucky enough to be able-bodied, and serves as a constant reminder of the importance of solidarity.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned from Sue and the Broken of Britain is about the sheer diversity when it comes to disability. Our iconography for disabled people focuses on what we can see. A person in a wheelchair, a blind person with a white cane – these are the traditional symbols of the disabled in our society. Yet disability comes in so many more varieties than that, some visible and some not. Vision and hearing impairments, mobility issues, those are the forms of disability that we can easily identify. Chronic conditions like MS, CFS or Crohn’s disease are just as debilitating, but they don’t fit into our mental model of disability. One day a person is fine, the next they cannot move, and the day after they are fine again. Our brains seem to have a binary switch – your body either works or doesn’t; we find it hard to make allowances for variable conditions, bodies which work some of the time, unreliably. We find it even harder to deal with mental health conditions, which can be just as debilitating. Just because a person doesn’t conform to our expectations of disability does not mean that they are “faking it”, “scrounging”, or even “fit for work”.
Another lesson I have learned from Sue is how close you and I – the average able-bodied people – are to the precipice of disability. An accident that puts us in a wheelchair may be just around the corner. I may feel fine today, but that means nothing when it comes to what nightmare condition my body may develop tomorrow. Every day you live as an able-bodied person is a day you’ve been lucky and a day you should be thankful for. If simple humanity isn’t enough to make us want to care for the vulnerable in our society, to show solidarity and help people in need, then this awareness of our own fragility and mortality at least should point us in the right direction.
A final lesson: this one from Sue, Chris Grayling and the Paralympic Games. Odd combination, I know. It was Chris Grayling who said (Q286) to the Work and Pensions Committee earlier this year that with the proposed welfare and benefits reforms he was trying to address a situation where “a Paralympic athlete with a university degree has no obligation to look for a job”. This is, of course, cheap and lazy rhetoric. Yes, Britain has world class Paralympic athletes. Yes, they are incredibly inspiring, both to disabled people and to the able-bodied. Yet equating all “deserving” disabled people with Paralympic athletes in the public’s mind – which is precisely what Chris Grayling sought to do with his remarks – is deliberately deceptive. It ignores the diversity of conditions which can cause disability, denies disabled people their individuality, implies that those who are not breaking world records on a daily basis are somehow worth less. On the other hand, one of the weird and wonderful things about competitive sports for the disabled is the sheer complexity of the rules: because everyone’s condition is different, you have to find a way to more or less compare like with like. Unlike Chris Grayling, this system allows disabled to people to compete on a level playing field. We as a society, too, should be able to allow for that. We should treat the disabled with dignity and respect, as individuals, and give them the support they need to have a meaningful and fulfilling life as part of our society.
So when we watch the Paralympic Games next year, let’s celebrate the amazing achievements on the athletes – and let’s at the same time remember all those other disabled people out there. Each of them, in their own unique way, tries their best every day – to get through the day, to contribute to society, to achieve something amazing.

In between Star Trek and episodes of True Blood I have been entertaining myself today with coverage of the Conservative Party Conference (or #cpc11 for the Twitterati). I have decided that this can only be survived with the aid of a drinking game, so I’m proposing a first draft below.

• The mess that Labour left us/Labour’s legacy – take a drink.
• The nation’s credit card/Living beyond our means – take a drink.
• Deficit – take a drink.
• We’re all in this together – take a drink.
• Quoting Ed Miliband or other senior Labour figures – take a drink.
• Hard-working families – take a drink.
• Referring to one’s own or another speaker’s weight – take a drink.
• Government minister mistakes conference speech for stand-up act – take a drink.
• First Past the Post is the best thing since sliced bread – take a drink.
• Putting price tags on intangible benefits of things like the environment because audience wouldn’t get it otherwise – take a drink.
• Let’s have the Scottish independence referendum right now – take a drink.
• Values or Conservative Values – take a drink.
• Tax cuts (except corporation tax) – take a drink.
• We’re not imploding in Scotland! – take a drink.
• Government minister sounding like 12-year-old behind the bike sheds (except Michael “I am a banana” Gove) – take a drink.
• Speaker congratulates government on success in Libya… and conveniently does not mention Syria, Bahrain, or Yemen – take a drink.
• Let’s have a positive campaign – take a drink.
• Scottish independence eats babies – take two drinks.
• Enterprise/Business/Entrepreneurship – take two drinks.
• Choice (except on abortion) – take two drinks.
• Corporation tax cuts – take two drinks.
• Cap on immigration – take two drinks.
• Michael Gove sounding like a 12-year-old behind the bike sheds – take two drinks.
• Big Society – take two drinks.
• I am a volunteer who doesn’t have a minimum wage – take three drinks.
• Modern Conservatism – take three drinks.
• We told you so about the Euro – take three drinks.
• Greece – down the bottle.

Anyone else want to add to it?

Ed Miliband stood up yesterday and said that if Labour were in government right now they would “cut” tuition fees to £6,000 a year. What struck me about this is that no one batted an eyelid – the conversation simply degenerated into tribal mud slinging without even the briefest of pauses to examine the extraordinary claims the Leader of the Opposition was making.
Here’s what gets me about Miliband’s proposal: He is “cutting” tuition fees from a current £3,290 per year to £6,000 per year – and we are to feel grateful for that. Yes, you read that right. It is true that from 2012 onwards tuition fees will be, for most intents and purposes, £9,000 a year – but right now they’re not. Right now Ed Miliband is saying if Labour were in government they would “cut” tuition fees from three grand to six grand. I’m sorry, what?
The second thing that got me was the reaction from Liberal Democrat circles on Twitter to Miliband’s announcement. @markwhiley opined, “I think Labour owe all those Lib Dem members they convinced to sign up on the back of fee increases BECAUSE of them and the Tories, a refund”. There was something almost smug about @aligoldsworthy‘s “What #lab11 are showing this morning is that there isn’t an easy solution to HE funding in current climate. We Lib Dems know that pain.” And @AAEmmerson tweeted at party president Tim Farron, “have you looked at Eds tuition fee proposals? Why arent we out briefing it’s a tax cut for the rich?” (To Tim’s credit, he responded that he didn’t brief but stood behind anything he said.)
“[W]e are only pointing out labour’s opportunism and hypocrisy over fees”, quoth @WoollyMindedLib, before explaining that it was still Lib Dem policy to scrap tuition fees while Labour policy would be to double them.
What none of these vocal Lib Dems on Twitter seemed to understand is that, had their party not broken their election pledge and enabled the trebling of tuition fees, we wouldn’t – we couldn’t – be having this absurd conversation right now. It was the Lib Dems’ support of the coalition government’s policy to treble fees which has ensured that scrapping them is now permanently off the table, and that Labour can come along with a proposal of fees of “only” £6,000 and seem like a saviour.
Right now, the only people I trust on tuition fees are Tories promising full deregulation and privatisation, and the SNP. Everyone else is probably lying.

About half an hour ago, Housing Minister Grant Shapps tweeted this:

We’re investing £400m in tackling homelessness over the next 4 years – zero cut to this budget in order to protect the most vulnerable.

This begged the question of how much homelessness was predicted to rise by as a result of the government’s policies. I’m thinking here of caps on housing benefit, sweeping changes (read cuts) to disability benefits, as well as of Mr. Shapps’ own proposal to evict people who took part in the recent riots (and their innocent families) from council housing. Because, you see, having a flat budget to tackle homelessness in the face of rising homelessness is effectively a cut.
Responding to my tweet asking this question of the Housing Minister, Sue Marsh quoted some stats, on decrease of homelessness under Labour and rise under the current government.
For the last half hour Mr. Shapps has been busy explaining how Labour doctored the stats. I am still waiting for an answer to my original question about his own doctoring of numbers and have tweeted it at him repeatedly. Do we think he’d spot irony if it bit him in the arse?

“Mindless violence”, “thugs”, “criminality of the worst kind” – these are the words used over and over again by police, politicians and the majority of the media to describe the riots we have seen in London and some of Britain’s biggest cities over the last few days. To a certain extent, there is no denying this logic. This is no peaceful read-in at a Vodafone store, nor a carefully organised, meticulously planned and highly creative action like the UK Uncut action in Fortnum & Mason. It isn’t even a largely peaceful political protest parts of which got out of hand. These riots are markedly different: there are no political demands, no slogans or chants – just destruction, theft and violence. So is it right to dismiss them as nothing more than the actions of violent thugs?
The first thing to note here is that at this stage, we know very little about the people involved. We have seen images of mostly young men, some of them from black or minority ethnic backgrounds but also many white faces, we have been told that in many cases it’s even very young kids – 10, 11, 12 years old – getting involved, and young women. Making generalisations is difficult – and so it should be.
The government obviously has a vested interest in representing the riots as mindless, criminal violence, rather than politically motivated action. Anything else would mean that at least some of the blame for what is happening would fall on the shoulders of our overlords – and that’s not something they can afford. Sometimes, however, there is not a clear line between criminality and political acts, and I believe what we are witnessing right now falls into that area of shades of grey in between.
Some of the soundbites journalists have managed to get from rioters and looters are particularly telling. In this one, young girls drunk on looted wine talk about what they’re doing and why. There’s a vague attempt to blame the government there, somewhat undermined by one of them saying “Yeah… Conservatives… I don’t know who it is!” When questioned why they are attacking businesses in their local community, the girls answer, “It’s the rich people, the people that have got businesses, and that’s why all of this has happened. So we’re just showing the rich people we can do what we want.”
Another item on the Today Programme this morning featured a young male rioter talking about his perception of the consequences of his actions. His expectation was that he would never get caught as police were overstretched, and even if he did, the consequences would be minor – prisons are already overcrowded so the worst he would get, he thought, was an ASBO – not something he considered a big deal.
On the surface, it is easy to interpret these remarks as willful criminality and mindless thuggery. Yet they betray a staggering level of alienation from society. What these young people are saying is essentially “Your system, your social structures, your reward and punishment mechanisms don’t apply to us.” The people some of our leaders call Alarm Clock Britain – small business owners who are struggling in the current economic climate – are viewed by the rioters as “rich people”, with no distinction between them and, say, investment bankers.
It is a commonly used tactic of the privileged to dismiss the arguments of the oppressed unless they are phrased and presented on their terms. You’ve probably heard such dismissals: just think “You’re just being over-emotional”. What I think is happening in the discourse on the riots is much the same thing: the privileged political classes refusing to recognise as political expression anything other than the kind of well-organised, targeted protest that predominantly white trade unionists and middle classes tend to engage in. Yet just because these young people’s feelings and experiences aren’t expressed in a sanctioned way, just because they feel they have no constructive way (or for that matter reason or incentive) to engage with the rest of society, doesn’t make their alienation any less valid, their acts any less political.
Do I support rioting and looting as a means of political expression? No. Do we live in a world where “society” is only for the privileged, and we quite literally have no common language with the truly alienated and oppressed? Probably. The biggest challenge once the riots are over will be to find a common language, to give these kids a reason to believe that there is a place for them in our society and that it is worth their time and effort to take that place.

I never trust statistics I haven’t forged myself. Case in point on the Today Programme this morning, with regards to public sector pensions.
Mark Serwotka, the general secretary of the PCS Union, made the reasonably well-known point that the relatively generous public sector pension provisions are a compensation for relatively lower pay during your career, compared to people in the private sector doing work of similar value. But he also questioned quite how generous those public sector pension provisions were: the average civil service pension is £4,000 a year, he said.
This was put to Frances Maude, the Cabinet Office Minister. Said Mr. Maude:

Let’s be clear about this. A civil servant on median salary, the middle salary, of £23,000, will retire after 40 years – a career of 40 years which many of them will have had – with a pension pot worth £500,000. Half a million pounds.

So how do both contributors score on forging your own stats?
Let’s take Mark Serwotka first: a quick Google search reveals he’s not quite right. The average civil service pension is around £6,000 per year – it’s the average local government pension that’s around £4,000. Neither of these numbers is something you’d want to live on in your old age, but one is 50% higher than the other. Having said that, using an average (mean) is probably being slightly generous here anyway because it allows the few individuals with the truly “gold-plated” pensions to drag everyone else’s contributions to the data set up. A median would be a much more useful figure if we had it.
Francis Maude does use the more meaningful median figure when he quotes civil service salaries^[1]. But watch how he hedges his bets: it’s only after a 40-year career, “which many of them will have”, that civil servants reach the mythical 500k pension pot. We have no information on how many people within the civil service actually will have the 40-year career. Given that the civil service employs over half a million people, Francis Maude’s “many” may refer to as little as 10% of that figure.
The other catch, of course, is that the assertion about the 500k pension pot is actually meaningless in the context of Defined Benefit pension schemes. Mr. Maude may have multiplied the annual pension resulting from a 40-year career at the median salary by the average life expectancy beyond retirement of civil servants to get that figure, but by definition a Defined Benefit scheme doesn’t have a “pot”.
So the Cabinet Office Minister is employing two tricks here: he has singled out a group of civil servants which may or may not be representative or significant, and he has deliberately quoted their pension benefits in a format which is designed to make them look larger, but is actually misleading and meaningless.
This is yet another example of policy by anecdote. Compare the stories of the £26,000 benefit scroungers to see the same approach being applied to different areas. What was utterly disgraceful about this morning’s episode, though, was that Jim Naughtie let it go through unchallenged. Most people don’t question the data they are presented with, but I would expect presenters of the caliber of Mr. Naughtie to do better than this.
Now, there may be (and probably is) a perfectly valid case for reforming public sector pensions, and the government’s proposals on the subject may even be the right thing to do. We will, however, never really know, because instead of presenting us with meaningful data and arguments, government ministers are relying on anecdotal, sensationalist soundbites.

[1] Interestingly, the median salary across all sectors in the UK is around the £21,000 mark. Does this mean that Mr. Serwotka’s assertions that public sector employees are paid less than private sector ones is not true either? Not necessarily. Remember the qualification: we’re talking about work of similar value. The national median earnings figure will include all types of work, from cleaning to being a chief executive. You would have to get a breakdown by sector and type of work to make a meaningful comparison. For time being, I’m inclined to believe Mr. Serwotka on this one.

I attended a workshop today organised by the Parliamentary Outreach Service on engaging with proposed legislation. It was an incredibly useful event, but it did highlight some of the issues we still face when it comes to our political system’s accessibility to “ordinary people”.
There were five speakers at the event, covering a range of topics. James Rhys talked about the basic procedures a Bill follows as it goes through Parliament, as well as the specifics of Public Bill Committees and the Committee Stage. Matt Ringer took us through some of the amazing functionality on the parliament.uk website. (You can find out what stage a Bill is currently in, see all proposed amendments as well as those selected for debate, find out the timetable for the Bill and if/when a Public Bill Committee is calling for evidence to be submitted, see all the written evidence, as well as the research on the subject produced by the House of Commons Library for MPs.)
There were also three more “practical” sessions – people sharing their personal experiences of engaging with Parliament, from both sides. Kevan Jones MP and Lord Shipley covered the Parliamentarian perspective, while Yetunde Adediran shared her experience of submitting evidence to Parliament.
By this point, you should be noticing something: out of five speakers, four were white and male. (The audience, in contrast to the speakers was actually reasonably diverse for the North-east.) Not only were the speakers unrepresentative of British society, but so were their stories. Kevan Jones in particular shared his experience of getting a Private Member’s Bill on the statute books – and there was nothing in that story that made me think that Parliament was anything other than an Old Boys’ Club. Lord Shipley’s stories, while making the House of Lords seem slightly more approachable (paradoxical, I know), also failed to feature any persons who were not white, probably straight, men.
I fully appreciate the spirit of the event, and as I said above, I found the information very useful. However, at times it did feel a little like we had come to be lectured by our betters. While the organisers could have put more effort into making the speakers more representative of society in general (we do have female MPs in the region!), we also need to recognise that this is only a symptom of the general state of our politics. There are still not enough women in Parliament (either house!), or people of colour, or representatives of various other minorities. Political careers (elected or otherwise) are increasingly closed and inaccessible to the working class. Take a look at the people who last year decided the fate of the country in the coalition negotiations: there wasn’t a single woman among them (though interestingly there were three or four gay or bisexual men).
Workshops like today’s are a great start to getting people more engaged in politics at all levels – but we need to do more. Political parties as well as institutions like Parliament need to do more to get minorities and disadvantaged groups engaged and participating in politics at all levels.

Congratulations! Disability has just become a “lifestyle choice”.

We saw it coming, with the government’s aggressive briefing on “benefits as a lifestyle”, but with the Department for Work and Pensions today releasing figures showing that 80,000 people claim Incapacity Benefit because they are addicted to drugs or alcohol, or obese, it is now official – we have “good disability” and “bad disability”. (Hey, that sounds familiar!)

Gay rights campaigners, particularly those following gay rights issues in the US, will be familiar with the rhetoric. The implication is that if being gay – or having an addiction – is a choice that you made, that should not be the state’s business and you do not deserve any support, regardless of whether it’s Incapacity Benefit or equal marriage rights. And no, Chris Grayling hasn’t come out and said in as many words that addiction or obesity is a choice, but the implication is very much there. Why else single out those groups and release the numbers, if not for the rabid coverage you’ll get from the Telegraph and the Mail?

Let’s take this logic a little further then. Who’s next on the DWP’s hitlist? Cervical cancer sufferers? It’s linked to HPV which is sexually transmitted – perhaps they should have remained pure and virginal. People with mental health conditions? After all, if the expectation is that you bootstrap yourself out of addiction or obesity (“Just pull yourself together!”), why not out of depression? Or perhaps the DWP’s approach will spill over into Andrew Lansley’s territory – maybe next we’ll classify treatment for addictions in the same category as cosmetic surgery. It’s a lifestyle choice, isn’t it?

Nevermind the fact that scientists are beginning to hunt around for other causes of our obesity epidemic than the simple “moral failure” story we keep being fed, or the biology of addiction – 40-60% of what makes us susceptible to addiction are our genes.

It’s a lifestyle choice. So, do you have a good disability or a bad disability? Ultimately, though, this divide and conquer approach only works if we let ourselves be divided. I for one don’t buy the rhetoric. Do you?

After pointing out a couple of weeks ago that the census is a political tool, tonight I decided to use it as such. As we know, the census is being administered by a US arms manufacturer who is hoping to make a significant profit off our tax money. After carefully considering the arguments (please read!), I decided that my initial responses to the census had not been quite helpful and informative enough.
Unfortunately, adding the extra information has required me to cross out my original answers and then scribble the new ones all over the page. My handwriting’s not very good I’m afraid, but Lockheed Martin, the British state, and future generations will now know many more exciting facts about me:

• I found, for instance, that the options provided in Household Question 7 (What type of accommodation is this?) did not quite match the type of house I live in. So I explained what a Tyneside flat was.
• While my flat has two bedrooms, I felt the need to explain that one of them is known and used as “the laundry and campaign materials room”.
• I was offended by the phrasing of Personal Question 2 (What is your sex?) and explained that while I was female, I found this question limiting and offensive on behalf of the many transgender and intersex people in the UK.
• I explained that I had come to live in the UK in “the month of September nineteen-ninety-nine, current era”.
• I felt the need to elaborate on the state of my health (Personal Question 13): “Very good. I can kick people in the head from cold.”
• When asked about my ethnic group, I first felt compelled to explain that Gypsy and Irish Traveller were two distinct ethnic groups. I then described myself as “a sort of pinkish colour that people tend to call white”.
• Question 17 has been deliberately answered. It now tells the government that I think they should be asking about sexual orientation too.
• I struggled with Question 19 the first time round, so I gave a much fuller explanation of my language capabilities. I also explained in Question 20 that my English was very good, as I could tell the difference between “affect” and “effect”, which many of my English colleagues couldn’t.
• When talking about my nationality I complained that I was not allowed dual citizenship.
• When asked about my employment, I pointed out that as well as a full-time job I was also volunteering for four separate organisations, and that I thought they should be asking about this, what with the Big Society and all.
• Oh, and then they wanted to know my precise job title and description. I was very precise indeed.

To help with processing, I have carefully coloured in all the barcodes, and I plan to staple the form closed to make sure it is tamper-proof (wouldn’t want unauthorised persons to view my personal data), and put it in the envelope with the “Visitor Questions” section visible through the window as that is surely the most urgent information they will want to know.

[We interrupt your Women’s History Month schedule for a public service announcement on electoral reform.]
I was unimpressed with Councillor Terence Paul’s contribution to the electoral reform debate. In a piece which is frankly insulting to the intelligence of voters – BME or otherwise – Mr Paul questions Operation Black Vote’s support of the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign. With choice quotes from Nick Griffin, Mr Paul raises the spectre of bus-loads of BNP MPs, all in our Parliament thanks to the Alternative Vote.
Leaving aside the questionable underlying premise that people whose views we find distasteful should not be represented, the argument the Councillor makes is still tenuous. It tries to create a false equivalence between the Alternative Vote and Proportional Representation by claiming, among other things, that the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign would like the former to become a stepping stone for the latter. So let’s get our facts straight.
Firstly, the Alternative Vote and Proportional Representation are not one and the same thing. Even the No to AV campaign goes to great lengths to point this out, in an attempt to divide and conquer pro-reform voters.
Secondly, neither the Yes To Fairer Votes nor the No to AV campaign have an official position on Proportional Representation. What is on the table on May 5th is a choice between First Past the Post and the Alternative Vote, and this is what the campaign is all about. Claiming that the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign wants AV to be a stepping stone to PR is a bit like claiming that everyone in the No campaign wants to keep FPTP – it is simply not true.
Thirdly – and this is the really important bit – the British National Party is actively campaigning against the Alternative Vote. Does this look to you like the action of a party which believes it will massively benefit from a change to AV?
I find it a constant source of amusement how the No campaign continues to rely on the bogeyman of the BNP for its scare tactics, while at the same time being supported by them. What is even more ludicrous are the repeated attempts to square the circle by scaring us with the prospect of the BNP in Parliament, while keeping supporters of other small parties on side. Here is my favourite quote from the No to AV website:

“AV ensures that the BNP will gain more votes and more legitimacy, while not giving any help to small parties like the Green Party.”

Quite how this will be achieved is never explained.
I, for one, have had enough of the No campaign’s attempts to create fear, uncertainty and doubt, enough of lies, half-truths and bad arguments. I believe voters deserve our respect, and to be treated as intelligent human beings. Arguments like Terence Paul’s simply don’t wash.
What is on the table are not bus-loads of BNP MPs but a small change to our voting system which will make a big difference for voters. It will give us a stronger voice and give MPs an incentive to work harder to represent us all. You can vote for that, or you can vote to keep first-past-the-post, the system which keeps MPs in jobs so safe that some of them don’t even bother to hold a surgery in their constituency.
Whichever way you choose to vote, I hope it’s on the basis of facts and truth, rather than fear.