/ November 17, 2016 at 3:43 PM
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Today Parliament debates the government’s plan to cut benefit payments from £5000 to £3500 per year for those it assesses as presently unable to work. Meanwhile, the Green Paper on Work, Health and Disability ventures a system of discretionary conditionality regarding those…
/ November 13, 2016 at 9:55 PM
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“This dithering is unacceptable” Mark Harper, Shadow Minister for Disabled People on the then Labour government’s delay in ratifying the UN Disability Rights Convention, January 2009 “At the heart of this report lies an outdated view of disability which is…
/ November 1, 2016 at 2:49 PM
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There was moment during my speed-read of the Work, Health and Disability Green Paper that I felt I had entered either the world of ‘W1A’, the BBC’s almost documentary about itself or perhaps that of Nicola Murray-era The Thick of It…
/ October 31, 2016 at 10:35 AM
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Peter Beresford has said ‘boo’ twice this Halloween, once in a capitalised rant on Twitter to accuse the charity Scope of being ‘GOVERNMENT COLLABORATORS AGAINST DISABLED PEOPLE’ with respect to the fact – I assume – that it is hosting…
/ October 19, 2016 at 10:12 PM
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Just back from a lecture by the new(ish) Director of Liberty, Martha Spurrier at the LSE, chaired by Professor Connor Gearty titled ‘Who are we? Hate, Hostility and Human Rights in a post Brexit world.’ First of all, to say…
/ October 7, 2016 at 11:09 AM
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For the past several years I’ve engaged in one way or another in thinking how to stop the rot of public discourse and public opinion surrounding human rights, first at the Equality and Human Rights Commission than latterly as Director…
/ June 30, 2016 at 2:50 PM
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Many disabled people and particularly those reliant upon out of work disability benefits to survive have felt largely abandoned by a political class that has spent the last decade increasingly locking horns over ‘welfare reform.’ Whatever the differences in policy,…
/ May 23, 2016 at 11:38 AM
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Several years ago I visited Baroness Jane Campbell in hospital to draft a speech to be delivered on her behalf by Baroness Tanni Grey Thompson on the occasion of the launch of the Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry report…
/ May 6, 2016 at 2:09 PM
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Peter Beresford has been a consistent and vocal critic of personal budgets, as elaborated in the Care Act 2014. This week he wrote a further familiar piece under the headline ‘Personal Budgets don’t work. So why are we ignoring the…
/ April 24, 2016 at 6:00 PM
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It surely follows that an organisation bidding for public contracts to provide employment support to disabled people on the basis of its expertise in doing so should have an exemplary record of employing disabled people? This would provide evidence of…
/ April 24, 2016 at 5:30 PM
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In 1995, the French Counseil d’Etat ruled that ‘dwarf throwing’ (lander de nain) was incompatible with ‘ordere public’ because the persons involved compromise human dignity by allowing themselves to be used as ‘mere things.’[1] The people of restricted growth in question…
/ March 21, 2016 at 1:20 PM
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For those affected by cuts to benefits, the effect is far less money to live on and to pay for the things that allow one to live a life. It doesn’t really matter where the money came from or why.…
/ March 11, 2016 at 3:42 PM
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A truly appalling image of contempt and abuse by a member of Mencap’s staff towards a person they were employed to support found its way online and into the press yesterday. It shows a ‘support worker’ talking on the phone…
/ March 2, 2016 at 10:37 AM
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When the proposals to reform Employment and Support Allowance were first touted by Ian Duncan Smith following the spending review he argued that: ‘ESA may have been designed with the right intentions, but at its heart lay a fundamental flaw. …
/ May 6, 2015 at 9:55 PM
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So the General Election is upon us. We’ve seen what the Party’s have to offer disabled people. It’s been somewhat disappointing, both in tone and content. Here are five things that the various manifestos perhaps still offer an opportunity to…
/ April 21, 2015 at 11:06 AM
323 views
Yesterday I blogged about Labour’s ‘mini manifesto’ aimed at disabled people. The Tories haven’t to the best of my knowledge produced an equivalent so the comments below are based on those elements of their manifesto that appear most immediately relevant,…
/ March 19, 2015 at 5:02 PM
323 views
Over half of disabled people are not in paid employment. For people with learning disabilities the percentage who have never had a paid job is a shocking 79%. The vast majority of disabled people who are excluded from the labour…
/ March 12, 2015 at 5:16 PM
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Well talk about pissing on your own fireworks…. Today, Minister for Disabled People Mark Harper MP made a statement to Parliament setting out reforms to the Access to Work scheme. The proposals include a series of very welcome developments, including…
/ January 29, 2015 at 5:39 PM
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I’m not aware of a single instance of a politician or newspaper describing disabled people receiving benefits as scroungers – certainly never people with a learning disability. What I have observed is the way people on benefits have been made…
/ December 4, 2014 at 10:14 PM
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While doing the rounds at last night’s Labour Party disability reception, Ed Miliband greeted guests by asking ‘so what can we do to secure a Labour government?’ On the evidence of his speech, if he’s relying on disabled people’s vote then…
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