Tag Archives: politics

Spitting the dummy!

Posted on February 22, 2013 | 1 Comment

Today, I was supposed to be in Brum rehearsing for InteGreat’s ‘Sweet Nothings‘ for the SHOUT festival on 1st March, but my ongoing winter flu bug kiboshed it. So naturally, I went on Facebook to see what was happening in the big wide world, or rather, to kill some time.

And I found this marvellous video from Lee Robertson. As well as being well made and having some great points re BSL ‘recognition’, I found his illustration of the dummy incredibly funny – and inspiring.

I could totally identify with what he was saying – BSL might have been ‘recognised’ but how much has actually changed? It’s been ten years, and in that time, I’ve been told by the JobCentre that they wouldn’t give me an interpreter because it wasn’t “in the budget”, dealt with poor awareness and discrimination more times than I can count, in fact I gave several examples last year of some of the access fails I’ve had to face when the whole ’limping chicken’ / ‘chickengate’ thing kicked off – which reminds me, The Limping Chicken just passed its one year milestone, Happy Birthday LC! – and believe me, I’ve had to handle many more since then.

What, actually, has changed? Do deaf children and their parents and families have automatic access to free BSL lessons? Are interpreters in schools provided as a matter of course? Hell no, right now they’re cutting services for deaf children. Here’s the petition against that; sign it now. I said now!

So, having been hit by Lee’s dummy, I’m spitting one of my own.

Here is a rough draft of a BSL poem that I spent the afternoon composing, feedback welcome! May need a little polishing before it hits a stage :)

PS when I give the title of the poem in the video, it’s meant to be ‘spitting the DUMMY’ not fag or anything else. Not sure how that happened…

“Spitting the Dummy”

(If it won’t play, here’s the YouTube link)

→ 1 Comment

Posted in BSL, Poetry, Politics, Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

Catching up on life!

Posted on October 23, 2012 | 2 Comments

*Stretches, limbers up, jogs up and down on the spot*

Blimey, this has been a while.

Didn’t mean to leave it so long before I updated this blog; I actually handed in my dissertation a couple of weeks ago, but I then gave myself the week off. Or two. I wish. More like real life hit me after I’d rested for a mere three days. My garden looks slightly less like a jungle now, but my room is still a tip covered in various ethics-related books, my email inbox is frankly terrifying, my DSA receipts still need doing and my blog is sadly neglected and gathering dust. Well, time to change that!

The blog at least.

The dissertation – well what can I say? After much fretting, worrying, typing, and wondering if there was ever going to be any end after having my deadline extended twice (not that I’m ungrateful, I am in fact deeply grateful) I finally handed it in two weeks ago today. Somewhat surreal to be given a small receipt as acknowledgement of my dissertation and the last two years. Two years and I get a receipt the size of a cheque. Huh. Not that I expected fireworks and a parade or anything, but talk about anti-climactic.

In the end, my dissertation, after taking a few tangents, got narrowed down to discuss a single question: “is clause 14 eugenic?” To which I replied a resounding ‘yes’ and accused the British government of reactionary, irrational, inconsistent, illogical, unethical, immoral behaviour and of engaging in the tyranny of the majority to boot. It’s a 20,000 word scatter-gun attack on Clause 14, and I think a lot of my bullets hit the target, but I won’t know for sure until November, when hopefully I’ll get my results in time for my birthday.

My birthday… one step closer to 30. No. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it. Focus on the results. Ommmmmmm.

In the meantime, I’ve got things to keep me busy, oh have I. Last weekend I performed at SignLive 2012, a BSL music gig organised by Lucy Barron, Claire Sloan and Alana Cookson to raise money for the Pahar Trust for the education of deaf children in the poorest mountain region of Nepal. I’m lucky enough to be one of a group of 20 people who will be visiting Nepal in 2013 as part of the Elmbury expedition, but between now and then the group are holding various fundraising events. SignLive was advertised to be a “jam-packed evening of live music, entertainment and performance centred around British Sign Language” and I’m happy to say it lived up to the hype! A great comedy show by Siobhan Dodd, ‘SSE – the musical’, that like all good comedy, had more than a grain of truth in it, live music interpreted by a bunch of cool terps; Jack, Pascale, Kathryn, Lee and Chris, a rendition of Ghostbusters by Roger Hudson that I can’t believe I missed and am really, really hoping that there is a video of – Lucy I’m looking at you! And of course, yours truly trying out a couple of new BSL poems and belting out ‘The Anthem’ by Good Charlotte in BSL :)

All in all, a bloody good night! Congratulations to everyone that made it happen!

And tonight, I’m heading to ‘Music and the Deaf’ in Cardiff, a shindig with the BBC orchestra Wales at the Millennium Centre, where we’ll be introduced to various instruments and they’re going to try and make music accessible to the Deaf, complete with BSL interpreters, should be fun!

And next week… Something very exciting is happening next week! Still nailing down final details, but if you have an interest in BSL poetry and translation, see if you can get yourself to Portsmouth Bookfest next Mon 27th. More details to follow! :)

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Deaf, Disability, Doctors, Ethics, Politics, Student

Tagged , , ,

An existential epiphany

Posted on February 3, 2012 | 2 Comments

This morning, I had a metaphysical revelation. It happened while I was cleaning out the cats’ litter trays; somehow the smell of dried ammonia put me in mind of the current situation regarding the government’s attempts to remove all support for the poor and vulnerable. But I’ve worked it out.

Somehow, I’m not sure how it happened, but we slid into Margaret Thatcher’s subconscious dream / fantasy state. Consider the evidence:

A ‘Welfare Reform Bill’, being dragged through parliament by any means necessary, up to and including reversing all the amendments made in the Lords and then slapping a ‘financial privilege’ on it that means the Lords cannot delay it any further; a Bill that ‘saves’ money by taking it from disabled children and limiting ESA to one year, ostensibly to ‘incentivise’ the terminally ill to get on with dying and the mentally ill to pull themselves together.

A ‘Health Bill’ that reforms the NHS by privatising some of it, allows hospitals to become up to 49% private, puts responsibility on GPs for budgets (and what happens when GPs cock it up? I wonder if the private companies waiting in the wings will volunteer to take over…) and is about as popular as a certain attempt to centralise the NHS computer system.

A Legal Aid Bill that makes it much harder for the poor / vulnerable to sue the rich when the rich screw them.

A ‘Work Experience’ project that forces claimants to work for free or lose their benefits – but somehow this isn’t forcing them to work and isn’t in breach of the Human Rights Act clauses on forced labour.

A film, based on some aspects of Thatcher’s life, that puts a vaguely sympathetic light on the politician who set the bar on penny pinching when she cancelled free milk for school children, and is tipped for two Oscars.

Somehow, somewhere, we accidentally fell into Thatcher’s fantasies. Now what we need to do is find some scientists who know how to return us all back to our own dimension of reality. Perhaps we can borrow the Doctor from Dr Who. Or, the other scenario, the scientists at CERN have accidentally zapped us all back into the Victorian era, which the Doctor could probably fix as well. It’s win-win. Where’s a fictional dimension-bending, time-travelling hero when you need one?

In the meantime, why not ask the real Queen to withhold the Royal Assent from the Welfare Reform Bill? It’s unlikely to happen, but I love the request; it’s simple yet brilliant in its audacity. After all the government’s machinations, imagine if it was all brought down by one person simply saying ‘no’.

If after all that, you need some cheering up, why not come to the Bristol Deaf Centre tomorrow evening and watch some magical signed poetry? Richard Carter, Paul Scott, John Wilson and myself will be lined up, ready to wow the audience! Come on down! :)

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Deaf, Poetry, Politics

Tagged , , , ,

Telling Our Stories

Posted on January 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

Tomorrow, I’m due to perform my BSL poetry at Bristol’s M Shed as part of Resistance: Telling Our Stories, an event that has been organised as a (slightly belated) nod to Disability History Month, with the backdrop of Resistance: Which Way The Future?, a media installation directed by Liz Crow of Roaring Girl Productions which is on at the M shed from 5th January to 5th February 2012. More info can be found here:
http://www.journomania.net/culture/38-art-and-culture/517-disability-arts-at-bristols-m-shed-for-uk-disability-history-month-.html
http://www.roaring-girl.com/productions/resistance-on-tour/

I was looking forward to this anyway, but with the twitterstorm that blew up over the #spartacusreport (which I gleefully added my little raindrops to) last monday, the triple defeat of the government in the House of Lords over the Welfare Reform Bill, which Lord Fraud, excuse me, Freud, then attempted to roll back as soon as the Labour peers had left* and the governments’ response which basically seemed to be that they were going to keep pressing ahead with the WRB, despite all protests, it seems to me that the themes of Resistance are just as relevant as ever.

*Mason Dixon gives a colourful and Hollywood-worthy version of events: http://masondixonautistic.blogspot.com/2012/01/us-and-them.html

Resistance looks at the Nazi eugenics program, Aktion T4, during which hundreds of thousands of disabled people… well, disappeared. They just went away in grey vans and didn’t come back. And apparently, not very many people questioned it at the time. It probably didn’t help that Nazi Germany was trying pull itself out of a recession, and the propagandists had done their best to tell everyone how much these ‘useless eaters’ were costing the state, via posters like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg
The translation is: “60,000RM. This is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the Community of Germans during his lifetime.”

When some Minister or newspaper bangs on about benefit scroungers / how much the welfare state is costing / benefit fraud, while the coalition sits idly by while the HMRC aids and abets what have to be crimes against the treasury, I think of that poster.

And it’s working. Disability hate crime on the up, people living in terror of Work Capability Assessments, people with mental health issues having to be talked down by kind voices after receiving a particularly nasty letter from the DWP. Well fucking done.

A little fact-checking.
1) DWP own figures put fraud at less than 0.5%.
2) Of the “5.2 billion lost to error and fraud”, only 1.2 billion of that was fraud.
3) The coalition has said they want to cut payment of DLA by 20%.
4) They also say they want to ‘protect the most vulnerable’.
5) Unclaimed benefit in 08/09 was 17.7billion (12.7billion means tested, 5 billion tax credits).

Compare and contrast 3) and 4) with 1), 2) and 5). Conclusion: there are far less benefit scroungers out there than the coalition would have you believe. Am I wrong? Feel free to google it and check. In fact, I want you to google it and check. Challenge me. Challenge the coalition. Just please don’t ignore the Welfare Reform Bill.

And if, after reading the Spartacus Report, you think we should all take a deep breath and be allowed to look at the WRB proposals properly, go over to ‘Pat’s Petition’ and sign the petition to stop and review the cuts to benefits and services.

Spartacus Report/ Responsible Reform:
https://skydrive.live.com/view.aspx/Responsible%20Reform%20for%20screen%20readers.doc?cid=cba86408918caa9e
Pat’s Petition:
http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20968

For my part, I hope lots of people will come and check out the Telling Our Stories event, there’s lots of happy stuff as well as serious stuff, and it promises to be at the very least an interesting day out! Plus, there’s my poetry :) For those who can’t make it, the media installation will be on until 5th February.

Which Way The Future?, indeed.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Access, Arts, Disability, Poetry, Politics

Tagged , , , , ,

Update to Random ramblings and links

Posted on January 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

An hour after I published my last post, the Daily Mail posted this. They pretty much agree with everything I said, and more. They tear into Cameron and the WRB, defend the disabled and quote the Spartacus Report. Not only do I take back (some) of what I said about them in my previous post, I think I may need a lie-down to get over the shock.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2084706/David-Camerons-Welfare-Reform-Bill-Hiding-truth-way-achieve-it.html

In fact, screw the lie-down, where’s my codeine? Fan me, someone, fan me.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Disability, Politics, Tories

Tagged , , ,

Random ramblings and links

Posted on January 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to update my blog regularly, so here I am. What to write? I fear my life is somewhat uninteresting at the minute. Finished antibiotics a few days ago. Woke up with sore throat. Coughed pitifully. Drank coffee. Took painkillers. Checked twitter. Etc. Apparently, the fact that I’m still unwell even after a course of antibiotics indicates that my infection is at least partly viral. No, really? And it can last for up to 6 weeks or more. Thanks for that.

However, life goes on, and the main event for me yesterday was the launch of the spartacusreport / Responsible Reform report on the proposed changes to DLA, funded, written by and supported by the very people the proposed changes affect, and ooh, does it make for enlightening reading.

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/files/response_to_proposed_dla_reforms.pdf

For example, where 98% of respondents opposed the qualifying period being raised to 6 months from 3, this somehow got translated by the government document as “some organisations were in favour of our proposal to extend the Qualifying Period from 3 months to 6 months before benefit would be paid… However many organisations and some individuals were not in favour of this” Er, excuse me? 98% against gets translated to ‘many’ and ‘some’ and 2% for is translated to ‘some’? Making it look as though the numbers aren’t as damning as they are? Google it if you don’t believe me. Even Boris Johnson objected in his submission: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielknowles/100127807/boris-johnson-turns-his-fire-on-the-governments-reforms-to-disability-living-allowance/ I think I’m starting to like Boris. It’s a strange sensation.

What I find even more damning though, is that the #spartacusreport was trending on twitter yesterday, even at first place for a short while, then hovering in second for the whole afternoon. It received support from various celebrities, including Stephen Fry and Tim Minchin, and even John Prescott noticed. It attracted millions of tweets.

And yet, where is the BBC report on this amazing reponse to the Welfare Reform Bill? Where is the Daily Mail story on this socially-funded and researched report? This must be it: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2084445/Incapacity-benefits-10-000-sick-Britons-abroad-claiming-1m-week.html
Oh, my mistake. Also, notice the ‘MAIL COMMENT: the welfare state has become a bonanza for the feckless’, mere days after being forced to print that, actually, the fraud rate for DLA is less than 0.5%: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083294/Boris-Johnson-attacks-Tory-plans-benefits-squeeze-disability-living-allowance.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
It’s like they’ve learned nothing.

Where is ANY mainstream news report on the twitterstorm that #spartacusreport inspired? It’s times like this that make me feel paranoid.

And how appropriate then, that the Resistance Exhibition Event: Telling Our Stories opens at M shed in Bristol this weekend, as a nod to Disability History Month. I’ll be performing BSL poetry in Studio 2 on Saturday as part of this event, all are welcome! http://mshed.org/whats-on/events/resistance-exhibition-event-telling-our-stories/ Check out the poster – how cool is that? Posed by none other than Liz Crow, the director of Resistance. Come on down!

Oh, and another thing: according to the pope, gay marriage is a threat to humanity’s future: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/09/us-pope-gay-idUSTRE8081RM20120109
There’s a lot of things I could say in response to this, but a tweet by Patrick Strudwick has summed it up perfectly:

Today the pope said that gay marriage undermines “the future of humanity itself”. I say telling people not to use condoms already has.

Well, quite.

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Disability, Gay, Poetry, Politics

Tagged , , ,