Another Of Frances Ryan's 'Deserving Cases'...

They are always illuminating:

It’s been a year and a half since her troubled husband left the family, leaving Sally to look after their five children alone.

The youngest of the girls is only three, and 11-year-old son Connor (“obsessed with computers”) is autistic.

Five children. And why not? Not only does she not pay, we pay her to have them!

And it gets even better:

For Sally, it was back in September 2015 that it first started. Her husband had been gone five months – taking any wage, as well as the working tax credits he brought in, with him – and she was struggling to stretch what they had left.

He was on a wage so low the governm... no, wait, you and I... made up the difference! What a catch, Sally!

For a family such as Sally’s, losing this money adds to what is already a struggle. On the 10th floor of a tower block, all six are crammed into a one-bed flat. Four of the children sleep in the one bedroom; two have a single bed and two share another; Sally sleeps in the sitting room, with her toddler next to her.

Yes, well, that's a consequence of expecting the State to be husband to your brood. You go where they'll put you.

Without the child tax credits, she’s had to go back to using Connor’s disability living allowance (DLA) to pay for small meals. “It’s very hard to get enough money for food,” she says. “We don’t eat much. Rice. Fish. Maybe chips.”

Disability living allowance isn't for food. Nor is it for fripperies:

The DLA used to go on things like console games for Connor (what for other children is a treat is, to him, a rigid routine that calms him). He cries when his mum reminds him they can’t afford it now. An autistic child doesn’t understand benefits being stopped, says Kim. “It’s just, ‘Mummy won’t let me play with it’.”

I confess, I stopped reading there. I mean, given governmental incompetence, there must be some genuine cases of 'no fault' hardship out there.

So why does it seem as if Frances Ryan and the 'Guardian' can't find any?

Austerity Is Working!

As can be seen by Frances Ryan’s increasingly hysterical rhetoric:

I can’t decide what is most disturbing: that more than 85% of allegations of benefit fraud put forward by the public over the past five years have been false….

Errr, not quite true. As we noted at Tim Worstall’s site, the actual wording is important:

“…between 2010 and 2015 the government closed 1,041,219 alleged cases of benefit fraud put forward by the public. Insufficient or no evidence of fraud was discovered in 887,468 of these. In 2015 alone, of the 153,038 cases closed by the DWP’s Fraud and Error Service, 132,772 led to no action.”

The weasel words there are ‘insufficient evidence’ and ‘led to no action’.

This is the sort of free and easy twisting of words that allows the feministas to claim men are ‘getting away with rape’ by counting the number of acquittals or failure to proceed with a charge due to lack of evidence as examples of men who have ‘got away with it’.

… or that this is about almost 900,000 out of more than a million cases. That isn’t a handful of mistaken or malicious individuals. It’s a widespread anti-benefit mindset that – over five years of austerity – has rooted itself in British culture: through Benefits Street type-television, the rhetoric of politicians, and the pages of national newspapers.

Yes, you see, in Frances’ world, if only it wasn’t for that awful media and those dreadful politicians, the Great British Public would regard benefit cheats as happy-go-lucky scalliwags who deserved to get away with it, bless their souls…

In this climate, a “benefit cheat” and a person on benefits is one and the same. It has not only become quite natural to be suspicious of your disabled neighbour when he drives by your house in a new car – but to report him to the authorities for it.

Just for a new car? That wouldn’t necessarily make me suspicious of my disabled neighbour. Are you perhaps projecting, Frances?

“It’s a hate crime of the worst type,” said one woman – who has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, fibromyalgia, and mental health problems – who spoke to me from Wiltshire about being falsely reported as fraudulently claiming disability benefits. She described the accusation as “the equivalent of saying I was working as a trapeze artist by night and in the SAS by day” .

And yet a lot of this does indeed happen.

Maybe the ease with which some people have been able to fool their GPs into supporting their claims should be a focus of your ire instead? Or even GPs swindling the system themselves?

The phantom benefit cheat is the perfect patsy for austerity. If there are hordes of disabled, mentally ill, or unemployed people who are draining the public purse, there is justification for sweeping cuts to social security. It doesn’t actually matter if this horde is lying to claim benefits or not. By nature of receiving “taxpayers’” money, they are still said to be cheating “hardworking families” .

Well, when a single mother of four can ‘earn’ enough in benefits to keep not just herself, but 6 large hungry animals, there’s clearly something wrong.

Why do you never rail against those who abuse the system, Frances?

This is the art of distraction mixed with a tactic of divide and rule. It not only stops much of the public questioning whether vast cuts to public services are necessary, but also diverts attention from the government’s failure to find solutions to the real causes of people’s struggles. It is not high private rents, lack of social housing, or low wages that deserve their anger but the people who are too ill to get out of bed in the morning.

Why is it the government’s job to ‘find solutions’, Frances? People struggle for all sorts of reasons, but the government can’t do much more than attempt to arrange a level playing field.

Knock Yourself Out, Frances, They Still Exist.

Frances Ryan has found another thing wrong with modern society:

...when it comes to watching films on the platforms, I am one extortionate paywall away from buying a DVD player off eBay and Googling: “Does Blockbuster still exist?”

What’s the problem? 

It is not simply that Netflix and co are killing cinema – although, yes, that is a thing that is objectively bad. It is that the advent of streaming has made watching a movie in your own home more costly, more restricted and often incredibly annoying.

Really? Is this part of Frances' disability then? 

Nowadays, if you rent a film that has recently been released it’ll cost you up to £20, far more than if you saw it in most cinemas – plus you’re paying the electric and heating bills.

Rubbish! I watched 'Zootopia 2' at the weekend, a film that was in the cinema at Christmas, on Disney+, it cost me nothing extra, whate sort of niche vieeing is she after?

When I fancied rewatching Sense and Sensibility recently, it struck me how it had become the norm to have to search through Netflix, Prime and Disney+ to work out which one currently owns the rights to each film. I eventually unearthed it on iPlayer. I think it was quicker for Jane Austen to write the novel.

You can just google that, you know... 

My personal loathing is what I pettily insist on calling Prime’s “double paywall”, in which Amazon blocks off popular films from its own subscribers unless they stump up a £3.49 rental charge on top of the £8.99 we’re already paying monthly.

I just want to be able to rewatch a beloved film without helping Jeff Bezos buy another yacht.

What do you care what he spends his money on? Is that the real issue? 

If Frothing-At-The-Mouth Lunacy Was An Olympic Event, Frances Would Win Gold!

Frances Ryan uses the South African 4x400 metres relay team inclusion of disabled runner Oscar Pistorius as a lever to get out the message that the disabled are being demonised as never before.

It’s quite something to watch, actually:

… there's an undoubted achievement simply in the inclusion of a disabled person in the Olympic competition. For most people with disabilities, inclusion is the shiny medal they spend their lives fighting for but which stays slightly out of reach. This isn't new. It's the nature of being different. It is worsening though, and in the current climate, without radical change, there is little hope of it getting better.

Ah, yes. The ‘current climate’. Said with the certain hope that everyone reading CiF will understand exactly what’s meant by this.

It shouldn't be that difficult, should it? For a person to be included? Sometimes it seems difference is a crime for which disabled people are punished daily. One aspect of this will feature on the route to the Games themselves – Paralympians being welcomed to a city whose transport system is usually inaccessible to them.

Yes, well, when the various disability acts were considered and then passed, the transport system got an exemption, due to the huge cost involved which made it totally impractical. Not to mention the drain on the productive sector while the works were carried out!

Oh, don’t worry, though; other people who believe in spending other people’s time and money on grandiose schemes are right behind you in demanding changes!

Exclusion is sneaky though, it doesn't even need to be literal. Thanks to David Cameron and friends, disabled people are facing not only physical barriers but growing symbolic exclusion. This is what a climate of fear does – a climate that doesn't simply emerge from tough economic times but needs to be manipulated and nurtured. It's manipulated by a government that thinks welfare reform means arbitrarily removing vulnerable people's benefits. It's nurtured by a rightwing populist press eager for benefits-cheats scapegoats and scaremongering.

Oh, here we go again with the bonkers rhetoric!

This is a climate in which a website needs to be created to collate the number of people committing suicide as a result of the government's policies.

I…what?

Calum's List details the deaths of people where either professional or family testimony, or a suicide note cites welfare reform as the main reason for their taking their own life.

*stunned disbelief* Yes, it really exists.

And those who click for their dose of outrage probably never get to the small print at the bottom that reads:

The primary aim of this website is to research and publish a definitive list of all deaths, where deficiencies in the current UK welfare reform legislation may have been a factor.

Not quite the authoritative documentation method she implies, then, is it?

A climate in which the number of disability hate crimes reported to the police has reached a record high .

Yes, of course it has. You set a target, people will strive to reach it. Their jobs depend on it, don’t they?

As the crowds cheer, the people of this country would do well to think on that sentiment. A disabled person shouldn't have to be "super-able" to be included. Having been allowed to join the mainstream, Pistorius can strive to rise above it. For the ordinary disabled person, it would be nice to be allowed to take part.

They seem to have no trouble taking part in the ongoing pity-party and rage against the idea that we can't go on spending as if there was a magic money tree, do they?

For Once, Rishi's Right - This Situation Isn't Fair On The Taxpayer

The country has a “sicknote culture” that needs to be tackled, the prime minister said. Britain “can’t afford” its record levels of welfare spending and it’s “not fair” on the taxpayer.

Who could argue with this? Frances Ryan, of course!

Attacking sick and disabled people is a method that has been deployed time and time again over the past 14 years of Conservative rule. It is the equivalent of the party’s in-case-of-emergency button: if in trouble, ministers can sound the alarm and the rightwing press will churn out headlines about getting the “jobless” off the “dole”.

The notion that we have a 'rightwing press' is laughable. If we did have one, would we see males being treated as females in the pages and broadcasts?  

The plan to shift responsibility for issuing fit notes away from GPs to other “work and health professionals” in order to encourage more people to get back into work is a classic piece of Conservative welfare thinking. If there are too many sick people in the country, don’t bother dealing with the causes – just get someone who is not a doctor to declare they’re not actually sick after all.

What has largely slipped under the radar, though, is a major reform: a review of personal independence payments (Pip), the flagship non-means-tested benefit designed to help cover the extra costs that come with disability. Proposals include asking for more medical evidence before awarding the benefit, looking at whether some payments should be one-off rather than ongoing, and withdrawing money from some people living with mental-health problems and replacing it with treatment.

How terrible, trying to treat someone's illness so they can live a normal, working life! Oh, the humanity! 

And asking for actual medical evidence! OK, I'll give you that one, since we didn't seem to need it for the pandemic, did we?  

The bleakest part of Sunak’s plan is that there is a genuine crisis obscured by his misleading rhetoric. Britain is a significantly sicker and poorer country than it used to be. In the coming years, addressing the growing number of long-term sick people will have to be the priority of any government. To do that though, ministers will need to forgo the fiction that hordes of workers are faking illnesses and admit the facts.

But it's a fact that some of them do. Even people who don't need to for monetary reasons. The question is, surely, how many.  

The true sickness in this country cannot be found in a benefits office or a GP surgery but in Downing Street. It is a political culture whose default setting is demonising and impoverishing people who are already suffering, and a rightwing media that for decades has parroted the lies and bigotry it is fed.

And those who live alongside the sicknote brigade and wonder why they work when others don't, Frances? They can't all be 'hoodwinked' by our so-called right wing media. 

More Bollocks Than An Abbatoir’s Waste Bin...

Yes, you know from the description it's another Frances Ryan column:

Shipped in from Manston – the overcrowded Kent asylum centre – last November, the 55 residents housed in this processing centre run by a private company have severe or life-limiting disabilities. Some have lost limbs, others are deaf or blind. Half a dozen are paraplegic. Some have been disabled since birth; others were maimed in the war zones they’re now fleeing from.

There are war zones in Calais, Frances? 

The centre has security guards but no trained care workers. Instead, disabled residents are left to fend for themselves.

Well, if they've managed to get in a makeshift dinghy or break into a lorry and cross the Channel how much 'care' can they really need?  

Only a few months ago an Iranian man living in the centre died. Doctors had repeatedly said he needed a wheelchair, but he never received one. It’s thought he suffered a fatal stroke. “We’re essentially waiting for the next [death],” Maria says. “And it will be because of a lack of care.”

Ah, I just knew there'd be a fakecharity at the heart of this... 

Try the food in the Essex accommodation and it’s tellingly prison-like: a falafel squashed in a slice of white bread, or a pile of beans in a polystyrene box. I’m told, three residents have become diabetic since arriving at the centre– one has lost two toes.

I'm sure the food would have been better in France... 

As we finish talking, Maria asks me not to publish the location of the centre. She says that an elderly resident has recently been attacked in the street, and there are fears of further hate crimes. “He was speaking in a foreign language on his phone … That was enough.”

Blimey, if that was a cause for assault, there'd be blood running down my Tube carriage every morning... 

Well, Frances, It Says We’re Living In A Society Where People Demand ‘Free’ Stuff…

Frances Ryan has a new hobby horse. It seems remarkably like every other one in the stable to me:

Louise Cooke, a 46-year-old ex-teacher and community worker in Nottingham, has never been elected nor is her work funded by the taxpayer – but she is filling in the gaps left by the government.

For the past two years, volunteering out the back of her local church, Cooke has been running Sharewear – what, in austerity’s language, we could dub a “clothes bank” . This isn’t packets of pasta or boxes of veg but winter coats and children’s shoes. Cooke describes the people who come through the doors as in “crisis” : anyone from job seekers to Syrian refugees, from low-paid workers to people on benefits (“We have people coming in on disabled people’s behalf because they’re housebound,” she adds). Five years ago it would have been inconceivable to think food banks – and the poverty that leads families to them – would be a normalised part of towns and cities up and down this country.

Five years from now, will we say the same about clothes banks? “It’s like we’re living in the developing world – but it’s the UK,” Cooke says. “What sort of society are we living in?”

Easy answer, Louise. It’s the sort of society that has allowed, nay, even encouraged, a section of that society to believe that it’s someone else’s job to provide them with free stuff.

It says something about how entrenched deprivation now is in this country that a key reason Cooke started the scheme in March 2014 was that her son – then volunteering at one of the city’s latest food banks – told her, among the queues for food parcels, people were coming in and asking about packs of baby clothes.

It doesn’t say anything about ‘entrenched deprivation’, but it speaks volumes about the fecklessness of the benefits culture, and the fad for baby-farming to get yet more benefits.

When Sharewear started it was three rails of clothes run by four volunteers. Now, there’s a team of 20 overseeing a main room for clothes, a separate one for bedding and another for children’s clothes – crammed with shoes, and grey, black, white bits for school uniforms. New things are always needed. “We didn’t do towels but people kept coming in asking for them,” Cooke explains. “It enables them to wash. You can’t get much more intimate than that.”

Gosh, how surprising! Who could have predicted that if you start offering free stuff, the demand will go through the roof? And that demand will begin to expand for type, as well as quantity?

Apart from everyone, that is..

Everyone coming in is referred by an agency: local children’s centres, housing associations, women’s refuges (the number of referral agencies started at a dozen and is now about 70). Someone will talk to a family about truancy and realise the reason a child hasn’t gone to school is because they haven’t got a uniform – and then send them to Cooke.

Of course they do! It gets them off their books, it means they get to tick a box – what’s not to like?

Vouchers have needs scribbled on them in pen: “Smart clothes for a job interview” or “Warm coats for kids”.

Those aren’t needs. Those are wants…

In the early days the vast majority of people who came to her for help had been sanctioned by the jobcentre (“People who’d missed a bus and had their benefits taken”). Increasingly now it’s working families struggling on low pay – often on zero-hour contracts. “Both parents are working and still they can’t afford shoes and coats for their children,” Cooke says. “We get people calling saying, ‘I can’t come on Friday because I’m at work. They need the clothes but haven’t got a chance to come for them because they’re working all the time. It’s unbelievable.”

If you can’t afford children despite both of you working, why have them? So that others can pay the cost of raising them?

Enough! No more. The bottomless well of taxpayer largesse is finally exhausted. As is my patience.

I Don’t Think Deafness Is Sanjeev’s Main Handicap, Somehow….

Frances Ryan is crying wolf yet again:

Against the backdrop of this month’s jubilant A-level and GCSE results, 17-year-old Sanjeev Singh provides a different picture of what it is to be young in Conservative Britain.

Oh, the humanity! I should provide a ‘trigger warning’ here, because it seems that Sanjeev is forced to…

*readers of a nervous disposition might want to look away now*

…ride THE BUS!

In many ways, Sanjeev is a young person “doing the right thing”. He lives at home with his mum and three siblings and, since leaving school a year ago, he has persisted in looking for work. But Sanjeev, 17, is deaf and once prospective employers know he has a disability, they don’t contact him again.

He keeps trying to get interviews but, unable to travel safely alone on public transport, he has no way of getting to them.

Yes, incredible as it may seem, in a country where a double amputee once flew fighter aircraft in combat in a war zone, the removal of a taxpayer-funded taxicab to job interviews is cause for weeping, wailing and rending of garments.

Personally, having ridden the bus in term time (thanks, RMT strikers!), I’d think being deaf would be a blessed relief from the screaming & shouting that seems to take the place of normal conversation, but there we are…

This is where the welfare state’s safety net is meant to kick in. Disability living allowance (DLA), for example – a benefit Sanjeev has received since he was six years old – could pay for a taxi on the days he needs get to an interview and has no one to help him communicate with the crowds on a bus.

But the government chose to replace DLA with personal independence payment (PIP) and after being tested for the new, tougher assessment in December, Sanjeev had his benefits stopped, after more than a decade.

What you’re describing isn’t a ‘safety net’, Frances, it’s a feather bed. Hundreds of deaf people cope with public transport, why should Sanjeev not be able to cope?

Clearly, the Benefit Office realised this, which is why the payments stopped.

Sanjeev tells me he’s going to keep looking for work while starting the appeal process to try and get his disability benefit back. He asks if I know how to fill out the forms. “I’m not getting any help,” he explains. “I’ll need to tell my mum to ring them.”

So you expect to get a job, but can’t manage to fill in the appeal forms without ‘help’? Good lord, you’re seventeen! Why would anyone employ someone so hopeless?

And this hopelessness has nothing to do with your disability, but with your attitude to life. Is being deaf and jobless a picnic? No, I doubt it. Has life dealt you a harsh card? Yes, undoubtedly. But that doesn’t mean you can expect a life coddled by your mum and the taxpayer forever!

Employers aren’t going to be impressed with ‘I can’t get to the interview ‘cos I ain’t got money for a taxi, innit?’ if they can look up and see their own disabled employees at their desks, working away, having surmounted the difficulty of commuting.

I think your main ‘disability’ is perpetual childhood. Grow up.

Frances Ryan Thinks The Queen Should Get A Winter Fuel Payment, I Suppose?

…Price said that if she paid privately for her disabled son’s government-funded transport to school, it would cost “up to £1,000 a day” .

He requires a driver and a nurse capable of giving emergency injections.

Price “admitted” – as if asking her local authority to fulfil its duty of care to a disabled child was a point of shame – that her 12-year-old son, Harvey, who is blind and has a complex range of health problems, has a driver to help him to school, and a nurse provided for him.

Well, yes, it should indeed be a point of shame if someone who can well afford it instead expects the taxpayer to stump up the cash.

Isn't that why the winter fuel payment to the rich or those settled abroad (they conveniently forget warmer climes don’t stay that way all year round) is consistently attacked by ‘Guardian’ commentators?

She has the money – why should he get benefits? There’s such a thing as personal responsibility, you know. Disabled people are expensive. Why should the taxpayer pay for her child?

Valid questions, to anyone not a chip-on-the-shoulder disability activist like Frances.

Katie Price is the face of a climate that has learned to hate need: a working-class single mother (of a disabled, mixed-race child), whom we can “legitimately” attack.

Quite unlike the Eton-educated ‘toffs’ the ‘Guardian feels free to attack, I suppose?

That’s exactly why universal benefits matter. Defend the right of mothers of disabled children, such as Price, to get help, and it reinforces the rights of everyone else. That’s how society works.

Strengthen one pillar and the other gets bolder; weaken one and it won’t be long before they all start to crumble.

Good. The sooner they do crumble, so that taxpayers aren’t forking out for the likes of single Marie Buchan with her brood of absent-fathered children, whinging about being ‘forced into work’ the better.

Hey, Grenfell Fraudsters - Over Here!

In bed in west Wales, with a laptop propped up on the sheets, Jemima is patching up Britain’s welfare state.

Well, since, despite the best efforts of the likes of Frances Ryan to convince us, we don't have people starving in the streets, she must be doing a bang up job!

So who is this wonder woman?

The 39-year-old has never been elected or even been paid a wage – in fact, she’s more likely to give out her own money than receive it – but amid Brexit cabinet infighting, Jemima offers something few ministers can: she knows what it’s like to struggle to pay the bills.

Fine, fine. So...what does she do, exactly?

Jemima knows all too well that one of the worst parts of poverty is the shame of asking for help.

The Biscuit Fund turns this on its head: instead of people in need having to turn up to a charity, Jemima and volunteers scour the internet – anything from benefit forums to cries for help on Facebook – and come to them.

I bet she never has trouble finding any.

But...But... Disability Cuts!?!

Two people have been hospitalised after being attacked by their own dogs in their home.

Derbyshire police and paramedics were called to a house in Boythorpe Road, Chesterfield, shortly after 7.20pm last night to reports that a man and a woman had been injured by their dogs. Both were taken to hospital by East Midlands Ambulance Service.

Police said the woman is badly injured while the man is in a "less serious" condition.

Thank god it's not an innocent member of the public...

Police say the two victims - who are believed to be a mother and her disabled son - remain in a serious condition in hospital.

 Wait, what..?

The attack is believed to have involved two bull mastiffs, which have since been put down. Another dog which lived at the property - believed to be a terrier type - has been taken into kennels.

Gosh! But isn't Frances Ryan always telling us how disabled people live in poverty, barely able to feed themselves?

Remember This Column Next Time The 'Guardian' Runs A Story....

...about people abusing the emergency services:

I called an ambulance myself last month. I’d developed flu complications suddenly after work and couldn’t breathe. In central London on a Friday night, I knew the service would be strained but, as the minutes went on, I worried whether they would get to me in time. I ended up calling 999 three times due to the wait; in the end, paramedics got to me after about 45 minutes (time blurs when you can’t breathe).

Yes, it's everyone's favourite shroud-waver, Frances Ryan there, who admits to calling repeatedly for an ambulance because she 'couldn't breathe'. For 45 minutes.

Which must be some sort of new record.

I was lucky in the end. I was at least well enough to take myself to A&E a day later for the tests I needed and had the family support to recover at home. But I can’t help but be struck by a worrying thought: rather than the NHS being a safety net, nowadays it’s as if it isn’t safe to be sick.

Clearly it is, because you're still gobbing off in the CiF columns.

People With Disabilities Worst Affected, Says Guess Who...

I used to love a heatwave. I was the sort of British person who acted like I was in the Mediterranean if the sun was slightly visible, coercing friends to take the outside restaurant table and eagerly working in the garden until my MacBook started to overheat rather than my internal organs. That was until I developed post-viral fatigue from the flu nine years ago.

Yup, it's Frances Ryan, the 'Guardian's perennial disability whinger.

Now, the heat means suffering rather than pleasure: less energy, more pain and worse breathing. This has only increased as heatwaves across Europe have soared. I have spent this week of record-high May temperatures in the UK largely in bed, with the blinds drawn and two 5ft-high fans looming over me like security guards at a club no one wants to get into.

How nice for you, the rest of us were at work. Someone has to pay for your benefits, after all. 

And yet there is a fact that many have not yet wrestled with: the millions of homes now enjoying air conditioning don’t house most of the people who really need it.

Well, who do they house? After all, the fact they bought aircon surely shows they do need it? 

While the wealthy and healthy can find tens of thousands of pounds to kit out their houses with built-in AC systems, disabled and chronically ill people – who are disproportionately on low wages or out of work long term – must make do with an Argos fan.

Even the lower-cost portable AC units, which cost hundreds of pounds, are out of reach to many people relying solely on disability benefits. And then there are the swathes of disabled people who rent (if you have a disability, you’re less likely to own your own home) who won’t have the right to upgrade their properties.

🙄  

Every time I see a reel on social media of chronically ill people wearing eye masks in bed during the day because the sunlight physically hurts them, I wonder exactly how many “record hot bank holidays” we plan to put marginalised communities through without support.

Do you have a solution, or just a grievance? 

There is, of course, a short- and long-term way of tackling this, if there was political will. As climate activists reluctantly argued this week, AC needs to be urgently installed as an emergency measure in schools, care homes and other places where people vulnerable to heat live.

Oh, I should have been more specific - do you have an affordable and sustainable olution? 

And yet AC is not sustainable for ever. Its environmental impact means it is as much a cause as a solution to climate breakdown.

It is also fundamental – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – to address the climate crisis that is actually causing our heatwaves, for example through reducing emissions and shifting to renewable energy.

So that’s ’No’ then…. 

I have bought AC for my bedroom that will be ready to use soon. I feel simultaneously guilty and lucky that I can afford it. Unlike millions of others, by the next heatwave, I will have a room to stay safe in.

If only it was soundproof and had nice soft walls…. 

One Swallow Does Not Make A Summer…

Frances Ryan weeps and wails in CiF:

I’ll resist calling Clapson’s death a tragedy. Tragedy suggests a one-off incident, a rarity that couldn’t be prevented. What was done to Clapson – and it was done, not something that simply happened – is a particularly horrific example of what has, almost silently, turned into a widespread crisis. More than a million people in this country have had their benefits stopped over the past year.

And have a million people starved to death?

No?

It’s a tragedy then.

But What ‘Support’ Will Ever Satisfy?

Frances Ryan welcomes the news that Andrew Marr had something of an epiphany regarding disability after his recent stroke:

The BBC broadcaster Andrew Marr had a stroke in January and has said that he now feels more aware of people with disabilities than he did before it.

…

The realisation that hit Marr, in many ways, reflects the words often used by campaigners: "Support the disabled and sick now because one day that might be you." True humanity comes from supporting the disabled or sick, even if it is never going to be you.

But just what is meant by ‘supporting the disabled’?

Disability groups, including former mayor councillor Mary Heathcote, who is registered blind, and Theo Harris, chief executive of Kingston Centre for Independent Living, accused developers of failing to listen to their advice before the centre opened.

Their report, to be discussed tonight at a health overview scrutiny committee, claims the centre has poor signage for visually impaired people, corridors too narrow for more than one wheelchair to pass through, no tactile paving to direct blind patients, and a lack of hoists.

Oh dear. And all those things are statutory access requirements, are they?

Well…no, actually:

Ms Theron said the partnership had taken “great pains” to make sure the building surpassed statutory access requirements, so that everyone could make use of the centre “no matter what their disability”.

She said corridors were 1,500m wide instead of the statutory 1,200m and that landscaping outside the building “is in contrasting colours and textures and clearly delineated”.

She also cited a recent report by Kingston Council surveyor Steve Wilson, which said the centre went beyond minimum building standards, although the report said the centre was not “incapable of improvement”.

So, they’ve done better than actually required to do by law, and yet are still catching grief for it from activists?