Speaking out can be empowering

The following was originally published on February 5, 2004 in Camden New Journal (CNJ) under the heading 'Disabled are role models' — accompanied by an advert for disability-friendly adaptations! (The CNJ is a local 'freebie' newspaper and thus very dependent on advertising.)

Here, I give it my own title.

I would also suggest, with the benefits of hindsight, that while there have been different governments since the early 1990s, senior civil servants in UK government have not been subjected to re-election. Over the same time period, I would argue and as Mo Stewart has highlighted in her research, UK 'welfare reform' policies have been steered behind the scenes by a disgraced American and global health insurance firm called Unum. Unum's ethos is far from that of a publicly owned 'welfare state' for the good of all, more like, as Mo has put it, 'The Corporate Demolition of the [UK's] Welfare State'!

Along those lines, I would argue that the dynamics and ergonomics in jobcentres changed drastically around 2003, imposing the presence of G4S security guards. I would ascribe that to a perversion of 'Scientific Management' and of the 'Hawthorne Effect'. 

There was, of course, also the distortion of public perceptions via Government-funded advertising campaigns proclaiming a supposed 'need' for and existence of 'thousands of benefit fraud investigators', while Disability Employment Advisors amounted to a 'workforce' of 650 UK-wide, under-trained with frequent rule changes and an under-recorded high burnout rate.

Mo's research has been highly illuminating. Speaking out and researching from experience can help illuminate what is really happening and has happened, so that the electorate can make wiser decisions. Likewise for Kate Belgrave's research that focuses on post-2010 Government.

Alan Wheatley

 

Screen capture of original publication in Camden New Journal, accompanied by 'Elderly/Disabled Facilities' advert

Speaking out can be empowering and helps keep me going

Some readers might find your publication of Christine Brody’s letter, ‘Hobson’s choice for our disabled pupils’ (January 8) depressing reading. I didn’t. It helped to put me in mind of a network of human survival rather than a league-table of suffering.

In the year when the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act becomes fully law, her letter can be viewed as expert witness testimony to room for improvement; your publication of it an act of empowerment.

While I have heard that the amount of teacher-training time allocated to addressing ‘special needs’ issues is derisory, I draw attention to statutory under-provision of Disability Employment Advisors.

As a disabled job-seeker, I commended Lib Dem work and pensions spokesperson Steve Webb’s denunciation of Alistair Darling’s 2001 call for Work Test interviews for claimants of Incapacity Allowance.

Further, I suggested a parliamentary question on provision of Disability Employment Advisors. (DEAs). That there are just 650 DEAs for the whole of the UK partially explains why the Acting DEA for Kentish Town Jobcentre has been based at Marylebone Jobcentre since October and burnout seems to be an occupational hazard among DEAs.

(Meanwhile, adverts on commercial radio celebrate the existence of “thousands of benefit fraud investigators,”)

A letter from Camden Financial Services dated January 12 and received January 18 urges me to re-apply for Housing Benefit asap. (My ‘entitlement’ expires of February 8, and the new form calls for ever more proofs of ‘entitlement’ to help prevent benefit fraud. My last housing benefit claim was made in October!)

Administrative stigmatisation coupled with mounting interest on 1997 graduation debt can be very dispiriting for the over-50s.

I commend Christine Brody’s aversion to ‘Maximising Disabilities’. Too often, news stories talk of a person’s life being ‘ruined’ by an incident that left them with an impairment. A more helpful focus would be the social construction of enablement.

Children and adults need a healthy self-concept in order to give of their best, and I would argue that a greater threat to society than ‘benefit fraud’ comes from the denial or diminution of disabled people’s potential to share their potential with the world around them.

I can be, and am, a role model, and that thought helps keep me going.

Alan Raymond Wheatley, BA in Interdisicplinary Studies (Major: Sociology)
Writing in early 2004