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
 

Today is 28 August 2019. Fifty-six years ago today, Martin Luther King delivered 'I Have a Dream' speech

Today is 28 August 2019. Fifty-six years ago today, Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, as he was announced on the platform of speakers at the March for Jobs and Freedom, delivered his 'I Have a Dream Today' speech. But too few people know what he actually said beyond those much played back words.

Well, those words meant a great deal to me as I was growing up through early adulthood with a copy of the major platform speeches of that day on a Folkways long play vinyl disc to listen to in unemployment. For more on that, see my Wednesday, 21 August 2019 blog posting,

Relevance of Martin Luther King's August 28, 1963 'I Have a Dream' speech to my past as disabled jobseeker

Relevance of Martin Luther King's August 28, 1963 'I Have a Dream' speech to my past as disabled jobseeker

It is now 21 August 2019. August 28, 2019 will be the 66th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at which "Revd Dr Martin Luther King" [as he was announced] delivered his 'I Have a Dream Today' speech that was substantially more than a 'soundbite hook'.

I first heard that speech in full on a long playing disc of March on Washington speeches. (I should also admire that in my 15th year King was a hero of mine while I had African-Caribbean friends at school and also experienced 'outsider' treatment after being 'outed' as a disabled person.) I was in my mid-20s in 1977/78 at a very vulnerable time for me, in a prelude to further disappointments for me as a disabled jobseeker. In February 1977 I had left four-and-a-half years employment in a Research & Development, Foods Laboratory in which I had been subjected to scapegoating on account of the slowness related to my disability, and sought refuge in an office job with the same conglomerate employer in Birmingham, England. That "deliverance did not deliver" as I was still too slow for the workflow, and the title of Statistics and Admin Clerk was not a true reflection of the invoice passing and double-entry bookkeeping duties.

I left that job in October 1977 on health grounds, and left Birmingham for my mum's post-1976 residence of Sidford, Sidmouth, Devon, awaiting real vocational assessment and a training place that was also to prove a huge disappointment. My subsequent experience has taught me that insufficiently funded assessment and training opportunities induced feelings related to the punishment meted out to the cruel Greek king Sisyphus.Each training period proved too short for me to acquire a successful outcome, leading me back to the dole queue and then to more such 'training opportunities' each time.

In Greek mythology Sisyphus or Sisyphos was the king of Ephyra. He was punished for his self-aggrandizing craftiness and deceitfulness by being forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll down when it nears the top, repeating this action for eternity. Wikipedia

Except that I had no idea what wickedness I was being punished for. (My current computing skills were developed mainly through my mum having bought me a PC and funding for training manuals in 1998, and my subsequent years of application.)

Yet the Martin Luther King speech gave me immense spiritual fodder for the rest of my life that I internalised even after the person I loaned that record to lost it around year 2001.

After I had drawn my campaigning friend Revd Paul Nicolson's attention to that speech a few years ago, he attempted to get it debated in the UK Parliament, but did not get enough petition backers. We both felt that King's "challenge to the authorities ["We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation."] was worthy of debate against the post-2010 watchword of 'austerity' as state benefits were savaged.

Now, I offer my blog's readers a link to an incisive intro to King's refusal to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of a nation.

http://quotesnack.com/martin-luther-king/we-refuse-to-believe-that-there-are-insufficient-funds-in-the-great-vaults-of-opportunity-of-this-nation-martin-luther-king-jr/

I also note that it can be said that the sentence meted out to Sisyphus has been echoed in the tale of American black 'steel driving man' song subject John Henry.



That song was related to the superhuman feats that oppressed people might be induced to make in response to the face of technological advances that threaten their employment prospectus whn that employment prospectus is what they gain a sense of personal worthiness and identity from and the State and employer are only interested in the cheapest solutions.