This was on “This Morning”, a chat show that goes out on weekday mornings on ITV1, earlier today (Wednesday): Carol Malone, a tabloid newspaper columnist, gave her judgement on the family of which six children were murdered last Friday in a fire started by pouring petrol through their letterbox. The family had been featured on TV in 2007 when the father, Mick Philpott, had appealed to the local council for a bigger house to accommodate his wife, girlfriend and 14 children. It appeared the girlfriend moved out recently and may have been arrested as a suspect, but reports over the weekend said that a man and a woman had been released without charge.

So, well before this government came to power, the Philpotts were being presented as an example of a benefits culture gone to extremes, and Malone made much of this when she said that they had “became a target a couple of years ago” and “had many enemies … and probably upset a lot of people at the time”. She also said that the family’s situation was “an accident waiting to happen; there’s a lot of resentment out there for families exactly like this, especially now when the country’s in the state it’s in and there’s not much money; I think people have seen families like this one to be taking advantage”. When the presenter pointed out that when someone pours accelerant through the letterbox and causes a fatal fire, it’s not an accident, it’s murder, she replied, “I kind of mean about the culture of the family and that they consistently did interviews about their situation, they bring attention to themselves, and the tragedy, this is what’s happened”.

It’s really only speculation that the murder of these children was in any way connected to their media appearances which were five years ago, not “a couple” of years ago as Malone said, but her tone really suggests that they brought it on themselves by being such a bunch of dole-scrounging wasters which, in light of the fact that someone has massacred the children, is rather poor taste. We have absolutely no idea why the arsonist started that fire, and we are unlikely to know until we know who did it — it could be for reasons entirely unrelated to that. Of course, with his lifestyle he is bound to have attracted some public hostility, but it would in no way justify anyone setting his house on fire while he and his children are asleep in it. If it turns out to have had anything to do with anger over his lifestyle, it might be asked what influence the repeated newspaper stories about “scroungers” had on the perpetrators.

This is a new kind of victim-blaming — normally, it consists of people blaming someone for an act of violence perpetrated against them, because of behaviour of some sort that did not hurt the attacker. This time, they blame him for someone else’s murder of his children. It’s disgusting. This was not a bit of name-calling in the street. It was a multiple murder.

What separates them is that airline staff do not train for their jobs for five years, yet have the safety of dozens, if not hundreds, of passengers in their hands. Doctors train for five years in medical school, then go through several years in junior positions which are essentially learning-on-the-job roles. And whatever they do wrong, 300 people will not get blown out of the sky.

What joins them is that they act like a law unto themselves, and feel entitled to disregard written agreements and assurances. Musicians are told they can take their instruments into the cabin, while disabled travellers are told they can travel … and they turn up and find that their instruments have to be thrown into the hold, or they need a chaperone (which they didn’t last time) or just can’t travel, and the written assurance means nothing. If someone requires a particular, unusual drug, and their clinicians know that, and it’s written on their notes in big letters and they even have a bracelet on and a firm promise that they won’t be given the drug that caused them a stroke in the past but the unusual drug nobody else has … and the patient is under anaesthetic and can’t object, they give them the drug they’re allergic to anyway.

Patients often don’t like taking these drugs. It’s not only doctors who think they’re “dirty”. They have no reason to get sniffy. Patients take them because they have no other choice.

I don’t like keeping a heroin-copycat in the house. I live in fear that my amazing children will somehow find a syringe lying about or a broken glass ampoule top. My GP and I have an understanding. I only ask for a script when things are desperate … — Sue Marsh, April 2012

I hate taking morphine (its actually pure - legal! - heroin) & I know my body is now dependent on it cos I get bad withdrawals if the pump stops going thru 4 some reason. BUT, I couldnt stay the way I was - curled up, crying, in agony, 24/7 - & Id tried literally evry other painkiller going — Lynn Gilderdale, March 2006

I’m a bit late writing about this due to work commitments, but yesterday morning Sue Marsh, the renowned disability campaigner who has Crohn’s disease, had bowel surgery. She had advised the staff at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge that she was allergic to the opiate painkiller fentanyl, which had caused a very severe reaction when she was given it in similar circumstances in 1997, which she describes here. Instead of reducing the pain, it caused extreme pain and when she, her husband and her mother protested, the latter two were expelled from the hospital by a nurse who threatened to call security as they were “disturbing the other patients”. In this recent admission, her husband was again kicked out of the hospital late at night, having been assured in writing that he could stay with Sue on her first night, by a nurse who, as previously, threatened to call security.

Stephen Sumpter summarised what happened in this recent episode at his blog (the full stream of tweets from Sue is reproduced there as well):

She was wearing an allergy warning bracelet and the allergy was also noted on her consent forms. In fact Sue had agreed with staff that she would be given Pethidine which is what she had been given after several previous operations and is one of the few drugs that will work for her. When in spite of all of this Sue was given Fentanyl while under sedation, the pain team refused to give her the Pethidine when she came round and refused to call the on-call anaesthetist to change it – they claimed that no one had used Pethidine for years. Even after Sue was able to prove that she had been given it more recently, and prove the agreement to use it on this occasion and her allergy, she was still refused the pain relief that she needed. Faced with this refusal Sue turned to Twitter for help.

The situation seems to have been partly resolved (Sue has stopped publicly talking about the situation for legal reasons) but that it has happened, yet again, is scandalous. As I said in a previous entry, people being at risk of harm while in hospital is something we condemn dictatorships like Syria for, but has been the lot of the chronically ill in British hospitals for decades. Many doctors seem to resent patients whose conditions resist their attempts to treat them, and patients who know more about their own conditions than the doctors do. Nor is it only due to recent funding and staffing cuts: this arrogance and callousness was being reported well before this government came to power. In fact, it’s not even confined to the UK.

As Sarah Ismail said, the next person this happens to might not live to tweet the tale. Mistakes happen sometimes, but there was no excuse for this: her demands had been clearly expressed and documented, so clearly either someone neglected to pass them on, or someone thought this was some drama queen making ridiculous demands. There must be some way of punishing medical staff who cause extreme distress and pain to patients through negligence, even if it does not cause loss of life or a measurable decline in their health. Patients must be able to have confidence that, especially when unconscious or for some other reason powerless to help themselves, they will not be subject to harm, and it is an important part of this that agreements are kept and assurances delivered on. Healthcare must, as far as possible, be fear-free, and nobody should be above the law or beyond the normal rules of polite society.

Danni Brennand (who has severe ME as well as autism) has posted some links of her own, as well as four articles about how ME affects her, at Dannilion.com.

Some articles I’ve written:

Fear-free Healthcare — an idea for a campaign to make healthcare safe for people with ME and other chronic illnesses and disabling conditions

On Vocationalism — A follow-up to that piece, addressing the misconception that people go into nursing or medicine out of a sense of vocation

Emily Rose Collingride, 1981-2012 — My obituary for Emily, author of Severe ME/CFS: A Guide to Living (you can join the Facebook group related to the book here, if you’re on Facebook)

“If Rod Liddle wants ME, he can have mine” — A response to a ridiculous piece in the Sun newspaper from January

My review of Voices from the Shadows — Also, a write-up of the question and answer session following the showing at the British Library last December

Likening ME to AIDS is irresponsible — A response to a claim that XMRV (and therefore ME) is contagious, made at an ME conference last year

The Times, Wessely and the ME Community — My response to the “death threats” controversy of last summer

Some other articles that have been written about ME in the last year:

Even Caged Birds Sing, by Susannah Grace — About the sense of loss that comes with losing years of your life to a chronic illness

These Small Candles, by Laurel Bertrand (at Dreams at Stake)

Silent Screams by Imraan Sumar — ME likened to a prison, and with particular reference to Emily Collingridge

ME is often dismissed — but sufferers like Emily Collingride are dying, by Scott Jordan Harris, a film reviewer who has ME

Life in the Shadows — A review of Voices from the Shadows, also by Scott Harris

Enough — One woman’s struggle to get a diagnosis in the face of doctors’ obsession with psychological explanations. (She was diagnosed early on with ME, although that was discounted and she was recently re-diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.)

All in the Mind? by Sonia Poulton — Exposing some myths about ME, following a conversion after watching Voices from the Shadows

The Journey and It’s All in Your Head, by Sue Marsh — Not about ME (author has Crohn’s disease) but both of great relevance to the ME community

Emily Collingridge’s Appeal — posted in early 2011, but reposted at her mother’s request after her death.

Some videos:

My Sister, Lorna

Stuff People Say to ME Sufferers — by Becki Luscombe. Great satire on media attitudes to ME.

Some general links:

Tymes Trust — a small charity which helps young ME sufferers, especially those caught up in the social service system and having difficulty with school

25% ME Group — a charity which supports the severely affected

ME Association — good for news and support information for people affected by ME in the UK

Voices from the Shadows — A film exposing the abuse of people with severe ME in the UK, by the mother and brother of a sufferer. Released last year.

The laptop cost £309, which is a web-exclusive price at PC World (the in-store price is £319), but you can reserve it and pick it up at the local PC World shop. Although an old price doesn’t appear on the website anymore, there are similar units which cost a bit more and had been reduced by £150-£200 from a few months ago. I had been planning to buy an Advent with a similar specification (indeed, more memory — 8Gb rather than this computer’s 6Gb), but I needed to be able to use the wifi with Linux and a look online about the Linux usability of that computer’s wifi revealed that you could just about get it to work by jumping through all manner of hoops. Furthermore, with some computers from PC World, you only know what chipset it has by going into the shop and looking on the Windows control panel. However, the website tells you what chipset this one has — the Acer InviLink Nplify — and a Google search reveals that you could get it to work by using the Ubuntu “additional drivers” program. These details should be available in the specification — after all, they are meant to be factual technical specifications rather than part of a sales pitch.

It does, of course, come with Windows 7 and getting that set up took only a few minutes. It also comes with a lot of promotional “freebies” including a limited version of McAfee’s anti-virus. I should add that the PC World salesman tried to get me to sign up for a whole load of other things while processing my payment, including a “club” which costs £10 a month (if I could afford that, I would not have been buying such a cheap laptop!) and some kind of cloud data storage. This was pretty annoying as all I had come to do was get my laptop, pay for it and go home and I had read about the available extra warranties and so on online and had not chosen any of them. What is not so quick is getting Windows set up for development: there is still no repository of open-source development software for Windows of the sort that exists for every Linux distribution (though even the repository that used to exist for the Mac has stopped producing binaries). So, to set up a Qt development environment for Windows, you have to download the Qt libraries, CMake, Nullsoft Installer, MinGW, Vim and Cygwin (for Mercurial or Git and SSH) separately. On Linux, you could do all that with one or two commands in the terminal.

Later on in the day, I got down to installing Ubuntu and was pleasantly surprised to find that you didn’t need the additional drivers to get the wifi to work — it just does, even in the live CD. I had been using Ubuntu’s Precise Pangolin (12.04) release since beta stage on my Mac mini and, as with previous releases, had not stuck with the Unity environment which is standard on Ubuntu because it does not suit a narrower screen such as the one on my desktop (because the “launcher” or dock takes a vertical strip at the side and thus narrows the screen), but on a wide screen such as is standard on laptops, it works fine and so far, I have not looked at other options such as Cinnamon, GNOME Shell or KDE. I find that applications are not as easy to find on Unity as on other Unix desktop environments; I miss having the menu structure, but you can search for them although you have to know what to search for (the name of the program is your best bet, rather than any descriptive term, like ‘web’ for a web browser — that brings up Firefox, but not Chrome). Some of the bugs that affected earlier versions of Unity, such as crippling the system tray so that only certain apps could use it, and showing multiple launcher icons if an application opened more than one window, have been squashed. It’s a much more mature environment than it was at the previous release.

There are two issues I have with the hardware itself. One is the keyboard, which is a rather noisy affair with a separate numeric keypad — it seems this is now standard (it wasn’t when I got my Dell in 2006) and it means the main keypad, where you do most typing, is off-centre. The trackpad is centred on the alphabetic part of the keyboard, which means it, too, is off-centre. I have hardly ever used the numeric keypad on the desktop computer and although you could use the “Fn” button to use part of the main keyboard as a numeric keyboard, I never did on the Dell. There are much larger gaps between the keys than on the Dell, presumably to make it easier to shake crumbs out. The second is that the monitor is not very well calibrated, a common problem with flat screens (which, of course, includes all laptops) where the graphics card has VGA rather than DVI output (I’ve never had this problem when I use a machine with a DVI output). That was a problem I first noticed with my Dell monitor on my Mac a few years ago, and the most noticeable sign was that some subtle colour distinctions were invisible and greys showed as a kind of dusty pink. This monitor is not as bad as that, but the grey-as-pink problem is still there and the cheapest calibration tool costs about £50 (the Pantone Huey Pro); the Windows calibration tool doesn’t do much good. Probably many people don’t notice or just accept the limitations, but it reduces my enjoyment of my computer especially as I know the display could be better. This really should be taken care of before the machine is distributed, but they should also stop using VGA graphics chips as they just don’t work well with flat panel screens.

So, in general, I’d recommend this machine if you need an inexpensive laptop, although I don’t know how long the deal lasts for — the memory and hard drive are great for a laptop, but if I had to pay £500, I’d want a better screen and a normal laptop keyboard in a smaller case. I have heard people say the speakers are not that good, but I have my own speakers in case I want to use it for watching videos or anything that needs sound, and external speakers are inexpensive. I would recommend looking in your local computer stores, if you live in a big town, rather than on the Dell website, because you can get machines with better specification (such as memory and hard drive) for the same price from PC World than from Dell right now.

I have my own theories about why Ken Livingstone lost again. I do not entirely believe that it was that he lost a popularity contest with Johnson, or a propaganda battle with the Evening Standard (which is no longer owned by the same company as the Daily Mail, but rather by the owner of the Independent), though I do think their attitude towards Livingstone falls into the issue of the responsibility of the press for impartiality which I wrote of in my previous post. In some sections of the community, he was a highly unpopular politician, particularly the Jewish community which regarded him as at best heavily biased against Israel and towards Muslims and at worst as an outright anti-Semite. I am not sure how much the general population are influenced by accusations of anti-Semitism, but it certainly would have lost him votes in their districts and among some people who are sensitive to that sort of thing, and earned him negative media coverage, even in the Guardian. There were some “anti-Ken” websites which focussed almost entirely on his connections to “undesirable Muslims” both in London and abroad, rather than on his policies or actual mayoral record. Livingstone also made an awful lot of ambitious promises, including a drastic reduction in public transport fares by October (he said he would resign if he could not fulfil this), as well as bringing back the Education Maintenance Allowance, something many people thought he could not do.

I also distrusted Livingstone because I regarded him as a “divine-right poltician”, someone who thought he was owed the job somehow, and his followers unfortunately reinforced this attitude. Even when the idea of the mayoralty was being discussed before 2000, there were those who envisaged the office as one for Ken to move straight into. He was someone who didn’t listen, holding a consultation into the western extension to the Congestion Charge zone and introducing it anyway when its unpopularity became obvious. As I wrote a few weeks ago, if he had been planning to bring that back, I would have voted against him. His Low Emission Zone clearly displayed some spiteful touches, including industrial estates on the outskirts of London where there was no environmental reason (like those in Chessington in the south-west and Cowley/Uxbridge in the west), which bars unapproved (mostly old) trucks coming in from outside London to deliver goods, but Johnson has not removed that and applied it to vans after having delayed it for a couple of years.

This time, for me it was largely about getting rid of Johnson because he was part of the same clique as Cameron, and because although it didn’t appear that his mayoralty had been the disaster I had been expecting (and his office was praised by the Spartacus Report team for giving a comprehensive response), others were saying he had let down people with disabilities by cancelling accessibility upgrades on the Tube that were not Olympic priorities and that during his period in office, only a tiny number of affordable homes had been built in London despite his loud protestations about “Kosovo-style social cleansing”, and that he had not returned from his holidays last summer when the whole city was hit by riots and looting. His much-vaunted “cycle superhighways” are just long streaks of blue paint, just a more prominent version of London’s already useless on-road cycle lanes, and the so-called Boris Bikes were in fact Livingstone’s idea; he also showed himself to be every bit as out-of-touch with the ordinary Londoner as Cameron, once describing £250,000 as “chicken feed”, and his past record of racist comments and anti-Muslim journalism easily give Livingstone’s supposed anti-Semitism a run for its money.

I would happily have voted for any other anti-establishment Labour figure, as would many others; Labour made a huge mistake by putting up someone who had already served two terms and lost as their candidate. Some people on the radio yesterday expressed the view that London is a “Labour city”, but Labour cannot take this for granted: although certainly cosmopolitan, London is an expensive, gentrifying city, and many places that would have been solid Labour a generation ago are now occupied by people who might be minded to vote Lib Dem or Tory — and let’s not forget, even in the days of the GLC, there were Tory GLCs. The north of Croydon, for example, did not return a Labour MP until the early 1990s despite its ethnic diversity. Boris Johnson is, at the end of the day, a likeable character for many people, and his mediocre record and close connection to David Cameron were not enough for Livingstone to overcome his unpopularity. He was the wrong man for this contest.

Readers in the UK will have heard of the Leveson inquiry, but for those outside, it’s a public inquiry being held into the standards of the British media, which was triggered by revelations about the Murdoch press (principally) illegally accessing people’s voice mails, including those of crime victims and other non-celebrities. This caused such outrage when it was revealed that investigators working for the News of the World, a Murdoch-owned tabloid, had accessed the voice mail belonging to Milly Dowler, a teenager murdered in Surrey in 2002, that News Corporation closed the paper almost immediately, but the fall-out has led to the resignations and arrests of several senior journalists and some senior London police officers. This past week, a Parliamentary committee reported that in their view, Rupert Murdoch was not fit to lead a major media corporation.

With all the talk of Murdoch’s fitness to own a company and his dealings with politicians and so on, little regard has been paid to what the papers actually print, and what goes on at the other media corporations which do not have a high-profile foreign owner, such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express. Furthermore, it should not be the print media or the commercial media that is under scrutiny: the BBC, particularly in its local radio stations and 5 Live, should have some answering to do as well; its hosts are often jabbering bullies who cut off or insult callers, or sensationalists who give undue prominence to people spouting off about things they know nothing about (like Katie Hopkins), or who recycle inflammatory stories from the tabloids (as Vanessa Feltz has done on more than one occasion on BBC London). Finally, not enough attention is being paid to what is actually printed.

This last point would not be quite so relevant if there weren’t so many restrictions on freedom of speech in this country, and libel laws that are not quite so stringent in protecting the reputations of the wealthy but do nothing for ordinary people, or whole groups of them. Over the last few years there have been laws passed which criminalise the “glorification” of acts of terrorism and groups have been banned which carry out nuisance behaviour and loudly express views that most people find offensive — but others haven’t, even when their demonstrations lead to violence. Newspapers in the UK are allowed to print false information that damages the interests of whole sections of the population — in recent years the favourite targets have been people with disabilities (particularly hidden ones that do not require full-time wheelchair use) who are depicted as scroungers, but in the past the papers routintely accused Muslims, in general, of supporting terrorism, or the introduction of Shari’ah law, and local government and business of giving them special treatment, such as by removing piggy banks from bank windows, holding modest single-sex swimming sessions in local pools (actually private bookings), and renaming Christmas “Winterval”, a myth which has been repeated again and again despite always having been untrue.

On Tuesday the Huffington Post carried an article by Katharine Quarmby, author of Scapegoat, a book about hate crimes against people with disabilities, which revealed that the inquiry, although it received written testimony from groups representing people with disabilities including Inclusion London, and individuals including herself and John Pring of the Disability News Service, the inquiry had decided not to hear oral testimony on the issue as it was not important enough, despite evidence that the biased and inflammatory reporting about “scroungers” was leading to the harassment of people with disabilities. The same was true when jaundiced reporting about Muslims appeared in the media, whether local or national: those involved were branded “Paki lovers” and similar things by ignorant readers when the “Muslim element” in the story was over-stated (as with the “extractor fan” case in October 2010, in which a man complained about an extractor fan from a neighbouring café pumping the smell of bacon into his house, which among other things put off Muslim friends from visiting; the case was reported in the media as being mainly about Muslim complaints). There were various violent incidents including an imam being blinded at Regent’s Park Mosque by a man who walked in off the street and attacked him, and a number of women being abused or having their hijabs ripped off, and while some might argue that the terrorist attacks in September 2001 and July 2005 might have contributed, the fact remains that there were far more inflammatory front-page stories about Muslims than successful terrorist attacks during that period.

There need to be laws governing the balance of the media. The BBC has a duty to be impartial, but the same does not apply to commercial newspapers, even when one title or one company has a monopoly over the newspaper market in a particular area. There should be a law to remedy this. There should also be a law governing the prominent display of untruths or distortions that are harmful to the interests of a large number of people, rather than to the reputation of named individuals; the yardstick for such offences must not be whether a story or public statements threatens or insults but whether it is true, or not, or only partly. While I accept that free expression of opinion must be maintained, a small group of wealthy media owners and their henchmen must not be free to sell poison to the public just because they will buy it, to present propaganda as fact, or to use the media they control to propagandise for their preferred politicians or attack those they despise. They have an immense power, are elected by nobody, and they must be required to face up to their responsiblities.

Danni Brennand posted the above article this morning, regarding how accessibility is often taken to mean providing wheelchair ramps, rather than making sure services are accessible to people who cannot reach them at all and cannot use the phone, as she often cannot. A couple of weeks ago, it was reported that a large proportion of commercial websites in the UK are inaccessible to those with visual impairments; they relied on being able to use a mouse, which of course, a blind person cannot do as they cannot see the pointer. Another form of inaccessibility which I have noticed is that some websites do not display properly on mobile browsers, and some do not do so at all.

This is an accessibility issue because, besides those of us who use our smartphones to browse the web while sitting in the passenger seat of a truck, some only have access to similar format devices for medical or disability-related reasons: smartphones or slightly larger tablets, some of which will always display web pages in mobile format because the browser programs identify themselves as such to the websites they access, which in turn send them the mobile version rather than the standard version. Among those often affected are people who are bedridden (Lynn Gilderdale, who was bedridden with severe ME for many years, used a PDA, which ran Windows Mobile, and later an early iPhone to access the Internet as she was unable to use a laptop, let alone a desktop computer, and I know another person with severe ME who cannot use a device bigger than a smartphone), along with some people in hospital.

Quite a number of websites have pretty good mobile websites; the better ones simply present the essentials, such as the content of a news story and sized-down versions of any images, and leave out any extraneous material such as advertisements and links which aren’t directly linked to the article. Others are overblown websites which almost exactly mimic the functionality of a mobile device application, and are incredibly slow and unreliable and the text jumps up or down as it loads that last bit of content (as with Facebook’s current mobile website). The worst, however, are those which, when someone tries to access a page on a website using a mobile browser, the website simply presents the front page of the mobile website, with no obvious means of reaching the page the reader was trying to access (there smay be a search button, but the tweet containing the incoming link may not have contained enough detail, such as the name of the person who was central to the story). I’m not even going to discuss the matter of how easy it is to enter information into some forms, because I can easily wait and use a desktop or laptop, though I will say that some browsers do not help (typing text into a text field on a mobile website is easy enough, but correcting your text by moving the cursor on an Android browser is always awkward and sometimes impossible).

It’s not that hard to make sure your mobile website is accessible; after all, readily available content management systems like WordPress and Drupal offer it out of the box or in a free add-on. I am no expert on how to make websites and forms fully accessible to this particular group of users, but it seems that there are a lot of clueless developers working for large corporations who produce cut-down mobile websites which are useless — modern mobile browsers are capable of delivering almost all the content a normal browser does, if a little more slowly, and use the same rendering engines (usually WebKit, the same one used by Google Chrome), unlike the very basic browsers found on the PDAs of 10 years ago. A poorly-engineered mobile version of a website is worse than having no mobile version at all, and just delivering the desktop version to everyone.

This post is part of Blogging Against Disabilism Day 2012.

Last Saturday night, there was a debate on the Stephen Nolan show, a late-night phone-in on the BBC station Radio 5 Live, in which the former Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins, who styles herself “the only candidate to say ‘no’ to Sir Alan” [Alan Sugar of Amstrad, who runs the TV series, The Apprentice], defended the government’s cuts to disability and housing benefits and Lisa “Lisybabe” Egan and one of the other callers tried to oppose her. Hopkins is clearly of the opinion that disability benefits are given out to an awful lot of people who aren’t really disabled or don’t deserve them, as shown by this tweet: “If people’s disability benefit was handed out from the top rung of a ladder I reckon most would climb the ladder to get it”. Her stance was that people need to rely on their own resources rather than the state as we live in “austere” times, a line that she trotted out again when Lisa reminded her that people had paid National Insurance and that the whole idea of an insurance scheme is that it pays out when things go wrong. As for housing benefit, she said she did not see why the state should pay for people to live in the south-east, without apparently realising that the majority of housing benefit recipients are actually in work. She also posted this rant about child benefits on her blog, claiming (without the slightest evidence, of course) that “for so many of our poorer families in this country the child does not benefit at all – but rather the overweight mother guzzling McDonalds with her large brown Primark bag bulging at her feet”. You can listen to the show here for the next week. (For non-British readers: a Primark bag does not signify affluence.)

The issue of housing benefit is not the main concern here, except to state that the majority of recipients are in fact in work, and much of it pays for the shortage of affordable housing stock, the political decision to sell off council houses, and the runaway house price inflation caused by the credit boom which ended in 2008. Disability benefits are a burden society has always had in one form or another, because there have always been people whose physical or mental condition, whether temporary or permanent, either does not allow them to work, or makes them a less attractive proposition to employers for one reason or another. There are two separate categories of disability benefit: the Disability Living Allowance, which covers the cost of being disabled (such as for care and mobility aids) and is paid regardless of whether the recipient is working — indeed, it may help them remain in work — and the former Incapacity Benefit, which supported people who were unable to work, whether due to illness or a complication of their disability. Many of those who currently receive DLA would previously have been institutionalised, a practice which ended because the public realised that there were rampant abuses, the care was often impersonal, taking no account of people’s needs and abilities, and there was little dignity or privacy in many of them, besides the fact that the vast majority of people do not need to be housed apart from their families and the community. They were paid for out of state expense as well, and the land they stood on is now in many cases prime real estate and the grand buildings have been demolished or converted into luxury flats, so a return to that is going to be extremely expensive as well as unsatisfactory for all concerned.

Hopkins introduced herself by saying that “as a taxpayer” it had become obvious to her that people could live where they choose, have as many children as they choose, and smoke if they choose and have the state pay for the consequences of that, and that benefits should be a privilege and that people should “look to themselves” rather than the state to provide for them. She also invited the others to come with her on “claimants’ day” to the benefit office to see people collecting their benefits in their pyjamas. (I was on Job Seekers’ Allowance for two years and I almost never saw people in the Job Centre in their pyjamas.) Lisa asked her if, in the event of her getting cancer or having an accident, she would try to use the national insurance contributions she had paid, and Hopkins replied no, that she had savings that would provide for her family in such circumstances, money she had made by “grafting” and getting up at 5:30am every morning to provide for her family. Further enquiries reveal that Hopkins has epilepsy, and if she expects everyone to rely on themselves rather than the state, she should explain whether she has used the NHS to provide either the medication or the care she needs such as consultations to decide which medications to take and so on, and hospitalisation in the event of a severe seizure. In any case, she is not the only one who gets up at that time or earlier, and the majority of us do not make a lot of money because our jobs do not pay us that much. Hopkins got lucky; she does not mention on her website that she invented anything or has actually run a business doing anything other than selling advice to other businesspeople and public speaking. She is, in other words, a professional mouth, someone with opinions who gets paid for them.

When Egan asked her if she really was so cruel as to insist that people with cancer not receive help from the state, she fell back on her claim that the benefit system was too generous. She claimed that the people she “accosts” in their pyjamas get “home allowance” of up to £400, job seekers’ allowance, disability allowance “although they’ve managed to walk very well to the job centre”, and that it makes it not worth your while to work part-time. In fact, having been on JSA, the last time I received it, it was about £65 per week, which is about a day and a half’s average pay and just enough to buy the bare essentials for a week with. The reason it is “not worth your while to work” is because the money is deducted from your allowance and the allowance is stopped if you have two days’ work that week, even if it is a one-off booking through an agency during a slump, so unless you get a permanent job or a prospect of a lot of casual work, accepting a work booking could well leave you worse off. This is simply a consequence of the version of means testing that is used for JSA, and it is one of a number of circumstances in which means testing is a proven disincentive to work.

Nobody really confronted Hopkins with why some benefits need to be paid, and disability benefits in particular. We either pay for people with disabilities to live at home, and for the necessary adaptations and home care arrangements, or we pay for them to live in a care facility, when the land is bought, and they’re built, and all the cooks, cleaners, nurses, managers and others are hired, at huge expense — there is no third option, unless you count leaving them to die or leaving them to beg on the streets. Some people with disabilities can work, and others can if they are provided with some assistance, or if people help them to find a niche they can cope with working in, or helps them through (or past) the interview process, and the benefits made to these people may be more than recouped in the taxes they pay because they are then able to work. Others cannot, either because they do not have the intellectual capacity, or because their physical limitations make it impractical, or because their health complications or mental health problems mean they will not be able to work reliably, or because prejudice or inconvenience means people will not hire them. Of course, some people with disabilities are very wealthy and can afford to pay for care themselves, and some can run their own business, but this is not the majority and the costs of being disabled or of having a long-term medical condition add considerably to the cost of living, which is why we have a health service and a welfare system.

Hopkins clearly does not know much about what she is talking about here, only that she doesn’t want to pay to finance anyone else’s lifestyle. She promotes herself as some sort of “self-made”, self-employed person who “tells it like it is” as a social commentator and public speaker (reinforcing her “tough” image by boasting that she went to the Sandhurst military officers’ academy), but on this evidence that seems to consist of making bigoted and ill-informed comments that might go down well with all the well-paid drunks at a corporate party but do not add much to this discussion. There is a lot of talk about scroungers in pyjamas claiming benefits that were enough to live on comfortably without working, yet no solution has been given as to how to get the idlers off benefits without impoverishing people who are in real need and are unable to work; the government did not come up with one and neither has she. Yet again, British talk radio allows a serious and important debate to descend into a slanging match by giving undue prominence to an opinionated but uninformed guest — at the expense of the licence fee payer!

Image source: The Sun.

The issue of fraud is a very real one, and over the years both parties have been responsible (in the 1992 election, so-called “granny farming”, in which elderly people in old people’s homes were signed up for postal votes which were then swapped for proxy votes, cast by Tory party workers for their own party, was a big problem and may have swung some seats); this time round, it was the Labour party which feared the loss of the Asian Muslim vote because of dissatisfaction about the Iraq war. Various methods were used, including the theft of batches of clearly-labelled envelopes containing postal voting forms, either by force from postmen or by the postmen themselves; sometimes the forms were stolen from letterboxes although this obviously has lower “yields”. Another concern by politicians opposed to Labour, such as Salma Yaqoob of the Respect party, is that fathers prevail upon their children to order postal votes which he then casts for them. The Asian community has long been in the pocket of the Labour party because they are the major party which has the best record of defending the rights of immigrants and ethnic minorities, but that relationship broke down when Blair’s government took the UK to war in 2001 and 2003. There are other reasons why young Muslim voters seek alternatives to Labour: the relationship is often with “community leaders” who tend to be middle-aged, male, not born in the UK and often from particular sections of the society “back home”; some voters want to be represented by their religion, not their ethnicity, and do not want someone who has ambitions of a ministerial career. However, voting for minority parties often works to the benefit of a larger party, particularly in a marginal constituency.

However, the need to combat fraud, which was perpetrated by one party in one particular section of the community, needs to be balanced against the needs of those who need a postal vote: principally, those whose disabilities prevent them from accessing a polling station. Permanent wheelchair users whose local polling station is inaccessible would no doubt have their reasons accepted for having a postal vote; it is those with fluctuating conditions, or those who cannot walk for long distances (or stand for long periods, as when there is a queue) even if they can walk around the house, or those with poorly-understood conditions like ME, who might lose out. This would be particularly true if the “reason” for needing a postal vote would necessarily include a formal diagnosis; a person with ME might be diagnosed with “chronic fatigue syndrome”, which might lead polling officials to conclude “they could get to the polling station, but would get a bit tired”, but they might not get a diagnosis at all if the important people within the medical profession in their region refuse to accept it exists. Another person might be struggling to get a diagnosis for a physical condition but keeps coming up against the assumption that their symptoms are psychological. Quite possibly, the same people who are having trouble being approved for sickness and disability benefits would also be deprived of their right to vote.

I do not think for a moment that those seeking to reform the postal voting system actually want to disenfranchise anyone — quite the opposite — but there are ways of making sure postal votes are not stolen or issued to people who do not exist without depriving those who need to vote from home of the ability to do so. Officials could query postal vote requests if most or all of a family request them, for example, especially if entire families are doing it in large numbers in a particular constituency, so their need for a postal vote could be ascertained (paper evidence of a forthcoming family holiday, for example). Voting forms should be sent out in less obvious packaging, and staggered so that a large (and thus detectable) does not go out in one day. Postmen could be brought in from other areas, such that those postmen matching the profile of those involved in the fraud do not have access to the postal voting forms. There are two vulnerable groups of voters here and it is important to strike a balance so that we do not disenfrancise one group with measures intended to stop the theft of votes from the other.

The above article explains the author’s decision to prefer locally-produced, organic meat over halaal meat which has been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic guidelines. He argues that the term “halaal” only applies to the method of slaughter and says nothing about the manner in which the animal was reared, including whether it was treated humanely or indeed fed on animal-based feed including pork. He refers to this article from the website SoundVision, which brings in the issue of “mad cow” disease, a disease which can be transmitted to humans when they eat ‘infected’ meat (I use the quote marks because the disease-causing agent is a protein, not a living organism of any sort). His decision is not Islamically valid, for a number of reasons.

He mentions (or rather, quotes the SoundVision article) as saying this:

Muslims are directed in the Quran to eat food that is Halal and Tayyib. Halal is defined as food that is permissible according to Islamic law. Tayyib means wholesome, pure, nutritious and safe. Traditionally, Muslims in North America have emphasized the Halal over the Tayyib when it comes to meat consumption, Hussaini [Mazhar Hussaini, president of the North American Halal Foundation] says.

I remember listening to a lecture by Shaikh Hamza Yusuf in which he explains that there is no redundancy in the Qur’an, so if “halaal” and “tayyib” are both used, they cannot mean the same thing. The basic rules for meat to be permitted (halaal) are that they are of a species we are permitted to eat in the first place (principally herbivorous stock animals, but some schools of thought allow other animals including some carnivores), that the animal was not sick or injured and that they are slaughtered correctly and that the blessing and the name of Allah ta’ala be recited at the time (meat slaughtered according to the rituals of the Jews and Christians are permitted provided that it was not slaughtered in the name of other than Allah ta’ala; the safest position is that kosher meat is permitted but the commercial meat in the West is not, because it was not ritually slaughtered at all). Tayyib means wholesome, as the SoundVision article notes, but although this clearly excludes animals that have been fed on meat-based feeds that they are not biologically supposed to eat, it does not make them forbidden to eat, because haraam is the opposite of halaal, not of tayyib. Scholars have in fact said that animals or plants raised on haraam food are in fact permissible to eat, although it is better not to (there was an article on SunniPath or Seekers’ Guidance to this effect, but I could not find it when researching this).

The fact that meat is raised on purer food and not exposed to pesticides does not mean it is permissible to eat if it does not meet the criteria to be halaal. The majority of meat that the early Muslims were exposed to would have been just as wholesome as the organic beef and lamb of today, but the Muslims only ate it if it had been slaughtered correctly, and they were much less sure of where their next meal was coming from than any of us are. Many of the scare stories about chickens fed hormones or cows fed offal from other cows are out of date; many of these practices were banned precisely because they caused disease in livestock and humans, or because they caused public outrage. Cases of spongiform encephalopathy in humans (variant Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease) peaked in the mid-1990s, and were probably in people who had eaten contaminated beef products in the early 1980s. The meat that was being produced then was already safe, and most pathogens are killed by cooking.

There are, of course, suspicions about how halaal the meat presented as halaal really is; and stories circulate from time to time that the blessing is played over a loudspeaker, and one of the major certifying organisations in the UK will only certified meat from non-stunned animals. They also say that stunning involves shooting the animal with a bolt through the head before slaughter, which could kill it but certainly means it would be classified as an injured animal. Many of us, even if we accepted the electric shock method, would not accept that an animal be shot before slaughter. However, we hear rumours about food a lot on Islamic forums, and we do not know whether the stories that we hear are true, or if they are based on something that happened years ago but is not happening now, or are distorted “Chinese whispers”, or are simply malicious rumours. To complicate things for Muslims, the organic certifying body, the Soil Association, will not certify meat that came from an unstunned animal regardless of how it was reared, although they do not have a monopoly on the term “organic” and many supermarket branded organic products do not have their logo (much as they often do not use the Vegetarian Society’s logo either), so theoretically, organic halaal meat suppliers should not need the Soil Association’s blessing.

It is fine to be concerned about animal welfare and the wholesomeness of food, but it does not change the fact that the basic criteria for halaal do not include being organically reared and that farming methods and humane treatment do not make the meat halaal if the animal was not slaughtered correctly; in fact, the meat is considered impure and one may not pray if it is on one’s person. In this day and age, fish is readily available, even far from the sea, and there are non-meat-based alternatives such as tofu; protein can be obtained through milk and other dairy products, nuts and eggs, so no Muslim has any excuse in this day and age to eat non-halaal meat. If you are concerned about animal welfare or food quality and the halaal meat available to you is not to your satisfaction, you should not eat meat.