Welcome home, Hilary
We're all rehearsing for the presidency … I always wanted to be commander-in-chief of my one-woman army — Ani DiFranco, Not So Soft Yesterday evening, just before 7pm, a lady called Hilary Lister completed...
Category: Disability
Cameron rebukes idiot MEP
BBC NEWS | Politics | NHS attack MEP rebuked by Cameron David Cameron is the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, and much as I despise that institution and much as I...
Come on Steve, prove you’re one of us
Where Are the British Birthers? | TPM Calling on Stephen Hawking to provide his bona fides (hat tip: Ginny, via Twitter): Perhaps there will be some brave republican willing to spearhead an investigation of...
Big Trev’s leadership pushes out equality staff
Perhaps to my discredit, I have not taken a great interest in the workings of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the successor to several official equality commissions set up to monitor various anti-discrimination...
Cerrie Burnell: what’s the problem?
In the Shade of the Veil: What’s the problem here? Last week, there was a huge controversy over the use of a presenter with one hand missing on a children’s TV channel run by...
Men, women and autism
Yesterday, the Guardian published an article on the special challenges facing girls and women with autism (It's not just boys who are autistic), in a special women's page guest-edited by Bridget Orr, who has...
The difference between hate and yob violence
Last month I wrote a review of Richard Littlejohn’s documentary “The War on Britain’s Jews?”, in which he presented as evidence of an upsurge of anti-Semitism an attack on a rabbi without mentioning that...
“Ashley” and sterilising the severely disabled
I'm sure none of us has missed the story of "Ashley", the nine-year-old from Washington state whose parents subjected her to major surgery, removing her reproductive system and breast buds and giving her hormone...
British gynaecologists back euthanasia
I always find myself surprised when I agree with anything Melanie Phillips says, but when she’s not talking about global warming (or the lack thereof) or anything to do with Islam, Israel, or the so-called “War on Terror” and its offshoots, which is nowadays what she’s best known for, I often do. In this case, it’s the declaration of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in favour of the “active euthanasia” of severely disabled babies. In the Netherlands, infant euthanasia is allowed “for a range of incurable conditions, including severe spina bifida and the painful skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa”.
Inconveniencing the disabled
My work as a delivery driver often requires me to lift heavy items up several flights of steps, repetitively. It’s a huge inconvenience and annoyance, and the buildings involved are often quite new, leading...
Jane Campbell on Lord Joffe and euthanasia
Guardian Unlimited: Stop trying to kill us off In today's Guardian, Jane Campbell, who has Spinal Muscular Atrophy, uses a wheelchair and uses help from personal assistants provided by the local authority, attacks Lord...
White and disabled “privilege”
Following on from Umm Zaid's post on "white privilege" and how it affects white Muslims, Ginny posted one on that topic and one on how it specifically affects her as a blind person who...
Cabbie turned away Muslim disabled customer
A sister posted this to the New Muslim Project email forum. It is about how she and her husband was refused a cab to take them from a recent conference in London to the...
No nice wheelchairs?
This morning I read in the Guardian’s Society supplement an article by Judith Cameron, a freelance writer who looks after a severely-disabled daughter, Sophie. Cameron has written a monthly column about caring for her...
The witch hunt on Warnock
The past few days appear to have been open season on Baroness Warnock, who in 1978 published a report advocating the integration of disabled children in mainstream schools. As you might expect, Melanie Phillips...
Reflections on a week with the dsabled
This past week (as explained earlier) I’ve been doing a temporary job driving a minibus, transporting the severely mentally disabled of New Malden from their homes and care facilities to two day care and...
Schiavo ‘blogburst’
Last night I got an email from a supporter of the Terri Schiavo campaign, asking me to join a “Blogburst” in their support. I clicked on the link in the email, and I discovered...
My new (temporary) job
I’ve managed to come by a rather sweet temporary job with the local facilities for dealing with the learning disabled, which consists of (who’d have guessed!) driving them around. It basically involves driving them...
Naked streets? Bad idea …
They were discussing on Vanessa Feltz’s afternoon show the news that the Dutch “naked street” experiment is to be copied in London, appropriately enough in Exhibition Road, in west London. A naked street is...