Ice buckets and cruelty
I'm sure everyone has heard of the "ice-bucket challenge", in which someone is filmed having a bucket of freezing water poured over their head in response to donations to a charity, usually one dedicated...
Indigo Jo Blogs Blog
Claire Dyer and the LB Bill
On Friday 1st August, Claire Dyer's family lost their legal bid to stop her being transferred from an assessment and treatment unit in Swansea, where her family live, to a medium-secure unit near Brighton,...
Claire Dyer: Transfer postponed!
Update 30th July, 14:13: See this BBC news report – this may be on TV later, especially in Wales. Update 14:55: There is to be a court hearing this Friday; Claire will not be...
'Retirement flats' to free up family homes
Demos: build retirement properties to free up 3 million family homes I was going to be writing a piece this morning about how unworkable it would be to ‘encourage’ the over-55s to move out...
Online friends, suicide and threats thereof
Recently, two people I know (or knew) on Twitter posted threats to kill themselves. One of them is a woman who has bipolar disorder and has been in hospital on several occasions recently; the...
Claire threatened with secure unit transfer again
Last January I wrote about Claire Dyer, a young autistic woman in Swansea who was at the time being threatened with transfer to a secure hospital in Northampton. Then as now, she was living...
Work
The past month or so, I’ve been working full-time, and most of that has been in one job that requires quite long hours — it usually starts at 9am (which is late for a...
McDougalls' children removed yet again
Mark and Kerry McDougall, the Scottish couple who fled to Ireland in 2009 to avoid the social services in Fife, Scotland, taking her then unborn son into care at birth (on the grounds that...
So, what are these 'British values', then?
I’m a bit late in writing about this, as I’ve been working long hours the past two weeks during which the Ofsted report into a number of Birmingham schools supposedly targeted by a conspiracy...
Bloody foreigners
There’s a letter in the current (July 2014) edition of Truck & Driver magazine from one D Pardner (address withheld) moaning about everything about foreign truck drivers, particularly eastern Europeans. He claims that they...
Ayn van Dyk is coming home at last
On Tuesday Amie van Dyk, mother of Ayn van Dyk who was seized from her home in Canada by social services after briefly wandering from her father’s home in June 2011 (see previous posts),...
Free speech
The last couple of weeks a few things have made me seriously consider the state of free speech in the UK. One was that a man (Michael Abberton, right) who had posted some innocuous...
Thalidomide: David Mason is no hero
Last Thursday there was a BBC documentary about thalidomide, the drug used to suppress sickness in pregnant women which was responsible for serious birth defects in the children of the women who took it....
Make no mistake: "halal hysteria" is malicious
Last week a number of newspapers ran with prominent stories that supermarkets and restaurant chains were using halal meat, or had been doing so without their customers’ knowledge for some time. This is actually...
On the Kim Walmsley gender case
Newspapers are reporting that a woman from Liverpool, Kim Walmsley (right), has had her marriage annulled, and been refused a passport, because the official copy of her birth certificate wrongly records her gender as...
Dudes
This post is part of Blogging Against Disablism Day 2014. Recently a fashion has emerged of referring to people with learning disabilities, particularly autism, as dudes. This fashion has emerged out of the Justice...
Why is T-Mobile censoring disability blogs?
I regularly read a blog, Blogging Astrid, by an autistic woman in the Netherlands who has been blogging about her life since her teens, but since 2007 it has been about her life in...
Rapists to Rio? Are we that desperate?
This past week, a man from Surrey was given a non-custodial sentence for a series of serious sexual assaults against a 12-year-old girl in December 2012. Adam Hulin plied the young girl, whose age...
Massachusetts: The land where torture is legal
Before and during the Afghan invasion twelve years ago, it was hotly debated whether torture of terrorist suspects is justified, particularly (but not only) when a terrorist has been arrested and it is suspected...
Before you say "poor mum" …
Last night three children were found dead at their home in New Malden, at an address half a mile from where I live. Olivia Clarence, aged four, and twins Max and Ben Clarence, aged...