So much for disability adaptations.
In my latest podcast episode, I talk with Mr T, who has been in a wheelchair since a serious traffic accident. Mr T lives in East Devon.
His council home had very bad leaks, mould and flooding. The floorboards were so rotten that his wheelchair went through them. Great stuff from East Devon council there.
Anyway, the council put Mr T and his wife in a non-adapted temporary flat where he can’t turn his wheelchair around.
Upshot is that Mr T has to drag himself down the hall to the loo which he sometimes misses. He also has to sleep on the floor, because getting into his wheelchair at night for a trip to the bathroom is too hard.
I can’t tell you how pleased I am that Labour has decided to blow the rest of its tenure on meaningless leadership contests, rather than on funding councils to sort out serious issues like this.
Hope the lot of them fall forever into a sinkhole, including Andy Burnham. See how they like it.
Appalling state of affairs. And the authotities have the nerve to spy on claimants bank accounts to check theyre not living it up on sickness benefits.
It’s actually ridiculous
Hi, Kate
My mum and ex-Eighth Army paternal grandfather attempted to groom me into becoming a ‘boy soldier’ for age 16. Their intention was to ‘toughen’ me up. He died around Christmas 1969 — shortly after my 16th birthday — of a blood clot after a leg amputation linked to his insulin dependency. They failed, and I’ve been a pacifist and Quaker since about the age of 25.
And while there is talk about ‘bringing in national service’, I consider acts of kindness to be a national and international service, as I have done in previous volunteering while a disabled jobseeker, where I taught a refugee woman computing skills. From that input, that once-a-week learner was able to upload family photos from her smartphone to social media and regain contact with family diaspora in diverse continents. She rejoiced in making contact with those she thought she’d lost all contact with.
Around Hereford — “home of the SAS” — I notice that Islamophobia seems to be a by-product of militarism.
One of my political outlook icons from my early 20s was ‘topical singer-songwriter’ Phil Ochs who committed suicide at age 35 in April 1976. Wikipedia notes that his dad received discharge from military service due to mental distress from medically treating victims of the Battle of the Bulge. One of my favourite Phil Ochs songs, ‘What Are You Fighting For’, addressed to prospective Vietnam War recruits, has chorus lines, “I know you’re set for fighting, but what are you fighting for?”
An excellent tv documentary ‘There But for Fortune’ of Och’s life can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvZn9C_z6Y0. And while, as President and former WWII general Eisenhower noted, spending on the ‘military industrial complex’ depletes the resources available for resourcing humanitarian possiblities, I note that my paternal grandfather was a parish councillor in East Devon.