By John Sangster.
I am very active in my community, and I chair the Inverurie Community Council, recently chaired The Garioch Area Partnership and played an active role in setting up the Aberdeenshire Rural Partnerships Federation.
At some places I have arrived for a meeting only to find there is nowhere to park, and once I ended up about half a mile away, so a Blue Badge would be ideal.
I should describe my disability. I suffered from polio when I was a baby. Polio is a muscle-wasting disease which has left me with a left leg with no muscle which is also over an inch shorter that the right one. Let’s just say I stick out in a crowd and you can see me coming.
I had filled in my form for the badge and went to the council headquarters to hand it in; this is an account of what happened, I handed in the form and the man said:-
“Thank you very much; we’ll get that off to your doctor.”
“Why do you need to send it to my doctor?” I asked
“Because we have to ascertain if what you said on the form is what you are actually suffering from.”
“But I’m standing in front of you, you just watched me come up the stairs to get here”, I replied.
“Yes, but you have to go through the system, we can’t just hand out badges to anybody, thank very much we’ll be in touch.”
So off I went home, only to be phoned later in the day, and a man asked:
“You put on your form that you use the Inverurie Medical Practice, but you haven’t put the name of your doctor.”
“I didn’t know I had a doctor, it’s a practice I just use one that I can get” I answered.
“No” he said, “you need a doctor’s name or we cannot process your claim.”
So I jumped in my car, went down to the Health Centre and was told that the doctor I had registered with had died 9 years ago, and I was now registered with a Dr Allan. I returned home and phoned the council and told the man my doctor at Inverurie was Dr Allan.
The man at the council asked me:
“What’s his first name?”
After I picked myself off the floor, I just told him:
“Vic,”
.…and the man responded with:
“Thank you, we’ll be in touch.”
On Tuesday morning I was phoned by Dr Allan who had some questions; he had received the form although he pointed out the Council had sent it to Vic Allan, when his name was in fact Robert, but I digress. He had some questions:-
Q 1: ‘Am I in pain when I walk?’ I answered “No, if I was I’d go to the doctor.”
Q 2: ‘How far can you walk without feeling tired?’ I answered “It depends how tired I am when I start.”
Q 3: ‘Can you walk further than 100 metres?’ I answered “Yes, but what’s that got to do with anything?”
I realised that these were in fact “loaded questions” and were designed to get me to withdraw my claim there and then. If I was in pain and could only walk a few metres, I may get a badge – but then if I was, I’d probably be in hospital and a badge would be no use to me, another one off the list – target achieved.
The truth is that a blind person would have ascertained that I am disabled, they would have said to me:
“you have one leg shorter than the other, I can tell by the vibrations.”
the sick and disabled don’t really matter as long as we give them a few hand-outs now and then
The Tory Government is beginning its purge on the sick and disabled, urged on by the land owners and other assorted Tory toffs in rural England. The Government is proposing alterations and cuts to two of the most important benefits available to the sick and disabled, The Employment Support Allowance, (ESA) and the Disability Living Allowance (DLA).
The Department of Work and Pensions has given each Job Centre in the country a target, the object being to get as many people off the lists as possible.
For example, a friend of mine knows of a case in England where a person with a thalidomide related disabilty, having no arms or legs and who relies on a wheelchair to go anywhere, has had their disabled parking right removed.
The government have scrapped the DLA and replaced it with The Personal Independence Payment, (PIP), made up of two components, The Daily Living and The Mobility Component: it is the former that we must resist. Under the new mobility component, the meaning of disability has been changed; for example, under the current DLA rules someone in a wheelchair is considered disabled, under the new rules this may be amended if you use a wheelchair but can leave the house, then under the planned changes you do not qualify as being disabled.
We could sit for a long time and not make up anything like this. It is draconian, it is brutal and it smacks of Thatcherism. We as a nation seem to be still worshipping at the altar of Margaret Thatcher with her notion that the free market economy is all that matters and that the sick and disabled don’t really matter as long as we give them a few hand-outs now and then.
Private consultation firms are now processing claims; these firms are only paid on a target-based system whereby they earn more if they reject people’s claims for benefit. You won’t find any of this in the news programmes, nor will you find it any of the Scottish election drivel that comes in your letter box daily. It is a “sweep under the carpet” subject that the politicians don’t want to talk about. It is being put forward by the Tories and their willing lackeys, The Liberal Democrats.
Coalition? What coalition? They’re all Tories as far as I can see – shame on the lot of them.
– Sangy
Photography credit – disabled parking, © Graksi | Dreamstime.com
http://www.dreamstime.com/free-stock-photo-invalid-parking-place2-rimagefree1358301-resi3350874
