One Voice Newsletter - October 2009

Welcome to our October newsletter—
This month lots of news and opinion on legal judgements, hate crime, disability benefits, arts and music.
The views in this newsletter are those of the article writers, they are not always what One Voice thinks.
Big Care Debate
Government’s new Green Paper Shaping the Future of Care Together sets out a vision for a National Care Service for all adults in England
One Voice is having some consultation events to give you a chance to pass on your views to the Government:

Friday 23rd October 11-1.30 at One Voice, Regent House
Or
Tuesday 27th October 2.00—4.00 at One Voice, Regent House
Refreshments will be served at each event.

Because places are limited, you need to let us know which event you want to come to—contact the office to put your name down today!

If you need help with transport, or if you need any help to take part, such as a signer, a note taker, information on audio cd etc, contact the office as soon as possible to book your place and let us know.

Casandra’s Column

The question for the moment seems to be—are disabled citizens being helped and supported enough by the British Government and Society?
Two cases put this at the front of our minds—Gary McKinnon and the Pilkingtons.
 Gary McKinnon is the hacker with Aspergers (a kind of autism) who has been refused leave to appeal his extradition to the United States by the newly created Supreme Court.
The High Court ruled the case was not of "general public importance" to go to the UK's highest court.
It seems odd that a test case on how we protect disabled citizens rights in relation to the demands of other Governments is not regarded as of ‘general public importance’.
Mr McKinnon is accused of breaking into the US's military computer system, Mr McKinnon does not deny this, but insists he was just seeking evidence of UFOs—such a claim is consistent with his condition
Laws rushed through in the wake of 9/11 mean that UK citizens cannot expect the protection or support of their government when the U.S. wants to try them. And under U.S. law he could expect up to 60 years in jail.
It seems like an unbalanced judicial system, when the UK Government is willing to intercede when it’s citizens are accused of drug smuggling or convicted of killing another football fan, but not in this case.
This same Government allowed Pinochet to go free (and not be extradited to Spain) on ‘health grounds’ which seemed insubstantial in light of his victory wave from the aeroplane. This Government also allowed free the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing on health grounds, but cannot seem to protect one of its own citizens from 60 years in jail on disability grounds.
This lack of support for disabled people who are in vulnerable situations is even more shocking in the case of the Pilkingtons—the mother who killed herself and her disabled daughter after years of bullying and harassment at her home, which was not acted upon by the police.
At the inquest the jury ruled that police inaction had contributed to their deaths.
For over 10 years a gang of youths terrorized her, her learning disabled daughter and her dyslexic son, and despite 33 calls to the police, no action was taken, no one was charged—in fact on one occasion she was told to draw her curtains.

Disabled people increasingly are victims of hate crime, but with the police unwilling to take action and the CPS unwilling to take cases forward (as reported in last month’s newsletter), we are being left without the right to freedom from bulling.

Let us hope that this leads to reported hate crimes against disabled people being taken more seriously.

The views in this piece are Cassandra’s they are not necessarily what One Voice thinks

News Shorts

Benefits squeeze
With the Conservatives joining labour in promising to reduce disabled people’s benefits, people on Disability Living Allowance or Incapacity Benefit might be wondering how much longer they can expect financial support in dealing with the extra costs of disability. Not much longer if a recent case is anything to judge by – a 10 year old girl with a prosthetic leg had her benefit taken away after the Benefits Agency used a report by her school praising her for coping with her new prosthetic leg.
That means she can’t have use of the car being paid for via Motobility to get to school, hospital appointments etc.
Her mother is appealing the decision.
Energy Companies breaching license conditions
Ofgem, the energy watchdog, has revealed that Energy firms cut off heat and power from the mentally ill and poor families last winter, in direct violation of their license conditions.
Under their licence conditions, electricity and gas suppliers should not disconnect them during the winter months when temperatures plunge.
In a package of reforms announced by Ofgem as a result, suppliers agreed to re-connect a disconnected customer who turned out to be vulnerable within 24 hours.
Suppliers also committed to contact customers who had been disconnected to check again that they were not vulnerable. They also committed to improvements in their treatment of mentally ill customers.

Disabled Brummie beats clampers
After a 4 year fight, Birmingham disabled man Lee Coughlan is over £8,000 better off this month, as a result of damages awarded by Birmingham County Court.

Lee Coughlan’s car was towed away by clamping firm Midlands Parking Contacts, and never returned after he parked on the car park of a doctor’s surgery to run an urgent errand. The firm has since gone out of business, so the Court has ordered the Doctor whose car park it was to pay the damages as restitution for the value of the car and the cost of not having it all this time.
The doctors bill now amounts to £23,000 including paying Mr Coughlans’s Court costs.

Wolverhampton in Figures
The Wolverhampton Partnership publishes a statistical survey on Wolverhampton every year.
It contains information about health, disability, employment, population etc for Wolverhampton.
You can download the newly published 2008 survey from their website here:
http://www.wolverhampton.gov.uk/council/statistics/window

Wolverhampton Council acts quickly on voting problem
In our newsletter in June, a One Voice member wrote of difficulties she had voting due to access problems at her polling station.
Wolverhampton City Council’s election officers got onto it immediately, and we received the following update in September:
“We have already been out to inspect and we have arranged to use an alternative room at the centre. This room is fully compliant; from various investigations I believe that the room used had been changed at sometime in the distant past but no one had notified us,”

Arts Unlimited
Unlimited  will provide the disability arts sector with the opportunity to develop new work for the world stage.
 The £3 million three-year programme – part of the Olympic Lottery fund- will be a celebration of arts, culture and sport by deaf and disabled people.
 
Major new works will be showcased in the UK in 2012 as part of the Olympics celebrations.
There will be a £1.5million commission fund to support the production of quality work by disabled and Deaf artists, and disabled and Deaf led arts organisations, with a training and mentoring programme for successful applicants.
Disabled artists and creative’s can get a funding application for here:
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/grants-arts/grants-arts-downloads/

HIV Vaccine Breakthrough

The US army and Thai Government have been conducting trials in Thailand on a new HIV vaccine with promising results - in 31.2% of cases the person didn’t go on to get HIV - the research is unclear on how they ensured that all people vaccinated had the same level of exposure, but this may be an encouraging breakthrough.

RADAR Guide

RADAR has published a new guide for public bodies called “Lights, Camera, Action!” - it has lots of practical tips on how to involve disabled people effectively, as required by the disability equality duty.

It includes case studies of good practivce from public bodies like colleges and councils who have used the Duty to make improvements in public services and performance and deliver greater equality and inclusion for disabled people.

You can get a copy from their website:

http://www.radar.org.uk/radarwebsite/

 ARTS

Two cds by disabled recording artists are out now—they are very different, and both worth a listen. (out editior has tracks from both on her ipod!) here’s a little bit about them....

Lizzie Emeh, a learning disabled singing artist who works with artists company Heart & Soul, released her first album this month.

Her debut album Loud and Proud was launched at the South Bank Centre on Friday 9 October, and features a range of musical styles including pop, soul, dance,and jazz.
As well as being Lizzie’s first album, its the first general release of an album by a learning disabled artist in the UK.

She wrote all the songs on the record,- because she can’t read and write she works out tunes and harmonies in her head and memorises them. Then she works with colleagues such as Heart & Soul director Mark Williams to layer and complete her compositions, she told the BBC Today programme that when she composes “I visualise Mark on the base .. and once I’ve got the baseline in my head, vocals come naturally”

You can buy Lizzie’s album from itunes, or by contacting Heart n Soul (call 020 8694 1632) Amazon will be stocking the album from 11 December.

You can check out Lizzie’s myspace page here:

http://www.myspace.com/lizzieemeh
and listen to the BBC news interview here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8298000/8298246.stm

Double Sentence by Definitely Theatre – Arena Theatre 1st & 2nd October 2009

Recently the Arena Theatre brochure arrived in the post, I always look what’s on and noticed a performance by  Definitely Theatre, interesting, so read on and was even more so when it said “When Tom Fry is sent to prison he finds himself not only being punished for the crime he committed but also punished for being deaf.  Double Sentence is a play about a young man’s struggle to be understood in a world where even the loudest have to fight to be heard.”  After asking some Deaf people I found out they were also excited about this performance after seeing the Deafinitely Theatre’s ‘Lipstick & Lollipops’ so I decided to go with my Hearing Dog, Hettie and it was great to see the Arena full and with lots of Deaf and hearing people present.

A brief background to Definitely Theatre, it was set up in 2002, it is an independent Deaf-led company which aims to promote Deaf culture, identity and pride also wants to provide a stage for Deaf stories and culture.  As their performances are in British Sign Language and English which means all can understand it aims to bridge the misconceptions on that hearing people have about the Deaf world and vice versa.

Now on to the performance, Double Sentence which was Directed by Paula Garfield and Written by Andrew Muir.  The play evolved from a report by the Deaf Cultural Centre that stated “Deaf and hard of hearing prisoners find themselves in a lonely and frustrating world, cut off from their peers and denied regular contact with people of their own culture”
Briefly the play's opening, with three speech therapists trying to get Tom to say his name, this came across as chilling and menacing and brought back painful memories for myself too of endless hours learning speech, you get the sense of brooding anger and frustration and then next scene jumps to where Tom (Matthew Gurney), a young deaf man, has been sent to prison for brutally assaulting a man and from the moment he arrives it is clear that the guards are not prepared to acknowledge or deal with his deafness; this is their world.  You see the difficulties played out how does Tom phone his mother, how does he communicate with guards but it also clever when his Psychiatrist, Anna (Emma Case) communicates with Tom in BSL but only after he learns that she has a Deaf brother that barriers start to come down and new problems arise.

The second half of the play was about reaching for goals and dreams it was here that we understand that Tom after being told that he couldn’t realise his dreams as he was Deaf exploded in violence.    This idea of achieving dreams and goals was done by introducing another Deaf prisoner named Alex (Wayne Jemmott), who has a knack of predicting winners for horse races – his prediction of a Grand National winner becomes central to the second half of the play.  It was very poignant that after predicting the winner of the Grand National also on the day of his release Alex commits suicide.

I thought the cast was superb especially Alex (Wayne Jemmott), I could follow the BSL and when hearing characters spoke read the captions above but was surprised that there was no interpreter for this also. Overall, fantastic piece of drama, please lets have more of this type of performance.  Big big thanks to the Arena for making sure me and Hettie were looked after.

Ian n Hettie

 

Holy Trinity Community Friendship Group
Holy Trinity Church Bushbury Road Wednesfield are setting up a new friendship for people of all abilities.
Meetings take place in the Church hall 11-1 on the first Monday of the month.
The group aims to:

  • Provide an opportunity for people to meet socially and make friends
  • Provide a range of activities to make the group an interesting and friendly place to come.

The first meeting was on Monday 5th October, 19 people attended and enjoyed chat, a quiz and refreshments.
The next meeting is November 2nd and we will be making some Christmas Cards, and having a bring and buy sale to raise funds for the group (you can bring things on the day if you want).
We welcome your ideas and talents to help make the group a success!
For further details phone Steve on 739053 or John on 736303.
Stephen Hopley
 Walk in the park
One Voice has a walk in West Park every Monday  that it doesn’t rain, between 1.00 and 2.00

If you want to come and join us, simply turn up at the Park Avenue Gate—by the 6 Blue Badge parking spots.

The park is looking particularly lovely at this time of the year, so come and join us to look at the autun leaves, and smell the autumn smells, while getting a bit of fresh air and exercise!

 

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