It's official: disabled people aren't allowed to be independent. This week, amid rows about how this country treats people with disabilities, it was announced that the government will be phasing out the Independent Living Fund (ILF), a vital stipend that allows more than 21,000 'severely disabled people to pay for help so they can live independently'. Such provisions, unlike bank bailouts and subsidies to arms dealers and millionaire tax dodgers, are no longer a priority for this administration. When I heard the news, I couldn't help but think of Jody McIntyre, a 20-year-old activist and journalist with Cerebral Palsy, who I saw batoned and dragged from his wheelchair at the demonstrations last Thursday, and who later delivered a series of epic discursive smackdowns to a senior BBC correspondent on prime time television.The press have been trying to imply that, because Jody is a revolutionary activist and ideologue who has travelled to Palestine and South America, he cannot be a 'real' disabled person - he must, as Ben Brown suggested on the BBC, have somehow been 'provoked'. He must have deserved the beating and the humiliation of being pulled out of his chair and across the road; he must have asked for it. Richard Littlejohn went so far as to compare McIntyre to Andy, a hilariously fraudulent and fatuous wheelchair-using character in the most disgusting pageant of blackface and grotesquery ever to defile British television screens, Little Britain. Like Brown and others, Littlejohn seemed to imply that because he fought back and spoke up, because he attended a protest and because he is not afraid to make his voice heard, Jody McIntyre is not a 'real' disabled person.
Laurie Penny, The New Statesman, Read more here.
