13 July update on Disability News Service top stories

The Kwug Blog editor knows that today is 14 July, but the actual publication day of Disability News Service was Thursday 13 July and Thursday is that publication's regular publication date.

Latest Stories

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  July 13, 2017 0 Activists set for ‘David and Goliath’ fight to defeat assisted suicide court bid
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  July 13, 2017 0 Government’s UN response ‘exposes failings on disability convention’
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  July 13, 2017 0 Inclusion London set to test social model job support, after £775k grant
• 
  July 13, 2017 0 Osborne shares ‘discriminatory’ cartoon ‘that breaches his own code of conduct’
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  July 13, 2017 0 Project aims for inclusion and a collective voice for ‘spoonies’
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  July 13, 2017 0 Labour silent on access for disabled MP excluded from debates
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  July 13, 2017 0 DPAC set for week of protests over social care, Atos and access to transport
• 
  July 13, 2017 0 Purple boss raises concerns over Disability Confident accreditation
• 
  July 6, 2017 0 New disabled MP accuses government of ‘eugenics’

Disabled people's housing crisis — a case study

Last month this blog republished an article from the Open Democracy website about the housing crisis facing disabled people. Today in Swheatie's inbox an email from the Children's Society serves as a classic case study into how Right to Buy legislation and the privatisation of formerly common ownership housing — council housing and social housing — emphasises the fact that the economic, physical and social barriers that turn a person's impairment into a disability (Social Model of Disability) are made worse under capitalism. (Capitalism tends traditionally to only regard people as producers or consumers, though maybe these days it values investors more — however unfairly or illegally their capital is generated?) As stated in Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia:

The social model of disability is a reaction to the dominant medical model of disability which in itself is a functional analysis of the body as machine to be fixed in order to conform with normative values.^[1] The social model of disability identifies systemic barriers, negative attitudes and exclusion by society (purposely or inadvertently) that mean society is the main contributory factor in disabling people. While physical, sensory, intellectual, or psychological variations may cause individual functional limitation or impairments, these do not have to lead to disability unless society fails to take account of and include people regardless of their individual differences. The origins of the approach can be traced to the 1960s; the specific term emerged from the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

The message in my inbox was headed, 'My blind granddaughter needs a place to live', and heralded a Care2 petition.

action alert! When my little granddaughter Amelia was 11 weeks old, we found out she was blind. She and her family need to find a new place to live very soon so she can develop to her full potential. Amelia Is Blind and Needs a New Home Now! please share it helps!     Dear [Swheatie], We found out my little granddaughter, Amelia, was blind when she was just a young baby and was not looking at things. She is a year old now and making progress every day. We want to do everything we can to help her develop to her full potential. That's why Amelia and her family urgently need to move into a new house as soon as possible. Professionals in the vision impairment team as well as health care professionals have told us that Amelia's current home is unfit for a blind baby. Because the house is privately rented, Amelia's parents are not allowed to make the kinds of adaptations that would help her so much. The house has massive steps made of Yorkshire stone that are impossible to adapt to meet the legal requirements so a blind child could go up and down them safely and learn about the outside. The upstairs banister has gaps that Amelia could fall through. The window sills have sharp edges, not curved ones that would be far safer as Amelia learns to explore her surroundings. The floors must be replaced with laminated ones so it would be far less dangerous for Amelia to move about in her walker. There are so many little things that need to be done to create a home that is safe for Amelia! But my daughter, Amelia's mother, cannot make a single one of these changes without permission, which takes weeks and weeks to get. Amelia can only benefit from a council house or housing association house as it would be possible to have adaptations done quickly. Health professionals and a local councillor support our requests for a new house for Amelia. But North Yorkshire Homechoice says Amelia's family does not qualify for urgent rehousing because they already have a home. They do not understand how inappropriate, and unsafe, Amelia's present home is for her and why she so desperately needs to move into a new one. Once Amelia maps out the house where she currently lives, it will be tremendously difficult for her to adjust to live elsewhere. If Amelia's parent were given a new home by one of the housing associations in our area, my little granddaughter's quality of life would vastly improve, with huge ramifications for her future. Tell North Yorkshire Homechoice and Craven District Council to provide Amelia and her family with a new home immediately! Thank you for taking action, Lianna T. Care2 Member

At the root of this problem is a crisis in disabled people's housing exacerbated by Right to Buy legislation, government non-investment in social housing, and an out-of-democratic control global housing market. This has been referred to already on the Kilburn Unemployed blog and is often spoken of at public meetings by Revd Paul Nicolson, who is now Chairperson of Taxpayers Against Poverty. See his September 2012 blog piece, "It's the land economy stupid."

Councils and judges too often talk about 'proportionality' in terms of the needs of individuals when housing waiting lists are huge. Yet disability equality trainer Michèle Taylor points out that the word 'requirement' is more empowering than 'need': 'requirement' connotes rights and responsibilities.

Will you, like me, sign this Care2 Petition?

Myelin and Deep Practice are good, but question CBT

Daniel Coyle's 'The Talent Code' has some useful ideas but should not be a blueprint for education, says Swheatie of the KUWG

I took good advantage of my recent break from London and from Internet by gaining some perspective on things regarding personal development and what I had learnt through life and am learning. 

The Talent Code: Greatness isn't born. It's grown'

 
In the Monday-14 July to-Sunday 20 July lead up to my departure and up till Wednesday morning 23 July, I was reading 'The Talent Code: Greatness isn't born. It's grown' by Daniel Coyle. (I ordered that through my local independent bookshop.) My cue for ordering it was a reference on youtube where a musician was talkingabout the importance of 'deep practice' as emphasised in 'The TalentCode'. The book talks about the newly emerging scientific understanding of myelin as an insulator of skill-related circuits in the brain, and its role in people developing 'automaticity' through hundreds of hours of practice. 'Deep practice' is where, say, a musician goes through a piece they have already practised, and takes each phrase and slows it down to a point where they no longer make errors. I have also found deep practice to be very helpful in, say, my:

• silent explorations from string to string of baritone ukulele, acoustic guitar and classical guitar, so that I could, say, more clearly identify the string my parallel fretting fingers were on by the gauge of the string under those fingers
• going beyond the physical motions of following the musical tadpoles with hand-eye-coordination, to developing a greater capacity to 'hear the notes' in my head and mimic them with my voice
• etc.

Coyle's book emphasises the perspective that there is no such thing as an 'overnight success' and that talent is developed through hours and hours and months and months and years and years of practice, and that practice leaves its mark in the brain's development of myelin to insulate skill circuits: “Skill is insulation that wraps around neural circuits and grows according to certain signals.”

I took my baritone ukulele away with me as a more portable travel companion than either classical guitar or acoustic steel stringed guitar. The first four strings of the baritone ukulele are tuned the same as the first four strings for either guitar. I also took with me the self-reappraisal that I am a persistent person with a learning difficulty rather than an unmusical person.

Where it comes to my musical development that perspective adds to my drive to practice. Re myelin, ageing and skill development, Coyle notes, "As one neurologist pointed out, the mantra 'Use it or lose it' needs an update. It should be 'Use it and get more of it.'"

Michélé Gallucio, my Information and Communication Technology (ICT) course leader at the now defunct Camden Itec noticed my persistence as a learner in 1997/98 as I went beyond the jobcentre-funded period totalling 18 weeks, to complete my NVQ Level 1 in a total of nine months with continued help from Camden Itec, before I went on to a more frustrating time at a more robotised establishment called Direct Computer Training when the local Training and Enterprise Council refused me further funded training at Camden Itec. (They said that they did not want learners to become 'institutionalised'. While TEC and jobcentre practice was to reward profiteers who short-changed learners, I say that the local TEC could not stand the idea of learners taking real charge of their learning and rewarding excellence.) Thus through maintaining my connection with Michélé, I got his support in writing a letter to my mum to help persuade her to buy me a PC on which I could further my study of ICT.

Thus I am transferring what I have learned through self-directed learning with the guidance of training manuals on a home PC that I would not have been able to afford on Jobseekers Allowance. From 1998 to 2011 I consolidatied my ICT skills learning through self-directed learning projects and through teaching [other] slower learners very basic computing skills. Learning guitar and musicianship via self-directed learning with manuals and half-hour per week, one-to-one tuition with a patient guitar teacher. In my 61st year I now have a goal of attaining some sort of Grade 1 certificate in guitar within a year.

Cause for concern

In some ways though, I find Daniel Coyle's book deeply disturbing for the wrong reasons. In the early chapters there is a hint of the potential of this new science of myelin in exploring the biological basis of certain impairments/diseases/disabilities. And yet in all the stories of the 'talent hotbeds' the author has visited, the intricacies of involving disabled fledgeling talents is never really considered.

Further, I find the chapter 'How to Ignite a Hotbed' more disturbing than inspiring. I take the viewpoint that the so-called 'Knowledge Is Power Program' is, as its critics have stated, more 'Kids in Prison Program' in that it does not really encourage independent thought and veers instead toward robotising children through a 'college is all that there is' view of life's goals. Instead it uses group coercion as I witnessed on 'New Deal Intensive Activity Programme' at A4e Holloway in 2008. Thus it is little wonder to me that “KIPP received a $15 million donation from Donald and Doris Fisher, founders of the GAP clothing store.”

In the 'Epilogue: The Myelin World' chapter, Coyle goes on to venerate Albert Ellis and his 'Cognitive Behavioural/Behavioral Therapy' (CBT) at the expence of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Thus he limits the scope for examining, say, the impact of physical, economic, and social structures that turn a person's impairment into a disability. A psychoanalytic approach would also help to reveal why something is important to a learner, especially an introverted learner who does not merely take on board the values of the social matrix into which they are thrown. I also point out that some people, through devoting far too long in the scale of things to their chosen discipline, have become unhappy and frustrated in other areas of their lives.

The dodgy well-springs of the rationale behind neo-liberal welfare reforms

I have already expressed concern on this blog regarding 'Happiness guru' Lord Layard's delight in CBT and his view that 'work makes free'.

And above I have pointed to Coyle's failure to address the matter of accommodating disabled learners in 'talent hotbeds'. Yet I am reminded with the references to CBT, that there is a dodgy rationale behind the 'Work Capability Assessments' used by Atos Healthcare for the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK and formerly used by another 'disability denial factory', the American disability insurance company Unum. That is known as the 'bio-psychosocial model' and has been swallowed wholesale by investment banker turned Tony Blair's 'welfare reform guru' who is now the Tory Welfare Reform Minister Lord Freud. That 'model' conveniently overlooks matters of social class that allowed, say, Lord Nelson and Sir Winston Churchill to accomplish what poorer disabled people would not. Beyond this blog piece, you can read about the 'bio-psychosocial model' and how it compares with the Social Model of Disability here.

About the authors:

Swheatie of the KUWG is a lifelong learning disabled adult. He has recurring nightmares of 'lagging behind in coursework on courses that are not sufficiently welcoming to learning disabled people, due to lack of investment in disability equality.

Four years on from 2009 publication of 'The Talent Code' and eight years on from being ghost writer for Tour de France cycling champion, Lance Armstrong, in 2013 Daniel Coyle went on to publish a book about the cycling hero's drug taking practices.

Swheatie of the KUWG questions the wisdom of 'happiness Guru' Lord Layard

Swheatie of the KUWG questions the wisdom of 'happines Guru Lord Layard

Chris Blackhurst in Monday's 'Independent' praises economist turned 'Happiness Guru' Lord Layard — Richard Layard: "Money is not the only thing affecting people's happiness." Layard reportedly has the backing of multi-millionaire and Prime Minister David Cameron. Yet I believe that this is a key quotation of that economist-turned 'Happiness Guru' who seems even more of an economist in his pursuit of 'happiness':

"In the 1980s, I worked with Stephen Nickell on employment. There was complete confusion about unemployment, its extent and its effect. My best book was Unemployment, which said you could have lower unemployment if you gave more help to unemployed people to get them into work, and made that help conditional on them trying to get work. That became the basis of the European 'Welfare to Work' approach, and Labour's New Deal."

I also reckon that Layard has an obsession with what is measurable. Measurable by whom and on what terms? He loves CBT [Cognitive Behavioural Therapay] because it is so 'measurable' in terms of its 'success'. But CBT is very superficial and does not really address the deep underlying issues involved in a person's distress, a close friend who is now a retired psychoanlaytic psychotherapist and who I once accompanied to her signing-on at the jobcentre or unemployment benefit office in the days of the Thatcher Government. She knows that a lot of 'standard' value jedgements are baised by the economic privilege and, say, sexual orientation of their creators or progenitors.

The interplay between society's non-understanding and failure to accommodate a person's impairment[s] can also lead to the distress of the person living in a disabling society. (That awareness is the basis of the Social Model of Disability.) 

Personal distress can lead us to seek creative outlets for what we are feeling/expereiencing even while a coercive and disabling society tells us to get on with 'business as usuall' so as not to be 'a burden upon others'. (People who 'step out of line' regarding the 'conditionality' of 'welfare to work' approaches are now increasingly subject to punitive and debilitating benefits sanctions that can do little to improve their mental health. Does Richard Layard stop to consider that in his equations?) I believe it is a mistake to think that artists undertake their projects simply to 'make ends meet' financilally and/or satisfy an external 'audience'.

Too much of Layard's rationale comes down to a 'cost/benefits analysis', I would argue, while he does not seem to recognise that being unwaged is distinctly ifferent from being 'unemployed'.

But for me, this life peer lost a lot of credibiity when he was so hopeless at answering my question at a TUC/Guardian conference about economic justice a few years ago that he was greatly relieved when the person chairing that session — who happened to be the Guardian's Economics Editor — gave short shrift to that question. The question was about the mental health of full-time family carers committed to a minimum 35 hour week for £53/wk Carers Allowance as carer to a person on middle or higher rate Disability Living Allowance. See, eg, Gary Vaux' criticism of 'the Cinderella benefit'.