Women in black, poppies in red

I can't remember war without striving for peace. Sisters and brothers, don't believe the warmongers. There is another way.

— Benjamin Zephaniah (@BZephaniah) November 9, 2013

On Question Time on Thursday night before this remembrance Sunday, Benjamin Zephaniah wore a white poppy, not a red one – and the BBC did their best to angle the cameras so that this would not be visible. I dropped some money in a British Legion collecting box on Friday, but refused the red poppy.

Prolifers in the UK become more American every day

Yesterday, two members of Abort67 won the right to continue to harass and intimdate women entering in a clinic in Wales. In the US this is called “sidewalk picketing” – harass enough women going into the clinic, the thinking of the prolifers is, and maybe one of the women will be scared or shocked or horrified out of deciding to have an abortion. Most women will of course just find these prolifers making a bad day even worse, but if you’re virulently prolife, that’s a win too.

If this catches on in Edinburgh, we may need clinic escorts.

Today, a group of people have written a letter to the Telegraph demanding that the legacy of the Paralympics should be – guess?

More funding for organisations that help disabled children to enjoy sport?

Paralympics and DLA

The UK government plans to cut £1bn from the Disability Living Allowance: described over and over again as a lifeline.

(In January last year, quietly, George Osborne cut funding for the mobility component of DLA from disabled people in residential care homes, since obviously there’s no particular need in David Cameron’s eyes for a severely disabled adult ever to leave the building in which they live. The Torch Relay is to pass within “easy reach” of 95% of the UK population, but I doubt if “easy reach” was estimated with disabilities in mind.)

ATOS assess disabled people to see if they’re “fit for work”.

[Update, 11 hours later: One of the people who read this and reacted to it was Kristina Veasey, who in 2008 at the Beijing Games was Paralympic Ambassador for Amnesty International.

@britishroses1 @EyeEdinburgh Article is DLA and being fit for work muddle.I was paralympian and working.DLA not to do with ability to work.

— Kristina Veasey (@tippyscarecrow) May 22, 2012

We talked on Twitter and I wrote an update: see end of blog.]

Mocking disability: the Telegraph’s hate speech

For some time now the Tories and the LibDems have been pushing the theme that disabled people are welfare cheats. This is a government-led reversal of a policy established by the previous government of tecognising that attacks on disabled people meant

people whose lives were blighted and eventually ended by the actions of an ignorant and hostile minority, either in brutal assaults or by their own hand in desperation