A year ago I was lucky
enough to take part in the Paralympic Torch Relay. In my hand I held
the Paralympic flame, it was meant to symbolise a change of
attitudes in the United Kingdom, towards disability. Disability was
meant to be tackled by society as a whole and not just by disabled
people.
Despite this hope, many
disabled people are despairing about the changes to disability
benefits and feel that instead of being inclusive society is
marginalising them through the use of language such as “scrounger”.
For some disabled people politicians are not to be trusted because
instead of helping to improve disability rights through welfare
reform, those rights are being taken away.
That trust can be
rebuilt by seeing disability as a positive thing. Today in the House
Of Commons there will be an Opposition Day Debate on the impact of
the government policies on disabled people. Some MPs will use
examples of their constituents to show how government policies are
hurting instead of helping disabled people and I'm sure I will find
this debate very depressing.
So how can the UK
government cheer me up? The answer is take me for a beer or at least
give me access information in England and Wales about where I can get
one. In Scotland I campaigned for and got a change in the law so that
all new licensing applications have to say what access for disabled
people their facilities have. This change was supported by all
parties in the Scottish Parliament and the licensed trade. Such a
move by the UK government has the potential to not just help the
disabled people, but people with young families or limited mobility
and help the licensed trade. The whole point of the legislation was to improve access information not to say all pubs have to be accessible.
Toby Perkins the Shadow
Pub Minister through a written question asked if the UK government
have any plans to introduce similar legislation and the answer is no see
here . I hope they change their mind and
if they do I may just buy them a drink
