How I spent March 26th

Based on the TUC's access info I'd planned to meet a bunch of other WtBers in Savoy Street for 11am. This was supposed to be the gathering point for disabled people to have a "safe space" at the front of the march. I have brittle bones and I was with 2 people whose joints dislocate easily so the notion of a "safe" space where we wouldn't get smacked around was pretty important for us to protest, you know, safely.

Apparently no-one hit the TUC with a clue stick. The gathering point in Savoy Street wasn't actually at the front of the march. That would've been much too sensible. They had us gather in Savoy Street and then walk through the crowd to get to the front of the march:

The pink cross on the map shows where we gathered and the turquoise line shows how far we had to walk through a sea of people to get to that "safety". Moving through large crowds as a wheelchair user is not easy at the best of times. You're at arse height to everyone else and people don't tend to look down when they move around so they walk into you, trip over you and generally leave you feeling pretty bruised. Add banners, flags and other things that feel like weapons when people hit you with them and it's even worse.

So that the TUC had us gather some distance away and then walk through the crowd where we got a bit battered was a serious common sense fail. Between the lack of logic and getting smacked around I started off the march really quite pissed off.

This was us gathering in Savoy Street looking cheerful prior to our adventure through the crowd:

This was my view of people's backs as we were making our way through the crowd:

And it's worth noting that I took this photo at a point while walking through the crowd when I had enough room around me to actually do so! I spent a lot of the time using my arms to protect my face from people's backpacks and such.

Eventually we did make it to the "special" spot:

Jack as taken by his wife Emsy

Thankfully once we'd made it through the crowd and the march set off there were no more such access fail dramas. As a result I began to really enjoy myself. The following 3 photos were taken by Emsy during the march:

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We made it into Hyde Park at about 1pm (after what seemed like quite a long human traffic jam at Hyde Park Corner). Most of us quickly nipped to the loo and then headed off to Soho Square for the UK Uncut comedy at 2. I didn't want to stick around in Hyde Park for the rally mainly because Mr "I'm in favour of cutting disability benefits" Miliband was speaking. I feared my anger at him would cause me to regress a few evolutionary steps and start flinging faeces.

I've always been disabled, but until about 5 years ago I was perfectly "healthy"; I was free from illness. For many people there's a massive overlap between "illness" and "impairment", but there's also some differences too. So I've always had a rubbish skeleton but before I acquired a plethora of illnesses unrelated to my mobility impairment I used to do that working-for-a-living thing.

I used to be a stand-up comic. Yes, I'm aware of the irony of a wheelchair-using stand-up.

On Friday evening while I was in the supermarket shopping for more T-shirts to iron the WtB logo onto a thought occurred to me: "It's comedy against the cuts. I'm doing all this stuff about the cuts to disability benefits and I have a background in comedy; I should be speaking." So I emailed the organisers and asked if I could do a short set. The reply I got back was "the line up's pretty full, but we'll try and fit you in." But in the end (and with a little help from the lovely Johann) I ended up on the bill.

This photo by Chris Coltrane who compered the gig shows what the crowd looked like from where the acts were (and makes me happy that I ironed the WtB logo onto the back of my T-shirt):

That's Josie Long performing. She opened the show. The crowd had gotten much, much, bigger by the time I went on. This CiF piece estimates there were nearly 1000 people watching the show. I wouldn't have thought there were quite that many, but there were certainly a couple of hundred.

Against all the odds I had a brilliant gig. Look, people were smiling and laughing!

Photo by Noa Bodner

If you look you can even see Mark Thomas laughing along in that pic. I'm actually quite proud of that as he is, basically, the industry standard to which all political comedy gets compared.

I say "against all the odds" because by rights I really should have died on my arse. It's 3 and a half years since I last gigged due to becoming too ill to carry on with the comedy thang. Usually if you take a break from comedy for 3 and a half weeks you come back to find your timing's a little off and your rhythm's a bit out. And I wasn't doing tried and tested material, I was doing stuff that I'd written 12 hours earlier because I only had the idea to ask to go on about 18 hours before I ended up on "stage". I shouldn't have been "in shape" enough to deal with a heckler and turn around a joke that was a bit of a dud. OK, the heckler was very nice and friendly but it's still an interruption to your rhythm and you need to regain control and come out on top with a laugh.

Somehow it was all OK. Sure, it wasn't my best gig ever but given everything going against me it went so much better than I could ever possibly have dreamed of.

In the past I used to mix up jokes about disability issues and other stuff because if I'd only talked about disability I'd never have been able to hold the attention of a non-disabled audience. But given that Saturday was such a political gig and the reason I'd asked to speak was to talk about benefits I did a set solely about cuts to disability benefits. The only reaction I was really expecting was some polite applause when I finished from people thinking "aw, wasn't that nice the disabled woman telling us about benefits." I wasn't expecting such a warm response and to come off stage to have all my friends hug me at once. It was like being mauled by an octopus, but in a nice way.

I've always thought that comedy had a wonderful capacity for education, another reason I really wanted to speak. So I was chuffed to bits when I got home to read this in The Guardian's Live Blog about the day:

I just spoke to two teenagers aged 17 and 19 who have come from the comedy show in Soho Square, and they said that what they heard there made them think more than anything they have ever learnt at school. It's their first demonstration and when I asked why they came they said they realised that the demonstration is about more than just the UK.

They can understand the connection between the shops and the banks that people are targetting and the global situation that is effecting everyone. They've heard Mark Thomas and a disabled comedian and Johann Hari speak. For these teenagers the protest is absolutely opening their minds to a much wider picture.

Noa, who snapped that pic of me in action, said:

you rocked it woman, it was FUNNY and also very disturbing to learn a few of the stories you shared. many thanks and please keep healthy and get back on stage where you belong!

I'm absolutely thrilled that I opened some people's eyes to what's going on for disabled people in the UK. There's a couple of extracts from my set in the Laugh Out London podcast.

I left Soho Square on such an adrenaline high. I'd taken a huge gamble in asking to do a set but it absolutely paid off. I would have skipped home if I could, you know, skip.

Then came the sadness. I love doing stand up so much. It's such an amazing feeling when you've got hundreds of people laughing at jokes you wrote, and Saturday was a reminder of just how thrilling it is. It's so painful that I'm not well enough to perform any more. I have good days and bad, Saturday was obviously a good day. But the sheer frequency of the bad days means that I can't book gigs more than 14 hours in advance because I can never guarantee that I'll be well enough to show up. It doesn't matter if you have a legitimate reason for not showing up to a gig, if you let a promoter down they're not going to book you again and will very possibly bad-mouth you to other promoters. I have this thing that I love doing, and Saturday reminded me that I'm actually reasonably good at it, but my health prevents me from pursuing it. And the government and tabloids really think I'd rather be stuck at home claiming benefits than out following my dreams?

The other element of sadness on Saturday night came from watching BBC News attributing the Black Bloc protesters smashing things up to UK Uncut. UK Uncut are a group of peaceful protesters who'd given me this wonderfully enjoyable afternoon of comedy in a park. And here these lovely people were being falsely accused of violence and vandalism. It was deeply disappointing.

Despite the day starting with access fail and ending in sadness I don't think I'll ever forget that chunk of a few hours in the middle where I had the best time I've had in years.

Cross-posted on my personal blog.

The Great Unheard

I won’t be marching at the March for the Alternative on Saturday, I won’t even be sitting at the static protest. My disability means that even if I got there and turned straight around I’d be feeling the effects for days, maybe even weeks or months. And in that I’m far from alone. As disabled people we have restrictions on our ability to protest that mean it is far more difficult for us to get out there and tell our stories, to put a human face on the people hit by the cuts and demonised by the press and the government PR apparat.

Previous marches have seen problems for disabled people, most visibly the brave boys in blue from the Met hurling Jody McIntyre from his wheelchair not once but twice, but even more passive policing can be threatening to disabled people. The Met is in love with the idea of kettling as a responsible form of crowd control (no matter its criticism by everyone up to and including their own Commissioner), but whereas able-bodied protesters may be able to physically withstand an indiscriminate decision to hold them in the street for hours, whether they have done anything against the law or not, many disabled people would have their health threatened, even endangered, by being held in the open. Then there’s the stewarding of disabled protesters by both police and march organisers to consider, a friend’s description of the Birmingham march sends shudders down my spine making me grateful I wasn’t there. Not because of any trouble, or overt police action against protesters, but simple cluelessness about how to make sure that disabled people are able to protest without being endangered by those charged with protecting them. Simple basics like how long the march was, where it was going appear not to have been communicated to people, and decisions were made on the fly to reroute protesters that could have endangered disabled people if the disabled people themselves hadn’t actively taken charge of ensuring everyone, whether mobility impaired, sensory impaired or whatever was able to safely extricate themselves from the situation police and stewards had created.

Sadly this cluelessness appears to have permeated planning for the March For the Alternative. There’s something badly wrong when individual disabled people are being asked to determine how many of us might turn up and inconvenience the police by being disabled in public, because the Met are clueless and have dumped that responsibility onto the TUC, who are equally clueless as to the answer, but at least know some real disabled people. Anyone else can spontaneously decide to turn up at the march and exercise their right to protest, but if we’re disabled then apparently we were supposed to fill in a form at least a week prior to the march (giving name, address and vehicle reg) in order to ensure we can be given a permit to be let through into our own private kettle. If that’s not a clear sign of our inequality then I don’t know what is. Even a day before the march it is possible to find disabled people who’ve only just been told that the coach bringing protesters from their local disabled people’s organisation won’t be allowed into Central London, that they’ll just be dumped out on the station concourse at Stratford and expected to negotiate the (barely accessible) Tube to central London on their own.

So, however many hundreds of thousands of people turn up at the protest tomorrow, remember that somewhere between one in four and one in five of the population are disabled, that those of us who are most disabled, most desperately in need of support from the government and society, have been selectively targeted for the cuts, deliberately demonised to the general public to justify them and that, no matter how many of us would want to be there, for tens of thousands of us it is simply physically impossible. We are the people hit hardest, yet least able to take our message to the public. We are the great unheard, the silent victims in the government’s war on those who don’t fit its mantra of work or be damned to you.

(And as if to emphasise my message, I’m writing this hours later than intended because my body’s reaction to a half hour trip into town to pick up a repeat prescription was to demand that I curl up and sleep for six hours).

No Alternative

So Ed Milliband has announced he wants us to tell him what we want. He says he’ll be speaking at the March for the Alternative on Saturday, yet would have made cuts if he had been in power.

It’s quite simple, Mr. Milliband, we want an alternative strategy. If cuts must be made, we don’t want them to be targeted at those least able to bear them. And that is where the Labour Party is failing us. It was a Labour government that introduced ESA and ATOS screening, it was the Labour government that stood hand in hand with the Heil, the Scum and the Vexpress in demonising those of us on IB and ESA as fraudulent scroungers and under your leadership it is the Labour Party in opposition that is still supporting those policies.

There’s no point in you speaking tomorrow, Mr. Milliband, the march is about an alternative strategy, and as far as disabled people are concerned, you and your predecessors have reduced the Labour Party to just another pale clone of the Liberals and the Tories. And isn’t that just a damned shame!

Tomorrow!

Here in WtB Towers (OK, my living room) we're getting all excited about tomorrow's march. My flat has turned into a T-shirt factory.

Should you wish to join us on the march we'll be meeting at the main disabled people's meeting point in Savoy Street at 11am. For details on that meeting point and other access arrangements see the TUC's page with access info.

Should you wish to wear your very own WtB T-shirt - the hottest fashion accessory for protesting - you can download our T-shirt logo as designed by our own incurable hippie from here. All you need to do is get your hands on some iron-on transfers and a plain T-shirt. It's A4 sized, you need to cut along the black line to separate the "back" logo from the "front" logo. (N.B. Depending on what transfers you get you might need to reverse the image before printing.)

Here's what the T-shirt looks like:

Front

Back

If you would like to hand out some WtB flyers they're also available to download. The black and white version is here while a full colour version is available here.

Really hope to meet oodles of you tomorrow. Don't forget that if you're physically unable to make it, you can make your voice heard online via DPAC's virtual protest.

The TUC, March for the Alternative and Language Discourses which Promote Exclusion.

Two blog posts were brought to my attention yesterday that really merit a post each, but I don't currently have the capacity to do that, so they will have to share a space.

Firstly, an open letter to Brendan Barber, the General Secretary of the TUC, from Disabled People Against Cuts.

This letter is appealing to the TUC to work with them to make the March for the Alternative on the 26th March, more accessible to disabled people. They point out that

At the latest count it was found that disabled people were facing fourteen separate attacks against our lives and living standards as a result of the Coalition government’s policies. What we are witnessing is our human rights, supposedly guaranteed under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Disabled People, being violated by regressive and draconian cuts to benefit and care funding.

and ask that disabled people are as " fully included in this march and rally as our non-disabled peers would take for granted".

Disabled People Against Cuts have clearly explained the numerous barriers to disabled people's participation in this event, and have as yet failed to get a response from the TUC about their suggestions of ways to improve access.

Given how horrifically the cuts ahead are going to affect disabled people's lives, it seems that we should be at the forefront of planning such protests, not ignored and sidelined.

The second is a post from My Political Ramblings about Welfare Claimants and the Discourse of Threat, and articulates really well the process of scapegoating, rhetoric and stigmatisation involved in making the cuts to disability benefits acceptable to the public. This is a really insightful and useful post, and is well worth reading.

**Edited to add, as I posted this, Lisa posted simultaneously that the TUC have now released access information. Please check her post for the most up to date information.**

(Cross posted at incurable hippie blog).

March 26 March

The TUC have (finally) released the access info for the March on the 26th of March.

As a result DPAC have officially announced that they will be taking part.

If you are at all able to make it (even if you can only do the shorter route) I highly recommend that you do; disabled people need to be seen and heard at this event. For example, if you're not a wheelchair owner but have concerns about your ability to remain upright for the march it's worth remembering that the Red Cross have a wheelchair loans service. It's also worth noting that DPAC have a page where people can find "buddies" for rallies if you think you might need some assistance on the day.

If you're really, truly, unable to make it then DPAC have also made plans for protesters to carry photos of those who wanted to be there but are too ill.

I look forward to meeting lots of you on the day.