by Kaarina Elisabeth
Harriet Harman believes that unless women are guaranteed positions in government, we won't get good government. She advocates positive discrimination, already employed for race and gender by various bodies. And it can be a good thing. It makes groups feel their views are represented.
Harriet Harman believes that unless women are guaranteed positions in government, we won't get good government. She advocates positive discrimination, already employed for race and gender by various bodies. And it can be a good thing. It makes groups feel their views are represented.
Gender has little to do with ability to govern, I'm sure. However, I
wouldn't expect a man to be in charge of, say, developing policy around
women's issues. He wouldn't have the insight to do the job as well as a
woman. Strangely, though, it's perfectly acceptable for those with no
experience, besides politics, to be in charge of whole government
departments.
The result: school secretaries championing SATS tests, against most teacher and parent advice; and welfare reform that fails to address the real reasons people are stuck on benefits and can't get off them.
Local level
At local level, things are no better. Services all too often aren't structured to provide the care people really want and need. As a result, for example, direct payments have been impossible for most people with mental health problems to access, despite being around for years.
A business does not advertise for inexperience when recruiting so why does government? Each and every one of us is an expert by experience. I myself am an expert in OCD, the needs of certain carers, problems with the benefits system, and how to make scrambled eggs. Conversely, I'm no expert on drug abuse, banking, the prison service or making curry. So I'd never expect to be employed in these areas.
The Conservatives seem to have got the idea with Tory-led think-tank, The Centre for Social Justice, hiring former minister Jonathan Aitken to lead prison reform policy. Having spent 18 months locked up he's well qualified for the job. It's about time then that leadership at all levels started including people who are qualified for the job.
Disabilities
A disabled minister of disability, for example, could better understand issues facing people with disabilities. Someone who's been on incapacity benefits has a greater understanding of how the benefit system needs changing.
How many people with mental health problems are service commissioners? Or sit on Mental Health Hospital trust boards? How many making decisions on in-patient care have ever been sectioned? We will never get the policies and services we want and need until we start employing people with real understanding of the needs involved. That would be very positive discrimination indeed.
Kaarina Elisabeth* is a mental health service user and a volunteer for Mind
* Name has been altered
The result: school secretaries championing SATS tests, against most teacher and parent advice; and welfare reform that fails to address the real reasons people are stuck on benefits and can't get off them.
Local level
At local level, things are no better. Services all too often aren't structured to provide the care people really want and need. As a result, for example, direct payments have been impossible for most people with mental health problems to access, despite being around for years.
A business does not advertise for inexperience when recruiting so why does government? Each and every one of us is an expert by experience. I myself am an expert in OCD, the needs of certain carers, problems with the benefits system, and how to make scrambled eggs. Conversely, I'm no expert on drug abuse, banking, the prison service or making curry. So I'd never expect to be employed in these areas.
The Conservatives seem to have got the idea with Tory-led think-tank, The Centre for Social Justice, hiring former minister Jonathan Aitken to lead prison reform policy. Having spent 18 months locked up he's well qualified for the job. It's about time then that leadership at all levels started including people who are qualified for the job.
Disabilities
A disabled minister of disability, for example, could better understand issues facing people with disabilities. Someone who's been on incapacity benefits has a greater understanding of how the benefit system needs changing.
How many people with mental health problems are service commissioners? Or sit on Mental Health Hospital trust boards? How many making decisions on in-patient care have ever been sectioned? We will never get the policies and services we want and need until we start employing people with real understanding of the needs involved. That would be very positive discrimination indeed.
Kaarina Elisabeth* is a mental health service user and a volunteer for Mind
* Name has been altered
I concur with the essence of what the author has written, but wish to take issue with the specific content she writes regarding disabled people.
'Kaarina' writes, "A disabled minister of disability, for example, could better understand issues facing people with disabilities. Someone who's been on incapacity benefits has a greater understanding of how the benefit system needs changing."
I would argue that this argument is built upon the preconception that all people who have difficulties getting paid work on account of disability are on Incapacity Benefit. That is not the case.
I had been on unemployment related benefits for over two decades when I was appointed Green Party of England & Wales Disability Spokesperson. From the perspective of being a working-life long volunteer with a disability, the Green Party of England & Wales acknowledged that I have much to contribute to the welfare reform debate; I had long experience of how social and economic procedures and methods disable jobseekers with impairments, and yet how some impairments are really cultural constructs in themselves. Eg, slower learners can help other slower learners better than faster learners can, because slower learners may have greater affinity with other slower learners at a basic skills for adults level.
I am on Employment & Support Allowance [ESA] that has been reinstated after a written appeal from my Vocational Support Adviser [VSA] against 'Atos Medical Services' awarding me zero eligibility points on all criteria. The 'Examining Medical Practitioner' had not read the supporting letter from my VSA regarding my March 2009 application for ESA after I realised that I could no longer live on the increasingly punitive and derisory Jobseekers Allowance conditions.
On ESA, I look forward to greater opportunities to inch my way into paid work via a greater 'earnings disregard' than the £5 per week 'earnings disregard' that has attached itself to jobseeker benefits since 1988! Some mental health difficulties are largely healthy responses to a dysfunctional system, I would argue. While awaiting the result of my most recent interview for a paid job, I had a bulimic attack in response to the "Could this be the big break" anxiety I experienced. I find the process of building up relationships with learners in my ICT coaching volunteer role a far easier means of demonstrating excellence than formal job application processes will allow.
That companies like Atos have been commissioned to implement the Government's welfare reform agenda should be regarded as a cause for great concern. They and their like are motivated purely by profit and have little or no empathy for disabled people. TV programmes like 'Benefit Busters' on Channel 4 add to the stigmatising of benefit claimants, and show contempt by the 'service provider' for such a colonised grouping of 'participants'. (I know from previous experience that A4e's idea of 'confidentiality' forbids 'beneficiaries' [sic] of its New Deal Intensive Activities Period from taking induction materials off premises to peruse at the 'beneficary's' leisure!)
The system needs its head and heart examined, and the Green Party of England & Wales is onto the case. 'Writing off workfare: for a Green New Deal, not the flexible New Deal' is the Green Party response to the Welfare Reform Green Paper. 'Writing off workfare' can be downloaded from the Green Party website and is now included at the British Library. It includes a case study based on interview with the single mother of a disabled teenage daughter. Follow-up publications have been hampered by the conditions of playing catch-up with an empire-like government that abuses its dominance and sets about colonising and commoditising economically vulnerable subjects to the benefit of corporate capital. (Disabled people, their parents and carers, often have their hands tied in day-to-day living that is underfunded.)
Yet the Green Party's welfare reform agenda is qualitatively worlds apart from that of those who have no concern for people living together harmoniously, or planetary sustainability and social justice.