Living not just surviving

Disabled activist talks about winning the battle to save fund allowing people to live independently.

The English Appeal Court has unanimously ruled that the Government misinterpreted the law when it decided to close a £320m ring-fenced fund that supports just under 19,000 disabled people to live independently.

Recipients receive an average £300 a week which helps pay for support to enable them to continue living independently in the community.

On 6 November the three Appeal Court judges decided unanimously that the Government had failed to properly consider disabled people’s views when they made the decision to close the Independent Living 

Fund (ILF) last December.

The Government was planning to reallocate the money to local authorities, who provide most social care support, but the five ILF recipients who brought the case feared that if this happened, councils faced with funding cuts elsewhere, might use the money to support other services. They risked losing some or all of their funding and might have been forced into residential care.

If this happened, the claimants argued, they would lose the ability to participate in work and everyday activities on the same basis as non-disabled people.

In the ruling Lord Justice McCombe, said that if the ILF was closed, ‘independent living might well be put seriously in peril for a large number of people’.

Sue Elsegood, a disabled activist who receives ILF funding to help pay for round the clock support, said she was relieved and elated by the decision.

Speaking to WVoN she said, “The ILF allows me to have a quality of life. It means that I can live. It means I have been able to go to university and do a post graduate counselling course.

“I can participate in the community rather than surviving within four walls. It means being able to visit my parents and my brother and just do day to day activities.

“Without the iLF my life would not be worth thinking about.

“If the ILF closed we may be left with the threat of not having enough support at home and having to go into residential care, which we all know can lead to all sorts of abuse. I was very frightened.”

The Government has indicated that it will not appeal the High Court decision, so the fund will stay open for now.

But Elsegood is clear that disabled people will have to keep fighting for the right to lead a full life.

“We are still having to defend the rights that we won years ago, and I for one am not prepared to see those rights disappear without a fight,“ she said.

She added that disabled people intended to put pressure on the Minister for Disabled People, Mike Penning, to extend the ILF to new applicants and with adequate funding to meet their needs.

But Elsegood, who plays power chair football, said the victory had encouraged some of the young disabled people she plays with.

“Lots of them are not yet old enough to be eligible for the ILF, but they want to know that in the future they can live independent lives as well,” she said.

Story published in Women's Views on News, 20 november 2013.

Review: Powder Room

Film explores the highs and lows of a good night out.

Powder Room - a comedy with an all female cast set in the private space of a female public toilet- follows a group of women on a night out in a London club.

Sam (Sheridan Smith) is there with glamorous ex-college friend Michelle (Kate Nash), who is over on a short visit from Paris with her fashion blogger business partner Jess (Oona Chaplin).

Michelle earns lots of money and has recently got engaged.  And although they have not seen each other for five years, Sam has been following her every move on Facebook.

Feeling inadequate, Sam brags about her job as a lawyer and her boyfriend Sean, but it soon becomes clear that they split up over a year ago and the best job Sam ever had was working in a cafe.

And to make matters worse, someone has spilled red wine over the back of her jeans.

By chance Sam’s best friends, sassy Chanelle (Jamie Winstone), hedonistic Saskia (Sarah Hoare) and dependable Paige (Riann Steele) are also in the club.

And despite her best attempts to maintain the facade, Sam’s cover is ultimately blown. But she also discovers (rather too predictably) that her friends’ Parisian lifestyles are not quite what they were first cracked up to be either.

Powder Room is based on Rachel Hirons’ play When Women Wee, and is the debut feature of director 

Morgan Jane (MJ) Delaney who was behind the You Tube hit Newport State of Mind, a spoof of the Jay Z and Alicia Keys hit about New York.

Although some of the characters draw a little too heavily on well-worn female stereotypes – the sensible one, the sluttish one, the glamorous one and so on, the film paints a witty and authentic picture of the pressures faced by young women today and the insecurities they feel.

Powder Room will be in UK cinemas from 6 December.

Shorter working hours will bring more equality

New book argues that a shorter working week would make us greener, freer and more equal.

Have you ever wondered why you are so busy?  Would you like more time to spend with friends and family?

A new book, Time on our Side, looks at the way we use our time and the value we put on it and makes the case for a shorter working week.

Time on our Side is a collection of essays from leading academics, put together by Anna Coote and Jane Franklin of the New Economics Foundation.

The authors argue that working fewer hours can help us achieve a greater sense of wellbeing, reduce our carbon footprint and even tackle gender inequality.

They argue that the modern world marks time in hours, seconds and minutes - universal values that can be measured in terms of money - but such an approach affords us little control over our time.

Most people work a ‘standard eight-hour day’ and if we choose to work less, we risk our future career prospects, because if we are not working for money we are perceived to be ‘doing nothing’.

Technology is pushing information at us at an ever faster rate and life is becoming a series of ‘fleeting episodic moments’. We are more easily bored, find it harder to concentrate and think deeply.

But rather than thinking that ‘time is money’ and ‘speed matters’ we should see time as a gift and  recognise that many things, such as thinking, caring for loved ones, nurturing and educating children cannot be rushed.

Time on our Side argues that wages have not kept pace with higher productivity, so we still have to work as long, if not longer than our parents, despite producing more.

Add to this a culture of rampant consumerism; this causes us to amass debts, which we then have to work longer to pay off.

Shorter hours would help society to share work out more equally, reducing unemployment. This could also lead to greater gender equality and break down stereotypes as, if men worked less, they would be able to devote more time to childcare or caring for older relatives – tasks normally associated with women.

In Time on our Side, we are encouraged to think about what it really means to live ‘a good life’.  If we worked less and had more time to enjoy what really matters, we might consume less, which would be good for the planet.

The authors call for curbs on advertising and higher taxes on luxury goods to encourage this.

Tine on our Side also offers some practical suggestions.

Workers, especially high earners, should negotiate for shorter working hours rather than higher pay.

The book suggests we could achieve a shorter working week over time if young people entering the workforce worked four days a week, and workers over 55 were encouraged to reduce their working time by an hour each year.

The book also introduces the concept of ‘National Gardening Leave’ – a shorter working week, coupled with an expansion of green spaces in urban areas for food cultivation.

And Time on our Side challenges us to think about the way we use our leisure time however we spend it.

The authors urge us to take up low carbon activities like meeting friends or playing games, activities which involve being, doing and interacting, and to cut down on pursuits like travel which tend to be more resource intensive.

But while working less would free us all up to do more of what we want, people with lots of responsibilities such as those with young children, or those with fewer resources, such as low paid workers would benefit less or even lose out.  So any move towards a shorter working week would have to go hand-in-hand with a higher minimum wage and affordable childcare.

But we may have to go a lot further to make shorter hours work for the poorest households.  The cost of essentials like housing, food and transport would also have to come down.

A study by housing charity Shelter in 2012, found that 16.5 per cent of UK households spend more than 40 per cent of their income on housing.  The study was based on figures from the EU which also revealed that Britons faced the third highest housing costs in Europe.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that households still spend significant amounts on food and transport.

Nevertheless the recent economic crisis has forced many of us to think about how we work, the way we spend our time and what really matters to us.

Having less money has forced us to think more carefully about what we need, rather than what we want, to rediscover long-forgotten crafts and to delight in simplicity.

As the economy picks up there is a danger that we will slip back into the old ways – but all that consumption will ultimately lead to environmental destruction.

As Anna Coote points out in the introduction, “the crisis provides a strong incentive to think afresh and seek out alternatives.”

Story published on Women's Views on News, November 4, 2013

Summit, platform for rapists and war criminals

Protest against David Cameron's attendance at Sri Lanka summit, says Tamil activist.

This weekend Sri Lanka will host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

Leaders of one third of the world’s population will attend. Among them, the UK's Prime Minister David Cameron.

The Commonwealth's decision to hold its summit in Sri Lanka is highly controversial.

According to the Telegraph, Sri Lanka has 5,676 “outstanding cases” of disappearances - more than any other country apart from Iraq - the Sri Lankan Prevention of Terrorism Act allows anyone to be jailed without charge for up to 18 months and there have been reports that security forces are still raping and torturing “suspects”.

In September, Navi Pillay, UN high commissioner for human rights, sharply criticised the Sri Lankan regime following a visit to the country, saying that it ‘is showing signs of heading in an increasingly authoritarian direction’.

On 15 November there will a protest outside Downing Street against the killing, rape and torture of thousands of their people by the current government lead by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, and at the Commonwealth's decision to hold this summit there.

Members of Sri Lanka’s 300,000 strong Tamil minority who live in Britain will be among the protestors there.

The conflict between the Tamils and Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhala population has been going on for centuries, but intensified in the last 30 years.

In 2008 the Sri Lankan government started bombing parts of north and eastern Sri Lanka which were controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and where the Tamil population is concentrated.

The Sri Lankan government urged Tamil civilians to move from where the bombing was to a designated 'no fire zone' and assured them they would be safe there. But as last week’s Channel 4 documentary No Fire Zone verified, once they got there government forces bombarded them from the air, killing and injuring thousands.

Since then the Sri Lankan government has banned Tamils from meeting, pulled down their temples, assassinated their leaders and hundreds of Tamil women have been raped.

Last year WVoN reported that British tour operators were advertising holidays in Sri Lanka that were commercially benefiting human rights abusers, and campaigners were urging holiday-makers to think again about where they were going.

“How can you give a world platform to someone who has committed so many war crimes and crimes against humanity?” Isai Priya of Tamil Solidarity, one of the protest organisers, asked.

Speaking to WVoN, she said, “No answers have been given and the situation has not been resolved.

“Even now people are going through as much as they did [in 2008 and 2009] so is it right to give them the privilege of having the Commonwealth meeting?" Isai Priya continued.

“When the LTTE were there the women were treated with respect, because a lot of women were in the LTTE themselves. The LTTE enforced that women were treated OK, so if any women was ill treated they would be arrested straight away.

“Since the LTTE have gone domestic violence has increased, sexual violence against children has increased.

“At first, if a woman was raped she was blamed for it. Because so many people have been affected, people now realise it is not their fault,” she added.

The controversy surrounding the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting has brought the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils to the world's attention.

But Isai Priya said that Friday’s protest must be the start, not the end of the campaign to protect the Tamils of Sri Lanka.

She is concerned that the violence will start up again after the summit is over if we fail to keep up the pressure on the Sri Lankan government.

“The government is keeping everything under control before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Summit. They don’t want to damage their image.

“But there were elections in the North recently and a Tamil political party was elected. Obviously the Sri Lankan government is angry about this. We haven’t seen their true reaction yet, but once the summit is over this is going to come out.

“The people have to hope that there is a way out. We must give them our support so they know there are people they can turn to," she said.

The demonstration takes place outside Downing Street from 4.00pm – 7.00pm on 15 November.

Please sign this petition.

It calls for an independent war crimes investigation; for the army to withdraw from all Tamil areas and stop the disappearances; for the immediate shutdown of militarised detention camps; for countries to stop arming the Sri Lankan regime; for democratic rights for all; for support independent trade unions; and for the right to self-determination.

Story published in Women's Views on News, 12 November 2013