This column is among the louder trumpeters of disability rights that you might awkwardly stumble across as you trawl the internet looking for pictures of Miley Cyrus. Barely an entry goes by without it venting at some wretched wrong-doing by the able bodied community who are, as regular readers will know, a villainous rabble. But it draws the line at this bloody bus row.
Now a proper journalist would review the facts of the case in great detail. However, I stopped being a proper journalist around 2001 so let me summarise for you. Some time in the recent past it was declared lawful that disabled people should be given priority over people pushing prams when it comes to blagging the pitiful amount of accessible space on offer. Then it was decided that actually, no, that is a lot of old nonsense and the pram-pushers were favoured. Notwithstanding the fact that you could never create a bus big enough for the pram pushing population of Thatto Heath, it is my duty to report that this latest decision is being challenged again by the disability rights campaigners. In particular, one disability rights campaigner who scored the Paralympic level own-goal of allowing himself to be photographed boarding a bus with his piss-bag sticking out of the bottom of his trouser leg for all to see. Now tell me how he gets priority?
So anyway the point I am making is that despite being a disabled person myself, and one who spends his life crusading for the rights of such people, I am against the idea that all disabled people should be given priority for the aforementioned pitiful amount of accessible space on offer. Some of us just should not. I have experienced all too often that awful moment when the bus driver, who is already confused about who should get priority it seems, makes some poor girl with 13 children move from her seat so that I can reverse into the space, being careful to place my head against the headboard and apply the brakes on my chair which exist only in the minds of the able bodied. It’s embarrassing and it will serve only to demonise the disabled population with young mothers in particular. What red-blooded male wants to be demonised by young women anyway? I say we are demonised enough. You have the space, love, I will use the fucking allowance that the government pay me to have a motability car (for which I am exempt from paying insurance), and we will all get to where we are going anyway. If I want a drink I will use yet more of my benefit or, Heaven for-fucking-fend my WAGES to get a taxi.
As I suggested this does not apply to all disabled people, just the likes of me actually. Yes there are people who for whatever reason can’t just jump in their mobility car and drive themselves to wherever, or who have trouble persuading that most common sufferer of back injury, the taxi driver, to help them into the back of their hire vehicle. Perhaps those people have a case to be given priority, but for it to be spread across the board and to be applied to all disabled people is loony leftism of the worst kind. The kind of strange, woolly thinking which leads to Mario Balotelli being punished for an anti-racist tweet in his second language while the institutional racism he has to endure in his daily life goes virtually unnoticed by the shitclowns at the FA.
Now wouldn't the answer be to provide more access for buses, and spare everyone the legal wrangling over who gets the last crumb on the island before we have to start eating each other?
This blog was written in 10 minutes at the end of a working day and you can’t half tell.
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