Badge Of Dishonour

This week’s access rant blog comes in the wake of news from Nottingham of another brilliantly under-thought scheme aimed at making life easier for disabled travellers. That’s people with a disability who use public transport, not people with a disability who knock about with the Fury family.

Finding room on buses as a wheelchair user is an age-old problem. Well, I say age-old. It’s a problem that has existed for about as long as buses have been accessible. I could boringly recount to you again how long it took Emma and I to get a bus home from Liverpool after the 2005 Champions League victory parade but I won’t because this column is about accessibility and not the validity of the penalty that eventually levelled the scores at 3-3 when Xabi Alonso knocked in the rebound from his own botched spot-kick. And that is surely where we would end up if I started riffing on the subject of 2005 and its European Cup Final.

Happily since then accessible buses have become a much more common sight, but space within those accessible buses is still scarce. There are times when the seats which fold up to create space for a wheelchair are taken. Quite often the driver will humiliate you by asking the person occupying the seat if they wouldn’t mind shifting their clearly non-disabled arse to another part of the bus to make some room for you. But if that doesn’t happen then as the wheelchair user you are left to either squeeze in wherever you can fit or else risk the wrath of your salt of the earth community by asking someone to make way for you. There is a reason why disabled people and parents with prams don’t get on. It’s a war zone out there. The modern update on Ben Elton’s famous double-seat stand-up routine.

To combat this the good-to-middling brains of Nottingham have come up with a badge scheme. There are two types of badge aimed at addressing the issue. One is for the non-disabled to wear which carries a message that they are ‘happy to move for you’ when they are occupying an accessible seat, and the other is for the disabled person to wear which rather mortifyingly asks ‘please offer me a seat’ if there aren’t any free. You are way ahead of me if you have spotted that wheelchair users already have a seat. It is a space we require. Semantics are important, but maybe this is more for those who have no need for a wheelchair but who have enough mobility problems to make clambering to the one empty seat at the back of the bus a problem. Yer nana for example.

The thing is that the wearing of badges has arguably as much of a negative stereotype attached to it as the use of wheelchairs or walking aids. For me it conjures up images of schoolchildren who have just managed to swim 25 metres in their local pool for the first time, boy scouts who have learned to tie 740 different varieties of knot, or loud centre of attention juveniles who want everyone to be made indisputably aware that ‘I AM 10!’. Adults don’t tend to wear badges, apart from that Portsmouth fan that Sky Sports were so fond of when Pompey were in the Premier League.

Despite my reservations the move has been met with a mostly positive response from disability campaigners, though they did point out that the need for people to wear portable requests for common courtesy on their apparel is ‘sad’. What baffles me about it is that in 2019 we have decided not to tackle the problem by designing transport with more accessible features staffed by people with a keener sense of how to make sure there is room for everyone, but instead to develop a way of making disabled people look like victims. Or to make the non-disabled stand out for offering a simple slice of decency. Badges are an acute embarrassment to me, but they are a source of pride and indicator of achievement to others. Vacating a seat that you should not really be using in the first place is not an achievement. It is not your 25 metre swimming badge.

Fortunately I drive so I will have little cause for wearing any kind of badge on my travels, except on the increasingly rare occasions I go out drinking. My most regular beef is not with accessible seat botherers (though they are villainous) but with drivers who continually use disabled bays without ownership of a badge that is anything approaching blue. One such little dweeb was on Twitter recently boasting that he arrived at his local supermarket at 5.30 in the morning and decided that it would be fine to park illegally in a disabled bay. The logic here was that there are 30 disabled bays and that the chances of 30 people who need disabled spaces turning up at 5.30am is low.

There are obvious reasons why this is wrong including the mind-blowing concept that he has failed to grasp of disabilities that you cannot necessarily see. But the biggest reason is that it assumes that disabled people don’t need to be going to certain places at certain times. It is still generally accepted by able bodied society that it is ok to make disabled people book assistance 24 hours in advance to use a train because after all, nobody who has a disability will ever need to go anywhere on a whim, will they? Assistance, by the way, can be defined as one member of staff plonking a portable ramp down on the ground so that you can board the train from platform level. If they didn’t lock them all up on station walls or on trains then you could probably pick the fucking thing up and do it yourself.

Again though, this is society deciding what is best for us. They lock them up on walls and on trains for the same reasons that they lock disabled access toilets. Namely that the general public can’t be trusted not to vandalise and ruin them if they are easily accessible. This fear may be real, but its effect is to rob us of our independence. I would happily piss into a broken toilet if it was a choice between that and having to ask Miss behind the bar if I can go to the little boys room. Many of us have radar keys but again the onus is on us to acquire them to make facilities genuinely accessible. If you are wondering, the official line on radar keys is that they will set you back £4.50. This is not a lot of money but if you lose them at the rate that I do then it all adds up. This is a tax on my bladder and nothing else.

Maybe one day in public places in Nottingham you’ll be able to get a badge that says ‘I need a wee’.

TV Talk - Manifest

I’ve been at the box-sets again. I watch far fewer TV dramas than I used to. That’s probably been the case since I bought the iPad that I’m using to write this piece right now. It has led to a healthy increase in the amount of reading that I do. I haven’t reduced the amount of sport that I watch so the one thing I have done less of is TV drama. I still have half a series of Killing Eve and an entire series of Big Little Lies on the planner.

Given that I devote less time to watching TV dramas something really has to pique my interest to get me to tune in. An intriguing premise maybe, a standout cast or a dramatisation of a film or book I’ve previously enjoyed. This happened recently with Manifest, an NBC drama which aired on Sky One. Unfortunately though not surprisingly it did not live up to my early hopes and expectations of it.

The premise is the hook. An aircraft takes off from Jamaica bound for the USA (where else, this is television drama after all) and goes missing. Five years later it reappears and lands. The killer twist is that for those on board it has only felt like a few hours. During the flight they experience some fairly terrifying turbulence during which the lights go out and the oxygen masks drop but once that is negotiated it seems to them like an otherwise uneventful flight. They disembark expecting to go about their business as usual only to find that five years have passed. The world has moved on around them. They have all been presumed dead by their families who have aged five years while the passengers have not. It’s a bit like living in Wigan only to step outside the boundaries of the borough and realising that it’s actually 2019.

There are hundreds of passengers on your average commercial flight from Jamaica to the USA so Manifest decides to keep its focus on one family. TV and film do not give a shit about anyone but those central to the plot. The Stone family are not all on board the time-shifting flight. It’s over-booked (no wonder Thomas Cook went under if this kind of travel balls up is common) so Grace, wife of Ben Stone and mother of twins Olivia and Cal, offers to catch the next flight with their daughter and Ben’s parents. Cal has leukaemia so takes priority, meaning his father has to travel with him and so be split from Grace. Also with Ben on that first, soon-to-be mysterious time-hopping flight is Ben’s sister Michaela.

It’s an incredible set-up but it all goes wrong from there. Even at 16 episodes it is a stretch to believe that the writers could come up with a reasonable explanation for the five-year lag, resolve all of the personal and relationship conflicts which arise and cunningly set it up for another money-spinning series. In the end they don’t try, settling instead for a resolution to some but not all of those conflicts but leaving the question of what happened to flight 828 to cause it to flash forward five years unsatisfactorily unanswered. All of which makes you feel like you have wasted about thirteen and a half hours of your life. At around 50 minutes per episode it turns into a longer haul than any flight you’re ever likely to take. Longer even than the one I took with American Airlines from Manchester to New York during which they had to rip the doors off the toilet to make it possible for me to spend any pennies.

The acting doesn’t help. The actress playing Michaela is Melissa Roxburgh and while she has every right to appear stressed under the circumstances her permanent hangdog expression starts to grate. Ben is played by Josh Dallas whose bio informs me that he was in Thor. I can’t say I remember his role in that but his performance here makes it even harder to imagine. He treats the Stone family crisis like Cliff Huxtable and Mr Drummond treated the teenage angst of the kids in their care. Let’s just talk it through and everything will work itself out. It won’t Ben. Least of all the plot which as we have established the writers have no intention of resolving until the last dollar has been squeezed out of the concept at the end of series 7.

In the end it all feels a little bit too much like Lost. If like me and 98.4% of the population (probably) you saw that show before seeing Manifest you’ll probably view the latter as an inferior tribute act. One of Lost’s strengths before it entered really disturbing levels of batshit craziness was in how it tied all of the numerous characters’ back stories into the air crash/island plot. There’s none of that with Manifest which dispenses with the diverse ensemble cast of its predecessor to focus solely on the Stones. Others on the time-hopping flight get involved at various points but with nothing like the same depth. Overall none of the characters, not even the Stones, do enough to show how inexplicably losing five years of your life in a single night might affect you.

I should have watched those still to be viewed episodes of Killing Eve and Big Little Lies from the planner.

Mass Debaters

Apparently there was a debate on TV last night. Whatever it was, the ITV shit show featuring Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was no more a debate than my wheelchair is a moon buggy. It was not remotely serviceable for the task in hand.

The phrase ‘Prime Minister Boris Johnson’ is still absurd some four months on from his arrival into Number 10. It sounds like a line from a dystopian novel. It has probably only managed to stay within manageable levels of shock value due to the presence of the even more preposterous Donald Trump in the White House. After that anything seems plausible. Liam Gallagher to become a social worker? Sure. Prince Andrew to present next year’s Children In Need? Maybe not. But we’re heading in that sort of direction if an absolute fucknugget like Johnson can be PM.

The problems with the whole production were numerous but principally the stumbling block was that only Corbyn clung to the naive belief that he was there for an actual debate. The fact that only the two main parties were invited to be represented should have sounded the alarm bells that this was going to be anything but a grown up discussion about policy. Foolishly, Corbyn had prepared reasoned arguments about his plans to make society fairer, improve public services and in particular the NHS. Meanwhile Johnson merely shifted every question thrown at him back on to the subject of Brexit. A word that didn’t exist four years ago is now the one most commonly uttered by the most powerful man in the country. Whether the hand-picked yet supposedly diverse audience members questioned the pair on health, education, taxation or the decision to dispense with the services of Mauricio Pochettino Johnson merely repeated the same mantra. He was like a ‘talking toy’ only instead of saying ‘to infinity and beyond’ or ‘there’s a snake in my boot’ he repeated ‘Let’s Get Brexit Done!’ when someone pulled the string in his back.

It’s actually quite shrewd of Johnson to avoid debate on policy. It allows him to perpetuate the bumbling man of the people con that he has been pulling since his hilarious appearances on Have I Got News For You, and also spares him from having to explain his cruel austerity policies which are killing people as I write this. Or go into detail about his sinister plans to sell off parts of the NHS to Trump. He also is observant enough to have noticed that as a nation we have become weirdly obsessed with Brexit to the detriment of all other policy discussion. The fact that the 2016 referendum result could not be delivered on without crippling the economy has fired up the defenders of democracy to the absolute max. The problem is that these witless slabs of gammon know as much about democracy as Eddie Hearn knows about humility. The referendum was advisory and always had to go through parliament. That is how democracy works. Threatening to ‘punish’ your local MP for not implementing the supposed ‘will of the people’ is a berserk position. As I said in my last piece, you will get the government you deserve if you do that.

But back to the moon buggy - I mean the debate - which was not helped by host Juliette Etchingham’s inability to guide the discussion. She spent much of the hour trying to stop Johnson waffling on, while whenever a genuine debate did threaten to break out she insisted that it was time to move on to the next topic. Which of course as far as Johnson was concerned was Brexit. Always Brexit. It may have been more palatable if his repeated promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’ was even realistic. The other thing that the baying hordes of Leavers don’t seem to understand is that despite Johnson’s claims that he has ‘a fantastic deal’ to leave the EU by the end of January the reality is that he has a withdrawal agreement that is several shades worse than the one secured by robot dancing wheat botherer Theresa May. That one was voted down several times by MPs but now, in their bid to stay in favour with Prime Minister Boris Johnson (eek! that phrase again) 650+ careerist Tory tossers have pledged to back it should the worst happen and the Conservatives win a majority. When they do so we will crash out of the EU with a deal but a shit deal. There will then follow literally years of trade negotiations with whoever we can find who is willing to deal with us and our mop-headed psycho Premier. Yes, including the EU nations.

To sell his idea Johnson actually uttered the Brexiteers’ stock catchphrase ‘take back control’, once more perpetuating the myth to gullible Little Englanders everywhere that we are not currently responsible for our own policy making. From the same school of non-thought comes the insistence that remaining in the EU would mean we would have to join the single currency (created in 1999 yet still not the currency of the UK) and that we would also have to forego our own armed forces to participate in the new EU army plan. Now you might think that being in a European army was a good way of ensuring that you never have a military conflict with another EU nation but that offends the sensibilities of the poppy fascists who actually believe that brave soldiers fought and died in order to force everyone to remember them in the same way using the same emblem and to Hell with anyone who might have suffered at the hands of British military activity. Soldiers aren’t all bad, of course, but they are not all good either. War generally is A Bad Thing but there is nevertheless a significant number of flag-hijackers who think you are unpatriotic if you don’t want to nuke at least six Muslim countries. In any case, a European army featuring British forces is no closer than you are to needing a wallet full of Euros when you visit your local pub to pay for all that beer made by.....Europeans that you are being taught to hate by the likes of Johnson and Wetherspoons Wazzock Tim Martin.

Johnson is a liar. He again made claims that his government are funding 40 new hospitals when the number is closer to 6. He boasted about putting 20,000 police back on the streets but aren’t they the 20,000 police that the Tory austerity regime took OFF the streets? This is the school bully nicking your lunch money and then handing it back to you years later as a ‘gift’. Lies, lies, lies from Johnson wrapped around the biggest one of all that he can Get Brexit Done without ruining the very economy that he alleges is most threatened by Corbyn.

In the aftermath the biggest criticism of Corbyn appeared to be that he didn’t wear a pair of glasses very well. Never mind that he wants to end poverty, revitalise the NHS, invest in better education. It’s all about the way his glasses made him look, an eerie parallel to the way Ed Milliband ate a bacon sandwich did for his hopes in the 2015 election. This is where we are now as a society. Four weeks between now and the General Election doesn’t seem like nearly enough time to turn around our fortunes. Still...at least we will Get Brexit Done.

We Will Get The Government We Deserve

Like me you may have missed every single 6.00 news bulletin for the last few weeks because you don’t want to miss House Of Games. Nevertheless you will no doubt be aware that there is a General Election looming. With TV personality turned pound-shop Donald Trump Boris Johnson having failed in his bid to drag the UK out of the EU without a deal by Halloween night, the other parties have agreed to take him on as he bids to recoup some of the 437 MPs that he has sacked for disagreeing with him since taking over from dancing dunce Theresa May just a few months ago. December 12 is the big date, which will apparently be the first winter General Election since Laura Kuenssberg was impartial.

As much as it is an opportunity for the bumbling, mop-haired cretin Johnson to bolster his ranks in the House Of Commons it is also a chance for us to finally get rid of this dismal government. The problem is that with Jeremy Corbyn in charge it is highly unlikely that the Labour Party will win. Even their own voters are turning against them amid allegations of antisemitism, non-committal dithering on Brexit and fears that his policies are a little bit too left wing and radical. The country can’t afford it, they scream, while ignoring the fact that tax evasion and the ludicrous bonuses paid to the already sickeningly wealthy are what is actually crippling the country. All of this is added to by the standard media-driven bile that Corbyn is ‘unelectable’. He is unelectable if the papers keep telling their millions of sponge-brained readers that he is unelectable.

Of course the reason we are approaching a third General Election in four years is Brexit. Soon after pig-fancying gobshite David Cameron snatched power from Labour in 2010 the Tories introduced legislation that meant that the full term of an elected parliament should be five years. Previously it had been four with an option for a fifth depending on how likely the incumbent Prime Minister felt that a General Election victory might be at the time. Despite this legislation the Tories have called two elections since Cameron made his contribution to history in 2016, calling a needless referendum on the UK’s EU membership without first offering anything approaching a debate on the subject. That decision has brought us to the brink of all-out civil war. One side accuses the other of refusing to respect the ‘will of the people’ while the accused fire back with their own allegations that leave voters had no idea what they were voting for at best and that at worst their vote was motivated by xenophobia and outright racism. In addition the Leave campaign was mostly built on lies scrawled on the side of a bus. There may be good arguments to leave or remain in the EU but we haven’t heard a single fucking one of them above the din created by these two warring factions.

If we can have three General Elections in four years how is it that we cannot have a second referendum on the UK’s EU membership? It is quite clearly bonkers to witter on about democracy when arguing against a second referendum only to then call another General Election. Leave voters counter with the argument that the wishes of their 2016 vote haven’t been carried out but that is to ignore the fact that parliament has spent three years doing absolutely bugger all else except try to work out a way to pass Brexit legislation that won’t destroy the economy. What Leave voters failed to understand is that the referendum was advisory, and that MPs would still need to pass the legislation through parliament for it to become law. That is how democracy works. I have every sympathy with Leave voters who believe that they are not being listened to but this goes back to the point about having the referendum before the debate. We had to make a decision about our EU membership without knowing anything of the complexities of Article 50, the Customs Union or the effect on the peace process in Northern Ireland. It was only after Leave won an unexpected victory that the politicians started to ponder these imponderables. It is no wonder that a large number of them backed away from the precipice when they found out what it really entailed. And yet still we seem to be holding on the dogged and stupendously dim idea that the result of a referendum in these circumstances should be legally binding. We have reached peak Brexit when the man on the street, when warned that leaving the EU could mean that he won’t get access to the medications that he needs to survive can only retort that ‘Leave Means Leave’. There are actually people out there who are stupid enough to not mind very much the idea of dying as long as the rest of us are forced to suffer with them. In the meantime, while all of this failure to secure a sensible Brexit deal has been going on piffling issues like health, education, transport, human rights, the environment, defence and cultural issues have been left to rot in the in-tray of MPs. While we are busy arguing about which course of action will turn the country to shit in the quickest time the country is turning to shit before our very eyes.

The greatest trick that the Johnsons and Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world have pulled is to convince us that we’d be better off after Brexit. It wasn’t long before that rather bold claim became something closer to ‘it’ll be ok in the end’ until now some kind of moronic reminiscence of Second World War Blitz Spirit has kicked in. If we survived being bombed to shit by the Nazis in the 1940s we will survive Nissan moving to Belgium or wherever it might be. Romanticising the Second World War in this way is an affront to the people who lived through it and especially those who fought in it. They didn’t fight for our freedom so that we could become an insular set of fucktards with the intellectual capacity of Isabelle Oakeshott. What is worse is that the vast majority of people going on about the Second World War as if it were just some character-building period of mild hardship were not around for any of it. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but Geoffrey Boycott springs to mind as an advocate of this kind of thinking. The same Geoffrey Boycott who was born in 1940 and so has memories of the Second World War which are restricted to potty training and just about taking on solid foods.

It will be difficult, but if you can find anything in the pre-Election debates other than Brexit you have a pretty stark choice on a variety of issues. On the one hand you have the Eton-educated posh boys who are set to get rich off Brexit while you bear the consequences, and on the other you have a Labour leader who wants to rein in the greed of the rich so that a higher standard of living and better quality public services will be available for all. All of which flies in the face of the absolute bullshit theory that all politicians are somehow ‘the same’. If they were all the same we wouldn’t have the NHS for starters. The Tories deny that they are trying to sell off the jewel in the UK’s political crown to that orange buffoon Trump but who believes them? I read on social media today that Jeremy Corbyn is the one trying to get rid of the NHS which, for all the faults of the train-dwelling lame duck Labour leader is a pretty out-there theory. He’s a socialist. He certainly is not going to endorse the idea of forcing people who are already financially challenged to stump up a few hundred thousand for their cancer treatment. Johnson on the other hand has publicly stated that if we had to pay for the NHS and health care in general then we would all ‘appreciate it more’. Those who could afford it might appreciate it more. Those who cannot will literally die in hospital corridors if we go down that route.

It is not only the NHS that is under threat. Austerity politics is having a thunderous and devastating effect on many people in their every day lives. Yesterday there was a story doing the rounds about a disabled woman who had been deemed not quite disabled enough to qualify for a motability car. That is quite common under this government to the point where we have reached the rather shameful stage of becoming desensitised to it almost. Yet this story caught everybody's attention. This wasn't just some old timer with a bit of a limp that right-wing plebs might shout 'snowflake' at (for that is the limit of their vocabulary in an alarming number of cases). This case is something else altogether. She has bone cancer and a fucking prosthetic leg! Tory austerity politics are literally killing not only disabled people but poorer people as I write this. But sure, politicians are all the same. Have a word with yourself.

Look it is not really my business how you vote or indeed whether you vote at all. I just wanted to check in with you today to remind you that on December 12 we will get the government we deserve. Either we take some positive action to get rid of this cruel, self-obsessed bunch of fuckwits currently running the country or we will allow them to continue unchallenged. Corbyn is far from perfect and I suspect that Labour won’t win a majority as long as he is in charge. The saddest part of it all is that if Labour had a more moderate leader, a middle of the road type figure who knew how to handle the media and how to cultivate a more positive image they would wipe the floor with the worst collection of right-wing fruit loops since Thatcher’s reign of terror in the 1980s. Yet even if we shouldn't expect an outright majority for a left-wing or even centrist party there might be a chance that we can salvage some sort of coalition between those parties who are a good deal less psychotic than the Tories.

The alternative is to let far right ideas which have been on the rise since the referendum continue to gather pace. If you think that is fanciful then ask yourself why such an esteemed organisation as the BBC, built on impartiality, continues to give a platform to the likes of Nigel Farage, Tom Harwood and Oakeshott. Farage has failed to be elected to the UK parliament on no fewer than seven occasions and yet still manages to convince one of the world’s leading broadcasters that he is worth listening to. He’s a man who barks loudly about the tyranny of the EU while, you guessed it, actually making his living out of being an elected member of the European Parliament. The same European Parliament that he would have you believe is undemocratic and should be disbanded as soon as possible. If he gets his way and the UK leaves the EU he is going to have to find another topic to barf on about on the BBC or on LBC Radio otherwise his tweed wardrobe won’t be getting stocked for a while.

If we are talking about pandering to right wing cranks Question Time is especially guilty here. What was once a sensible and enlightening topical debate show has degenerated into a right wing shit-show led by uber-Tory host Fiona Bruce. Her mask of impartiality slips so often on that show I keep waiting for her to stand up and deliver a full hour monologue on the greatness of Thatcher. I'm not basing this on any recent experience of watching to be honest because I gave up on it weeks ago.

It isn’t just the Beeb though, with most TV broadcasters having been guilty of taking the racist filth spewed by Tommy Robinson far more seriously than is warranted over the last few years. He’s just an EDL white supremacist who thinks he has the right to prejudice court proceedings with his vile message of hate. Yet somehow he is also a household name. How the fuck does he even get a platform? This is where we are in 2019. Meanwhile in the written press Rod Liddle has just created a storm by suggesting in his column for The Spectator that we should hold the General Election on a day when Muslims would be prevented from voting for religious reasons. This is bigotry and nothing else. By the way ‘Boris’, your Prime Minister, was editor of The Spectator until 2005. Make of that what you will. Just don’t tell me that all politicians are the same.

We have less than six weeks to think about this. Irrespective of the Brexit outcome we have to decide whether we want to continue persecuting the poor, sick and the disabled for the benefit of the wealthy or whether we want to go down another path. It might not be much of a choice given the shortcomings of Corbyn, but let’s be clear. It absolutely is a choice. You will get the government you deserve.