People liberate themselves

Ernesto Che Guevara
"I am not a liberator.  Liberators do
not exist.  The people liberate
themselves."

The sell-off to Serco, Virgin and other corporate vultures of the NHS in England has taken us back to a time when capitalism was only too ready and willing to make money out of the pain and misery of those people who thought twice, three and more times before calling on the services of a GP.  History will recall the coalition government's wrecking of the NHS as a shameful footnote to the time when bankers, instead of jumping out of tall buildings as they did in the Wall Street Crash, begged government for a hand-out.

The more recent slaughtering of the Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] in terms of budget, staff and functions, has left people who encounter discrimination feeling as if the only option left for them will be to jump out of tall buildings.

Alongside this, George Ian Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, who shows his contempt for disabled people by taking a shit in a toilet designated for disabled people and leaving it floating there, unflushed, presides over such a dismemberment of the state support 'benefits' system that Sweeney Todd himself would have been embarrassed at the gratuitous scale of Duncan-Smith's cutting and slicing.

Emiliano Zapata
'it is better to die upon
your feet than to live
on your knees' 

There are people and organisations who continue still to petition and lobby government to change this or that of the worst excesses they are imposing on the non-Eton educated people in the name of an economic recovery that stubbornly refuses to arrive.  Perhaps they do so as they cannot bear to contemplate the awful alternative reality - that just like George Ian Duncan Smith, the rest of the Cabinet does not give a shit, and certainly won't flush.  Even the most recent reversal of government policy - reducing the tax take on hot sausage rolls - is a risible concession which history will conjure up as the government's 'let them eat sausage rolls' defining moment.

Our choices are stark.  We can endure another 3 years of the coalition's voodoo economics which is deepening the recession, or we can, collectively, decide that the government really does have to start flushing its own shit, and the first turd to be flushed has to be the coalition deal itself. We need to accept that no political leader can do this for us.  It needs to be an expression of our collective will which makes it happen.  As Ernesto Che Guevara rightly said, 'the people liberate themselves'.  

Dolores Ibarruri

Just as relevant now to the fearsome challenges and choices we face are other echoes from our history.    In the early part of the 20th century, a popular revolution against the Diaz dictatorship in Mexico was led by Emiliano Zapata.  He is credited with the inspirational phrase 'it is better to die upon your feet than to live on your knees'.  La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri, used it in her remarkable personal contribution to the republican side in the Spanish Civil War.  The words spoke to many people then.  They took action, got off their knees, and took control of their destiny.  The call remains powerfully relevant today, more than 100 years on from Zapata.

Equality Commission being starved into surrender

Just when you thought the economy could not get any worse, that the duplicity exposed by Lord Chief Justice Leveson had already caused record levels of sewage to back-up in the rose gardens of Downing Street, and that the corruption in workfare programmes had required ever more grotesque dissembling by government ministers to pretend that they and not their grubby, greedy business friends were in control of things, the awesome power of government to gag any organised or formal dissent can be revealed.

Some of you will be aware that my passion in life is equality and human rights.  Not the theory, not the policy, and not the law, but the practical reality of how all of these combine [or more often, don't combine] to stop the daily discrimination hundreds of thousands of people encounter in this country - just because they are different.
The Equality & Human Rights Commission [EHRC] is a relatively recent creation of the previous Labour government and was given a lead role in guiding, empowering, persuading and if necessary enforcing the changes necessary to eliminate that discrimination.
Sadly, the current Westminster government has come to the view that the EHRC and its work  is nothing but a mass of red tape which holds back business growth and so is bad for the economy.  From that voodoo-style analysis, government has butchered EHRC funding by over 30% this year and more blood to be spilt in the years ahead.
When I was checking this week on the progress the EHRC was making with Codes of Practice on various elements of the Equality Act 2010, I found their web site offering this chilling posting:

Our intention was to produce a statutory code for the public sector duties in Scotland and codes for the Further and Higher Education (FEHE) sector and schools in Scotland.  Unfortunately, we are no longer able to proceed with this plan.  The Westminster Government is keen to reduce bureaucracy around the Equality Act 2010, and feels that statutory codes may place too much of a burden on public bodies.  Although the Commission has powers to issue codes, it cannot do so without the approval of the Secretary of State, as we are reliant upon the Westminster Government to lay codes before parliament, in order for them to be statutory.It is the Commission’s view that, rather than creating a regulatory burden, statutory codes have a valuable role to play in making clearer to everyone what is and is not needed in order to comply with the public sector duties.  However, as this is no longer an option, we feel the best solution is to issue our draft code as a non statutory code instead.  This non statutory code will still give a formal, authoritative, and comprehensive legal interpretation of the PSED and will make it clear to everyone what the requirements of the legislation are. The draft Scotland PSED non statutory code will be published in May for review and we will be looking for feedback on the draft texts so that we can make sure they fully meet the needs of public bodies and other potential users.

Government is hell-bent on ignoring laws which do not fit with their voodoo economics model, and will simply ignore [the rights of prisoners to vote in elections] international obligations or tear up domestic laws [parts of the Equality act 2010] which they see as an impediment to their unhinged lust for making yet more obscene amounts of money for their friends and family.  They are wilfully starving the EHRC of the resources needed to do its core job.  If the EHRC were a dog and the government its owner, people would be clamouring for action to stop this offence to humanity.  If our government are allowed to de-claw the EHRC in this way, it will not be long before we see the Job Centre+ signs replaced with 'Arbeit Macht Frei' and the mobile Dignitas vans doing the rounds of care homes and long-term geriatric wards in what is left of our NHS.

The future of equality is in 5 pieces of 4-day-long boiled cauliflower ....... and shooting deaf people

NHS Health Scotland.  One of the 22 Health Boards which are used to meet the health needs of Scotland's people.  One of the things they are big on is making sure you live longer.
They do this by persuading you to eat 5 bits of 4-day-long boiled cauliflower a day [cheese sauce optional], drink less booze [or even give it up - as long as people abroad by our whisky], give up fags [ciggies to the 'squeezed' middle -class and who always 'borrow' from other smokers], breast feed often and in public, wear hip & crotch-hugging vibrantly-coloured designer lycra when jogging along the leafy boulevards of Wester Hailes, and to stay away from shops like Greggs.
I recall when I first came across this earnest corner of the NHS a few years back.  They were uncovering data that the average man in Shettleston died a lot earlier than the average man in Barnton.  It quickly became a core part of the NHS mission that the gap should be narrowed and eliminated.  My reaction was what a cruel and perverse construct - make Shettleston man live longer so that he can endure even more years of a crap life and without the offsets of booze, fags and sausage rolls which can help fuzz the sharp edges of a bleak life.  When I voiced an alternative [shoot all Barnton men when they reach Shettleston man's age] there was a lot of sucking of teeth.
More recently and having left my labours in the vineyards that is the NHS, my attention was caught by a newspaper advert for an NHS Health Scotland Board meeting.  Buried in the classifieds, it invited those interested [if you read the Scotsman classifieds - why not on page 3 of the Sun?] in attending the Board meeting to telephone a staffer to make arrangements.  Some of you avid readers of this blog will by now know I have a hearing impairment and that landline telephones don't work for me.  E-mail and text messaging are both good options for me - and the tens of thousands of other deaf and hearing impaired people.
I emailed NHS Health Scotland's Chief Executive, Mr G McLaughlin, and observed :

• the notice takes no account of deaf and hearing impaired people like me who find communicating using the telephone either difficult or impossible, as it represents a well known barrier to effective communication.
• no other method of contacting NHS Health Scotland was offered in the notice.
• Equally absent was any indication that I or others with particular communication support needs would find NHS Health Scotland ready, willing and able to put these in place so that attendance at the Board meeting could be more than a token event in terms of accessibility.

I then asked Mr McLaughlin :

• Given NHS Health Scotland is a public sector body and has a legal responsibility to eliminate discrimination in how it works, can you please explain just why a simple thing like publishing a notice of a Board meeting and inviting attendance by the public, should find the Board discriminating against deaf and hearing impaired people in the way I have described?
• Could your explanation also touch on the fact that this form of discrimination is far from new and far from being an unknown issue to public bodies? 
• It would also be interesting to read just how an NHS Board which houses the NHS Scotland support function on equalities should fail to meet the equality duties in such a basic manner.
• Could you also please advise if the function of Board meetings has been Equality & Diversity Impact Assessed and, if so, could you please provide me with a copy?

A response did come, fairly promptly:

We recognise that the notice in The Scotsman did not offer ways for getting in contact which are accessible to people who are deaf or have a hearing impairment. Thank you for drawing this to our attention. We will address this in future notices.
Like all NHS Health Scotland events, Boards Meetings are run in line with our Events Accessibility Check List. This was originally developed in partnership with, among others, members and representatives of the deaf community. The Check List is currently being reviewed, two years after development as planned. Therefore, I have attached a copy of the 2010 edition for your reference. However, as a specific function, Board Meetings have not been impact assessed.

Needless to say I have asked for replies to my original questions and why they have not followed their own check list which calls for the offer of an email address when advertising events.

I am beginning to wonder if the accessibility and equality question is one which will only be solved by deaf and hearing impaired people shooting ourselves.

Bullying culture in our NHS

Just in case you missed it, the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Nicola Sturgeon, last week published a report into the management culture at NHS Lothian.  The trigger for this was the discovery earlier this year that NHS Lothian has been fiddling waiting time guarantee lists.

The report revealed a culture of bullying at NHS Lothian.  
The report also revealed that according to the data from regular staff surveys across Scotland's NHS, the problems in NHS Lothian are experienced by staff across the rest of our NHS in Scotland.
Just before the report was published, James Barbour, Chief Executive at NHS Lothian, resigned.
All of the Board members who run NHS Lothian on behalf of the Cabinet Secretary, and who are appointed by her, remain in place, and continue to be paid several thousand pounds a year for their trouble.  Part of their job is to hold the paid staff of NHS Lothian to account for all that they do and, in some cases, for all that they don't do.
Seems to me that the governance arrangements at NHS Lothian were not fit for purpose, if bullying of staff was allowed to go on to the extent revealed in the report and to such an extent that it directly created the environment in which data on waiting time guarantees were fiddled.  Not convinced that asking the Board members who presided over this sordid mess to clean it up is going to deliver the culture change required - they were and are part of the failed culture.
Further up the chain of accountability is the Cabinet Secretary herself.  She has been running the NHS in Scotland for a few years now.  All that we encounter in our NHS is her responsibility.  Very little of what is there now in the NHS can be blamed on the previous administration.  In all that I have read, including press releases from government, I find nothing which suggests the Cabinet Secretary accepts any responsibility for the mess at NHS Lothian and, as the report makes clear, across the rest of the NHS in Scotland.  
Three questions have not been answered in this report.
Why has the Cabinet Secretary, who has lead responsibility for creating the management culture in the NHS at the most senior levels, not accepted responsibility in any way for what has been uncovered and why has she not decided that her resignation would be the most appropriate and honourable action?
Given the adverse impact on the patient experience as a result of the fiddling of waiting time guarantees, what confidence can patients have that the bullying culture has not also impacted on the quality of patient services in other parts of the NHS?
And finally but no less importantly, why has the Cabinet Secretary not required NHS Lothian to investigate the number of staff who have been dismissed or who have resigned from NHS Lothian employment as a direct result of the bullying culture and look at options for reinstatement or at worst appropriate levels of financial compensation?

Disabled people left to flush government shit

As some of you may know, I have been signing on [since April] as one of the many millions who are unemployed.  As part of my preliminary indoctrination into the quasi-masonic rituals designed to humiliate those who dare register and seek modest levels of state support, I realised that Job Centre + could text me, bit not vice versa.  Odd, I thought.  
Being deaf I assumed that once I explained to staff about my disability, they would quickly set up a system allowing me to contact them by text messaging rather than phone calls [not always possible depending on how good/bad my residual hearing levels are].
When I raised the issue with staff at my local office, I encountered much bewilderment and sucking of teeth and out-of-the-side-of-mouth comments on the snail's pace at which the Department of Work & Pensions [DWP - an Orwellian title if ever there was] embraced IT.  Indeed on the day I registered, the work of registering was conducted at snail's pace as the network was 'down'.
Given the response, I raised a simple Freedom of Information request with the DWP.  I asked for :

The arrangements that DWP has currently in place and widely available for deaf/ hearing impaired people to use text messaging as a 2-way option for contacting (and being contacted by) the DWP generally at national level and at each local Jobcentre Plus office.
Deaf/ hearing impaired people are not always able to use phones to call and contact the DWP and Jobcentre Plus, especially in such contexts as advising that one might be late for signing on. Text messaging should be an option for them and systems need to be in place to ensure that messages are dealt with promptly by the DWP and Jobcentre Plus.
All of this would be a ‘reasonable adjustment’ in terms of the Equality Act 2010.

I got the usual response, answering questions I hadn't asked and requiring me to search through the mountain of manure to locate the essence of where DWP was at with text messaging for deaf people.

Here is some of the core response, in their own words:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is committed to providing excellent customer service. The Department does have SMS text messaging in place, however, these are one way and are used to relay messages from the Department to our customers, for example details of job vacancies and interview times. Currently, customers who wish to contact the Department will have to use either a telephone, textphone or attend the jobcentre.
The use of SMS text messaging is a relatively new service for the DWP and we are still exploring ways to maximise the use of this technology.

Put simply, the DWP has no plans to make it possible for people, including deaf people, to use text messaging to contact their local JC+ office.  There is simply no understanding of equalities and of how their structures, systems, attitudes and cultures are discriminatory.

Ian Duncan-Smith - leaves disabled people
to  flush his shit

But then this is a major government department which is run by someone [Ian Duncan-Smith] who thinks it is OK to use a toilet designated for use by disabled people and when caught leaving it after keeping someone waiting, was found to be doing a runner without even flushing it.  Speaks volumes that a government minister thinks it of no great moment that he leaves disabled people to deal with his shit, literally as well as metaphorically.

Equality & Human Rights Commission being slaughtered

Just when things seem as bad as it can get, government seems determined to unleash a plague of locusts on the support systems needed by the most marginalised and excluded people in what passes for our society.
Government decided that in order to reduce public sector spending generally it would slaughter the funding of the Equality & Human Rights Commission from the £55 million it had in 2010-11, to £26 million in 2014-15 - a budget butchering of 53%.  It has also been decided to give the EHRC £36.8 million [a massive cut of 33%] for this current financial year.
The PCS union which organises staff in the EHRC estimates that this will reduce staff by 72%, with most of them having to go by the end of this year.

Sandra Osborne

Sandra Osborne, Labour MP for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock, moved a debate on Government policy on the Equality and Human Rights Commission on 24th April.  This received an 'answer' from the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Crime and Security, James Brokenshire.  The Equalities Minister, Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone, could not be at the debate because she was on a tour of Africa - promoting equalities.  If you want to read the Hansard record of that debate, follow this link.

Lynne Featherston, Equalities Minister

Government is taking the piss on equalities and is dismantling important parts of the few protections people have against discrimination.
If you want to email Lynne Featherston and protest at the level of cuts being imposed on the EHRC, use this link.

Embarrassing Body of Equalities in Scotland

I attended yesterday's meeting of the Scottish Parliament's Equal Opportunities Committee as it took Cabinet Secretary Nicola Sturgeon for a gentle canter over her 'evidence' for them to agree a new set of specific equality duties for Scotland.
It was May Day 2012.  An auspicious date.  A grand point from which to launch the work needing done from today which would then leave us with a legacy of a Scotland, 20 years from now, where discrimination was withering on the vine of what once was rampant bigotry and prejudice.  
The omens yesterday were not good. I blogged that Nicola sounded and looked as if she wanted to be elsewhere - on the streets of Glasgow campaigning for councillors in the elections tomorrow.  There was a marked lack of passion from her for the subject of equalities.  A bored reading of her brief.  A dismissive fumbling at answers to questions from Committee members and heavy reliance on ministerial wibbling.
The morning after what was a quiet May Day, I was on my way back from the newsagents, reading the reports on the Westminster Culture, Media and Sport Committee which condemned Rupert Murdoch as 'an unfit person' to run a major firm, when I realised that my usual scanning of the newsagent's piles [of newspapers] had revealed that nothing from the fragrant Cabinet Secretary on her big equalities day out yesterday had made the headlines or front pages.
Using Google and bookmarks, I scanned the news media for any sense that the Cabinet Secretary - normally not shy of any photo opportunity in the form of opening of an envelope or switching on a piece of hospital equipment - had done the rounds of the studios extolling the virtues of the new specific equality duties, and which would have the rest of the world beating a path to Scotland to learn how to eliminate discrimination.
The Herald lead story?  Fears of a low turnout in the council elections.
The Scotsman led with how young people are [I am not making this up] amongst the happiest in Europe.  The BBC Scotland website decided that speeding up the appointment of a Chief Constable to the new single police force was the lead item.
And the Soar-away Sun in Scotland, favoured reading of our First Minister ? Teen Fling Teacher Gets the Boot was their lead story.  The Daily Record led with the care worker who fed a resident a dog biscuit.
This was getting to resemble that 'Embarrassing Bodies' programme I sometimes catch trailers for after Channel 4 news bulletins [and rush for the remote to get away from them]. I then tried a search on Google.
Using 'specific equality duties' I found nothing in the first ten hits which suggested Nicola had been media schmoozing on the world-leading specific equality duties Scotland now has.  When I made that 'specific equality duties Scotland', this too revealed that Nicola had not been hand-bagging Brian Taylor of the BBC or anyone else of her size on how all is well with equalities in Scotland.
I tried other combinations.  Nothing came up which suggested Nicola or her officials were so chuffed with the new specific equality duties that they wanted the world to know about them, and to know that it was all down to her government.  Nothing.  Nada.  Zilch.
Equalities in Scotland is, for our government, on a par with 'embarrassing bodies'.  Why not try encouraging Nicola to move over if she is so embarrassed, and let someone else do it.  

Tweet to @NicolaSturgeon

No Jaggy Tweed Revolution in Scotland

Scotland has new specific equality duties.

What Scotland doesn't have is a government Cabinet Secretary [Nicola Sturgeon] who is passionate about them or who showed on the day that she even knows that much about them.

We - 7 people in the public gallery - turned up for the start of the Parliament's Equal Opportunities Committee [EOC] session at 2.00pm.  

The very courteous security staff outside the Committee room asked me to switch off my mobile phone.  When I engaged with them on this [wondering why I could not tweet from the Committee Room] I was told that the press are allowed to tweet but not citizens.  I will need to follow that up.  I was also aware that the security staff outside Committee Rooms were in plain uniforms while colleagues on reception desks were in pin stripes.

The Committee took their time in planning their meeting.  Enough time for the Cabinet Secretary to approach the security staff and have one of those 'do they know who I am/that I am waiting here' type conversations.  They courteously assured her that the Committee were indeed aware she was there.

Sadly, Mary Fee, Convener of the EOC, had to be elsewhere.  Stuart McMillan as Deputy Convener was in the Chair and got all present settled and down to business.  This meant that Nicola Sturgeon read out a brief, offering a highly sanitised summary of how we had got to this point.  Translated roughly?  The government had again consulted widely, most people again agreed with what was proposed, there isn't really a problem, discrimination is something which only happens somewhere else, and I [Nicola Sturgeon] would rather be campaigning in the local government elections to try and win Glasgow city instead of sitting here in front of a Committee where we, the government, have an in-built majority. 

I had got my infra-red headphones at reception so that I could hear what everyone said.  Surprise, they didn't work and we were 15 minutes in before security staff managed to get me a set which worked.

There followed some very gentle questions to the Cabinet Secretary from some members of the Committee.  These were batted back by Nicola Sturgeon, either by simply reading from her brief in a tome of voice showing as much interest/passion as you would expect from the person having to recite the stations on the Edinburgh to Glasgow Central line, or embarking on a surreal existentialist wibble punctuated with some vigorous head butts and where the question was simply buried in a deluge of government-speak.  Most questioners were stunned into submission by the responses from the Cabinet Secretary.

Stuart McMillan did ask for a bit more on how the views received had been taken into account.  Wibble from Nicola.

Siobhan McMahon tried to get clarity from the Cabinet Secretary on what section 7[5] of the regulations meant, where it set out that the government would review 'from time to time' whether the 150 staff threshold in relation to reporting gender pay gap data should be amended.  I couldn't make sense of the Cabinet Secretary's wibbled response and from what I could see neither did Siobhan.

Annabel Goldie queried the lack of clarity around section 11, where government could require public bodies 'to consider such matters from time to time as was decided by Ministers'.  Nicola tried to answer this and tried to explain whether or not these 'such matters as may be specified' would need additional regulations to be brought forward.  Lots of wibble.  We left that section with the lack of clarity firmly in place.

Annabel returned with a question on section 9 on procurement, observing that it had changed from previous drafts but that it was not clear and wondered whether a public body might be prevented from accepting a bid from a voluntary sector organisation which is below bids which are deemed 'the most economically advantageous'.  Nicola struggled badly with that, wibbling furiously, and looked to her team of officials to help.  Not a lot of clarity emerged on this section either.

Stuart McMillan asked the Cabinet Secretary if during the consultation that any of the responses had been given any differential weighting.  This triggered a cataract of platitudes and cliches from the Cabinet Secretary which reassured Stuart that the consultation culture in Scotland is a national treasure and is something in which we doubtless lead the world.

Siobhan McMahon wondered what plans the Cabinet Secretary had for government's monitoring the impact of the specific duties. A rambling making-it-up-as-we-go-along answer from Nicola in which she started by saying that she expected public bodies to involve the voluntary sector.  It was yet another version of PM and FM questions - make up a question in your own head and use the answer to that to provide a response to what you have just been asked - no matter how wide of the mark it is.

Siobhan also pressed the Cabinet Secretary on enforcement of the duties, given the massive cuts in the budgets and staffing of the Equality & Human Rights Commission.  The Cabinet Secretary started by suggesting that this was an area outwith her scope but meandered on to wibblingly conclude that her contact with the EHRC suggested they would be robust.

The specific duties were formally put to the Committee by the Cabinet Secretary and equally formally adopted.

There will be no jaggy tweed revolution in Scotland - on equalities or indeed on much else.  The evidence from that Committee session this afternoon was that there is a lack of conviction that there is a problem in Scotland needing an answer in the shape of the new specific equality duties.  We have a Cabinet Secretary with oversight of equalities in Scotland who doesn't know how these specific equality duties will work in detail.  We have a public sector culture in Scotland which still thinks we are already pretty good on equalities and that there is not much more to do before we can claim the gold medal in the world equalities games.  

May Day ... and Scotland's own jaggy tweed revolution?

On the morning of May Day 2012 the media is a tad self-absorbed with the sleaze oozing across the doorstep at 10 Downing Street, and much of it having backed up in the sewers which were the channels of communication between government ministers such as the lambada connoisseur Jeremy Hunt and Rupert Murdoch.
In Scotland, we are in that part of the socialist cycle [and I have been here before] where trade unions don't 'do' May Day on May Day and instead package it around a week-end [if you are lucky] of some loose-knit cultural gig.  It is almost as if we are ashamed of the concept of organised labour and celebrating that core function of protecting people from ruthless employers.
Equality has always been part of my understanding of what trade unions were, are and must be about.  Trade unions have been, for some decades in the latter part of the 20th century, part of the bulwark against the exploitation of the weak, the marginalised, and those whose difference made them easy targets for ruthless employers.  Trade unions helped [and sometimes had to be pushed themselves] force government action on equal pay, on tackling racism, on challenging disablism, and on LGB&T equality.
Today, May Day 2012, the Scottish Parliament's Equal Opportunities Committee [EOC] will consider a proposal from Nicola Sturgeon on adopting new specific equalities duties to underpin what public bodies must do to show compliance with the general equality duty they have.  Nicola tried to get the EOC to adopt a set she put forward last year.  A small group of us [most of whom share a trade union hinterland] persuaded the EOC that they were not fit for Scotland's equality communities and they rejected the draft duties Nicola had submitted then.
I will attend the EOC meeting this afternoon, partly to check that all goes well and that there are no last-minute hitches.  But also to see if there is any sense of this being recognised by those present and by the Minister as a day from which we can - if we are minded - seize the opportunity to lay and build a legacy on equalities in Scotland.  
Can we expect Nicola to reach beyond the important but uninspiring words on the order paper and instead trigger a chain reaction across the public sector in Scotland to start Scotland's own jaggy tweed revolution in ways which will deliver real measurable changes in the lived experience of people who encounter discrimination on a daily basis?
I'll let you know when I get back.