Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

For a long time the music of the Pogues was an essential daily feature of my life, along with too many fags and jugs of black coffee, spiked with the odd drink or four at the end of some very long days in my trade union work during the 1980's.  Shane MacGowan was, for me, an heroic figure during that twisted time, when the rich got obscenely richer and the poor were just ignored.  He captured the rotten, twisted, poison of society then and gave voice to some profound discontent and dissent.  He articulated what it was like for so many whose lives were not just touched but torched by Thatcher.   Many a night I found myself shattered after dealing with the human carnage of yet another round of cuts, re-organisations and worst of all redundancies.  After a few beers, I would find some kind of solace, some maudlin comfort, some understanding, in the sound, the passion and the lyrics of the Pogues.

Recently, as I have been excavating my way through and under the keech which passes for what public sector bodies call workforce employment monitoring in relation to equalities, I have found my mind more and more turning to a Pogues album, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.   The cover of that album [see below] always seemed as if it was a potent comment on the toxic wasteland of society which Thatcher and her boys were creating, with those who were not part of her infamous 'one of us' cadre being cast adrift, like the crew of the shipwrecked Medusa, wondering if safe haven would ever be reached in our lifetime.

One of the equality communities I have been digging for data on is that of disabled people.  It is one of the many communities I personally identify with, along with having an ethnicity I describe as mongrel European, and one who consistently fails the ever-changing nationality tests set by government. In the NHS in Scotland, my calculations are that if all the NHS Boards employed the proportion of people - 13.1% - cited by the Equality & Human Rights Commission as being the available disabled adult working population, then across the entire NHS in Scotland there would be over 20,200 people on the payroll identifying as disabled.  The reality?  As published by NHS Scotland itself?  722.  

I shovelled around in the keech of what are the published employment data sets of Scotland's 32 councils.  They employ 254,800 people.  If they met the 13.1% level, that would mean 33,379 people being employed across all councils and happy to identify as being disabled.  The reality?  From data made available by councils themselves [19 out of 32] the average employment rate for disabled people is 2.04%.  This translates across all 32 councils as meaning there are just 5,198 disabled people employed in councils.  Yes, some 28,000 people short of being able to say that councils don't discriminate against disabled people. So while government, the media and others combine to demonise, marginalise and stigmatise disabled people as shirkers and a burden on the state, the state itself is ensuring that there are institutional barriers in place to disabled people being in work and contributing to the economy.

For some disabled people [deaf and hearing impaired] our ability to take part in the democratic process is being blocked at the very heart of that process.  Both the UK parliament and the Scottish parliament fail to provide sub-titling or signing of the parliamentary tv broadcasts from the main chambers and committees.  When I challenged this as discriminatory it was suggested that referring to Hansard was a suitable alternative.  In these days of social media enabling rapid response, rebuttal and influence on policy within seconds of such as government ministers uttering their statements, being told I can just wait a few hours and then read what they said is to be very explicitly treated like a piece of shit on the shoe of government.

And so, back to Shane and back to the Pogues.  If you want to hear how they told the story of those who had fallen from grace [drug users], listen to 'The Old Main Drag'.  It sounds like the wretched story of many people in the UK today.  I believe we are not far from where disabled people, and many others who are being marginalised and monstered by the coalition government [with help from the Sun and the Daily Mail], will be openly talked of as being a unfair burden on the state, of being somehow less than 'pure' [the cricket test], and that somehow it is all our fault.  The last verse of 'The Old Main Drag' could almost be read as as a prediction of the fate which awaits those of us who dare to be different and who are decidedly not 'one of [Thatcher/Cameron's] us'  :

And now I'm lying here I've had too much booze

I've been shat on and spat on and raped and abused 

I know that I am dying and I wish I could beg

For some money to take me from the old main drag