Post by nickd on Sept 2, 2011 22:10:16 GMT 1
Are the papers now fueling a new breed of disability hate crime?
And are our politicians complicit in getting the papers to print these outrageous headlines?
We have all seen headlines like this and worse, time and time again they are being printed;- despite them being based on information which is clearly being deliberately misinterpreted before these papers go to print.
This has gone far enough, in the course of compiling information for the welfare reform car crash post on Mylegal, I have seen headline after headline, full of nothing but utter contempt for those who claim benefits for disability. I know the factual reports far better than those who are taken in by headlines like this and it absolutely appalls me that no-where near enough is being done about this. The irresponsible promotion of these headlines is fueling hatred towards those who are unfortunate enough ever to be either disabled or incapacitated. The facts, as Lord Freud knows all too well, is that it is less than 1% of the claimant count who have been found to be cheats.
But who is asking the tabloids to print this garbage and why are they not being stopped or held to account?
David Cameron, George Osborne, Iain Duncan Smith, Lord Freud and other ministers have all played their part in contributing to headlines like this. Yet when the statistical inaccuracies are exposed, little is said of their apologies, they always appear hidden behind the headlines in the small print. Why can't they be bold enough to make a proper apology and make sure it hits the front page?
How dare these papers label four million people they know nothing about as scroungers, it is an utter and most deplorable state of affairs when disgraceful headlines like this are circulated to millions of people who are stupid enough to believe all they read.
It's high time these papers went the way of the Sun and found themselves forced to shut down their wretched printing presses for once and for all.
Read this excellent article by Full Fact, who put forward what these reports really mean, then read of the all too grave consequences of how disability hate crime can lead to the worst crime of all; - the murder of a totally innocent and disabled victim.
Full Fact article
2 September, 2011
"The publication of the Office for National Statistics report on the subject of workless homes in Britain workless homes in Britain was a major story in many of the newspapers this morning.
Though the figures were covered in a range of papers, the coverage in both the Daily Express and Daily Star referring to four million “scrounging families” prompted several Full Fact readers to ask us to check out the numbers.
So what do the stats show?
The two big figures that most newspapers seem to have picked up on is the fall in workless houses by 38,000 (a decrease of 0.3 per cent) and a rise in the number of households in which no one has ever worked by 18,000 up to 370,00.
A workless household is one in which at least one resident is aged between 16-64 and is not currently in employment. The term 'household' refers to a single person or a group of people living at the same address who live together. This is not necessarily, as some papers seem to suggest, the same as a 'family'.
The ONS splits workless households into three types, unemployed, inactive and mixed. As the name suggests, unemployed houses have more than one 16-64 year old currently looking for work."
Read their analysis of it here...
fullfact.org/blog/workless_households_statistics_unemployment_welfare-2952
Guardian Article
Disability hate crime needs to be tackled
Keith Philpott was killed by so-called 'mates' because of his learning disability. In a new book, Katharine Quarmby asks what can be done to prevent this type of hate crime
The Guardian, Wednesday 1 June 2011
Keith Philpott’s sister Christine (right) with his twin brother Kevin and mother Pauline, holding their favourite picture of Keith, who was killed in 2005. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
He was a lovely lad, peaceful and quiet, says Pauline, his mother, looking at a photo of Keith Philpott as a baby with his twin brother Kevin, in her neat sitting room in Billingham, near Middlesbrough.
The twins were born prematurely, in November 1968, into a close-knit family with four older siblings, Carol, Stephen, Michael and Christine. They were diagnosed at around one with learning difficulties, and attended specialist schools throughout their childhood. Both left school unable to read or write much, but were prized locally for their handiness in repairing bicycles for children.
Christine tells me that Keith wanted to live independently after he came back from a spell in London, where he had attended college and lived with their brother, Stephen. Keith's flat seemed perfect. It was just 15 minutes' walk from his mother, and near other family members.
Keith was unemployed and filled his days with cleaning, cycle rides and visits to relatives, eating tea at his mother's house every night as he couldn't cook. But this tranquil existence was cut short in March 2005.
On 24 March, Pauline recalls, she had prepared one of Keith's favourite meals, sausages and mash, for his tea. But Keith never came. She, and other family members rang Keith's phone, again and again. Christine recalls: "It just went to voicemail, and he was never without his phone, it was his lifeline, so we knew something was wrong."
The family went to his flat and peered in through his bathroom window. They saw that the door was off its hinges and phoned the police. Officers broke the front door down to gain entry.
Inside, they found Keith's dead body. During the trial of Sean Swindon and Michael Peart for his murder, prosecutor Graham Reeds, said: "It is the pathologist's opinion that the deceased has first been intimidated or physically overwhelmed, then gagged and bound, then placed on the floor and assaulted by multiple punches, kicks, stamps to the head and face. Once reduced to unconsciousness or near death, he has then been stabbed in the abdomen in a peculiar manner producing a large, gaping abdominal wound. Bleeding may well have been the proximate cause of death."
The attack had stretched over several hours. Eventually, the two men left Keith dying on the kitchen floor. They had stolen the ring off his finger and his bicycle.
So what had provoked this vicious attack? Several months before his murder, Swindon's teenage sister had become friendly with Keith, who was 36. Reeds stressed that there was no evidence of any sexual element to the friendship, but that Swindon's sister complained to her family that Keith was sending sexually suggestive texts to her.
She, meanwhile, continued to go round to Keith's flat, to which she had been given a key, and sometimes "dossed there", according to witnesses. She smoked there, and brought boys and girlfriends to the flat.
The defence counsel for Sean Swindon, Aidan Marron, agreed with the prosecution that his sister's allegations were pivotal in the attack. He said in court: "They were accusations which were uppermost and at the vanguard of the defendant's mind when he went there on that particular occasion … [Her] accounts, did, in fact, fuel the mind of her brother."
The family had warned Keith not to associate with his new "friend" and her family, but had never thought that the nasty texts he was getting from her brother were anything but silly. They were worried that Keith was buying the sister beer, with what little money he had, and had said it would be best if she didn't have a key. But because he wanted to be independent there was a limit to how much they felt they could step in.
Swindon and Peart were convicted of Keith Philpott's murder. Swindon's sister was never charged, and there was no suggestion that she was involved in the violent attack that killed him. She lives four streets away from the Philpott family.
Over the last four years I have examined many similar cases to that of Keith Philpott, as part of an investigation into what has become known as disability hate crime.
In Scapegoat: how we are failing disabled people in Britain, published next week, the results of this investigation show that there is an even smaller sub-set of crimes – called "mate crimes" – where people with learning difficulties are groomed and exploited by so-called friends – who then go on to assault them and, in the worst cases, murder them.
Read the full Guardian article here..
www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jun/01/disability-hate-crime-keith-philpott
Far too many people are allowing themselves to become drawn in to this despicable hatred campaign. I have read many reports of how genuinely disabled people fear leaving their homes because of the attitudes of those around them, people are ending up being imprisoned in their own own home for fear of reprisal.
The physically and mentally ill/disabled have enough problems to contend with, the last thing they need is to feel ostracized from a society which should embrace, rather than alienate them.
Let none of us forget how all to quickly lives can change, those that indulge in this hatred could well find that they become victims themselves one day, how their attitude would then change.
Read the welfare reform car crash article here..
mylegal.org.uk/index.cgi?board=frontline&action=display&thread=405