Tuesday 29 October 2013

Towards Reflective Campaigning


In my family, one of my parents was a Tory and the other a Socialist; respectively one read The Express and the other The Guardian and later The Independent. I was taught to try to determine a writer’s or programme-maker's agenda and/or bias. My parents did not force me to take sides. Nor did they attempt to pooh-pooh others’ stances. Opinions and beliefs were to be respected. My siblings and I when debating were not expected to raise our voices nor use ad hominem attacks, but rather behave in a rational and reasoned manner. In this kind of background I learned: to listen to arguments and look at any evidence put forward; assess them for myself; and, conclude what I believed.

In a similar vein, it was made quite clear to us by one agnostic and one atheist parent that we were free to choose what religion or none we wished to follow.

I was also a beneficiary of what has been termed progressive education, where we were taught to teach ourselves and which imbued me with an inquisitive (some might say nosey!) mind and a life-long love of learning.

This was liberalism with a lower-case ell.

When I trained as a teacher, we were taught to be reflective: that is self-assess lessons for their good and bad points, so that this could and would feed into improved praxis. For a brief overview see this Wikipedia article Reflective Practice.

Below is one model of reflective practice, from Graham Gibb in 1988. I have chosen to highlight this model because it does include one’s emotions.


The cycle includes the following steps:

"Description   What happened?"; 
"Feelings   What were you thinking and feeling?"; 
"Evaluation   What was good and bad about the experience?"; 
"Analysis   What sense can you make of the situation?"; 
"Analysis   What else could you have done?"; 
"Action plan   If it arose again what would you do?". 

As can be perceived clear, common-sense steps.

Emotions can and often do run high, in families, in the classroom and, getting finally to my point, in the disability movement. Folk, often justifiably, sink their passion into projects and causes. However, this can blinker them to the broader picture let alone alternative routes to attain goals.

In my last blog-post on the Secret Grassroots Disability Summit, I called for more openness, so that supporters and, in the case of organisations, members can be fully apprised and informed. A political system without transparency, openness and information is not democracy. Nor is there any true accountability. The disability movement can of course choose to follow the routes already firmly trodden by political parties, those self-same politicos we are all railing against. Or, we can pursue another way, one that involves and engages disabled and/or chronically sick folk, our carers and supporters.

One invitee to the aforesaid summit described the organisation as needing several Northern Ireland peace processes at once. The kind of petty bickering, vanity, histrionics, selfishness, stubbornness and lack of sympathy, let alone empathy, for others will not help a nascent movement coalesce. All parties have to come to the table with no pre-conditions.

The United Nations could serve as a model. All nations, like family members, do not agree on issues. Sometimes one or two members might throw a strop or sulk, but generally calm down and re-start talking. All members are not forced to agree one line, the UN allows for multiple voices to be heard in the attempt to reach consensus on multifarious issues.


Given the current dire circumstances & milieux in which many disabled and/or chronically sick folk find themselves, individual campaigners, groups and organisations need to be moving towards developing a more reflective and consensual approach to dealing with issues, projects and campaigns.

Monday 28 October 2013

Secret Grassroots Disability Summit



On Friday a meeting was held at Unite Union's headquarters in London. It apparently consisted of several disability groups and campaigners. One campaigning group described it as a grassroots disability summit aka #GDS13. However, it was neither live-streamed, live-tweeted nor live-blogged. The agenda, what was discussed and what was agreed has at the time of writing, more than fifty-four hours after the meeting ended, not been published. Indeed, the vast majority of sick and/or disabled folk knew nothing of this coming-together. In other words, the summit was 'secret'.



Perhaps some may object to my use of the term secret. Per my computer’s dictionary this means that the very existence of the meeting was “not known or seen or not meant to be known or seen by others”. Furthermore, I have it confirmed in an email that the session wasn't an open meeting.” QED: secret.

Let us now turn to the term grassroots. Again per my dictionary,  the grassroots are the “ordinary people regarded as the main body of an organization's membership”. I doubt very much that the organisations themselves and prominent campaigners can therefore be justifiably described as grassroots. This epithet is therefore a misnomer, or spin as it is now commonly referred to in the vernacular.

A summit is classified as “a meeting between heads of government” or in this instance the leaders of organisations and/or prominent campaigners.

It is therefore quite obvious that a grassroots summit is an oxymoron.

From the tweeting that resulted from the lack of updates about the summit, it was revealed that the planning was ten* months in the making. When several disabled and/or chronically sick folk are dying each day - within six weeks of being advised that they are fit to work within the following six months by the much maligned and hated work capability assessments (WCA’s); when several folk commit suicide each month due to the stresses incurred including mental (stress), financial (sanctions, withholding of benefits) and physical (unable to afford food & heat); when evil stalks our land one would have anticipated all haste and effort to have been expended in reaching agreement on an early date. Certainly, to take ten months to reach agreement appears to have seriously failed disabled folk.

[Update 28th October 20.00 - this was actually a "couple" of months. The misunderstanding arose from one of the organisers' tweets.]

To make matters worse, I have heard from three separate sources privy to the email correspondence between organisations, etc. that many simply dropped out of the summit. All three used the word “egos”. In short diva-like demands, strops, fits of pique, unwillingness to compromise and so on derailed what could and should have been a meeting of those supposedly representing disabled and/or chronically sick folk. It seems, those who shouted the loudest and the longest got what they wanted whilst most of the others shied away.

By now, the reader has probably come to the conclusion that this secret summit was hardly a beacon of democratic philosophy.

In these technological times all meetings can be live-streamed (live broadcast from a telephone- or computer-camera via the internet), live-tweeted (short messages detailing the goings-on via Twitter) or live-blogged (short passages often accompanied by photographs of meetings as they progress). This September and last October I myself live-blogged Blogsummit and Blogcamp respectively and I myself am disabled, dyslexic and suffer dyscognition. It can be done.

One source has countered that the summit did not have the technological nor financial support to pursue the technological avenues. Well, did any one bother to ask for volunteers?

The aforesaid means can result in many more individuals attending meetings that they physically or psychologically could not attend. Obviously a boon to those of us who are disabled/sick and house-bound.

There is a famous disability mantra: “Nothing for us, without us!” In other words, we disabled should be involved in decisions that affect us not have them made for us on our behalf. In fact, this principle is at the root of much that is contained within the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Disabled Peoples’ Organisations (DPO’s) often cite the UNCRPD in attacks against current Government policies, but here at least have failed to heed it themselves.

I suggest that in future all meetings are open to all with a technological inlet for those who cannot attend. A list of all invitees should be made public along with details of intention to attend and actual attendance. Agendas should be drawn up and each point should be followed by those who agree/disagree/abstain from comment. Minutes of the meetings should be published as soon as possible after the event with full voting details. In this way DPO’s, etc. can be held to scrutiny by their membership and/or supporters.

What #GDS13 managed to do was create suspicion, distrust, a feeling of being patronised and mistrusted by those who supposedly represent us. We disabled are often at the vanguard of change, change that often benefits all. We can choose to behave like the Establishment - top-down, do-as-we-say - or we can develop an alternative, an exemplar of open decision-making, seeking views fromas broad a base as possible. It is up to us to apprise those who represent us of our wishes, demands and priorities.

What follows is the storify I drew together from the #GDS13 tweets of which I was aware. It is therefore not a full account. Some of the tweets have already been deleted.

**Please note there is FOUL LANGUAGE throughout!**



@blacktriangle1 @Dis_PPL_Protest @WOWpetition Morning! Are we having a hashtag?