Disability hate crime hits record high

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This man and his government department are the only people likely to be delighted by these figures.

Nobody should be surprised by this.

The Guardian reported today (August 14) that hate crime against disabled people has hit its highest level since records began, totalling 1,942 recorded incidents in 2011, an increase of more than 25 per cent – that means it’s up by more than a quarter – on the total for 2010.

The Crown Prosecution Service managed only 523 convictions for disability hate crime during the same period – so only a little more than a quarter of the perpetrators were punished for their crime; the rest got away with it.

The number of recorded incidents has risen by 60 per cent since records began in 2009.

Just to give you an idea of what this means locally, in my own police area, Dyfed Powys, there were three recorded incidents of disability hate crime in 2009. In 2010 there were seven.

In 2011 there were twenty-seven.

This is what your votes condone.

It’s the logical result of the government’s effort to demonise disabled people and those who claim benefits on their behalf, and I think we know where government behaviour of this kind leads.

Picture the scene: A street in a typical British town, with two men walking down it. We’ll call them Iain and Chris.

Iain: It’s so much better here, now that we don’t have all those disabled people cluttering up the place!

Chris: Absolutely! With the crips gone, we’re not spending all our tax money paying for them. (Taxes haven’t gone down though)

Iain: And so much more peaceful, after we got rid of all the racial minorities.

Chris: Not half! We couldn’t keep them here – they were a threat to our peaceful British way of life.

Iain: And now that we’ve got rid of the trade unionists, we can all get on with our jobs in peace, too!

Chris: Totally! It’s so much better now that our bosses can pay us as little as they like to work in deplorable conditions.

Iain: So where are you going for your holidays this year – somewhere nice?

Chris: Actually, I’m saving up for a trip to the private healthcare specialist instead. I’ve been having trouble with my back ever since the health and safety laws were repealed and-

Iain: Police! Police! Come quick and take this man away! He’s a dangerous radical and probably a socialist! He dared to complain about our glorious New Britain!

A policeman appears. He’s wearing a jacket emblazoned with the letters ‘G4S’.

Do you really want to live in this kind of Britain?

The bare minimum – and what it gets you

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Conservative, employers, Facebook, Margaret Thatcher, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, minimum wage, Mrs Thatcher, Tories, Tory, unions

COMMUNICATING with people who have opposing points of view can be very valuable and I advise everybody to try it.

I mention this because I have been chatting with some of the folk on the Conservatives’ Facebook page, about this week’s big subject – work and working conditions. It follows my article, Benefits v bonuses – everybody’s a loser, to which some of them took offence, and I wanted to draw your attention to our dialogue about the minimum wage.

They want it dropped. One of them claimed it has devalued jobs, saying that he used to work in a warehouse, driving forklift trucks, for around £9 per hour – but when the minimum wage was brought in, the hourly rate went down all over the warehousing industry and suddenly idiots were driving trucks, taking no care in what they were doing.  If they did something wrong, they were sacked and another employed who was just as bad.

This indicates that “you get what your worth”, the gentleman said, and then asked how small businesses can be expected to survive when they have to pay a good wage, even if the person is no good.

My answer was that, unfortunately, you don’t get what you’re worth.

Employers try to pay the lowest amount possible, and in the case of these forklift truck drivers that was the absolute minimum. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys (as the saying goes) and that’s what happened – the quality of the workforce dropped.

If the workforce had been unionised, it could have negotiated for better pay and higher-quality workers. I know unions have not been very strong since the days of Mrs Thatcher – but they do have their uses sometimes!

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