I must say how concerned I am about government plans for disability living allowance. While I think it safe to say that Lyn an I fall well over the threshold for qualifying as needing state benefits, I have come across, in some quarters of the disability sphere as well as outside of it, a notion that too many people are claiming it who are just lazy. While I have come to expect such tosh from the political right, would you believe I have heard fellow crips starting to suggest some people claiming to belong to our community shouldn’t, and are jumping on the political bandwagon yet have no experience of ‘real’ disability, whatever that is.

I have no idea how widespread such views are; I hope they belong to a tiny, easily ignored, minority. The ,moment one disabled person starts casting doubt on a fellows’ right to call themselves disabled is the moment our community begins to fragment from the inside, and that must not happen. A forty year old with CP has no more right to call himself a member of the disability community than a twenty-five year old diagnosed with bipolar last year, simply because they didn’t go through the hell many crips went through in the 70s or the special school system. Such thinking is just plain wrong; I find it abhorrent, and, while I know freedom of speech is sacrosanct, part of me says that such voices must be countered lest they be taken as something other than the tiny, ill-informed minority they are.