I’ve just got back from quite a long afternoon out and about in the south-east London, so I’m feeling slightly worn out. One of the first things to greet me upon getting back to Facebook, though, was a picture of a Torygraph headline in which a Reform candidate, Ben Delo claimed that his autism meant he cannot cope with lying, which is why he supports Nigel Farage. I won’t repost the image here as I don’t want to smear shit on my website’s carpet, but it was enough to instantly make my blood boil. The scum of Reform are obviously trying to pervert current trends to their own sickening ends. For good or ill, people are now much more aware of conditions like Autism than they were ten or even five years ago; many more people are now said to be on the autistic spectrum. Delo is now blatantly trying to exploit that trend and use it as some kind of justification for his fucked up, reactionary politics.

As a survivor of the special school system, I know how profound and debilitating Autism can be – it’s nothing to be laughed at. To see the term being thrown around like some kind of sociocultural frisby, as it currently is, was bad enough. Yet to see this wretch of a man attempt to commandeer it for his neo-fascist politics, obviously thinking that people are more likely to vote for him if he claims to have autism as they might do, really is beyond sickening.