Crippen Cartoons cartoons at the cutting edge of disability

You just couldn’t make it up! Not content with misleading other MPs about the so called “success” of the nine regional stakeholder networks across England, the Disability Unit have sent out desperate emails to the Chairs of its regional disability networks, begging for positive accounts of how its policies have improved disabled people’s lives.

The government’s email asks the network chairs: “We are looking for disabled people who would be willing to write up to 100 words about how they have achieved their aspirations, and if there has been a government policy that has supported them to do so.”

Disability News Service reports that it was sent out as the 13th February deadline approached for disabled people around the country to respond to the government’s national disability survey.

Professor Peter Beresford, co-chair of the disabled people’s and service-user network Shaping Our Lives, said the note sent to the network chairs was “a shameful manipulation of reality”.

He said: “Only this government could choose a time when disproportionate numbers of disabled people are dying as a result of its disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic to ask disabled people to send in accounts of their successes to bolster its own appalling record on disability issues.

“If this government wants the truth then let it commission disabled people to carry out independent research on trends in our life chances.”

Mark Harrison, from the Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance (ROFA), said the Disability Unit’s note “smacks of desperation”.

He said: “The fact that they are writing to the chairs of the networks asking for good news stories suggests to me that the feedback coming from surveys that are being filled out is not what the government wants to hear.

“They are putting a PR gloss on 10 years of grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s rights and retrogression against most of the articles of the UN convention [on the rights of disabled people].”

Read the full story in Disability News Service.

 Description of cartoon for those using screen reading software

Several civil servants are in the office of the Disability Unit. A large sign on the wall says, ‘Disability Unit – National Disability Survey team’. They are knee deep in returned survey forms all baring an unhappy-smiley face symbol. One of the men is holding up a single piece of paper with a happy-smiley face upon it. He is saying: “It’s OK guys we’ve got one positive response we can use – just ignore the rest!”