physical document stolen, no holiday, and listening to us could have prevented it

In today's Metro I was overjoyed to find that someone else, not me, had written in supporting the view favoured by me and the education reformer John Holt, that there should be no age limit on the vote at all. That everyone can start voting when they personally feel ready. You see, whenever you are oppressed, there is always someone somewhere who sensibly realises it.

But never in this world does pleasure last, before pain takes it all away again. The same Metro also told of a couple who got burgled during their wedding, and the man's passport was stolen. Despite the personalised nature of passports the burglars obviously reckoned they could do some fraudulent changing of it, and nicked it, with the result that the couple can't go on their honeymoon to Iceland.

Think about that. They are no longer allowed to do something they have presumably already booked and paid to do, because by no fault of their own a physical object has been stolen from them. For being victims of crime, victims of theft, they personally cease to be allowed to do a thing.

Then remember what I have said here several times before, about how the fine coordination and dyspraxia and attention issues in autistic spectrum conditions increases the losability of small objects like tickets, so makes it disability discrimination for your status as you move around ever to depend on your possession of any small physical object like a ticket. Like a passport too. It is a form of ticket, and it is barbarously primitive to have its losability during your holiday to be able to get you into a frightening practical crisis. Very visibly it is a form of apartheid pass book too.

There is a disability equality duty to listen to all the impacts made by any disability. If there had been no blatant evading of the responsibility to listen to the autism scene concerning this, then the issue of losable documents would already have been forced, including at a brilliantly democratising international level because passports exist. If this had been done uncorruptly, following the medical facts as far as they go, then passports would no longer exist and this couple's experience could not have happened.

Maurice Frank