travel injustice could not happen if we were getting listened to properly

News story from the Independent and Yahoo news:

uk.yahoo.com/news/man-hundreds-docked-wages-apos-154002072.html Man has hundreds docked from wages for boarding train without ticket, despite being in wrong city at the time.

Not an autism story, this is an ordinary person. BUT - this scenario could not happen at all, to ordinary folks, to anyone, if something arising from autism, that I have been raising ever since the noughties, had been acted on. Something that Scottish Autism meaninglessly stated only that it "noted".

That all carrying of physical documents to prove your entitlement when you travel around, is a disability discrimination, because it treats unequally all medical minority groups who have a greater than equal likelihood to lose the document by human error. This includes dyspraxics, and autistics by our condition's effect on fine motor skills and link to dyspraxia. Those medical words mean, our coordination in handling small objects is less than equally good.

If this item is acted on on the principle that discrimination items can never be ignored and that answering minority groups' needs is never a selective choice -principles that the system is only functioning honestly if it follows - then it abolishes tickets. Passes, the identity cards that New Labour wanted: it does away with all physically carried proving of entitlement to mover around.

It abolishes tickets. Passports too.

teach the teachers from the voices of all

At the now revived autism Cross Party Group in parliament, today Oct 23 the topic was education. Specifically, and nicely accountably, the follow-up to a report on rates of school exclusion, jointly by SA, the NAS, and Children in Scotland.

Among the report's list of "calls for action", enlarged on to us by Charlene Tait speaking for SA: is for more training up of the autism understanding level among teachers, and for schools. As has ever been so throughout the modern autistic scene's existence, here again the case evidence quoted and directly told by school leaver age autistics present, showed that schools widespreadly are brutally deficient in their understanding, and in their attitude towards having any.

There is a perfectly predictable explanation or that. Teachers are piece of shit tyrants by intentional design, and the authoritarian model of school is a disastrous destructive evil and one of the outstanding horrible tyrannies of history -site - Authoritarian Schooling a Catalogue of Damage.

My point given at CPG. After all the consequences they had heard of failed understanding, with even suicidality at issue, when they follow up this training up of teachers there will be an automatic duty to SHEER CHILD SAFETY, that the 3 organisations set up a facility for preventing the autism training from being incomplete by missing things. To date, clearly, teachers and schools have missed a lot of it. So they need a facility that ANYONE who has been part of an autistic school problems case can send in the itemisable school problems shown by the case details. Then the facility's responsibility would be to check whether the items are already recognised in the awareness program for the teacher retraining, and any items that are not already there, to add them in.

From anyone who comes forward with a case experience. Not just a selection of cases, which could miss something, but ALL who come forward. This proposed as explicitly being a duty to child safety. That is the govt's principle of "Getting it right for every child," GIRFEC. That is accountability. That is inclusive, against the problem mentioned by another contributor, of affected families feeling their cases invisible.

None out of 3

Besides an NAS social group discriminatorily only for aged under 35, and how is that legal? there is still no adult aspie support in Clackmannanshire. The Forth Valley's position with small council areas has left it as a void in the national coverage, left on the sidelines whle the bigger more prominent conurbations get to set up services. What about a job placing service equivalent to Edinburgh's Intowork, which should be particularly important in this economically oppressive era?

The services that Autism Initiatives has developed in a wide spread across Scotland, Borders, Perth, Highlands, are being missed in the Forth Valley. The perception of why is alarming. It is perceived locally there, that the local dominance by Scottish Autism, headquartered in Alloa, is a discouragement to AI from setting up any projects in the Forth Valley void. That the 3 national autism charities are behaving territorially with each other, allowing each other to be the big boy in certain localities and not intervening in their patch.

Who does that fail to help? The autistic folks ourselves, who are supposed to be the point of all 3 charities' existence. If SA has not set something up in that locality, which AI can set up and has done in many other places, then AI should. Ain't that common sense?

Unless the charities function by common sense and not by mutual politicking, all their supporters and donors must ask themselves who the charities actually care about? Whose interests they work in?

Maurice Frank

Covering ground

It matters to be an independent group that runs itself, not tied to any council funding nor run by the big charities. It matters because to be a genuine voice in what you say. But there is a very clear top reason why it matters, which Elas is living now. It means we are free to have no territorial boundary.

Elas has been the core of making a string of successful meet-ups happen all round the Central Belt, as recently at Perth and Paisley. In them we have put face to face reality to personal links made beyond our own region, in 2 ways.

• So that aspies within reach of us have joined us, who have no similarly independent group running in their localities: our filling of that void has been right and made a needed practical difference in several cases.
• Or, so that folks in those places where a new venture can start up cautiously, that is independent like us, can use us as a reference point and a friendly link to meet up with and share with. Supporting the free aspie scene to take root in new ground.

We can do this because nobody's office is in a controlling place to tell us to only serve folks inside a defined boundary line. Number 6 and its Glasgow counterpart the Arc have not been allowed to succeed in the same way, as what would be a good part of their service. By their state funding to serve particular councils or health regions, they have been tied into functioning only inside territorial boundaries. Of NHS Lothian's region, or of the terribly arbitrary Glasgow city boundary that is smaller than the physically real city and is often just flung between 2 houses in long streets of unbroken habitation, causing division and exclusion and pain as we have heard when visiting the West. The autism strategy is now to extend Number 6 type services to everywhere, but presumably they will still each be little islands whose users are separated from each other by boundary lines. It still won't be a cross-regional scene for folks in places of well developed service to help out folks in places of rudimentary service. But aspies organised independently to meet up can be that.

Now we hear of a new group in Stirling with the council paying Scottish Autism to run it. This arrangement again ties it to only serve the territorial boundary of Stirling, We have seen this result in exclusion from that local scene, in time of need, be experienced when resident in an adjoining council area, clearly inside the radius of having Stirling as a focal place. Incredibly ironic of SA to accept deals like this to run groups, when its own head office is in Alloa, one of the places this group is barred from serving.

In common sense care for the participants, SA should want this arrangement to be as temporary as possible. The folks in Stirling need their group to evolve to the model of running independently same as us, and as Argh in the Highlands. So that it can include folks' friends in Alloa and all the places around there regardless of what council they are in, and so it can make the same non-local links as us, maybe including with us, and be part of the growth of a speaking out scene that covers everywhere. Local groups don't need funding to exist, members just need to agree a place to meet up that does not involve expensive room booking and they are all comfortable with. Local groups by contact and meet-ups, and by folks crossing region to belong to whichever group they feel best in, helping each other to make the scene cover everywhere, is the vision. We are already starting to make this happen. It also protects our freedom everywhere to speak on problems with services and to have blogs like this, when what we want to say goes well beyond what the big charities want to say.

Remember another way these links massively importantly protect our free voice, and indeed our personal links and friendships. By our links with each other in different places we will all safeguard each other against getting trapped by any authoritarian takeover in any group, like the cautionary horror story of what happened to a group in a region adjoining us, that was run by a bigger society whose committee suddenly passed Orwellian cult-like rules misusing data protection to ban members from speaking freely to each other, before they had even had the chance to consent to this being put in place, so that it interfered in communication between friends and cut folks off from each other. A sinister story I told here a year ago, it is time to remind ourselves of it. In fact the group concerned has remained suspended from meeting ever since then, supposedly temporarily, which is now a farce. It is a clearly failed and destructive outcome to how to run a group. Compare that with the success of the total opposite model, the free model, ours.

The folks who were in that group, now unjustly adrift without an aspie scene, or who have been in any type of controlled group, have a need to find the scene all over again, but our free scene of independent groups that all support each other's members in keeping it the free scene.

Maurice Frank