a famous aspie does not mean all is right for us.

Let's see. You've come for a look at what aspies are all about because you heard the news about Susan Boyle? Splendid: here's what the media should be telling you. Are they?

• Our heightened physical sensitivities, including to fabric and heat, are biologically incompatible with dress codes and make them an assault on our physical wellbeing. Our existence abolishes all work dress codes and school uniforms. This has been known for years and the big charities have not been choosing to push it.
• Because some aspies find it easier to focus on the written word than the spoken, there is a correlation between aspies and child authors. There is a succession of books by aspie child authors, and there is a child cruelty offence done in long history of big charities' total avoidance and failiure to publicise that there are WRONGED child authors, like me, whose chance to write was destroyed by harmful school pressures and homework.
• With the big charities' big failings to speak for us where needed, you can see how seriously we have needed the voice developed for us, to contribute into professional awareness and policymaking, by the AUTISM NETWORK SCOTLAND, developed out of Strathclyde University and now a part of the national strategy. It's invaluable, and its creation is the great success of the scene in Scotland. So IT NEEDS COPYING IN EVERY COUNTRY. If you are outside Scotland do you think your aspies deserve not to have any ANS?
• The NAS is to be complimented on attending properly to striking off its contact list a bent autism legal service that advised me to surrender in a dispute with a council tax malpractice where I was in the right by statute law and won. There needs to be a media consumer exposee of bent services that will prey on their clients instead of stand up to councils - you want to know more, you need it publicised.
• Likewise you want to know that aspies' local groups can't be corrupted and seized control of by malpractisers bent on hushing up emotional abuses, as happened to a group near us, defunct since stood up to by an earlier post on this blog describing its malpractises: 28 Feb 2011, Invitation to an autocratically restricted group's members to escape it and join us.
• It's only the same common sense that all the details should be published of the ways we have been harmed by schools and by child psychiatry. Aspie kids not safe until these things stopped, and how do you stop them unless you have heard widely what they are? In a safely non-deletable way on paper: for it's no good putting them in an Amazon e-book where the site's lawyers reserve a power to turn round and say, no no no, delete to be on the safe side. So the media are turning their backs on child safety unless they read this and chase after these things' publishing.
• Where competitive jobsearch utterly has never worked for us, the approach that works is to have aspie employment services who talk through both our strengths and our limitations with an employer to work out a working niche for us. But more ethical accountability upon these services is needed, to prevent the malpractice of them turning round and claiming that a third party problem that arises after you are in a job is not in their remit to deal with. By obvious definition, a remit to support employment automatically includes any problem that affects the work's doability or the work environment's justice in any way. This an item I am holding Edinburgh's new local Autism Plan responsible to put right locally.

Maurice Frank

Don't let the council make it up as it goes along

From Local Government Finance Act 1992 section 81, which creates the power of council tax appeals in the Act's Scottish section:

(1) A person may appeal to a valuation appeal committee if he is aggrieved by -
(a) any decision of a local authority that a dwelling is a chargeable dwelling, or that he is liable to pay a council tax in respect of such a dwelling.
(b) any calculation made by a local authority of an amount which he is liable to pay to the authority in respect of council tax ....

From www.scotland.gov.uk/library3/localgov/ctha-00.asp "What are the grounds for appeal?"

• If you disagree with the levying authority's decision that your dwelling is chargeable,
• if you disagree with the levying authority's decision that you are liable to pay the council tax in respect of a particular dwelling, or,
• if you disagree with the calculation of your bill

You can check out the full act yourself. It states simply and clearly that if you want to appeal any disagreement you have with the calculation, any error that you personally perceive in it, you are absolutely entitled to do that. That power of appeal is written literally in the law. As aspies know, what is literally said is what is said. In the written law and the public info on it there is absolutely nothing, not a word, that says the council ever has any power to say that it refuses to recgonise your appeal's existence or to carry it out as a case, on grounds of its view of your appeal's merits. It has no power whatever to say, we don't think this is a "relevant" subject for an appeal so by our say-so you are not getting an appeal held.

It follows that it has no power or entitlement further to threaten to take you to court unless you acquiesce to this. You would then be under threat of legal penalties precisely for following exactly what the law says!! It would not be possible to rely on any law as literally meant, or to know that following it means less trouble than not following it. A system of law would not be operating, arbitrary terror would be operating instead, if a council was ever upheld in behaving this way. Over council tax appeals or over anything else ever.

The duty that public bodies have to communicate fully and effectively with us, especially with us because we come under disability equality, rules out the council inventing rules of its own that are not there in the rules issued to the public, of a nature as to let it conveniently suppress appeal cases lodged against its own actions - and for it to claim to enforce what it has invented while ignoring the actual position.

More info from within the scene:
Autism, as a recognised disability, implies a number of rights in court settings. Probably the relevant one to follow up here is to have an ‘appropriate adult’ to provide support. The courts will generally take a helpful and sympathetic view of how to help people who are vulnerable or have disabilities, so long as they are primed beforehand to understand the situation. Often what happens with autism is that there is insufficient prior knowledge provided regarding what the problems are, and the person may present superficially as not having any particular disability.

Statutory rights are conferred by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, of which the UK Government is a signatory. These include a number of general principles and obligations in relation to equality and non-discrimination (Articles 3-5), and the requirement for States to take appropriate measures to provide access by persons with disabilities to the support they may require in exercising their legal capacity (Article 12), and to ensure effective access to justice for persons with disabilities on an equal basis with others (Article 13).

The principle is that to provide an ‘equal basis’ a person with a disability requires such measures as will provide a level playing field with people who do not have a disability.

Written straight after a meeting with the council, that had to be lobbied for before it could be held!! about a dispute of this nature.

Maurice Frank

Advice Shop

The Advice Shop, on South Bridge, the council's so-called service for money problems, advertises in its own shop window that it's impartial. It's not impartial at all, and has now admitted the fact in the written minuted record of meetings hosted by social work about a complaint.

I have been fighting for years over a council tax appeal, which I repeat annually, which the council refuses to recognise as an appeal. This is obviously a money problem of malpractice - lodging council tax appeals is an entitlement enacted in law, and the council absolutely does not have the power it is claiming to exercise,. it does not have a power unilaterally to decide that any appeal should not be recognised as an appeal.

The Advice Shop will refuse to take up such a case or represent you. It is outside its powers, because it is a conflict of interest to pursue your fight against the position taken by the same council as pays their salaries. This they have openly said in answer to the complaint. How impartial is that?

But there is a deeper concern, for the ethics being shown to vulnerable groups, and specially to those with a communication problem. Advice Shop will not actually take this position of refusing until you complain against them through social work, and in my case it has taken as long as 2 years, from first contact, to reach this position. The type of case that Advice Shop now say they can't take on, at first oh yes they do take on. They take you on, on a false basis, but never actually engage with the council on behalf of your case. They try to manipulate you into giving in to what the council says. They keep sneaking that assumption into their advice, while declaring themselves not qualified to answer your reasons for holding that the council is wrong. If you stand by it and press them for a committal position on what you are saying, they will take a view against pursuing your conflict with the council's position, on the excuse of the worst-case legal risks, no matter how obviously the council's position is wrong, while continuing to refuse to take any position on the merits of your reasons for saying the council is wrong.

In effect this means they will side with the council, against you their client, and test your will to stand up to it. Then they will say, we have reached an impasse and you won't cooperate with our advice.

They won't do what they literally claim they will do. Indeed, at the time of accepting my case they gave me a form to sign to allow them to represent me, which would give them a blank cheque over what to do, and when I carefully added extra words to it to tie them only to uphold my case not retract it, they made pressurising noises and hand moves trying to stop me. I knew not to trust their agenda, from that moment on, after seeing them willing to try to make you sign things under pressure instead of you taking your time to scrutinise them first. This is a public help service towards folks in all sorts of vulnerable positions, doing this. Testing our ability to stand up to themselves, in the hour when we had come seeking support in standing up to the council!

I have established now, factually, through social work, the well foundedness of complaining of these practices. It is an ethically disturbing pattern of testing our vulnerability to manipulation in conflict with our own wishes.