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
Showing posts with label discrimination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label discrimination. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Friday, February 10, 2012
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
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
Monday, February 28, 2011
Invitation to an autocratically restricted group's members to escape it and join us
Elas is open to all spectrumites who can reach us and want to, any radius, and we go visiting the aspie scene in other places too. All who want to link up with an aspie scene where folks communicate freely across region and groups are democratic and uphold personal wellbeing with everyone getting their say. That is the aspie scene we want, and folks beginning to network across Scotland want too, and all spectrumites with important stuff to say want it.
We extend a standing invitation to all folks on the spectrum who are unhappy with groups of a less free nature, to link up with us. Nobody must feel stuck in a group that is not the right type for them just by where they live. There is a disturbing case happening in an adult aspie group in a region near us.
There is a group where all the deciding power belongs to the chair and committee of a broader autism society also working with kids. The society set up the group, and in that society the chair, who until recently was also the founder, has always been the dominant leader, the committee following like sheep. So the group's members don't have their own direct say in how the group runs, what practices it follows. Imposed on them from above like that, as a "code of conduct", they are not allowed to communicate with each other, using contact info given in their contact list, for any other purpose than to arrange social meet-ups. Unlike Elas they never do arrange meet-ups, either: how can they feel close enough to each other to do that with all their contact censored? How is such a ban enforceable, it has been asked? Data protection law, designed to fight spam and junk mail, can be misused to set conditions like this to what types of messages folks consent to receive using their data. But in that group, the trap comes from how this rule was first imposed. It was announced to be in effect without advance notice, before its contents were even declared, and before the members had any chance to make known to each other their own consents to receive other types of messages. So they can't make that consent known to other members who have not already consented to them to have it made known to them, and who for the same reason can't make that consent known either. So any 2 members are trapped in a vicious circle of neither being allowed to open up closer terms of contact with the other.
Members have been cut off from each other, and from receiving info from outside the group by email from other members. The leader hence holds control of what they receive. This Orwellian rule was introduced openly for the purpose of preventing members discussing with each other anything going wrong with the group, without having to go through the leader. Needless to say they have no blog like this one: they have always been welcome to use this one but did they know? Consider too that in this now low attendance and socially dead group whose meeting last week was actually abandoned, it is clear that a large proportion of the contact list is of lapsed or ex-members, yet their ability to contact each other or the remaining members or be contacted by them remains under the same restraint. They have no say over it, if they even realise it is happening. Elas's response to the autism bill consultations contrasted that model with our open and decentralised model. Watch out for this if you are joining or visiting any aspie groups in central/south Scotland: do they follow Elas's model or the other group's?
The problem society has also appointed a spokesman for the ruling committee on all issues to do with the contact list and banned all contact with any other committee members about those. Are you keeping up? Layer upon layer of paranoia. No sensible thinker can feel safe in an organisation that behaves like that: like a cult, tying you up in gags on talking about what is happening to you and hogging all power to the leadership. How are we going to retrieve our fellow spectrumites entangled under these tricky controls they have never had proper opportunity to consent to? Is that the challenge to its legality that will break it? we have that committee spokesman already questioned thus. This should concern the whole rest of the scene in Scotland, the free scene as it may now be worth calling it.
2 members of Elas used to also belong to this other group, and as a part of Elas's far wider success in keeping socials going it used to have some contact established with one of the other group's members. All swept away now. That is really helpful in defending and growing the scene's wellbeing, eh?
The group's trouble began when a member X, volunteering at an ecology centre, recommended another member Y to do the same. When the ecology centre discriminated against Y for being a victim already and rejected him, X brushed it aside and defended the ecology centre's discretion to do it and refused to take any stand against it. Y as a result made a complaint that X should not do support work, including for teenagers, in that autism society, and the bully-hurt of being expected to endorse that as part of life in the society. He tried to overcome prolonged hurtful noncommittality from the leader and force the right outcome on its moral merits by an email to the group members. This issue could not even arise in an independently organised adult group like Elas that is not tied to a bigger society and/or to endorsing any support work. If an X/Y situation happened in Elas, Y could just cut off speaking terms with X and not be pressed about it, and could tell the story and be deemed the justified hurt party, and X might have the brass neck to stay around but would not impinge on Y's life in any way.
The problem society's committee has defended and sided with X, this being paired with the ban on members discussing its merits as justice, and answered an inaccurate rewritten version of Y's complaint with a pile of personal attacks on Y that making the complaint was aggressive and constituted not caring about anyone. This when Y had obviously cared about fair play in the ecology centre's community, and when they made no comment at all about what had happened to Y in a previous workplace.
They ranted like the Tea Party extremists in America who don't believe in autism at all, saying aspies must not lobby for any special treatment at all, and must take "life's disappointments" as they come without lifting a finger to anticipate and prevent an unfairly big share of "life's disappointments" or else they are to blame for "expecting problems." They defended X as "being realistic". These are a rejection and denial of the same organisation's whole history and all the care which the parents in it have argued with schools for and expected this society's support against getting labelled arguers or troublemakers. It contradicts the whole principle of a support scene and the whole idea of supported employment services like Intowork, it is a harsh right wing attitude that we should go back to sinking or swimming in a neocon economy geared to reject us, exactly like before we were known to need any different at all. The committee spokesman accompanied this with reckless defamation threats against Y making any outside criticisms of the society at all no matter what happens inside it: say anything to the outside world and you risk being criminalised and going to jail. (Yet defamation is civil law, he had not even realised.) More sinister behaviour like a cult, constituting an attempt to blackmail through fear and to enslave a person into a control trap and into fearful silence. It has no force: it is an established part of fair civil life that an organisation's ideas and practices can be criticised on merit, accountably to factual accuracy.
Now, you would think it is important to challenge every member of the committee on whether they are behind this or are spoken for by it. No no, can't have that - contact with the committee about it, except the spokesman, is also banned !!! How then does Y even tell anyone else in the committee if the answers to issues never raised show that the complainer has been wilfully misrepresented, hence defamed indeed, to the committee? If the spokesman can imtimidate the person he is writing to, like Y, like this, then the same intimidation hangs over any committee members who step out of line. This kafkaesque tangle of bans on who may contact whom and about what, has grown into a monster. It allows no way to find out whether all the committee are behind any decision or spoken for by any answer and no means for dissenters to be discovered or to advertise their own existence. In such a situation, to set out these obvious facts in public and not succumb to the undemocratic threatening into silence, is actively a duty of not defaming the committee members: any of them might not be behind the shockers hissed in their name and might be gagged and in fear. The only way to see that nobody is under control and in fear of speaking, will be when that whole society that has so tragically chosen power against long lasting friendships and by it has collapsed into this horrifying condition, breaks under the self-inflicted cumbersomeness of its own barminess and falls apart.
But all the innocent members in it must be able to get out without having the aspie scene lost to them, and to find refuge in the rest of the scene unintimidated and no longer obeying any of that cult regime over who they may contact. Join us, or use us as a base to bypass that controlling society and to reestablish your local scene in a form with free contact again.
We extend a standing invitation to all folks on the spectrum who are unhappy with groups of a less free nature, to link up with us. Nobody must feel stuck in a group that is not the right type for them just by where they live. There is a disturbing case happening in an adult aspie group in a region near us.
There is a group where all the deciding power belongs to the chair and committee of a broader autism society also working with kids. The society set up the group, and in that society the chair, who until recently was also the founder, has always been the dominant leader, the committee following like sheep. So the group's members don't have their own direct say in how the group runs, what practices it follows. Imposed on them from above like that, as a "code of conduct", they are not allowed to communicate with each other, using contact info given in their contact list, for any other purpose than to arrange social meet-ups. Unlike Elas they never do arrange meet-ups, either: how can they feel close enough to each other to do that with all their contact censored? How is such a ban enforceable, it has been asked? Data protection law, designed to fight spam and junk mail, can be misused to set conditions like this to what types of messages folks consent to receive using their data. But in that group, the trap comes from how this rule was first imposed. It was announced to be in effect without advance notice, before its contents were even declared, and before the members had any chance to make known to each other their own consents to receive other types of messages. So they can't make that consent known to other members who have not already consented to them to have it made known to them, and who for the same reason can't make that consent known either. So any 2 members are trapped in a vicious circle of neither being allowed to open up closer terms of contact with the other.
Members have been cut off from each other, and from receiving info from outside the group by email from other members. The leader hence holds control of what they receive. This Orwellian rule was introduced openly for the purpose of preventing members discussing with each other anything going wrong with the group, without having to go through the leader. Needless to say they have no blog like this one: they have always been welcome to use this one but did they know? Consider too that in this now low attendance and socially dead group whose meeting last week was actually abandoned, it is clear that a large proportion of the contact list is of lapsed or ex-members, yet their ability to contact each other or the remaining members or be contacted by them remains under the same restraint. They have no say over it, if they even realise it is happening. Elas's response to the autism bill consultations contrasted that model with our open and decentralised model. Watch out for this if you are joining or visiting any aspie groups in central/south Scotland: do they follow Elas's model or the other group's?
The problem society has also appointed a spokesman for the ruling committee on all issues to do with the contact list and banned all contact with any other committee members about those. Are you keeping up? Layer upon layer of paranoia. No sensible thinker can feel safe in an organisation that behaves like that: like a cult, tying you up in gags on talking about what is happening to you and hogging all power to the leadership. How are we going to retrieve our fellow spectrumites entangled under these tricky controls they have never had proper opportunity to consent to? Is that the challenge to its legality that will break it? we have that committee spokesman already questioned thus. This should concern the whole rest of the scene in Scotland, the free scene as it may now be worth calling it.
2 members of Elas used to also belong to this other group, and as a part of Elas's far wider success in keeping socials going it used to have some contact established with one of the other group's members. All swept away now. That is really helpful in defending and growing the scene's wellbeing, eh?
The group's trouble began when a member X, volunteering at an ecology centre, recommended another member Y to do the same. When the ecology centre discriminated against Y for being a victim already and rejected him, X brushed it aside and defended the ecology centre's discretion to do it and refused to take any stand against it. Y as a result made a complaint that X should not do support work, including for teenagers, in that autism society, and the bully-hurt of being expected to endorse that as part of life in the society. He tried to overcome prolonged hurtful noncommittality from the leader and force the right outcome on its moral merits by an email to the group members. This issue could not even arise in an independently organised adult group like Elas that is not tied to a bigger society and/or to endorsing any support work. If an X/Y situation happened in Elas, Y could just cut off speaking terms with X and not be pressed about it, and could tell the story and be deemed the justified hurt party, and X might have the brass neck to stay around but would not impinge on Y's life in any way.
The problem society's committee has defended and sided with X, this being paired with the ban on members discussing its merits as justice, and answered an inaccurate rewritten version of Y's complaint with a pile of personal attacks on Y that making the complaint was aggressive and constituted not caring about anyone. This when Y had obviously cared about fair play in the ecology centre's community, and when they made no comment at all about what had happened to Y in a previous workplace.
They ranted like the Tea Party extremists in America who don't believe in autism at all, saying aspies must not lobby for any special treatment at all, and must take "life's disappointments" as they come without lifting a finger to anticipate and prevent an unfairly big share of "life's disappointments" or else they are to blame for "expecting problems." They defended X as "being realistic". These are a rejection and denial of the same organisation's whole history and all the care which the parents in it have argued with schools for and expected this society's support against getting labelled arguers or troublemakers. It contradicts the whole principle of a support scene and the whole idea of supported employment services like Intowork, it is a harsh right wing attitude that we should go back to sinking or swimming in a neocon economy geared to reject us, exactly like before we were known to need any different at all. The committee spokesman accompanied this with reckless defamation threats against Y making any outside criticisms of the society at all no matter what happens inside it: say anything to the outside world and you risk being criminalised and going to jail. (Yet defamation is civil law, he had not even realised.) More sinister behaviour like a cult, constituting an attempt to blackmail through fear and to enslave a person into a control trap and into fearful silence. It has no force: it is an established part of fair civil life that an organisation's ideas and practices can be criticised on merit, accountably to factual accuracy.
Now, you would think it is important to challenge every member of the committee on whether they are behind this or are spoken for by it. No no, can't have that - contact with the committee about it, except the spokesman, is also banned !!! How then does Y even tell anyone else in the committee if the answers to issues never raised show that the complainer has been wilfully misrepresented, hence defamed indeed, to the committee? If the spokesman can imtimidate the person he is writing to, like Y, like this, then the same intimidation hangs over any committee members who step out of line. This kafkaesque tangle of bans on who may contact whom and about what, has grown into a monster. It allows no way to find out whether all the committee are behind any decision or spoken for by any answer and no means for dissenters to be discovered or to advertise their own existence. In such a situation, to set out these obvious facts in public and not succumb to the undemocratic threatening into silence, is actively a duty of not defaming the committee members: any of them might not be behind the shockers hissed in their name and might be gagged and in fear. The only way to see that nobody is under control and in fear of speaking, will be when that whole society that has so tragically chosen power against long lasting friendships and by it has collapsed into this horrifying condition, breaks under the self-inflicted cumbersomeness of its own barminess and falls apart.
But all the innocent members in it must be able to get out without having the aspie scene lost to them, and to find refuge in the rest of the scene unintimidated and no longer obeying any of that cult regime over who they may contact. Join us, or use us as a base to bypass that controlling society and to reestablish your local scene in a form with free contact again.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Genetic selection against us
Genetic selection to prevent our existence is now demonstrably happening. See this page by Helen Keeler on fertility services rejecting eggs from women who have had aspie kids.
the-newrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/12/genetic-screening-for-as.html
the-newrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/12/genetic-screening-for-as.html
Saturday, September 26, 2009
America and the Royal Bank of Scotland
3 aspies in the Scottish scene, to my knowledge alone, have made recent or present visits to the United States. Others are more daunted by the fraught and risky pospect of that country's arbitrary and chancy entry barriers, which are on edge against any imperfection in foreign visitors, disabilities included, though this is never discussed in our media. It would very obviously be an injustice in the scene, if supportive chats and swapping of experiences should just accept easier US access for some than others. That the ups and downs of social experiences located in the US, for some, should be shared and receive support while not all are confident they would have access to that country at all. As a point of disability discrimination, such arbitrary difference between the accessibility of the same experience to folks with the same condition shouldn't be possible.
Now, more than just another protest that the big autism organisations will ignore as they always do with all ordinary aspies' issues. There is something timely to do about this one. While others have been having adventures in the US, I have had one concerning the US. Consider this. Read 3 paragraphs about a banking problem here at home, then see how it impacts on US travel. I have been writing the following to all the constitutional reform campaigns and others like Jubilee Debt.
**
The Royal Bank of Scotland, among the biggest players in the banking crash, has rejected doing a clear ethical duty for its customers against a blatant violation of a basic democratic principle: innocent until proved guilty. RBS is supposed to be getting cleaned up and showing us all so to rebuild confidence. Instead, there is now a reform to be forced in the West's basic standards towards its citizens by exposing that our second biggest bank is still offending.
There is now a security system around bank cards, that has never been publicly announced, in which your card can be blocked without warning while they check up on any activity that fits a profiling system's view of being suspicious. If you find your card blocked when you use it in a shop, you have to answer confusing security questions to RBS over the phone, which will take time, so unwarned you may suddenly face a choice between losing your card or missing transport and not reaching your next destination - on time or at all. It happened to me after I used my card to pay 50p for a coach seat reservation, because that is an unusually small transaction and card fraudsters often test systems with "dummy transactions" of this size. Okay if they explain this to folks, but I made a complaint about all the life situations I could think of where unfair effects can be caused if this can happen without warning and you don't know how to prevent it.
Anything at all that counts as "unusual", even just for you personally, can trigger a security block, so if you can think of anything unusual you intend to do with your card you are now advised to inform the bank first. This you only learn after having your first experience of a problem. Foreign travel is always one of the "unusual" items that you should notify.
Now - pair this with how this security includes profiling that makes assumptions about the customer, which means, about their character, and RBS itself says it does not know all the details of how the system it is using makes its assumptions! Apply this to travel to the United States. The Western superpower's immigration control system is in massive violation of the basic human rights standards the West says it stands for. It asks foreign visitors, as one question, "Have you ever been arrested or convicted" for any crime. It requires innocent people who have been arrested to declare the details just like a criminal record, it does not treat them as spotlessly innocent, burt as carrying a likelihood to be guilty that the US will pass its own opinion on regardless of the person not being found guilty in court. They may never even have gone to court.
The US has not signed up to the International Convention on Civil + Political Rights, but on any reckoning of international law and the standards that coutnries with uncorrupted law must show to each other's citizens, the US's entry control system is illegal. My complaint about the bank card problem gave RBS, which does business in the US too, an opportunity to lay claim to have the US's system abolished! because it is causing card security here in Britain to be undermined by an illegal human rights violation affecting customers here. This follows because if an RBS customer plans a visit to the US, known to the bank, then is refused entry on grounds of character tarring by an arrest, and by any other event the card security system discovers that the customer is not in the US when they should be, it can make assumptions about what has happened and about the customer's character. This is clearly a violation of the customer, on the human rights count of judicial propriety and on data protection. So RBS commits such a violation, upon its cardholders here in Britain, by leaving it possible for this to happen, by refusing to take the formal legal position I described towards the United States and all its business there. By taking this position, RBS could have forced the US to stop operating this outrageous system that most of the Western public are quite unaware of unless they have travelled there.
Now - by speaking out about RBS's failiure, you can force an end to this system. The ethical impact on the working of banks still stands despite RBS's silence on it. Others, reform campaigns, can publicise the fact instead. This is an actual case, an actual bank customer complaint, around actual practices in bank card security. To speak out what RBS should have done is to cite the same illegal violation by the US upon folks here, to make it known to be that - and so to actually force its abolition. All cooperation of law and police and business between the US and here will now collapse into illegality unless the US's use of a question about arrests is terminated forthwith, abolished not even as a policy shift but specifically as illegal. A major democratic reform, that affects folks' lives and character records here. You [meaning any reform campaign group I write this to] can force it to happen, just by exposing this bank issue. So please do!!
So will they?
Maurice Frank
Now, more than just another protest that the big autism organisations will ignore as they always do with all ordinary aspies' issues. There is something timely to do about this one. While others have been having adventures in the US, I have had one concerning the US. Consider this. Read 3 paragraphs about a banking problem here at home, then see how it impacts on US travel. I have been writing the following to all the constitutional reform campaigns and others like Jubilee Debt.
**
The Royal Bank of Scotland, among the biggest players in the banking crash, has rejected doing a clear ethical duty for its customers against a blatant violation of a basic democratic principle: innocent until proved guilty. RBS is supposed to be getting cleaned up and showing us all so to rebuild confidence. Instead, there is now a reform to be forced in the West's basic standards towards its citizens by exposing that our second biggest bank is still offending.
There is now a security system around bank cards, that has never been publicly announced, in which your card can be blocked without warning while they check up on any activity that fits a profiling system's view of being suspicious. If you find your card blocked when you use it in a shop, you have to answer confusing security questions to RBS over the phone, which will take time, so unwarned you may suddenly face a choice between losing your card or missing transport and not reaching your next destination - on time or at all. It happened to me after I used my card to pay 50p for a coach seat reservation, because that is an unusually small transaction and card fraudsters often test systems with "dummy transactions" of this size. Okay if they explain this to folks, but I made a complaint about all the life situations I could think of where unfair effects can be caused if this can happen without warning and you don't know how to prevent it.
Anything at all that counts as "unusual", even just for you personally, can trigger a security block, so if you can think of anything unusual you intend to do with your card you are now advised to inform the bank first. This you only learn after having your first experience of a problem. Foreign travel is always one of the "unusual" items that you should notify.
Now - pair this with how this security includes profiling that makes assumptions about the customer, which means, about their character, and RBS itself says it does not know all the details of how the system it is using makes its assumptions! Apply this to travel to the United States. The Western superpower's immigration control system is in massive violation of the basic human rights standards the West says it stands for. It asks foreign visitors, as one question, "Have you ever been arrested or convicted" for any crime. It requires innocent people who have been arrested to declare the details just like a criminal record, it does not treat them as spotlessly innocent, burt as carrying a likelihood to be guilty that the US will pass its own opinion on regardless of the person not being found guilty in court. They may never even have gone to court.
The US has not signed up to the International Convention on Civil + Political Rights, but on any reckoning of international law and the standards that coutnries with uncorrupted law must show to each other's citizens, the US's entry control system is illegal. My complaint about the bank card problem gave RBS, which does business in the US too, an opportunity to lay claim to have the US's system abolished! because it is causing card security here in Britain to be undermined by an illegal human rights violation affecting customers here. This follows because if an RBS customer plans a visit to the US, known to the bank, then is refused entry on grounds of character tarring by an arrest, and by any other event the card security system discovers that the customer is not in the US when they should be, it can make assumptions about what has happened and about the customer's character. This is clearly a violation of the customer, on the human rights count of judicial propriety and on data protection. So RBS commits such a violation, upon its cardholders here in Britain, by leaving it possible for this to happen, by refusing to take the formal legal position I described towards the United States and all its business there. By taking this position, RBS could have forced the US to stop operating this outrageous system that most of the Western public are quite unaware of unless they have travelled there.
Now - by speaking out about RBS's failiure, you can force an end to this system. The ethical impact on the working of banks still stands despite RBS's silence on it. Others, reform campaigns, can publicise the fact instead. This is an actual case, an actual bank customer complaint, around actual practices in bank card security. To speak out what RBS should have done is to cite the same illegal violation by the US upon folks here, to make it known to be that - and so to actually force its abolition. All cooperation of law and police and business between the US and here will now collapse into illegality unless the US's use of a question about arrests is terminated forthwith, abolished not even as a policy shift but specifically as illegal. A major democratic reform, that affects folks' lives and character records here. You [meaning any reform campaign group I write this to] can force it to happen, just by exposing this bank issue. So please do!!
So will they?
Maurice Frank
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Effort to contribute our issues to another good cause
Is the society around us seriously registering aspie issues? and the beneficial impact they make upon many other fairness issues too? Or are they just saying what the socially minded say too often: Oh dear, will we be understood if we say anything new, let's just keep saying what we find familiar? When a local project starts up for a good cause, does it do its own thing, oblivious to us?
On May 9 the No Borders campaign held a dayschool here, as part of a tour, on the oppression of asylum seekers. Part of its purpose was to assemble such folks as might want to take part in starting a local project for practical solidarity with asylum seekers, similar to one already functioning in Newcastle. There was a predictable way that the prevalence of local faces who are already regular in the left wing or anarchist scenes reduced the likelihood that anyone not of those scenes could be involved and feel comfortable or included. The rigidity of attitude those folks have about most topics, really thwarts the wider growth of projects they would like to see wider growth of.
Some of what they are about was sensible practical sharing of material goods with asylum seekers who can't obtain them, either who are paid in food vouchers of tightly limited usability instead of cash, or who have had all income cut off completely at the same time as not being allowed to get jobs. Solidarity in the face of the unviability of life the asylum system is intentionally designed to cause. Naturally also they are interested in raising public support for our guests, for making the true situation wider known about how folks already come out of desperately dangerous situations are getting treated, and if need arises, for having the means to create campaigns of the community's eagerness to keep someone, around blatantly corrupt refusals of asylum or attempts to deport. There has in fact already been a past campaign in Edinburgh preventing a spiteful deportation of a care worker whose life was totally established here and formed part of the care of learning disabled folks too. These campaigns are brilliant in their impact aginst racism, because they pinpoint how immigration barriers trample over the practical common sense of daily life.
Here is the problem. Folks doing these campaigns, if they seriously and genuinely care and want sheer reasoning decency to win against racsim, then they must want every possible contribution to victory for asylum seekers to be seized on and made maximum use of. This is an automatic duty. In the dayschool, in the session devoted to gathering ideas, I contributed an idea arising from autism. Think about this one:
Disability discrimination is now an established principle, itself owed to a history of struggle too. Among asylum seekers, just as among any other group, there are bound to be some aspies, some dyspraxics, and some attention deficits. To treat them in any way they will have a disadvantage with because of their conditions, is disability discrimination hence must be illegal. This is arguable by 2 separate routes, nationally on grounds of disability discrimination law, and internationally on human rights grounds applying to medically real minorities. But is there a screening system that is diagnosing all the autistic spectrumites among asylum seekers, and doing it straightaway without a wait, and being generous about diagnosing in uncertain cases? Of course not. As there is not even such a system for the ordinary settled population, even less possible is it for asylum seekers. This proves - the system handles asylum seekers completely blind to which ones are on our spectrum. Hence, any way that all asylum seekers are treated, that would be disadvantageous to the spectrumite ones, is a disability discrimination and is invalid to continue. Where there is an impairment of concentration or attention, there is a greater chance, innocently and without blame, of losing physical objects, especially small or flimsy ones. Like - identity papers and cards. It is visibly disability discrimination to make any autistic spectrumite verify their status by carrying documents. Because of not knowing which asylum seekers are spectrumites, disability discrimination is committed by making any asylum seekers at all depend on carrying documents, in any way at all !
This gets rid of the identity cards being introduced for asylum seekers, and it wipes out the validity of ever penalising them for lacking papers or passports on their arrival here.
So we wait to hear that No Borders or any other asylum solidarity project makes some use of an item of this whopping magnitude. How long will the wait be? At the dayschool, my point was just put in the list, with a murmur of uncertainty of how much gain it would be possible to make from it in practice. One more voice, speaking from lack of knowledge of disabilities, voiced the sense of unsure ground hence of need to pass this item on to any folks with more secure disabled knowledge who might pop up in the local project in future. This is all that happened. Indeed from experience this is about all I expected would happen. The item was not focussed on again in the ending. It's obvious what this means: no commitment that the item will be used at all. The project will start with local radicals just saying the familiar things they are already used to saying, that don't force any big shift in the system's nature.
We have never yet had an asylum seeker in Elas. In theory we could, if there was an aspie one living in Edinburgh. Then we would be involved at the real personal level of experiencing the oppression, the global apartheid, splitting friends and vandalising lives. We will all as a community, not only the asylum seeker, have been medically wronged and violated by any functioning local asylum solidarity project, if it claims to have even in theory a choice not to make use of the item I raised. Same goes for all the national projects. If the local project does get going, then any asylum seekers reading this will know whether the project honestly cares a damn and wants to win your cause, by whether it takes up my disability discrimination argument and cites it publicly against the identity rules in the asylum system. It is a simple clear argument.
How many other good causes are there, where the opportunity for autism to force positive advances in civil liberties gets received only with uncertainty and doing nothing, just because it is unfamiliar? This makes all the difference to whether aspies are marginalised, or campaigners for other causes are seen to care at all about the biological needs they raise. The issue about losable documents does not only affect asylum seekers, they are only the most extremely and urgently affected group. For all the settled population too, the issue has the potential to stop identity cards and to force the democratic world to abolish passports and tickets on public transport. Which brings a whole lot more issue campaigns under the same clear test:
EITHER to commit medical betrayal cheating the entire ordinary population out of a great gain, OR to have no psychological barriers ever to immediate takeup of new information heard for the first time.
Maurice Frank
On May 9 the No Borders campaign held a dayschool here, as part of a tour, on the oppression of asylum seekers. Part of its purpose was to assemble such folks as might want to take part in starting a local project for practical solidarity with asylum seekers, similar to one already functioning in Newcastle. There was a predictable way that the prevalence of local faces who are already regular in the left wing or anarchist scenes reduced the likelihood that anyone not of those scenes could be involved and feel comfortable or included. The rigidity of attitude those folks have about most topics, really thwarts the wider growth of projects they would like to see wider growth of.
Some of what they are about was sensible practical sharing of material goods with asylum seekers who can't obtain them, either who are paid in food vouchers of tightly limited usability instead of cash, or who have had all income cut off completely at the same time as not being allowed to get jobs. Solidarity in the face of the unviability of life the asylum system is intentionally designed to cause. Naturally also they are interested in raising public support for our guests, for making the true situation wider known about how folks already come out of desperately dangerous situations are getting treated, and if need arises, for having the means to create campaigns of the community's eagerness to keep someone, around blatantly corrupt refusals of asylum or attempts to deport. There has in fact already been a past campaign in Edinburgh preventing a spiteful deportation of a care worker whose life was totally established here and formed part of the care of learning disabled folks too. These campaigns are brilliant in their impact aginst racism, because they pinpoint how immigration barriers trample over the practical common sense of daily life.
Here is the problem. Folks doing these campaigns, if they seriously and genuinely care and want sheer reasoning decency to win against racsim, then they must want every possible contribution to victory for asylum seekers to be seized on and made maximum use of. This is an automatic duty. In the dayschool, in the session devoted to gathering ideas, I contributed an idea arising from autism. Think about this one:
Disability discrimination is now an established principle, itself owed to a history of struggle too. Among asylum seekers, just as among any other group, there are bound to be some aspies, some dyspraxics, and some attention deficits. To treat them in any way they will have a disadvantage with because of their conditions, is disability discrimination hence must be illegal. This is arguable by 2 separate routes, nationally on grounds of disability discrimination law, and internationally on human rights grounds applying to medically real minorities. But is there a screening system that is diagnosing all the autistic spectrumites among asylum seekers, and doing it straightaway without a wait, and being generous about diagnosing in uncertain cases? Of course not. As there is not even such a system for the ordinary settled population, even less possible is it for asylum seekers. This proves - the system handles asylum seekers completely blind to which ones are on our spectrum. Hence, any way that all asylum seekers are treated, that would be disadvantageous to the spectrumite ones, is a disability discrimination and is invalid to continue. Where there is an impairment of concentration or attention, there is a greater chance, innocently and without blame, of losing physical objects, especially small or flimsy ones. Like - identity papers and cards. It is visibly disability discrimination to make any autistic spectrumite verify their status by carrying documents. Because of not knowing which asylum seekers are spectrumites, disability discrimination is committed by making any asylum seekers at all depend on carrying documents, in any way at all !
This gets rid of the identity cards being introduced for asylum seekers, and it wipes out the validity of ever penalising them for lacking papers or passports on their arrival here.
So we wait to hear that No Borders or any other asylum solidarity project makes some use of an item of this whopping magnitude. How long will the wait be? At the dayschool, my point was just put in the list, with a murmur of uncertainty of how much gain it would be possible to make from it in practice. One more voice, speaking from lack of knowledge of disabilities, voiced the sense of unsure ground hence of need to pass this item on to any folks with more secure disabled knowledge who might pop up in the local project in future. This is all that happened. Indeed from experience this is about all I expected would happen. The item was not focussed on again in the ending. It's obvious what this means: no commitment that the item will be used at all. The project will start with local radicals just saying the familiar things they are already used to saying, that don't force any big shift in the system's nature.
We have never yet had an asylum seeker in Elas. In theory we could, if there was an aspie one living in Edinburgh. Then we would be involved at the real personal level of experiencing the oppression, the global apartheid, splitting friends and vandalising lives. We will all as a community, not only the asylum seeker, have been medically wronged and violated by any functioning local asylum solidarity project, if it claims to have even in theory a choice not to make use of the item I raised. Same goes for all the national projects. If the local project does get going, then any asylum seekers reading this will know whether the project honestly cares a damn and wants to win your cause, by whether it takes up my disability discrimination argument and cites it publicly against the identity rules in the asylum system. It is a simple clear argument.
How many other good causes are there, where the opportunity for autism to force positive advances in civil liberties gets received only with uncertainty and doing nothing, just because it is unfamiliar? This makes all the difference to whether aspies are marginalised, or campaigners for other causes are seen to care at all about the biological needs they raise. The issue about losable documents does not only affect asylum seekers, they are only the most extremely and urgently affected group. For all the settled population too, the issue has the potential to stop identity cards and to force the democratic world to abolish passports and tickets on public transport. Which brings a whole lot more issue campaigns under the same clear test:
EITHER to commit medical betrayal cheating the entire ordinary population out of a great gain, OR to have no psychological barriers ever to immediate takeup of new information heard for the first time.
Maurice Frank
Monday, March 30, 2009
endemic bus malpractices
Here is an action towards a public office, citing disability discrimination on our behalf, that consequently they have a duty to act on, and they are not doing. Now, what is the point of having a disability discrimination law if we are not supplied with the means to pin down any public office to give answers according to it???!!
These 2 emails were to the "Bus Passenger's Platform", the complaints department of an entity called Passenger View which advises the Scottish government on what bus passengers need without at all having to ask bus passengers what we want it to say! When you complain to BPP about malpractices by bus drivers, usually it is on the bus companies' side and completely in their pocket. BPP will scrape the gutter for any excuse to find that the bus company couldn't have taken an absolute line on preventing the malpractice.
BPP is one of those bodies that exists to make it look like something is being done. In reality, even if you have been blatantly bullied by a bus driver and the advertised bus sevice blatantly not honoured at all, as long as BPP's decisions are discretionary it is utterly pointless to lodge a complaint to BPP. The only thing there is any point in doing, is to extract from each bus malpractice any aspect you can of distinct ill-treatment of a minority needs group, and lobby BPP about it, telling BPP it is acting illegally concerning discrimination unless it admits that its duty to make findings in favour of the minority need is automatic, not discretionary. You need to ask BPP to confirm this to you before you file an actual case to them. This is what I sought to do in the following emails:
Mar 5: I belong to [mentioned Elas and Sasn].
The vulnerablilities caused by Asperger Syndrome include a reliance on literal information, and lack of facility to make contextual guesses that information is not meant literally. This would include, that we more than other passengers can't be expected to guess, by cultural norm, that some information given in a bus timetable is less true than other parts of the timetable and may routinely not be honoured by the bus operator. It would be illegal disability discrimination to expect any such thing of us.
A consequence of this, is that it would be illegal disability discrimination against us, ever not to find against the operator, in a case where a particular service frequently jumps one of the stops it is advertised to observe, and the operator has ignored or evaded all efforts to pin them down committally to do anything about it. A case where there is always a 50-50 chance that the bus you want will sweep past the stop in the central dual carriageway lanes that block it from observing the stop, instead of taking the side lanes to observe the stop, and this is on a long distance service so that total wreckage of a day's travel plan is inflicted by it.
In any case of this nature, it needs only be established that the company is allowing the offence to happen, by its lack of committal answers, and that makes it a simple 100% certainty that the complaint would be upheld. Hence, it would be illegal disability discrimination to a recognised medical group who have public speaking outlets, for you not to agree that this is the case, to this enquiry in advance of an actual case being brought, or to be noncommittal about it.
It would be disability discrimination to insist that the actual case is brought before you take any position, because by so insisting, you would be keeping in existence a visibly provenly illegal margin of discretion against the position being an automatic certainty. You would be forcing the case to be a gamble instead of a routine upholding of a literal principle. You would be saying that in a case where the factual finding was that yes the events concerned have happened, it could ever be at all possible even in theory to find against a complaint of the nature described and to allow a bus operator to behave in this way.
Past experience proves the need to put the case's committal medical principle to you before being forced into taking any gambles on which way you might go if it is left to arbitrary discretion.
Mar 12 BPP's answer: [first an unnecessary para explaining what BPP is]
Unfortunately you have not indicated whether or not the bus company has had an opportunity to address your complaint. I would be grateful if you would advise this office accordingly. If the operator has responded to your complaint and you are unhappy with the response, you must sens a copy of all relevant correspondence to this office.
If the complaint has not been taken up with the bus operator in the first instance, I regret that BPP is unable to consider your complaint at this stage.
Mar 14: Yes, we are talking about a case here the bus company has had this problem repeatedly put to it over a year and a half, and has only gone from explaining each incident as an isolated driver error, to not answering at all.
I know the rules about sending correspondence with an actual complaint - I have experienced the process before. But I have not made any actual complaint to you yet. I was enquiring about BPP's attitude to a principle: the committally automatic wrongness in every case ever, of a bus service being allowed to persist in often jumping one of the stops it is advertised to observe, by passing it in the wrong traffic lane for stopping.
I pointed out the disability discrimination to a whole population group, that would be done if BPP refuses to take a position on this principle that would be known in advance to apply to any specific case of it that is brought to you. So that cases are not forced to be brought to you with the discretionary possibility of BPP choosing not to uphold the principle even if the facts are found to be as described.
Thank you,
- To which there has been no further answer. You can see that BPP is meticulously evading making any comment at all on the question asked of it. Does a complaint of this particular malpractice by buses have to be upheld automatically if it is established the malpractice happened? BPP is blatantly committing disability discrimination and acting corruptly to the oppression of bus users, by ignoring this question and seeking to hold onto a discretionary power to reject such a complaint.
Let me tell you where this bus malpractice has been happening - it is on an important trunk route. It is on Citylink's M91 stopping service from Edinburgh to Perth, some coaches continuing to Inverness. One of the advertised stops on the more frequently stopping coaches is at the south side of the Forth Bridge, the former tolls, which is still stubbornly being called "tolls" in bus timetables long after the tolls have been abolished. Quite often these coaches just charge past in the central lane of the dual carriageway and ignore this stop. It can happen in both directions, but mostly in the northward direction where the stop is located on an entry sliplane, so that if the coach fails to take an exit from the main carriageway it is then barricaded into the central lanes and can't access the stop.
For a year and a half I have had repeated cause to make complaints to Citylink about this, and the only answer they ever give is a one-off apology for the driver error in forgetting the stop. The first time they said they would remind drivers about it, but this changed nothing. They will never say anything committal specifying how they will force all their staff to observe the stop. Twice I have enquired on behalf of both Elas and our equivalent in Fife, telling them that aspies have no instincts to guess in some cultural way that their service's published details should not be taken literally! and formally asking which coaches they will guarantee for certain will observe the stop, if we should organise some group travel starting at that point. CITYLINK HAS IGNORED AND NEVER ANSWERED THOSE ENQUIRIES. THIS ITSELF IS DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION, THAT THE BPP's ASSISTANCE IS NEEDED TO STOP, YET WE LIVE IN A STATE WHERE THE BPP ITSELF CAN GET AWAY WITH BEING EQUALLY CORRUPT. If you are a visitor in the Year of Homecoming, this is the state of the state here. If you are an aspie as well, and if you are trying to head north of the Forth, you have cause to complain that you are left in unclarity how the hell you are supposed to plan travel in a state where nobody enforces the honouring of published transport services in reality. If you tell Year of Homecoming about this, do you find them committal or noncommittal about caring? - for that will tell you whether it's just a con.
Some other bus malpractices that BPP's attitude also encourages to happen, are these.
* A driver on Stagecoach who drives away from the present diversionary stops in central Edinburgh, with their long queues, before passengers who were well back in the queue can reach him, and visibly laughs about it.
* First refusing to give any committal answer that their buses can be hailed from the wrong side of the road, even when they know this evasion is an offence against road safety because it meant you had to run in front of a very late bus that suddenly appeared in Galashiels' one way system, and which still drove past you anyway,
* or even when you are walking from East Linton to Haddington in the evening because 3 successive of their buses have not turned up, ("mechanical failure!") and then one passes you on the road some way short of Haddington just when it's starting to rain.
* Drivers on First who refuse to believe that the fare you want exists, in First's preposterously muddled zonal system.
* Who insist that a day ticket is just an ordinary return, or
* who take a £20 note from you then refuse to give it back or to sell you anything but the fare they think you should want instead of the fare you do want. NB - I got signed for a free bus pass as a direct result of that experience, actually on grounds of the burden of coping with communication with bus drivers! and this establishes every aspie should get one. But that is no get-out from the need to enforce proper trading standards upon First too, is it? including sacking that driver?
The Green Party, which always insults our intelligence by saying please use public transport and save carbon, never takes any position on any specific transport malpractice. I asked their council candidate in 2007, for a position against First because of the Sunday morning trains that had repeatedly been leaving early from Dalmeny station, that I had twice in 6 weeks seen ruin the travel plan of a mother trying to take 2 small infants to Glasgow visiting family. I got, "If you will forgive me, I can only respond to your general query about public transport and accountability, rather than your ongoing problems with First." DON'T FORGIVE THEM - this is the worst offence that democracy's entire effectiveness is still abused by, it is NONCOMMITTALITY. If the Greens keep this up in the coming Euro election, they are committing a specific minority uncaringness upon the autistic spectrum, because we can't be expected to communicate successfully with corrupt bus or train staff or to observe corrupt unstated principles of how to get by despite them.
Maurice Frank
These 2 emails were to the "Bus Passenger's Platform", the complaints department of an entity called Passenger View which advises the Scottish government on what bus passengers need without at all having to ask bus passengers what we want it to say! When you complain to BPP about malpractices by bus drivers, usually it is on the bus companies' side and completely in their pocket. BPP will scrape the gutter for any excuse to find that the bus company couldn't have taken an absolute line on preventing the malpractice.
BPP is one of those bodies that exists to make it look like something is being done. In reality, even if you have been blatantly bullied by a bus driver and the advertised bus sevice blatantly not honoured at all, as long as BPP's decisions are discretionary it is utterly pointless to lodge a complaint to BPP. The only thing there is any point in doing, is to extract from each bus malpractice any aspect you can of distinct ill-treatment of a minority needs group, and lobby BPP about it, telling BPP it is acting illegally concerning discrimination unless it admits that its duty to make findings in favour of the minority need is automatic, not discretionary. You need to ask BPP to confirm this to you before you file an actual case to them. This is what I sought to do in the following emails:
Mar 5: I belong to [mentioned Elas and Sasn].
The vulnerablilities caused by Asperger Syndrome include a reliance on literal information, and lack of facility to make contextual guesses that information is not meant literally. This would include, that we more than other passengers can't be expected to guess, by cultural norm, that some information given in a bus timetable is less true than other parts of the timetable and may routinely not be honoured by the bus operator. It would be illegal disability discrimination to expect any such thing of us.
A consequence of this, is that it would be illegal disability discrimination against us, ever not to find against the operator, in a case where a particular service frequently jumps one of the stops it is advertised to observe, and the operator has ignored or evaded all efforts to pin them down committally to do anything about it. A case where there is always a 50-50 chance that the bus you want will sweep past the stop in the central dual carriageway lanes that block it from observing the stop, instead of taking the side lanes to observe the stop, and this is on a long distance service so that total wreckage of a day's travel plan is inflicted by it.
In any case of this nature, it needs only be established that the company is allowing the offence to happen, by its lack of committal answers, and that makes it a simple 100% certainty that the complaint would be upheld. Hence, it would be illegal disability discrimination to a recognised medical group who have public speaking outlets, for you not to agree that this is the case, to this enquiry in advance of an actual case being brought, or to be noncommittal about it.
It would be disability discrimination to insist that the actual case is brought before you take any position, because by so insisting, you would be keeping in existence a visibly provenly illegal margin of discretion against the position being an automatic certainty. You would be forcing the case to be a gamble instead of a routine upholding of a literal principle. You would be saying that in a case where the factual finding was that yes the events concerned have happened, it could ever be at all possible even in theory to find against a complaint of the nature described and to allow a bus operator to behave in this way.
Past experience proves the need to put the case's committal medical principle to you before being forced into taking any gambles on which way you might go if it is left to arbitrary discretion.
Mar 12 BPP's answer: [first an unnecessary para explaining what BPP is]
Unfortunately you have not indicated whether or not the bus company has had an opportunity to address your complaint. I would be grateful if you would advise this office accordingly. If the operator has responded to your complaint and you are unhappy with the response, you must sens a copy of all relevant correspondence to this office.
If the complaint has not been taken up with the bus operator in the first instance, I regret that BPP is unable to consider your complaint at this stage.
Mar 14: Yes, we are talking about a case here the bus company has had this problem repeatedly put to it over a year and a half, and has only gone from explaining each incident as an isolated driver error, to not answering at all.
I know the rules about sending correspondence with an actual complaint - I have experienced the process before. But I have not made any actual complaint to you yet. I was enquiring about BPP's attitude to a principle: the committally automatic wrongness in every case ever, of a bus service being allowed to persist in often jumping one of the stops it is advertised to observe, by passing it in the wrong traffic lane for stopping.
I pointed out the disability discrimination to a whole population group, that would be done if BPP refuses to take a position on this principle that would be known in advance to apply to any specific case of it that is brought to you. So that cases are not forced to be brought to you with the discretionary possibility of BPP choosing not to uphold the principle even if the facts are found to be as described.
Thank you,
- To which there has been no further answer. You can see that BPP is meticulously evading making any comment at all on the question asked of it. Does a complaint of this particular malpractice by buses have to be upheld automatically if it is established the malpractice happened? BPP is blatantly committing disability discrimination and acting corruptly to the oppression of bus users, by ignoring this question and seeking to hold onto a discretionary power to reject such a complaint.
Let me tell you where this bus malpractice has been happening - it is on an important trunk route. It is on Citylink's M91 stopping service from Edinburgh to Perth, some coaches continuing to Inverness. One of the advertised stops on the more frequently stopping coaches is at the south side of the Forth Bridge, the former tolls, which is still stubbornly being called "tolls" in bus timetables long after the tolls have been abolished. Quite often these coaches just charge past in the central lane of the dual carriageway and ignore this stop. It can happen in both directions, but mostly in the northward direction where the stop is located on an entry sliplane, so that if the coach fails to take an exit from the main carriageway it is then barricaded into the central lanes and can't access the stop.
For a year and a half I have had repeated cause to make complaints to Citylink about this, and the only answer they ever give is a one-off apology for the driver error in forgetting the stop. The first time they said they would remind drivers about it, but this changed nothing. They will never say anything committal specifying how they will force all their staff to observe the stop. Twice I have enquired on behalf of both Elas and our equivalent in Fife, telling them that aspies have no instincts to guess in some cultural way that their service's published details should not be taken literally! and formally asking which coaches they will guarantee for certain will observe the stop, if we should organise some group travel starting at that point. CITYLINK HAS IGNORED AND NEVER ANSWERED THOSE ENQUIRIES. THIS ITSELF IS DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION, THAT THE BPP's ASSISTANCE IS NEEDED TO STOP, YET WE LIVE IN A STATE WHERE THE BPP ITSELF CAN GET AWAY WITH BEING EQUALLY CORRUPT. If you are a visitor in the Year of Homecoming, this is the state of the state here. If you are an aspie as well, and if you are trying to head north of the Forth, you have cause to complain that you are left in unclarity how the hell you are supposed to plan travel in a state where nobody enforces the honouring of published transport services in reality. If you tell Year of Homecoming about this, do you find them committal or noncommittal about caring? - for that will tell you whether it's just a con.
Some other bus malpractices that BPP's attitude also encourages to happen, are these.
* A driver on Stagecoach who drives away from the present diversionary stops in central Edinburgh, with their long queues, before passengers who were well back in the queue can reach him, and visibly laughs about it.
* First refusing to give any committal answer that their buses can be hailed from the wrong side of the road, even when they know this evasion is an offence against road safety because it meant you had to run in front of a very late bus that suddenly appeared in Galashiels' one way system, and which still drove past you anyway,
* or even when you are walking from East Linton to Haddington in the evening because 3 successive of their buses have not turned up, ("mechanical failure!") and then one passes you on the road some way short of Haddington just when it's starting to rain.
* Drivers on First who refuse to believe that the fare you want exists, in First's preposterously muddled zonal system.
* Who insist that a day ticket is just an ordinary return, or
* who take a £20 note from you then refuse to give it back or to sell you anything but the fare they think you should want instead of the fare you do want. NB - I got signed for a free bus pass as a direct result of that experience, actually on grounds of the burden of coping with communication with bus drivers! and this establishes every aspie should get one. But that is no get-out from the need to enforce proper trading standards upon First too, is it? including sacking that driver?
The Green Party, which always insults our intelligence by saying please use public transport and save carbon, never takes any position on any specific transport malpractice. I asked their council candidate in 2007, for a position against First because of the Sunday morning trains that had repeatedly been leaving early from Dalmeny station, that I had twice in 6 weeks seen ruin the travel plan of a mother trying to take 2 small infants to Glasgow visiting family. I got, "If you will forgive me, I can only respond to your general query about public transport and accountability, rather than your ongoing problems with First." DON'T FORGIVE THEM - this is the worst offence that democracy's entire effectiveness is still abused by, it is NONCOMMITTALITY. If the Greens keep this up in the coming Euro election, they are committing a specific minority uncaringness upon the autistic spectrum, because we can't be expected to communicate successfully with corrupt bus or train staff or to observe corrupt unstated principles of how to get by despite them.
Maurice Frank
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