no loo Inverness to Edinburgh

"Stagecoach trains its entire staff in the importance of customer care and does not tolerate incidents such as the one you have described in your letter." So they welcomely wrote on 25 May 2007, concerning a jobsworth driver who was stuck in a queue on a sliproad at the Forth bridge and refused to let passengers off before reaching the stop, even though some were desperate for a pee which they had to take behind a junction box as soon as they got off. By that time the situation on that bus had got aggressive. I should think so.

Now that Stagecoach and Citylink have become half-merged, can we rely on the same principle to be brought out again? Yesterday, they put an ordinary Stagecoach express bus such as you see around Fife, with no toilet, onto an Inverness to Edinburgh Citylink service lasting 3 1/2 hours. Its driver was very good about it, full marks to him, when I asserted the right to get off for a pee at Broxden, the coach stop site on the edge of Perth - which itself has no loo. But what position are Citylink going to take on the driver of the connecting Glasgow coach, who refused to allow me to use his onboard toilet? "Absolutely not, no way, as soon as I'm loaded up I'm away." Peeing in the bushes instead meant climbing over a fence and squeezing under some very thorny vegetation, obviously without time to waste. An older passenger with limited mobility might find this too hard to do, yet is even more likely to need the loo. There was no other way to get out of sight, at least not without taking a long walk away from the coaches who might then go without them. They will be entitled by the facts of biology to go right where they are, the indecency will be Citylink's fault not theirs, won't it? I challenge Citylink to find any way to say otherwise, and next time we write any diversity feedbacks for the police we should put this to them too. This point needs committally forcing, to make the bus companies work properly.

Clamber into the bushes I did, promptly, in front of this driver. He knew it meant no chance to wash my hands, I suppose Citylink expects its other passengers to be happy with that? If his ego seriously expected me to continue my journey without going, he was delusional, with a delusion of authority over biology. No it was not established at any sod's order that I would hold on. If y' gotta go y' gotta go, asserted.

Sometimes it is part of autism, its metabolic and digestive issues, to need the loo more frequently. The willingness now found, of the operator of the longest trunk coach service through the middle of Scotland, to do this, puts a barrier between the aspie communities of the Central Belt and the north.

Maurice Frank

some progress on social work

See post of 5 Dec 2010, update added to it. Not a lot of content in social work's answer but at least by defending that they are still talking about the personal case they admitted they have to do that. Have had a meeting with them at Waverley Court with opportunity to tell them more of the details.

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.

now uniforms take life, preventably

Many papers today carry a child death story that challenges anyone willing to persist in believing there is any good at all in the physical world. In the Australian floods, a boy aged 13 was swept away and killed, along with his mum, when the floodwaters swamped their car, the reason why they narrowly missed rescue by a truck driver was because this boy made said rescuer save his younger brother first !

Now, there is more to this horror than accident. Here is the twist to make you angry, that adds to this story an element of human evil which our scene could have prevented: quoting from the Metro's story, "Ms Rice and her sons were returning from a trip to buy school uniforms when they were caught up in what police called an "inland instant tsunami."""

This is a child's life actually ended, entirely by reason of the prison badge of children's enslavement, and the obligation on families to actually buy with their own money the chains of their own oppression. To make this purchase mattered enough to go driving in the middle of a flood crisis for specifically this purpose, to buy a degrading slave costume whose communist purpose as openly declared by the nutty professor - see last post - is to airbrush away children's personal identity and give physical form to a state of possessed subjection.

For a century we have been told school uniforms do all these wonderful things. Anyone who defends them now is seen to defend costing lives and intentionally to be willing to cost more lives, and this is for a purpose of destroying liberty.

This includes any big autism organisation that continues not to speak out against them, and against all uniforms ever, as they owe to adult workers too. For years the big organisations have known this need exists. For years they have kept themselves on hobnobbing terms with employers and teachers. This boy most likely was not one of us, and there is no need for him to have been. Remember, acting on aspies' biological needs will get rid of uniforms, not just for aspies, but for everyone. If the big autism organisations had done this, then thanks to autism knowledge, uniforms could have been eradicated all over the democratic world years before now, for everyone. Then, by the reported facts, this family's fatal car journey would not have happened.

This be on the head of all limits to publishing of facts, all control and filtering of issues, that has existed in the autism scene. In the media too.

Meanwhile, yesterday, here, parliament threw out Hugh O'Donnell's bill for an autism strategy, at first stage, by 109 votes to 5. I watched them in the public gallery, all jumping on the momentum to say oh it's not proven what difference this would make oh we need less obligations for service users to run around trying to enforce and we need more time muddling along as we are. The way they seized on the committee report to criticise the bill for being too noncommittal! is an irony howling against the way all law is practised at present. All of them every day are in the political class's game of always being noncommittal, and now they have damned a bill for the same thing.

It is an indictment of the NAS for its insistence on legalese drafting of the bill. In the consultations last year, we put in for using ordinary language, and through it, for having some committality about what the bill would definitely make happen. The NAS have dominated this entire campaign, and their aversion to committal obligations to any issues that come from us to them, has delivered this rubbish outcome for them and us alike.

Maurice Frank

horrific professing

A psychology professor, Thomas MacKay, got a story run in the Sunday Herald saying school uniform prevents teenage violence. Front page of today's Metro is about a terrible schoolboy gang murder in London, which on the evidence the story reported, was committed while wearing school uniform. There is the professor's stark answer.

So far from schools meriting respect as in his theory, such murders show also that herding children together like cattle into a jungle-like mass in day prisons called schools is desperately unsafe and destructive of civil order, let alone of personal wellbeing and belonging. It always was, this has always been apparent from all the history of bullying. I have a strong need to make the same case from the history of teachers misusing their power and having greedy ambitions that make the child suffer. But bullying and violence is the present issue this great big professor has argued on.

This professor is popular with politicians, he was praised in a book by Gordon Brown and he has been advising the SNP government on educational psychology. He even used to be head of the British Psychological Society. How rational is that?, 2 items the Herald story did not mention, are:
* that the professor is an Evangelical, which itself involves a psychology for proclaiming truth unsubstantiated out of thin air, and for needing to bend all psychology to match with the social attitudes in a few arbitrary ancient scrolls that oppress women and defend slavery,
* and that he has already worked in autism a lot.

Now, if he knows autism, how can he possibly not know about what are termed "sensory issues"? Our sensitivities to rubbing fabric and texture and heat, which make our bodies often biologically incompatible with narrow Victorian norms of dress and prove our physically real need for total freedom of dress. Autism proves all dress codes and uniforms a serious bodily harmful human rights violation. A sensory irritation undermines our ability to concentrate and to function well. Hence, any discomforting clothes are a serious medical assault on our bodies. School uniform trousers did violence to my body, and gender discriminatory too when girls get a choice over their leg cover and boys don't.

My physically real need of health and wellbeing, to wear shorts perpetually, has always been upheld by the local supported employment service, to employers and to the benefits/training system. An adult precedent of autism need can never be rejected by anyone or else they would commit a disability discrimination. But if this holds for adults, it holds for children too. It is national scale biological harming of children, that this many years into autism awareness, school uniform still exists.

Where are the big autism organisations' efforts to save spectrumite children and indeed all children, and adults in the type of jobs concerned, from the primitive body slavery of uniforms? and to stop the march of oppressive ideas like this professor's going without even media opposition ?

No oppositional letter was printed in the Sunday Herald, which thus appears to be in favour of pushing the professor's oppressive communist-style openly declared keenness to airbrush out individual identity. He openly wants the uniform to symbolise subjection to authority, in effect he openly admits it is a prison uniform. It will express values of violence to their own medical wellbeing, this he intends to make them feel respectful and positive towards adults, and this the Sunday Herald leaves unchallenged.

Not getting letters printed in national newspapers is quite normal or course, but the Sunday Herald can be a decent letter printer if you write a view that is already part of the predictable established package of progressive views. Thus I have had letters printed on proportional voting and on asylum injustice. But not on the moral desirability of exterminating tigers to protect human life, and not on this. The Sunday Herald shows an interest, not in unlimited critical thought, but only in selling already prexisting established safe attitudes on its side of politics.

Meanwhile, the professor himself can't be reached. So says Strathclyde university, for he has moved on from his visitorship there. So he is nicely shielded from ever getting notified of any medical objections to his oppressive ideas.

Maurice Frank

a letter sent from Elas to social work

To Michelle Miller, chief social work officer for Edinburgh.

We are the local group of Asperger and high functioning autistic adults, ELAS. Our support for each other includes speaking up concerning life dangers and sharing awareness of them. We are a voice heard by other services, against any of us coming to harm, getting exploited or manipulated, in positions of vulnerability.

Hence, we are alarmed to hear that social work services now deny that it is their role or their power, to intervene against any party putting us in positions of vulnerable harm, when this is outside any services run by social work itself. You say this in your letter of Nov 27 to our member Maurice Frank.

In society broadly, it is commonly known and understood that exactly this is the purpose of social work's existence. It is common knowledge when support issues are discussed in the autistic community on the web, that social work is the party who you are entitled to expect a response from to these situations. Its function is to prevent harm coming to anyone in any vulnerable position, anywhere in society, by responding on the evidence whenever evidence of ill treatment is raised. It is immaterial who runs the place where it happens.

If this ceases to be the case, then we directly ask: how are any of us ever safe, committally for certain, from bullying or discrimination or any ill-treatment in attending any service that claims to be suitable for us? All Asperger and HFA adults are classed as vulnerable. We will be endangered, in all services, if there is not defined to be any local authority to complain to with a committal automatic duty, standing accountable directly to the merits of evidence in each case that arises. This does not require you to act as other organisations' internal complaint investigator, but simply to make them do that completely and properly not corruptly, and you to take action if they defend any distressing or discriminatory practices.

You stated in your letter that the council has no role thus. The local coordinator of Choose Life confirmed that the council most certainly does have a role, as when an organisation falls under mental health she identifies a Mr John Armstrong, "joint programme manger for mental health", as having a responsibility. Yet you wrote that the council has no role at all. Do you stand by denying his function? The public would be very alarmed to know that contrary to such factual evidence, social work denies there is any obligation by the council towards autistic adults being exposed to ill-treatment in any services run by other parties than the council itself. They will recognise it as an abdication of function.

This ethical emergency now exists, gives us a duty to let all aspies know they are potentially left unsafe in any service and always have those grounds to give against using any service, unless in reply you are committal not noncommittal that social work's popularly known role is automatic not discretionary.

Update: Anyone who reads our letter can see that it was asking for a position on the safety of all aspies in using services, not an answer to a personal case. Yet social work sent us a brush-off reply saying just that they can't answer on a personal case because of confidentiality. So there is some more to know about them, they are willing to waste a month testing if we are stupid. So we wrote back, repeating that the general position for all is what we are seeking.

From our minutes, Feb 14 meeting:
"Social Work Correspondence
Another reply has been received to ELAS letters expressing concern about the way some social workers deal with people on the autistic spectrum, but sadly it was vague and non-committal in its wording."

The one good thing we extracted from them was a recognition of needing to continue talking to about the personal case. Previously they had been trying not to talk at all, so it is progress when the fact of talking becomes their defence. That is an implied acknowledgement of the need to intervene, which can be cited in other cases too - if folks know of it.

Circulated from Norma Curran, Coordinator, Values Into Action Scotland.
Please circulate this to anyone who will benefit from receiving this information.

Very soon, people on Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance and 'incapacity related' Income Support will have to undergo the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) test. If they pass the test they will go onto Employment and Support Allowance.

If you are called for an assessment, it is important that you know as much about the Employment and Support Allowance as possible. Please click here to access information issued by the Department for Work and Pensions on Employment and Support Allowance and the Work Capability Assessment.

Kind Regards
Norma

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