Then let’s discuss the paywall which was already blocking poorer people’s path to university…

To be radical is to acknowledge neo-liberal economists are the equivalent to religious fundamentalists. To understand the Middle East wars were planned by people who views world politics through a particular fear driven lens….pentagon realism….

Lets redefine pragmatism and realism

Not look towards US politics every time we ran out of ideas a la Fabian Society but how radical Argentina was to confront the IMF, how Ecuador won at the WTO or Taiwan did immense land reform to preventing it’s populace from supporting China or how we ended slavery with the help of the opposition. This is radicalism…

But doesn’t that presuppose that Ed Miliband is heading up a set of policies and behaving in a way that I can morally support? Loyalty is earned, not assumed by right, and it is the policies espoused by a political leader, and his actions in driving those policies forward that bank up his right to expect loyalty from each of us as individuals. And there’s the rub.

I’m not a Labour Party member, but I am a core Labour voter, and unfortunately the policies currently being proposed by Ed and the actions he is taking over them are building an impenetrable barrier between his leadership and my moral imperatives. I may be a Labour voter, but I’m also a disabled person and a disability rights activist, blogging for Where’s the Benefit, and Ed’s policy on disability and disability related benefits, the things he has said about disabled people, mean that as it stands I cannot possibly support the man, and in fact am morally bound to oppose him.

Just to refresh people’s minds, because I’ve talked to Labour supporters who outright deny he said what he did, Ed’s speech about disability and responsibility is available at http://edmiliband.org/2011/06/13/ed-milibands-speech-on-responsibility/ In that speech Ed talked about meeting a Incapacity Benefit recipient on the campaign trail and deciding that, without needing to see his medical records or have any form of medical qualification, that he was capable of work (I predict a bright future for Ed as an ATOS assessor), and he then went on to say:

“And there is a link between the man on incapacity benefit and those executives at Southern Cross.
What is that link?
That these are people who are just not taking responsibility”

So the Leader of the Labour Party believes himself miraculously capable of judging fitness to work on the briefest of encounters and despite no medical training, and, based on that complete lack of qualification, of condemning disabled people as showing exactly the same irresponsibility as the owners of Southern Cross who have grabbed the money and run, leaving thousands of elderly people facing an uncertain future.

As I said earlier, I happen to be disabled, I also happen to be in receipt of ESA because of that, and I have no doubt that on a similar brief encounter Ed would conclude that I too am capable of work – after all I’m clearly articulate and there are plenty of jobs that can be done even if I can’t walk very well. Unfortunately for Ed, he’s making exactly the same mistake nearly every other non-disabled person makes, assuming that disability is something simple that you can see. The reality is that much of disability is invisible, and much of the rest is counter-intuitive. I may have some difficulty walking, but far more important to my ability to hold down a job is the fact that I have even greater difficulty in sitting, and that even lying prone (as I’m doing to write this) may leave me curled up in pain and unable to string two coherent thoughts together. Yet I look fine. And beyond that ill-informed pre-judgment, disabled people face the inherent disablism of the jobs market. When I was made redundant in 2008 the outsourcing career consultant took me aside, knowing only what he could see, and told me that, no matter I was a highly qualified enginer, I had to forget getting any job in the private sector, the discrimination in recruitment was simply that bad, and that the public sector would be little better, a view repeated by several of his colleagues since. And yet Ed felt justified in condemning us all as ‘irresponsible’ for being unable to work or unable to find work, no matter that Scope and the Observer had flagged up just weeks earlier that demonizing disabled people in this way was already resulting in increasing harassment of disabled people on the street.

As I said, loyalty must be earned, and at the moment Ed is earning exactly the reverse.

If Britain is going to link talent to career access, ensure its education system supports equal opportunities and incentivise hard work and innovation it is gong to have to break up the strangle hold that the richest 5% of the population currently have on all the rewards. This inconvenient truth didn’t feature much as far as I could tell!

I agree that the British economy will need to be rebalanced if it is to deliver majority prosperity in future. This is definately an area where, given the combined new realities of environmental strain and economic growth in China and India, only a radical approach can be considered pragmatic.

yes newer labour.