Disabled people are treated not only like second-class citizens, but like babies

This week, I was in conversation with two disabled women, Sarah and Louise. When reflecting on her experience as a disabled woman, Sarah said, 'Disabled people are treated like...' and then paused. Louise quickly jumped in with, 'Babies!' Sarah clarified that she'd been about to say 'second-class citizens'. I said to them that from what I'd seen, I actually thought that Louise had nailed it!

The context of this conversation was a major protest that I was involved in organising in Abergavenny, over the proposed sell-off of the Tudor Street Day Centre (formally known as My Day My Life, a hub with services for adults with learning difficulties and mental health problems). My involvement in this came from the fact that before we met, my partner Owen worked at this day centre, helping some of society's most vulnerable adults get the most out of their lives. Owen found this a rewarding enough experience that this year, he has brought out the novel Vulnerable Voices, about a young man who does a similar job. The book is entirely fictitious, and features a day centre in North Yorkshire instead of South Wales, but some of the characters and incidents that occur within it are loosely inspired by real life events. The audiobook will be released soon, narrated by the actor Nico Mirallegro.

In addition to the nostalgia, the book also covers some of the darker side of that kind of job. Owen was aware of bullying and neglect that went on behind the scenes, and this is covered in his novel with characters whose depictions will be recognised by almost anyone who has worked in any kind of office - but it seems to happen all the time in the world of care. You can find myriads of news reports detailing unsavoury things that our vulnerable relatives have been through. I questioned recently why it is that the care profession, supposedly one that attracts the most compassionate people, so often attracts the precise opposite, and was drawn to the conclusion that it must be because it's one of the easiest industries to get into. More importantly, there rarely seems to be any sturdy and systematic process to stop these kinds of things happening - and the reason for that is very straightforward. Processes cost money, and processes that protect vulnerable/disabled people benefit people who are least likely to generate capital for the establishment - therefore, they are not considered worthy of the money. Compassion is not the goal; if compassion exists at all, it exists purely to create a smokescreen of a caring authority.

This is the underlying reason for the proposed sell-off and demolition of Tudor Street Day Centre. The My Day My Life service was closed as part of the 2020 lockdown, and has never been re-opened. The 'official' version of events is that other services have since come about which have provided new and better services for the former service-users; but this is untrue. Having spoken to numerous service users and their families, we have it on record from quite a few different people that there are now very few really decent services for them within the Monmouthshire area since the closure of the My Day My Life service. What's more, I understand Owen to tell me that the My Day My Life service was being undermined as far back at when he left in 2017, with alternative schemes being set up to take some of the funding and provide a lesser-quality service - i.e. to take people on day trips, but in a less person-centred and individualised way. The council claims that a review is currently being undertaken in regards to disability services within the county - but is selling off its greatest asset, which already has all the disability access sorted, in advance of this review being concluded. (Incidentally, the proposed sell-off is to a housing development trust, which the council claims is to house the homeless. This is patently not true; no one believes that any new homes built there will be affordable to homeless people, and saying they will is merely an attempt to pit one marginalised group against another.)

The protest was on Wednesday 7th December, and involved a large group of us, including many past service-users and their families, standing outside the building in Tudor Street holding placards and chanting. Joining us at the protest were local Labour councillors Tudor Thomas (Cabinet Member for Social Care, Safeguarding and Accessible Health Services) and Sara Burch (Cabinet Member for Inclusive and Active Communities). That these are their job titles is actually laughable, because neither of them behaved with the slightest interest in safeguarding, making social care health services accessible or inclusive in the slightest. They actually behaved in a consistently passive-aggressive manner; upon arrival, they set up a speaker system to lecture the crowd at our own protest, before attempting to leave without listening to any of the actual disabled people who wanted to speak.

Here is a picture of myself, Owen and another protester confronting Councillors Thomas and Burch as they attempted to leave. Whilst this was happening, there were service users addressing the crowd on the other side of the road:

Unfortunately I didn't get to hear much of what the service users were saying, as I felt it more important to try to reason with the councillors and try to get them to listen. We did eventually persuade them to come across to the other side of the road for a few more minutes, during which time they were confrontational, dismissive of people's concerns and, in my own humble opinion, quite rude. I think their body language in the above photo says quite a lot about what their priorities were; they had intended to come purely to represent the council to Wales Online and the South West Argus who were there on the day, rather than to listen to anyone's actual needs for that building. They couldn't have hurried away fast enough after they'd barged in to give the first speeches, and then we practically had to drag them back over.

At one point, I asked Councillor Thomas if he himself had ever actually visited any of the service users at their homes, sat down with them and asked them what they thought about all of this. He admitted that he had not. Doing this is absolutely essential to any review, because one of the most truly wrong things about this is that of all marginalised groups in society, the disabled are often the least capable of speaking out and defending their human rights. This is why disability rights so often lag behind the rights of other people - because no matter how oppressed someone is, in most cases they're easily able to network with other people who have similar experiences and band together to get their voices heard. I know from personal experience that there were a lot of interested parties who were simply unable to make it to the protest, either because they were too unwell, because they couldn't find people to bring them or because their carers had already made other plans for that day. This last was actually the basis behind the 'they treat us like babies' outburst - all too often, carers make plans for their clients unilaterally, irrespective of what the clients actually wish for. I can appreciate that on occasion someone with a severe learning difficulty will be unable to make their own decisions, but in most cases it seems to me that the whole point of having carers is to help people live more independently. If they can't do that, if they're treating their clients like children and making decisions for them like a parent, I would think that is separate from their remit).

Why am I so passionate about this, when I don't even live in the area? Well, aside from the fact that I got involved by accident through my partner, I actually believe in helping communities get the best out of their public services. We hear so often about unilateral decisions from politicians, without undertaking effective consultation from the people they are meant to serve. Disabled and mentally ill people are some of the most vulnerable in society, and it's important that we stand up for them - especially when they are unable to stand up for themselves, which many of them are.

The protest has so far been quite successful, in that it has generated a call-in of the council's decision to sell off the Tudor Street building pending a meeting in early 2023, which Owen and I will be attending. In the meantime, please sign this petition against the plans. And if you'd like to read a more impartial account of Wednesday's protest, take a look at this fantastic article in WalesOnline by the journalist Jonathon Hill.

Here are some more photographs of the protest, courtesy of photographer Annie Ward:

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