It’s been a bit of a low time for disabled music fans. London’s Wireless music festival made it almost impossible to experience the gig without the aid of a telescope and a jet pack.
Gravel paths might seem like a sensible way to prevent a mudbath for walking patrons, but if you’re on wheels, pushing through gravel is as bad as pushing through mud or sand. It’s hard work, physically painful, and you’re quite likely to get stuck.
If wheelchair and mobility scooter users did manage to get through the gravel, they couldn’t get up the slides – sorry – ramps. There’s no difference if they don’t have grips. You might as well cover them in washing up liquid and rebrand them as slip and slides. Because there is no getting up them.
In the absence of decent ramps, many were stuck on an accessible viewing platform without a view. Unless you count the back end of a massive tree, or ant sized performers of a stage half a mile away.
This ‘special corner’ approach to access is so wrong. Disabled people want to be in the thick of life, like everybody else, not stuck in special areas so far from the stage that if someone sees them with a ticket in their hand, they assume they’re a tout, not a punter.
There’s an easy way round this. Employ, among the thousands of employees who make festivals happen, a lived experience access advisor. There’s a national register to make it extra easy. Glastonbury got it right. Well, almost.
Which brings us to Noel Gallagher, star of High Flying Birds, who decided that his own personal Oasis at Glastonbury was the John Peel stage disabled viewing area, which he gatecrashed, drunk, with Rita Ora, and his Access All Areas pass. One could be forgiven for thinking that he was bringing a VIP (very ineptly p****d?) experience to the people.
Except he wasn’t. He ‘joked’ about tipping people out of wheelchairs to give his son a front row seat, and alluded to touching people on the head to make them get up and walk. I mean, Jesus… Thoughts and prayers to Noel in the hopes that he realises that’s never a good look.
Wheelchairs are often seen as an extension of personal space or even bodies for many wheelchair-using disabled people. Threatening to tip someone out of one – something that happens a fair bit due to abuse, or poorly maintained infrastructure, isn’t funny – it’s at best horribly disappointing, and at worst, invasive and extremely frightening. And the old ‘cure’ trope. It’s insulting. We’re looking back in anger, Noel.
Disabled people should be able to expect a lot more respect from the man whose most famous lyrics include the wheelchair-user friendly ‘you’ve got to roll with it’. Noel mate, slip inside the eye of your mind. Don’t you know you might find a better place to play? Clue: it’s not the disabled viewing platform at Glasto.
The problem with PIP
“PIP pip!” No, it’s not just a greeting you’d expect to hear between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson. For millions of disabled people, PIP – Personal Independence Payments – are a lifeline.
PIP is a benefit given to disabled people to help us to live independent lives. If we can’t do certain things that non-disabled people do, PIP helps (but doesn’t always fill) the £600 a month difference that we have in costs compared to our non-disabled peers.
But there’s a big problem with PIP at the moment. People aren’t getting it.
Citizens’ Advice, the national information and advice organisation, is getting 150 calls an hour from disabled people seeking help about PIP. It gets 40% more calls about PIP than its next most popular topic.
It estimates that around £300 million is owed to hundreds of thousands of people who are having to wait for five months or more to hear whether they will receive payments.
That’s a third of a million people currently stuck in the backlog.
To get PIP, you need to be assessed. And it’s a long wait for assessment right now. Many disabled people are terrified of PIP assessments. I know far too many disabled people who are far too frightened to open up to an independent assessor about the most intimate parts of their lives (when was the last time you needed to prove to somebody exactly how you use a loo and wipe yourself?)
They know that even if they should be entitled to PIP, many get refused at assessment, and then have to undergo a mandatory reconsideration, and then if that fails, go to a very stressful tribunal, at which point a whopping two-thirds of government decisions get overturned in favour of disabled people. If they make it that far. We have to wonder whether the government banks on them not making it that far. Stress is an integral part of life for many disabled people. And sometimes, a righteous challenge is a stress too far.
A fifth of people who needed a foodbank referral have had issues with PIP. Without PIP, they can’t qualify for the £150 disability benefits cost of living support payment necessary to catch up with this Spring’s energy price hike. Come October, many are at a loss as to what to do about the next price hike.
Without PIP, many disabled people have to live on bare bones benefits of under £80 per week.
That’s a little under two bottles of Shawsgate ‘Frampaign’ available from the House of Commons Wine List. When you’re living on that little money, life loses absolutely all of its fizz. A life lived on the most meagre of benefits is so far removed from the lives of those in the Cabinet it is impossible for most of them to even begin to conceive of the stressors involved in such living. Less chin chin, than taking it on the chin, like an uppercut that knocks you out, flat on the mat, with no getting up again, sometimes ever.
