Tag: Disabled Rights

Torquay: King’s Gardens – Opened 1904 (Visited 14.4.2019)

King’s Gardens appears to have been the result of slum clearing in Torquay with a place called ‘Rotton Row’ being demolished for new houses (King’s Drive) in 1877. We only hope that the people once living in ‘Rotton Row’ were re-housed and not left homeless (as happens far too often today). Originally called ‘Alexandra Gardens’, it was re-named just after opening in 1904 as ‘King’s Gardens’ after Edward VII. When driving into Torquay on numerous of our visits from London, we have often seen free-roaming swans on a patch of ornate and picturesque landscape to the right of Abbey Grounds (separated by a small road). We finally got round to visiting this area yesterday – despite the howling wind and freezing rain! We did try to ‘walk’ from the house to this area, but the waves were coming over the wall and we had to retreat to the safety of the car and slowly drive through the storm of rain and sea-spray… The children – who are strong-willed and usually wanting to press-on – decided that a tactical retreat to the relative safety of the car was in order!

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Invalidation of the Worker Part II - 2017

Invalidation of the Worker – Part II (4.12.2017)

My original article entitled The Invalidation of the Worker – A Study of Disability in Capitalist Society was published in October, 2013. It is logical to assume that as ‘Austerity’ has continued unabated, thousands of disabled who were alive to read it then, are nolonger with us now. The proliferation of articles that over-simplify and misrepresent ‘disability’ are common place within bourgeois society. Most miss the vital point of economic exclusion, and focus instead upon misguided notions of bourgeois individuality – making such puerile statements as ‘if only disabled people were viewed as individuals and not their disabilities’, or ‘disabled people should not be viewed as dysfunctional able-bodied’, and so on and so forth. It is not that there is no truth to statements such as these, but that this kind of narrative is entirely bourgeois in nature, and as such, does not address the central reality of economic exclusion. Why should a person with a disability be categorised as ‘disabled’, when ‘able-bodied’ people are only referred to in that manner, within a temporary discourse which distinguishes the non-disabled from the disabled (privileging the former and disempowering the latter). In reality this situation is a matter of Marxist-Leninist critique, and involves the exclusion of the disabled community not only from bourgeois society, but also from proletariat society.

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How UK Governments Exploit and Kill the Disabled

The disabled people of the UK are now more exploited than at any other time in the history of this group since the Hitlerite extermination policy of WWII. In fact it has been suggested that since 2010, the Liberal Democrats and Tory administrations have actually deliberately targeted and killed more disabled people through their policies, than those killed by the Nazi German regime during the same time-scale. In the meantime, people with disabilities are forced to ‘buy’ equipment from those who do not care about their existence or well-being.

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