Disability charities were right to boycott Miller meeting
Published 22/03/2012 10:30 PM
As grassroots disabled people’s organisations, Black Triangle and Disabled People Against Cuts was extremely dismayed and disappointed to see Inclusion Scotland, ILIS and LCIL branded ‘childish and petty’ and accused of having ‘put their vanity before the needs of the disabled people they claim to represent’ by refusing to attend a meeting with Maria Miller, Minister ‘for’ Disabled People (Bill Campbell, Letters 8th March 2012).
The facts are that, in a Freedom of Information Request exposed by the Spartacus Report, Maria Miller had claimed in official documentation that she had met with Inclusion Scotland and the other named organisations and based on these fictional meetings asserted that they all supported the ConDem regime’s welfare ‘reform’ programme.
This fraud was therefore not only perpetrated upon these organisations but upon us also – ‘the disabled people they claim to represent’.
This latest outrage was obviously the final straw rather than just an isolated event.
Inclusion Scotland and the others are to be warmly applauded for taking a principled stand against the shameless manipulation and duplicity on the part of the government in its dealings with disabled people and their representative organisations, not to mention the charities.
John McArdle
Black Triangle Anti-Defamation Campaign In Defence of Disability Rights