38 Degrees: Part Way There

38 Degrees are finally asking people to throw their weight behind changes to the Welfare Reform Bill. That’s good, that’s really, really good, but that doesn’t mean that this series of blogs has completely achieved its purpose. Help fighting the Welfare Reform Bill is a huge part of what disabled people have been asking 38 Degrees for over the past year, that lack of support is what started me blogging on the subject, the call to arms to oppose the Welfare Reform Bill is what I set out to achieve, but asking for that help has thrown light on a problem at the heart of 38 Degrees itself.

An organisation that builds its identity around its democratic mechanisms needs those mechanisms to be accessible to all, but the truth is that they aren’t. The near insurmountable difficulties disabled people have faced in getting support in the 38 Degrees votes on where to campaign next are just one aspect of that problem; any demonised minority, Travellers for instance, is going to face the same issues. If disabled people are begging for support, with well beyond half a million of us facing losing our benefits, and we are losing the votes, yet badgers are winning*, then isn’t there a problem 38 Degrees need to address? That’s a major problem in itself, but the problem extends even further.

People in social housing don’t face quite the same problems in demonization that disabled people do, yet they are another disenfranchised minority when it comes to campaigning for support from 38 Degrees, Martha Lane Fox, in her role as web accessibility tsar, pointed out before Christmas that half of people in social housing have no way of getting online, and therefore no easy way to try and ask for support from 38 Degrees, no matter how worthy their cause. That's a feature they share with disabled adults, a very high proportion of whom have never been online and who, on top of the demonization, are similarly restricted in lack of Net access when trying to get help from 38 Degrees.

The two groups most comprehensively disenfranchised by lack of Net access were the same two groups most savagely targeted by the Welfare Reform Bill, and the same two groups worst placed to get the support they needed from 38 Degrees. Even badgers have better (if indirect) Net access. An organisation which prides itself on the democracy at the core of everything it does cannot ignore the fact that those who need its help most desperately can't even get into the polling booth….

The fight to get 38 Degrees into the battle over the Welfare Reform Bill has been won, but the need for change in 38 Degrees itelf remains. The principles at the core of 38 Degrees mean that it cannot afford to remain an organisation that disenfranchises those who cannot afford to be online, just as it cannot afford to disenfranchise those demonized by the media or society (particularly when that demonization extends into the beliefs of its supporters). 38 Degrees cannot afford to be seen as solely a tool of the trendy, web-enabled, chattering classes, but unless everyone can access its help on an equal basis, then isn’t that ultimately what it is?

* I signed the badger petition, I have nothing against badgers, the cull is bad science, but their cute, furry beeline to the heart of active, online 38 Degrees voters is the clearest example I know of the problem I’m trying to highlight.

Where is 38 Degrees? The World Wonders.

This week, disabled campaigners launched the SpartacusReport , demolishing the logic, and truthfulness, of the government case supporting the Welfare Reform Bill’s brutal assault on disability benefits. And on Wednesday night the government suffered 3 consecutive defeats in the House of Lords over amendments to the Bill, the biggest defeat of this parliament to date. Having spent two years studiously ignoring us the media didn’t seem to know how to handle that, the BBC seemed almost to imply that we were being irresponsible for daring to oppose cuts.

Getting access into the media, and to non-disabled people as a whole, is a very large part of the reason we have been appealing for a year or more for mainstream campaign groups such as 38 Degrees, UK Uncut and OccupyLSX to get behind our campaigns, even if only by drawing them to their members attention. But progress has been terribly slow, at a time when, with the Welfare Reform Bill almost law, a laggardly reaction is the last thing disabled people can afford. I’ve made some progress with getting 38 Degrees to admit there is an issue, as seen in blogs here and my guest blog on their own site,  and their campaign on Legal Aid is a start, but Legal Aid is a tiny skirmish on the fringes of the main battle, the Welfare Reform Bill which threatens to leave hundreds of thousands of disabled people without any government support whatsoever, even while the government admits that they are not fit to work, while gutting just about every other disability benefit in the name of party ideology.

Meanwhile a handful of disabled campaigners, with next to no resources, either physical or financial, have stood their ground and inflicted a major defeat on the government through nothing more than smart, net-savvy campaigning, supposedly the very strengths on which 38 Degrees prides itself. In christening their paper the Spartacus Report the team behind it tapped into the media image of Spartacus, the slave who refused to be cowed by the might of Rome and led a revolt that is still legendary two millennia later. On Monday, #SpartacusReport became the number one trending hashtag on Twitter. On Wednesday, Spartacus was triumphant in the Lords,  but the battle isn’t over and the Coalition is threatening to reverse our victories in the Commons.

This would have been the perfect moment for the mainstream groups to throw their weight behind us, to combine their media access and mass membership with our analysis and use the impetus of victory to save literally millions of disabled and other vulnerable people from the vicious, bullying attacks of the Welfare Reform Bill. 38 Degrees showed its ability to rapidly seize and exploit political opportunities with the ‘I am not a Zombie’ campaign, turning a ministerial attack on 38 Degrees members into a media-worthy demonstration of Coalition arrogance in the space of just a couple of days; but it’s Friday now, the Spartacus Report has been out there for five days, and we’re still waiting for 38 Degrees to declare ‘I’m Spartacus’ and urge their members to do the same.

The Spartacus Revolt is the obvious analogy for the Spartacus Report, but in considering the role of 38 Degrees in this I’m reminded more of the WWII Battle of Leyte Gulf. In the middle of the battle, with US forces fighting their way ashore in the Philippines, the US battlefleet, Task Force 34, was lured away, leaving the invasion beaches open to the Japanese battlefleet, including the mighty Yamato, the largest battleship ever built. A handful of US light ships, Taffy 3, with no hope of winning, threw themselves into the teeth of the Japanese guns, and earned themselves a place in history by driving the Japanese off. As they fought for their lives signals were sent pleading for the US battlefleet to turn around and involve itself in the only battle that mattered. One of those signals has become emblematic of plunging headlong in the opposite direction to the real fight: “Where is Task Force 34? The World Wonders.”

Legal Aid is important, vital even, but Legal Aid can only help disabled people to access those rights they are granted in law. The Welfare Reform Bill will destroy many of those rights for ever.  

Where is 38 Degrees? The World Wonders

38 Degrees: Getting the Message Out

I challenged 38 Degrees with failing to support disabled people in my blog almost a month ago now, to which David Babbs, head of 38 Degrees, replied both here and via phone and email discussions, and today 38 Degrees have carried through on their promise to publish a guest blog from me, giving disabled people a chance to be heard, a chance to say that we desperately need their support, but that 38 Degree's democratic model serves us poorly.

I have to praise 38 Degrees for that, how many organisations would have the courage to invite someone to put up a guest blog on their website after calling their basic honesty into question, a blog that points out the flaws in the model at the very heart of their own structure? 38 Degrees gave me that opportunity and its members are now talking about the fact that disabled people haven't been able to access their support, that we need 38 Degrees and other mainstream groups to take action in support of us, but that's just the start and it doesn't address the major issue, simply puts it up for debate. Talking is good, but we need that talking to lead to action, or all it will have done is prove our point that we are so disenfranchised and demonised that even the most overwhelmingly liberal of mainstream campaign groups won't support us.

38 Degrees – Negotiating the Avalanche

I’ve just had a very positive chat with David Babbs of 38 Degrees on the problems with how disabled people have perceived what has been happening with their voting mechanism.

David addressed the issues really openly and I’m happy to agree with him that the problems are cock-up, not conspiracy*; meanwhile he has had the opportunity to take on-board our message that, after years of demonization in the media, disabled people just won’t win popularity contests, and that therefore 38 Degrees’ vote-driven campaigning mechanism is a real problem for us.

That’s a problem 38 Degrees will have to wrestle with, everything they stand for says they should be standing up for the most marginalized and discriminated against in society, but the democratic model at the heart of everything they stand for also means that the demonized can’t access that support, because the population has been brainwashed by the media over how we should be regarded. 38 Degrees depends on its membership telling it what to vote for, the membership depend on the media to identify issues, and the media portray us as frauds and scroungers living a life of luxury.

There’s a real tension in how 38 Degrees deal with that, I understand the difficulty of working with two ideas that don’t play nicely together. Cognitive dissonance barely starts to cover it. And I think that David has offered us a way ahead on that which should hopefully hell leach away some of the anger people in the disability community are feeling towards them. But it is also a discussion 38 Degrees needs to have with itself. If they remain wedded so tightly to their democratic mechanism, then how do they ensure they don’t ignore those in the most desperate need? They also need to look at their own behaviour and decide if it is truly consistent. David admitted that opposing DLA changes should have been on their latest poll and was left off accidentally, but he doesn’t feel they need to do anything about that. I’m not so convinced and I suspect that others will feel the same.

So we’ve made progress and I hope we see more, but things aren’t entirely resolved and as disabled people we’ll be watching to see that 38 Degrees does take a hard look at how it makes sure disenfranchised minorities aren’t beyond its help. After all, no vote told Wilberforce to support the abolition of slavery, no vote told the Pankhursts to lead the Suffragette movement, and no vote should stop 38 Degrees from doing what is right.

* You can see that DLA issues have been on the past votes by scrolling done on the Future Campaigns page , but they aren’t on the current one and you can also see that our votes are falling – people simply don’t understand the depths of the attack on us, and if they don’t understand that, how can they vote for us? It really is a textbook example of disenfranchisement in action.

Disabled People, Betrayed By 38 Degrees?

You may detect a slight hardening of my language since Friday's blog, that's because I've been looking into the matter in more depth, and the more I look, the uneasier I become about attitudes within 38 Degrees towards disabled people.

Shortly after publishing Friday's blog, a friend tweeted and pointed out that disabled people had actually won the previous campaign vote, but that 38 Degrees had then shelved that vote and staged another at which the NHS won. Obviously that's a very serious allegation, the problem is that the facts seem to back it up.

If you go to 38 Degree's Campaign Suggestion forum, and order all suggestions by popularity, which this link will do, you'll find a list of the most popular campaign ideas.

Sitting at number 6 is "A campaign to stop the abolition of Disability Living Allowance - the measure of civilised society."

Sitting at number 9 is "The coalition "are considering" assessing children in their DLA shake up." But attached to that is this note:

• "We're looking into a technical problem with the suggest a campaigns system. Last night we merged this with another DLA campaign after being asked to by the people who had originally created the suggestions. This follows on from previous problems we had with merging campaigns.  Unfortunately last night there was a problem with the system and when we merged the campaigns thousands of votes were removed from the total. I'm really sorry this happened. We're looking into this and trying to sort it out."

If we assume the minimum possible value of 'thousands', i.e. 2000 votes, then that would have been sufficient to boost this to just over 4000 votes, making it at a minimum the 4th most popular campaign suggestion.

But 'that's okay' you say, 'the problem just happened last night, 38 Degrees will fix it on Monday'. Which would be fine if it was true, but I know for a fact - having seen it myself - that that message has been there for months with no action being taken, and all but a handful of the comments attached to it are 8 months or more old. Months with no action, months of wasted inactivity during which the Welfare Reform Bill has been trekking through Parliament side by side with the NHS Bill. Look at everything 38 Degrees have achieved in trying to stop the NHS Bill, look at everything 38 Degrees haven't done to stop the Welfare Reform Bill. The suspicion that disabled people, and the votes and activities of the 38 Degrees membership, have been sacrificed to concentrate on the NHS Bill is impossible to shake. In fact I can't find any sign that 38 Degrees have lifted a finger to oppose the Welfare Reform Bill or defend disabled people.

There's a word for treating disabled people as second class citizens, that word is disablism, or two words if you aren't familiar with the one, disability discrimination.

I don't want to believe that of 38 Degrees, but their own polls show opposing the disability related provisions of the Welfare Reform Bill at numbers 4 and 6 in their own members lists of suggested priorities, combine them together and they are the 2nd most popular suggestion with a minimum of 7,243 votes, within 350 votes of the most popular suggestion and nearly 1,500 votes ahead of the 3rd most popular suggestion.

Sitting down at number 18 is opposing badger culling, and yet that's currently splashed all over the 38 Degrees front page as one of their successful campaigns?! I can't help wondering if the problem is 38 Degrees HQ thinks crips aren't as cuddly as badgers.

So, opposing DLA changes has got more votes on the 38 Degrees website than any idea but fairness and equality for pensioners (and we all know the strength of the pensioners lobby), but when 38 Degrees put out 17 suggested campaigns, including issues as diverse as powerstations, tax avoidance, the Murdochs, and benefits for pensioners living abroad, disability issues don't feature at all? Forgive me, but something's not just rotten in the state of Denmark, but stinking to high heaven of disablist discrimination.

If you think I'm writing this to shine a light on 38 Degrees and shame them into treating disabled people as the equals this government is determined to ensure we aren't, then you're damned right I am.

So what's it to be, 38 Degrees? Do you really believe in democracy and equality, or is it just a sham to trick people into campaigning for your own hobbyhorses? Are you for disabled people, or against us?

Has 38 Degrees Abandoned The Hardest Hit?

The campaigning group 38 Degrees has been one of the features of the ConDem regime, challenging government policies on things as varied as the plans to sell off the forests and the NHS.

Yet there has been one glaring and continuing absence in their policies, any attempt to fight for the rights of the Hardest Hit of this recession.

Disabled people have asked them for support, we've posted on their fora, we've even received substantial voting support there from other followers, but somehow we never seem to be amongst the campaigns they propose they adopt.

38 Degrees just sent me an opportunity to vote on their latest proposed campaigning priorities:

1. Continue the campaign to stop Lansley's NHS plans
2. Run research and local campaigns to expose cuts to the NHS
3. Continue to campaign for planning laws which protect the countryside and local communities
4. Stop rip-off increases to gas and electricity bills
5. Support proposals to make gay marriage legal
6. Continue speaking up for our forests and challenge future attempts to sell them off
7. Make sure that every child from a poor family receives a free school meal
8. Continue to push for a Robin Hood Bankers Tax, a tax on banks that would give billions to tackle poverty and climate change
9. Stopping the building of new coal power stations
10. Step up the campaign to ban secret lobbying
11. Push the government to do more to tackle climate change
12. Continue to demand a real clamp down on tax dodging
13. Campaign for British pensioners living abroad to get increases to their pensions
14. Speak up in support of the British government continuing to give aid to poorer countries
15. Show support for the "Occupy London" protests outside St Paul's Cathedral
16. Campaign against government plans to scrap some employment laws
17. Reform media laws to stop media moguls, like Rupert Murdoch, ever getting so much power again

I support the vast majority of these (the powerstation issue is presented too simplistically for me to take a position on), but the Welfare Reform Bill is almost law, 700,000 disabled people who even the government acknowledges are not fit for work face losing potentially all of their benefit, 20% of DLA recipients face losing their benefit by fiat, unknown numbers of families with disabled members face being forced out their homes because of the housing benefit changes, and the horrors of WCA continue unchecked, while support cuts mean disabled people are being told by the courts that it is perfectly acceptable for a council to let them lie in their own waste. Yet not one of these is addressed in the proposed campaigns, disability is simply not mentioned at all.

I'm forced to the conclusion that 38 Degrees have abandoned us, that the horrendous assault on disabled people and the benefits and support we depend on is beneath their notice. And if that's the case, why should I support an organisation that believes what happens to disabled people isn't important?

So come on, 38 Degrees, convince me that you value disabled people and recognise that what is happening to us needs to be fought against by the entire country.

Or are disabled people simply not trendy enough?

And that's why my response to their poll reads simply: "I'm sorry, I can't continue to support an organisation that refuses to recognise the assault on disabled people and the benefits and support they depend on."

Addendum:

In the short time since writing this, I've been reliably informed that supporting disabled people actually won the last 38 Degrees poll, only for it to be shelved and a second poll taken which opted for supporting the NHS. I'd really like to see an explanation of that.