Listen to Scope's Chair on BBC Radio 5 Live

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Ross_Alumni

Scope's recently appointed Chair, Robin Miller, joined BBC Radio 5 Live for an extended discussion about how disabled people have been forgotten throughout the pandemic

You can listen to the interview by following the link below. Let us know what you think about the topics raised on the show. The discussion is the first item on the show, so you can listen right from the start.

Listen to the conversation

newborn

Thanks.  This was amazingly helpful, and really the general public should know about it.  
(Yes really, it's true, even people not currently being championed by Marcus Rushford do actually exist, and do actually have important problems directly caused by Public Services ignoring that existence)

A heads up is to start about 7 minutes in, because it is old news and loud music/jingle jibbering.  (beware, that is repeated at intervals.   B.B.C. as a public service provider takes care to be discriminatory by intrusive, startling, pointless noise of all kinds, particularly music but also shouting )

One problem which wasn't cleared up is that, to a non-insider, Scope seems to have two chiefs, not in contact, and they in turn communicate with two different government chiefs, also not in contact.  The Chair of Trustees is also busy with his music business, and is disadvantaged by matters arising from Covid19, but it seems his disability is a single continuing vision problem, and that previously, he has not encountered the absolute imperative of persisting and concentrating single-mindedly on incessantly repeating attempts to get responses from officials.  It appeared he thought dropping a line and awaiting a response should be enough, and that if he sent it to the wrong part of government it would be forwarded, so he did not chase anything up. Non-stop full time battering away at closed doors and closed official minds is a  more typical experience of being either disabled, or a parent or carer (the interests of the two groups, and of old people, overlap to a great extent.)

Meanwhile, and (according to the impression, no doubt wrongly given to listeners)  apparently without any communication between left hand and right hand within the Scope organisation, some other Scope chief has a routine habit of going a few times a year, if invited, merely  to restate the Scope policy as  presumably decided annually by a committee meeting of Scope.  In this way, all  government departments will be kept  informed about everything  they need to know, about all the country's disabled people,

Outsiders to government, to disability, or to the hierarchy within Scope,   (or to the clash of egos between two rival alpha males??)  may spot some beartraps in the set-up.   Real people, such as those featured in the admirably representative collection of disabled voices which Scope assembled for the show, would maybe wonder if things could be changed?   Could there be an inclusive and diverse weekly meeting to decide the Scope response to changing events, to be put forward to any publicity outlet and any government department, and chased up non stop in order to make it impossible to risk publicity by ignoring it?   Could there be an agreed unimpeachable high status non-ignorable champion, as the dreaded nuclear option, chosen not for single knowledge or admin skill but for ability to  get publicity and oblige  government to respond?.   

The late actor Brian Rix used to do it, for Mind, because of his daughter. He was in his day a national treasure like Morecombe and Wise, or Attenborough, and was forever popping in and out of Downing Street, for his good cause.  Right now, a footballer is dictating government policy.  Joanna Lumley single handedly changed policy to  admit thousands of Ghurkha families past immigration bans.  There must be someone who is famous and publicly popular and  willing to persist and who for some reason can be bothered about disability?  Sir Paul McCartney???