Letters: How many more people with learning difficulties will be abused and scapegoated?

A Big Issue reader discusses the history of injustices that people with learning difficulties have faced in the UK.

Enough is enough 

“Another one.” My exact words reading the article about the disgraceful treatment of wrongly convicted Gareth Jones. The words “learning difficulties” buzzed in my head.

How many more people with learning difficulties will be fitted up, abused and scapegoated, manipulated, coerced, cornered and bamboozled, seen as an easy target for a lazy, incompetent and rotten to the bone legal system?

The life-long miscarriage of justice faced by another man with learning difficulties, Peter Sullivan, for a murder he never committed was only quashed this spring after 38 years of life were stolen from him. It served us another reminder that the ghosts of Derek Bentley and Timothy Evans still haunt British courts and British policing; the so-called PACE do very little to protect our most vulnerable members of society.

But I ask, where is the anger for these people? How many more cases will we hear of before the enough is enough grows too loud? 

Heather Barrett 

Medical misogyny

I largely agree with the sentiments and points raised in your article ‘The UK has a fertility crisis’, but feel a glaring omission from the causes of the declining birth rate – be those medical or societal – is the dire state of women’s healthcare in this country. 

As a woman in her 30s I have first-hand experience of being systematically dismissed when raising concerns about my reproductive health, eventually being diagnosed with endometriosis seven years after I first told the GP something was wrong. Unfortunately, the majority of my female friends and loved ones have parallel experiences. Trying to get your reproductive health taken seriously in this country takes years of perseverance, assertiveness and resilience that takes a toll on your mental health, let alone the struggles dealing with the physical symptoms, which often include chronic pain. The impact of this is profound – women are not treated for debilitating health conditions and left to struggle in often unsympathetic workplaces, they find access to fertility support extremely difficult, and more subtly but nonetheless importantly, our faith in the NHS to look after our reproductive health
is broken. 

This does play into decisions whether to have children. Alongside unaffordable childcare, the soaring cost of living and career sacrifices are you surprised people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all?

Anonymous 

Misdirected praise

When I was at school we regularly sang the hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, including a verse that went:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them, high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.

Googling it now, I see that most versions now omit this verse, written in 1848, presumably as it’s deemed unacceptable to the modern world. Yet I suspect the sentiments behind it remain – that poverty is inevitable, even if not specifically ordained by God these days. So I’m totally with John Bird when he says that what needs to change is the underlying mentality that abolishing poverty is impossible and all we can do is try to mitigate its worst effects.

Sylvia Rose

Green thinking

The great Labour Party leaders such as Blair, Brown and Prescott did NOTHING to help the non-wealthy
citizens of Britain when they won the general election in a landslide in 1997 while singing that “things can only get better”.

Yeah I was there as the new, caring socialist government slid the poll tax problem under the table when they saw just how much money it was making in a punitive, unfair taxation on where you live, regardless if a millionaire lives right next door, and pays the same now renamed council tax every month. 

They’ll never get my vote for that act of cowardly selfishness, just like the rest of them. Vote Green Party and ‘waste your vote’ while the forests continue to burn and the ice melts.
Phill Gee, Facebook

Home truths

We need to be better at tackling homelessness. The government won’t, they want more people to have little or nothing. They’re slashing disability benefits, doing nothing with rents, no investment in housing. 

More will become homeless and the government don’t care because they have their multiple houses and huge wages. If you think this will change you are truly mistaken because those at the top don’t give a damn.

Julie Nixon, Facebook

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