It is incredible to believe it has been five years since I was blogging for the Huffington Post on a weekly and even twice weekly basis on the topics I wanted to talk about. The way the Huffington Post allowed so many people with different viewpoints on so many different issues to have voice felt like a revolution in free speech and citizen based democracy.

My blogs were almost as controversial as they are now and many other ‘disabled’ activists were outraged the Huffington Post gave me a voice, there was even a small petition demanding I was banned from their website. But I was just one of many views on impairment-related issues the site allowed. If people were capable, they could write their own articles to be published challenging the views I had.

I believe it was about two years ago that my relationship with the Huffington Post began to change in two ways. I was becoming more confident in my viewpoints as well as my political understanding. My awareness that I was an independent and honest activist meant that I wanted to be able to say what I really meant and the Huffington Post would reject posts that it found uncomfortable.

On my own blog, I could publish whatever I wanted as I indeed did. I now had my own large twitter base and I was considering what exactly was the Huffington Post offering me at this stage of my development, the answer was nothing. If I was truly independent, it was time for me to blog as an independent and honest activist on my own blog.

At the same time, the Huffington Post was recognising its growth and standing, and felt the need to better organise itself, shifting it into the central-left liberal competitor to the Guardian it is today. This included taking a tighter control of its material related to people with impairments stories, going for safe and comfortable feel good stories that offered no room for the intellectual challenges I offered.

The new look Huffington Post was one that called for all people with impairments to accept their role as victims of society, wonder that is victims of welfare forms, and people who have failed to have the perfect middle class lifestyle they feel they deserve. A classless significantly impaired independent and honest activist like myself, with a level of intelligence and confidence comparable to Sherlock Holmes, certainly did not fit into the direction of the Huffington Post,  and hence our silent divorce was only a matter of time.

The Huffington Post like the Guardian and BBC have shown how liberalism and political correctness has been turned into a veil and vile acceptance of the ideology of the left. In terms of people with impairments, this means accepting people with impairments are second-class citizens although wrapping it up as human rights, equality, compassion and fairness. The Huffington Post has moved from a platform of free speech, to a typical left wing puppet designed to keep people with impairments disempowered for the benefit of the industries that profit from this.

Maybe the Huffington Post experiment on true free speech was too successful or maybe the will of advertisers and executives took priority, the fact is still that the revolution of free speech promised by the Huffington Post is over as it takes its role as a direct competitor to the Guardian and a traitor to the meaningful inclusion of people with impairments.

 

The welfare reforms has had a lot of criticism, but the harshest has been the accusation that the work capacity assessment has resulted in some people committing suicide. Activists and the media have highlighted a number of cases they believe shows the government is responsible and want the government to be made accountable for them.

My first reaction is wariness of the implications of these accusations. Suicide is a complex and sensitive issue where at the end of the day, even with a suicide note, no one else really knows what was in someone’s head when they took the action when they take the decision to end their lives. Receiving a letter to inform them their benefit has stopped, for reasons that may or may not be correct, may indeed have been the final straw, but there is likely to be many other factors that has caused someone to reach that point.

Politicising suicides is a dangerous game and one that I am very uncomfortable with. If we accept the government is ‘to blame’ for these death to the point that criminal proceedings for corporate manslaughter could be brought, what does this mean for other reasons of suicide? It could be that if anyone sends any person any form of communication material, email or letter, that becomes the last straw in causing them committing suicide, the sender could find themselves in prison! This would bring a new meaning to Dear John letters.

Activists have called for a public inquiry into the so-called benefit suicides, and I would welcome this myself, but not for the same reasons. I believe any inquiry would acknowledge that there are many factors involved in these deaths, and I would like to give evidence that the media has had a big part to play in pushing people towards a situation of hopelessness and despair, and towards suicide.

I am not suggesting in this instance the media has deliberately and knowingly pushed anyone on disability benefits to commit suicide. I am however suggesting they have created a contextual backdrop where the public’s and therefore claimants’ understanding of how the benefit assessment system works as been corrupted with deliberately misleading information for political reasons, particularly in the ability to receive a fair assessment.

Many activists now pride themselves on making the benefit assessment system toxic and unworkable, and the media has played a big part in this. There has been almost daily articles for a number of years on how people with impairments have been wrongly or unfairly found fit for work, whether that is correct or not, based on a culture of pity towards people with impairments. This bias reporting, that has not been balanced with positive cases, can only fill claimants with dread, causing them to experience unnecessary anxiety and so providing the foundations for suicidal desires.

So when people’s only defence to Labour’s appalling bigoted policies towards people with impairments is the uninformed quip that the government kills people with impairments, my response is that it is more likely to be the fault of the media. Not only that, but the media’s actions have so far been unchallenged by activists, other political parties, charities and organisations made up of people with impairments, making it a conspiracy as they all have something politically to gain from these suicides they blame the government for.

If you are going to use suicide as a political weapon, it is important to understand it is a dangerous and potentially immoral exercise. In blaming the government for so-called benefit suicides, activists and the media may have unwittingly revealed the blame actually lies with them.