Disability in Blair's resignation speech
- 10 May 07, 2:31 PM
Did you hear it? Did you? If, like Monkey, you've spent all morning glued to the news coverage of the Prime Minister announcing the worst-kept secret in politics - his - then you may have heard the brief mention of disability in his speech. Yep, we get in everywhere, don't we? Here's what Mr Blair said:
"And people say to me [that being Prime Minister is] a tough job. Not really. A tough life is the life led by the young severely disabled children and their parents who visited me in Parliament the other week."
Yes, it is kind of 'blink and you'd miss it', but I suppose he had a lot of other things to get through ...
Comments
Maybe I'm old fashioned but I wanted Tony Blair to apologise for taking our country to war.
I believe that the Prime Minister is like the "head" of our national family. Some one we all should be able to look up to and respect his judgement.
It is a very strong head of the family who can admit that they have made a mistake. As a Father and Grandfather I know that it is difficult to say you are sorry in some circumstances.
However I believe it is a strong person who can admit a mistake and aplogise for it. Blair is obviously a weak character if he cannot see the error of his ways and is probably only interested in the image he has of himself not the image which "his" people think of him.
For history Blair should be renamed BLAIRAQ and he should now take up a job in Iraq helping to rebuild the country he and Bush have devastated.
Finally, this is not being wise after the event. I wrote to Blairaq six months before the invasion telling him that based on my experience of working in Iraq, Saudi and Kuwait that the people would not thank us even if we deposed Saddam Hussain and that we would be come the enemy.
What a world we have created for our children and grandchildren.
Wej Parry
Comments like that really bother me, as someone born seriously physically disabled & Autistic, plus knowing people with all degrees of disability up through living on a respirator. Life wasn't automatically tougher for me as a child, it just had different obstacles from the norm, many of which were created by politicians or other people. Watching my younger brother grow up five years behind me, it was clear to me that the same applied to raising me vs. raising him!
There were good and bad parts for everyone... We each had our own ways of driving them batty, making them fear for our lives, or causing exhausted depression. Just like how our personality, gender, and the presence/absence of video/computer games in our first ten years of life changed things.
Things like what Blair said are dangerous for people like me: it depicts our lives as being terrible no matter what others do, keeping them from grasping that society is a huge factor. That encourages feelings of pity in others, replacing awareness that changing our communities will make a difference with beliefs that it's better to be dead than one of us.
Perhaps if Mr Blair had listened more to the people of the country, and what matters more here, he probably wouldn't be giving up his post as PM.
I know being the "top-man" is probably the hardest job anyone could have, and maybe he has been wrongly criticised over sertain issues in the past, but surely his main priority should be his own people?