This video from Britain says about itself:
Morning Stories | Penny Pepper On The Problem With ‘Sensible’ Shoes
24 August 2015
Penny Pepper, a disabled writer, talks about rebelling against the “what’s best” rhetoric when it comes to fashion.
By Felicity Collier in Britain:
‘The world was a liar and I had too much to say to listen to its prejudice’
Thursday 23rd November 2017
Self-confessed saucepot PENNY PEPPER talks to Felicity Collier about the life experiences informing her recently published memoir
JUST before she starts her reading in a Camden Town pub from her memoirs First in the World Somewhere, Penny Pepper is abuzz with anecdotes from her punk youth, be they striking up a rapport with Morrissey or performing gigs in front of Diane Abbott.
A writer and disabled-rights activist, she instigated change in the 1980s by firing off a letter to music magazine Jamming! calling for equal access to gig venues.
The reaction she stirred led to her meeting her first love, forming a band, and recognition that, if punk is about “breaking down barriers,” that must include disability rights.
Her memoirs follow Penny’s childhood and adolescence in the Chilterns where she was keen to escape her lot with an abusive stepfather and a home life she describes as “a prison, hell.”
She savoured times when there was enough money for batteries to power her radio so she could listen to John Peel (“an absolute saviour”) and, when she first heard The Smiths, she immediately bought “everything they had breathed on.”
Feeling represented by Morrissey’s outsider lyrics, Penny wrote to him “endlessly” and was rewarded with a vinyl copy of Barbarism Begins at Home.
Another pivotal moment was watching Siouxsie Sioux and the Sex Pistols on TV setting the tone for a new youth movement.
Rejecting “the designated life of the cripple,” and the restrictive attitudes from health professionals, she was determined not to live a life ruled by Still’s disease, the arthritic condition which affects her joints and requires her to use a wheelchair
Her dream of living an independent life in London was granted when Ken Livingstone, then Greater London Council leader, acted on a letter she wrote. “Letter writing was my escape, my way of fighting back in the world,” she tells me. “The power of my words took me somewhere.”
Cue letters to the Greenham Common women, membership of CND and Rock against Racism, all provoked by “hating Thatcher and everything she stood for.”
She moved in with her partner-in-crime Tamsin — also disabled — and the pair studied, partied and made music together.
“We didn’t think we shouldn’t do what other people do in their twenties,” she says, recalling how at that time disabled people lived with their parents or in a care home. She was intent on avoiding “incarceration” and the sense that her destiny was set in stone was vehemently rejected when she decided to write.
But it took a long time for her to realise that she had “as much right as anyone else” to tell her story. As with writing, so it was with having a sexual identity as a disabled person. She published a pamphlet on the subject and wrote erotic fiction and her candid and vivid memoirs are excellent testament to her tackling ignorance and discrimination.
As a musician, record company executives “leered” over her breasts, she recalls, but took umbrage at her wheelchair. It was an awakening — being made to feel like she could not belong or be sexy because she used a wheelchair and had arthritis. “I decided the world was a liar and I had far too much to say to listen to its prejudice.”
Outrageously funny and brilliantly defiant, Penny is now in her fifties and she has an enduring identification with anarchism, defining it as mutual aid that involves people who are “programmed to help each other to survive rather than the survival of the fittest that capitalism thrives on.”
Yet she’s been a socialist all her life and has a lot of hope for Jeremy Corbyn. Penny encountered Corbyn in the summer while fundraising and he has supported her disability campaign group Disabled People Against the Cuts (DPAC).
“He’s definitely captured the imagination of people — he’s made politics fresh. You can’t undo the passion he’s stirred. For the many, not the few!” she chortles.
Penny and her partner were among the first to have a home help in their own flat. She refused to be placed in a care home in an impersonal system, instead demanding independence in her youth.
But there was a battle to have disabled access fitted to the front door when she was forced to move house and the couple encountered fierce opposition from neighbours.
These days, she works with DPAC in its campaigns against the government’s dismantling of social care, including the fight to preserve the Independent Living Fund that enables disabled people to live independently in their own homes, with visiting personal assistants.
But she is not, she says, “vulnerable” and it’s a word she hates. “It’s really abused. I’m no more vulnerable than anyone else, unless my social care is threatened.”
Of government cuts, she says: “We’re talking about basic equalities — being able to sleep and not in your own pee.” It’s a shocking testament to today’s government because, as she points out, Thatcher ignored disabled people, “but she gave us benefits.”
First in the World Somewhere is available from Unbound, unbound.com. Penny is appearing in Brighton tonight at New Writing South, 9 Jew Street. British Sign Language-interpreted.
Under the Tories, attempted suicides by disability benefit claimants have doubled – why won’t Theresa May scrap the work capability assessment? Here.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
Reblogged this on HUMANSINSHADOW.wordpress.com.
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Tuesday 28th November 2017
THOUSANDS of people have told an inquiry into disability benefits of their despair at the system, including dozens who have been driven to suicidal thoughts.
MPs have heard how people were denied disability benefits or had to fight to keep their entitlements, the chairman of the work and pensions committee Frank Field said yesterday.
Some 3,000 people gave evidence, with many saying their mental health had worsened after trying to claim employment and support allowance (ESA) for living costs and/or personal independence payment.
More than 100 people said that they, or someone they care for, feel their suicidal feelings have worsened or been triggered by the process.
Claire, who has mental-health problems, wrote to the committee to say: “The assessor had to write things like if you were ‘rocking,’ which made me feel like the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] got their ideas of mental illness from fiction books.
“I had to fill the form in again recently and I believe that this has triggered another crisis period, which meant that I ended up attempting suicide.”
Some assessors overlooked disabilities or illnesses that are not immediately visible.
One respondent called Lisa said: “If you look well enough, then you don’t get it. I’m struggling to live on the £73 a week, I’m not sure I can cope with being turned down again. Have even considered suicide. I’m at my wits’ end, please help.”
Mr Field, a former Labour welfare minister, said: “These are carefully written pleas of anguish and for help from individuals. This system is acting as a concrete block on the top of people rather than acting as a floor from which people can build security through their own efforts.
“We expected to get about 100 letters and we have had over 3,000, and they are still coming in although it is after the date.”
One person who works on the ESA benefit inquiry phone line wrote in to say: “Customers are always saying the DWP decision-makers’ written report doesn’t reflect what happened in the assessment room.”
Linda Burnip, co-founder of campaign group Disabled People Against Cuts, told the Star: “People have been in touch saying they’ve also been asked why they’ve not tried to kill themselves yet.
“The Tories seem quite happy with the way things are going and don’t really seem to care.”
http://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-cec3-Benefit-assessments-drive-dozens-to-consider-suicide#.Wh274HmDMdU
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