Archives for 2012

The Moving Toyshop — Edmund Crispin

books and books review
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Cover of The Moving Toyshop


The Moving Toyshop
Edmund Crispin
205 pages
published in 1946

Edmund Crispin, the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery, who under his own name wrote music scores for amongst others, the Carry On series of movies — something I only learned when I looked him up on Wikipedia just now — was yet another of those cult favourite English detective writer. Sometimes it seems there are hundreds of such writers published from the twenties to the sixties, intermittedly forgotten and rediscovered after their deaths. In Crispin’s case he’s on the upswing, his novels having been reissued in both American and British editions in recent years. This is less of an enterprise than with some detective writers, as he only wrote nine novels and two short story collections.

My copy of The Moving Toyshop isn’t a shiny new reissue though, but a green paperback Sandra bought years ago, when she first had discovered Crispin. She was always much more of a crime reader than I am, always keen to reread old favourites, of which this was one. You can easily tell as there was a cigarette burn (and even some ash still) near the front of the book; this having been one of the books she reread a lot in hospital. I can just picture her sitting in her wheelchair, cup of crappy tea or coffee nearby, out in the hospital garden smoking a fag, reading this book and perhaps dozing off and dropping her ciggie in it….

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Waging war on the disabled

Tories, UK politics
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The independent looks at what the relentless focus on stopping disability benefits cheats means for those actually disabled:

So who are the targets for this abuse? Is it the benefits cheats featured in the various stories about “sick note Britain”? Is it the man who claimed to be too ill to cut his own food caught on camera playing golf or the man who claimed to need a wheelchair filmed Jiving? Of course not. Their friends, far less passersby, will have no idea what income or benefits they receive and certainly won’t know what they said on an application form and pretended in an interview. Who would believe they would have such a brass neck? No it is not the real fraudsters, estimated to be less than 1% of benefit claimants, who are the target for the abuse, it is those with an obvious physical or learning disability. That’s why some of the irresponsible reporting has been so dangerous. It is the person who clearly has a disability, who may actually be in work, who is having to suffer the taunts, the name calling and being spat on.

Meanwhile the Guardian looks how Atos, the for profit company judging people on disability, actually operates:

The film also demonstrates the unease about the radically heightened eligibility criteria felt by some trainers employed by Atos to teach new recruits how to carry out the tests. It is now harder for some very severely disabled claimants to qualify for support. No matter how serious claimants problems are with their arms, for example, “as long as you’ve got one finger, and you can press a button,” they would be found fit for work, a trainer explains.

Which reminds me of when the Dutch government first started to tighten guidelines for disability benefits in the early nineties, with the focus on “finding suitable work for people yaddayaddayadda”, with suitable work defined as, “well, you can always fold eggroll cases”.

I forgot who said it or where, perhaps it was Sandra, but one of the most sensible pieces of advice I’ve ever heard was that you shouldn’t look at what the intent was behind a piece of legislation or policy, but at what it actually does in reality. The purpose of any machine is what it actually does and with law and policy it’s no different. The current disability polices have the effect of killing disabled people, through suicide, through just not having enough money to live on, of isolating them in poverty, of destroying solidarity with the disabled as they’re being portrayed as scroungers and cheats. It’s a war on the disabled.