Project V (#Projv)

I've just got back from a romantic day trip with Dave.

Yep, we got to take a 260 mile round trip to Addenbrookes in Cambridge for my post op check. What's more, in an almost unbelievable bit of NHS organisation they managed to schedule a bone density scan (for the osteoporosis) and an ultrasound (for my gall bladder pain) and a consultant appointment ALL ON THE SAME DAY!!!!!!

I know, it's too much.

Nadine Dorries please note : Yes, all that tweeting was from the car on the way to a hossie appointment. my eyes are strained and my iphone went black-screen-of-death in protest just as Lancing college came into view.

Nonetheless, if any of you haven't checked out the #Projv hashtag on twitter you really should. "Tweet Stories" from countless sick and disabled people explaining why DLA is vital to their dignity, quality of life and survival. It's had phenomenal support with slebs and politicians joining us sickies to tweet in support. Still, not as important as Justin Bieber's latest hairstyle obviously, as we aren't quite trending, but an amazing campaign.

A MASSIVE congrats to Broken of Britain who again dreamed this up and go on!! If you've never tweeted, try one in solidarity of sick and disabled people everywhere using #Projv after your tweet.

Why #Projv? Because our massive hearted coalition chose today, Valentines Day, to end the consultation on Disability Living Allowance (DLA) cuts that (amongst other sickening cuts) will leave the most disabled without power wheelchairs or transport. . In fact the deadline has been extended until Thursday, but we're only a bunch or sickies and they didn't announce the change til Friday, so hey! A good campaign idea is a good campaign idea. So Project Valentine it is. But unless our hearts - and lives - are to be truly broken, we need you all.

Have a tweet!! Go on, go on, go on, go on, go on. You know you want to ;)

#Projv

I PARTIED!!!

Dave and I have been trying to work out when this last happened, and worryingly, can't find a precedent. I am the one who goes pale at 11 ish, or sneaks off to be sick when no-one's looking or disappears quietly off to bed.

Last night my gorgeous (and embarrassingly young) niece held a cocktail party. We received a charity "old-person's-invite" and amongst much trying on of flouncy frocks, glueing on of false beauty aids and shoe deliberations, I arrived resplendent in feathers (if a little sticky) just as the first cocktail glugged into plastic Tesco champagne glasses, old tumblers and chipped mugs.

Crohn's has a silver lining. What I consider malnourished, society considers desirable, so knobbly giraffe legs and visible hip bones transform from "very bad thing" to "very good thing" in a sparkle of leg glitter and some high sheen 10 deniers. A flat chest simply needs a couple of silicone chicken fillets and the spirit of Victoria Beckham is invoked. Poky out collar bones and xylophone ribs become Audrey Hepburn chic with a carefully chosen teeny-weeny dress and cunningly draped feather boa.

I felt glamorous, happy and (say it very, very quietly) well.

Never before have the planets aligned to ensure such freedom!! Bowels quiet? Check. Nausea absent? Check. Pain gone? Check. Energy? (After hour long pre-party-nap) Check. Drinking potential? Medium to high. Pleasant young people? Check.

I will share the happy news, that I was, for the first time ever, amongst the hard core ordering kebabs at 3am. What's more, my malevolent bowel allowed me to actually eat it, rather than just pretend. I can also confirm that pineapple mojitos and raspberry martinis are very tasty. But then as well people, you probably know that already.

What's more, I even got chatted up by some of the handsome young boys, inflating my ego to levels that could have been unseemly. Dave watched with benevolent pride, all too aware of the pitiful mess they'd have been hitting on a few months ago.

We decided if I become a blogging superstar I shall go for the title of "Paloma Faith of Politics". It would be refreshing and not a little funny to see Paxman or Dimbleby confused by sick-person-who-looks-hot-in-feather-boa-female-talking-politics. There might be some short-circuiting of stuffy old men, which would be amusing.

I was "normal" for a whole night!!! Yayyyyyyyyy.

Paxman-confusing Paloma Faith style Suey surrounded by attentive young boys. No tube up her nose or anything.

This week belongs to the People

Less than two weeks ago, I did my weekly roundup post with a very heavy heart. Slammed about the place like cripple-flotsam, we'd been fobbed off and stonewalled at every turn.

This week however, Suey liked very much.

To say the government wobbled would be an understatement. Firstly, Andrew Lansley tried to make a case for his NHS reforms in the Guardian and not one single comment supported him! It was a sight to behold. Tories, Lefties, Libs, Doctors, Nurses, Carers, GPs and Patients all told him what they thought. The comments were so universally damning that they became news in their own right. Along with a raft of scathing press from the Mail to the Telegraph, his reforms look very shaky indeed.

Suddenly, by the end of the week, it all came at once. A letter, written by 88 senior LibDem criticised the speed and scale of local authority cuts, FINALLY putting a voice to all the grassroots LibDems who'd been so silent for so long.

As if to legitimise this criticism, 6 councils won a high court challenge to Michael Gove's decision to scrap projects under the Building Schools for the Future fund. He must now go back over the decisions "with an open mind." The judge ruled that in 5 out of the 6 challenges, the decision was so unfair as to result in an "abuse of power". Surely many other school projects will now mount legal challenges of their own?

After endless pleas from the voluntary sector and the Citizen's Advice Bureau, the coalition have been forced to announce £27 million pounds to ensure that people continue to get face to face advice on debt and other legal issues after the government scrapped the Financial Inclusion Fund, leaving hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people with nowhere to turn at all.

Forests have been given a reprieve after an explosion of outrage at the government's plans to sell off our woodland. Gone, but not forgotten, at least the policy is "under review" and protesters scent victory.

In Scrounger news, Iain Duncan-Smith finally apologised for the tone of DWP rhetoric on Welfare Reform. He admitted that his department were "wagging their fingers" and "stigmatising" people on benefits as committing fraud despite their innocence. After numerous complaints to the Press Complaints Commission and Parliamentary Standards, it seems campaigners like myself and the Broken of Britain might just be getting through. Just a little bit.

Underpinning it all were the extraordinary events in Egypt. Through sheer determination and unity, the Egyptian people showed the world that people can come together - Christian and Muslim, military and civilian - to claim their own democracy. Peacefully but doggedly, in just over two weeks, a country that had been ruled by an oppressive dictatorship for 30 years, took to the streets and stayed there until they won the right to decide their own futures. Regimes around the world and particularly in the Middle East, must be shaken to the core, wondering who will be next? Campaigners here in the UK took great heart in knowing that protest can be effective. My favourite factoid from the whole event is that Mubarak finally stepped down 21 years to the day after Nelson Mandela was freed from goal.

When the coalition formed, I made a few predictions :

1) The cuts were beyond comprehension. Nothing on the scale Osborne is now attempting had ever been done before and I predicted that when they truly became clear, there would be chaos. What's more, I have always doubted that they will reduce the deficit.

2) The cuts would not in fact be the downfall of this government - incompetency would be. Gove's rail-roading and la-la-land "free schools", Lansleys ham-fisted NHS privatisation, cutting police numbers in the middle of a recession, forcing millions of the sick and disabled off benefits at a time of high unemployment.... I could go on all day. It's a car crash.

3) The economic recovery would not go well under Osborne's austerity plans. I said from the start that we wouldn't really see the effects of his ideological rampage until the second quarter of 2011, but the 4th quarter GDP figures of 2010 shook economists and gave a very worrying indication of the future.

4) Finally (and this is the risky bet) that the coalition would fall apart in 2012. When something looks unlikely, or unsustainable, it usually is and soon, we'll see the AV referendum and May local elections on the agenda. There is little evidence to show that these will go well for the LibDems and with their jobs on the line and the prospect of a rout at the next General Election, I find it hard to see how - or more to the point why - the Lib Dems would continue to prop up a Tory party that makes Maggie look like Mother Theresa.

So there we are. Cards on the table, bets placed. with a few more spins of the wheel and many more weeks like this one, we might not have to wait 5 years to end the destruction of UK PLC after all. I'm sure any Tories or Libs reading will dismiss this as partisan nonsense, but my great love is strategy and living through 13 years of Labour in power made me very good at knowing when it was head-in-hands time and when I was just hearing "Daily Mail White Noise". This was not white noise week, it was the start of an unravelling. When a Tory PM resorts to "rivers of blood" style rhetoric that the BNP describe as a "legitimising" of their message all is not good in the world of Westminster.

Anthem for the Sick and Disabled

Nina Simone. Beyond Class.

Surely this song says everything the sick and disabled would like to say? So come on, click on the link and get swayin' along......

"I wish I could give all I'm longing to give

I wish I could live like I'm longing to live
I wish that I could do all the things that  I can do
though I'm way overdue I'd be starting anew.......

How Can I be any use to you now?

This video from Evita shows how sickness and disability strike anyone, any time. Kings or Queens, Husbands or Wives, Mum's or Dads. Suddenly, even presidents carry you up the stairs or fear for the future.

Lib Dem Councillors may re-define the Coalition

When the coalition formed last May, I know I wasn't the only Labourite shouting at the TV "Don't do it Labour!! Don't do it!!" I had my fingers crossed for so long, there were nearly amputations.

Let's face it, the numbers weren't there, but there was more to it than that. We were tired. People in return were tired of us. Did you see the white, fury of Adam Boulton and Nick Robinson when the Libs dared to even discuss a Lib/Lab deal? OK, the Adam Boulton/Alastair Campbell debacle has become the stuff of legends, but did you see Robinson? He was so outraged at the thought of Lord Adonis, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandleson being a part of the negotiations, that he demanded to become interviewee and screamed at the screen "UNELECTED, UNELECTED, UNELECTED!!!" He referred so often to a "coalition of losers" that I thought he'd been struck down with some form of trauma-induced tourettes. The writing was on the wall. A Lib/Lab deal was never going to happen and if it had, the media would have torn it down within 6 months with outraged  bile.

I confess, I knew nothing of the nuts and bolts of coalition and it turns out I knew nothing about the "Orange Book" LibDems either. Still, I'm a political geek and if I didn't know, then it's pretty certain that Joe public didn't know either. Nonetheless, it seemed that if I must endure a Tory government, then a LibDem upgrade could only improve things. I hazily imagined that coalition meant that each party would have to compromise and work together, ensuring that the unpalatable parts of either manifesto would be mitigated.

In fact what we seemed to get was a brand new political party with a whole new set of policies that no-one had voted for. The clever ConDem nickname is so popular not just because it's brilliant, but because it felt like a whole new name for a new party. When Dave and Nick emerged, shiny and new into the blossoming rose garden it felt all wrong. Surely we didn't need them to morph into one, we needed them to stay distinct? I'd hoped that where one party opposed a policy we would be spared the worst excesses, but in fact it turned out that democracy had been carried out in private for 5 days and all future votes in parliament had already been decided. There would be no abstentions, no votes against, no dissension, just one big ConDemNation.

The news today that 17 council leaders and 71 local party heads have spoken out against the devastating 28% local authority cuts should be celebrated, not opposed by the Liberal Democrats. I firmly believe that if indeed the public did vote for a coalition, then this is what they expected. When something seemed wrong, I think they wanted one or the other party to oppose it. Not destructively but passionately. Not to harm the government, but to strengthen it.

If I'm 100% honest, this was the only thing that gave a leftie like me a moment's chill. There is a strong conservative (with a small "c") streak in the UK public and that, tempered with the more sensitive, inclusive policies of the LibDems could, electorally, have been a force to be reckoned with.

However, in the 9 months of coalition that we've seen so far, this amorphous, undefined mess has given Labour little to fear. Policies are too ideological and ill thought through. The economic lack of policy is a car crash and the Libs have sacrificed themselves so often at the altar of "Strong and Stable (Insert "Tory") Government" that they risk becoming nothing but a subject of satire .

We could have had a Lib/Con coalition that took forward policies mandated in both manifestos. Everything where there was no joint mandate for could have been negotiated, then put to a free vote. A government like that might just have been able to pull itself through the most unpopular cuts agenda in living memory with some integrity. Today, these LibDem councillors could have made the first step towards a more viable UK political model - coalitions that allow parties within them to keep a distinct identity.

If Nick Clegg and David Cameron don't listen, then we don't have a coalition. We have a merger.

What DLA means to me....

Just wanted to share this lovely Scope campaign featured in the Guardian yesterday.

Photos of disabled people with short captions explaining why DLA helps them.

Do click, It's really worth a look.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2011/feb/09/disability-living-allowance-reform-scope-in-pictures?INTCMP=SRCH

As they say - a picture speaks a thousand words.