Oh, for a prime minister who knows about families of disabled children!

 

'But did he then have to dodge behind some psychological barrier so that he could enact the savage cuts in public services...'

Comment by Peter Limbrick: When I worked with families of disabled babies, on very many occasions I observed mothers and fathers (and other close family members) plunged suddenly into very dark places from which most would emerge after some months or years. By this time, after acquiring the painful art (if they did not have it before) of closely observing the workings of their own mind – an art practised perhaps during many long wakeful nights – many parents would observe they were no longer the same person they used to be.

The changes I could observe, or the changes they reported to me, were fundamental. These could include change from having no religious belief to faith (or vice versa), change from a lifestyle prioritising affluence and material acquisitions to one of giving family and friends a much higher value, change from a general low-level prejudice against people with disabilities to a growing acceptance of all forms of difference. (I remember seeing one mother making this conscious attitude shift while nursing her new baby who had Down's  syndrome). If there were two parents, they might both experience these radical transformations or only one of them would – and then be out of synch.

If, like me, you have been to gatherings of families of children with a particular condition or disability, I expect your heart was warmed by the atmosphere of genuine kindness, compassion, helpfulness and conviviality of the people around you. I am not sentimentalising disability here. These gatherings would have discussions about life and death, about family breakdown, about desperation and about financial ruin. But many of these family members have been to places where the rest of us have not been. They know things we do not know. They have a soft embrace for their fellows and case-hardened tools in their survival kits.

Nor am I failing to recognise the valued places disabled children and young people have in families. Parents' first dark places in my experience came from grieving for the perfect baby mixed with deep confusion and intense anxiety about the future.

Very often, long dark nights of fear and grief can produce more rounded human beings; women, men and children who are more fully human; people the world needs more of if we are to reverse the slide into materialism, avarice and perpetual conflict.

Here I can confess to my own mental confusion. I see before me a prime minister who has suffered, who we could see was suffering and who, genuinely, spoke the things that people in the world of childhood disability have heard before from bereaved parents. But did he then have to dodge behind some psychological barrier so that he could enact the savage cuts in public services that his dogma and his party's ideology demanded of him? What happened for goodness sake? What sort of anti-human transformation was this? What are his dark places now?

The coalition's public service cuts, even in this early phase, are socially criminal. We all have to get used now to the ministerial, or executive or managerial shrug of the shoulders when we complain that our child has reduced support at school, that the school leaver must stay at home day after day, that the impoverished family has not enough food and is falling into debt.

What we have to get used to at the same time is that our various impassioned campaigns to get the government to understand the impact of their policies on vulnerable people are falling on deaf ears. Just that. Public service cuts are riding over us like tanks, riding over you and me and our children with all the blind ferocity and brutal determination of a military attack on a rural village. And who is driving the tanks? Men in very shiny suits who are yet to learn how to be fully human – who have not yet grown into the sort of people the world needs – who have not yet learned from their own dark places.

This is my dark time as I watch the suffering and premature deaths of very vulnerable people. Perhaps it is your dark time too. Perhaps, like me, you have looked for a full-grown being inside our prime minister and have not seen one. Perhaps, like me, you see only very expensive clothes, hear polished platitudes and smell the cruelty and cowardice of the playground bully exploiting the weakest child.