Particularly relevant to the disability experience is that you may be a different kind of person to what your income, education, occupation or housing suggests.

You could be unemployed, you may consider yourself unemployable, but you may have a masters degree, enjoy opera and hang out with CEOs and surgeons. if that’s you, then what defines your class?

Disability campaigner Kaliya Franklin tweeted earlier that she is not sure what class she belongs to. She says she is: “Middle class by upbringing & education but underclass due to benefit receipt?”.

After taking the new class calculator test on the BBC website, Spoonydoc Tweeted that she ended up in the lowest class grouping: “I was precariat. Test very skewed by being housebound. Changed to emergent service worker otherwise.”

What is class anyway?

Well, it’s all about your essence and standing, your station in life, your status, your regardability, your power. It gives clues as to what kind of consumer you are, what your politics might be, and all sorts of other unsumuppable traits. If you can be pigeonholed, you can be broadly understood as a person or householder, and targeted accordingly by those who need to know: advertisers, political canvassers, statisticians, town planners, who knows what.

Many disabled people take a non-standard route through life. It’s recognised that opportunities in education or employment are harder to achieve due to physical accessibility or barriers that are attitudinal. Disabled people are likely to have less money as a result of having fewer opportunities.

If you don’t generate your own economic capital due to not having a regular job, the influences around you are perhaps more important in turning you into the person you are. This survey recognises that and it calculates your “cultural capital” i.e. what TV, newspapers, arts and events you are a consumer of.

Could you, or should you, be summed up by what you like? Rather than what you’re like? Should we define disabled people by what’s going on in their head rather than their bank balance? And is that power?

There are, of course, plenty of disabled people for whom disability has been no barrier to socio economic progress … but it’s not clear quite how many that is.

BBC by Damon Rose

Her central vision was not affected but she has no peripheral vision and experiences temporary difficulties in adjusting to changes in lighting.

She notified the trust in August 2011 that she was ready to return to work after maternity leave.

An eye specialist had stated Ms McCracken was fit for work and that she “should only be placed in work where it is brightly lit”.

But an industrial tribunal has ruled that the advice was not acted upon by Ms McCracken’s employers within a reasonable timeframe.

Despite a series of meetings in 2011 and early 2012, it was only last September before she was able to return to work.

The adjustments regarding the wards and the hours within which she could work were not made until December.

The award of £16,684 covered financial loss from January 26 to August 2 2012 and included £6,419 for “injury to feelings as a result of the unwarranted delay”.

Ms McCracken said: “I am glad to be back at work. That period where my eyesight was deteriorating was extremely difficult for me, I was also coping with a new baby and a toddler.

“The delays I encountered when trying to get a reasonable adjustment to allow me to get back to work made it even more stressful, and being informed that my employment was being terminated caused me a lot of distress.”

Anne McKernan of the Equality Commission, which supported the case, said lessons should be learned. “This case highlights the importance to employers of responding to requests for reasonable adjustments, not just in the terms of changes made, but promptly,” she said.

Belfast Telegraph

Data from more than 66,000 operations showed the odds of a stroke increased more than fourfold in the fortnight immediately after surgery.

The research in the journal Stroke showed that taking drugs such as aspirin could reduce the risk.

The Stroke Association said the results should be taken “very seriously”.

Hip replacements are a very common operation, carried out on hundreds of thousands of people around the world each year.

Researchers in the UK and the Netherlands said the probability of having a stroke in the year after surgery was 2%, compared with 0.4% if they did not have the operation.

The risk peaked in the weeks after surgery before returning to normal over the course of a year.

One of the researchers, Prof Cyrus Cooper from the University of Southampton, said the risk was twice as high as would be expected from general surgery.

‘Traumatic’

Taking medication which reduced the risk of a blood clot, such as aspirin, appeared to lower the risk in the study. The report’s authors called for more studies to investigate if patients should be given pills before going under the knife.

Prof Cooper said: “This research has demonstrated that there is a high risk of stroke to patients soon after having a total hip replacement and suggests that the use of soluble aspirin might be beneficial in reducing this risk.

“Normally we would have reservations about people taking aspirin every day but our results suggest aspirin is a benefit and worthwhile to give to the patient before the surgery.

“The data is of huge clinical importance.”

Dr Peter Coleman, from the Stroke Association charity, said: “Hip replacement surgery is a significant operation and can be very traumatic for the body. Like with any major surgery there is always a risk of incurring further health problems.

“This research suggests that hip replacement surgery could increase your risk of stroke and the results should be taken very seriously.

“If you are due to undergo a hip operation, it is important that you speak to your GP or hospital consultant beforehand in order to discuss the potential risks.”

By  James Gallagher, Health and science reporter, BBC News

A member of United Response’s campaign panel – a group of people with learning disabilities – explains why the government must listen more.

My name is Shairaz and I am a member of United Response‘s campaigns panel. We are a group of people with learning disabilities and some family members who want to speak out on issues that are important to us.

United Response asked us to tell them what we thought about the government’s plans for social care. The government has put these plans in its white paper and draft care and support bill.

Our opinions have been turned into a report by United Response, published today, called Our future. In the report we tell people about what it is like to have a disability and what we think the government should be doing to make things better for us.

Many of us (two-thirds) had not heard about the changes that the government was going to make to social care, before we took part in the report. Those of us who did know about the changes were worried about our benefits as we knew that funding was being cut.

For me, I think that if I was prime minister, I’d make sure that everyone had better support and funding.

I’d make sure that disabled people were always cared for and that they were not neglected and I’d want people to have the facilities and things that suit them; for example someone might need a wheelchair or things changed in their home to make it easier to live there.

It’s really important that people’s living environment is right, because it helps people to live a good life.

The government is looking at who will receive care in the future and how it will be funded. We all felt that disabled people should receive free care.

It’s all about fairness. Some people will need support forever and the government just has to accept us as we are.

We didn’t choose to be disabled, so it’s not fair for the government to expect us to pay. A lot of the time people with disabilities are neglected, and they shouldn’t be.

We need to help all people with disabilities.

We also felt that people should have support for their needs early on. For example, if someone has depression, it’s really important to spot it early. If people get more support early on, then they’re less likely to end up in a crisis.

Some of us had bad experiences when we moved from one sort of service to another and so we think its good that the government is going to help people more with change and to set a minimum standard of care. But we also think that there should be more support for people who only have a few needs.

Just because someone has a disability that’s under the surface, it doesn’t mean they don’t need help.

Disabilities are not all the same and they’re not just about physical difficulties. Things can go wrong inside your head too. People can be like apples or eggs – they look fine on the surface, but you don’t know what’s going on underneath.

Disabled people shouldn’t all be classed as the same. People need to see the human underneath and see that everyone had been born with differences.

The campaigns panel liked many of the government’s plans, but we are concerned about funding and benefits and how things will actually work.

For things to be better in the future the government must listen more to disabled people.

All politicians should meet disabled people; just sit down and have a chat. Once they understand us, they can support us better.

Shairaz is a member of United Response‘s campaigns panel.

Read more at Guardian

Dr. Helen Tremlett has found that some MS patients experience ‘natural’ improvements (Credit: UBC/VCHRI).

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The Prime Minister’s voice cracked as he revealed his hope that society’s attitude to disability had changed since the Paralympics, and Mrs Cameron was seen welling up in the audience in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall.

Large sections of Mr Cameron’s speech were deeply personal, and left him open to the charge of using sympathy to win votes.

The PM repeatedly referred to his upbringing, attending a ‘posh’ school and his father’s disability.

And he took aim at Labour’s ‘class war’ saying Tories ‘just get behind people who want to get on in life’.

And he said he hoped the huge public attention which the Games attracted would have a lasting legacy in altering the way people with disabilities are viewed.

The PM said: ‘I am so grateful for what all those Paralympians did.’

‘When I used to push my son Ivan around in his wheelchair, I always thought that some people saw the wheelchair, not the boy.’

TV cameras caught Mrs Cameron sitting in the auditorium with tears in her eyes. Ivan, who had cerebral palsy and epilepsy, died aged six in 2009.

The main theme of the speech was a rallying cry to people who ‘strive to make a better life for themselves’ as Mr Cameron sought to recast the Tories as not the party of the better off but ‘the party of the want to be better-off’.

He signalled his intention to challenge Labour attempts to portray him as out of touch, declaring: ‘I’m not here to defend privilege, I’m here to spread it.’

He went on: ‘To all those people who say: he wants children to have the kind of education he had at his posh school. I say: yes – you’re absolutely right.

‘I went to a great school and I want every child to have a great education.’

Mr Cameron’s voice also appeared to crack when he spoke of his father, Ian, who died in 2010.

‘I don’t have a hard luck story. My dad was a stockbroker from Berkshire,’ he said as his voice cracked.

Mr Cameron added: ‘He was born with no heels on his feet and legs about a foot shorter than they’re meant to be. But he never complained – even when he lost both those legs later in life.

‘But Dad was the eternal optimist. To him the glass was always half full. Usually with something alcoholic in it.’

He said his father’s life was ‘not a hard luck story, but a hard work story’. He added: ‘Work hard. Family comes first. But put back into the community too.’

He used the speech in Birmingham to set the battleground for the next election, putting welfare, education and economic reforms at the centre of the Tories’ pitch for an overall majority at the next election.

He said: ‘Let us here in this hall, here in this government, together in this country make this pledge – let’s build an aspiration nation. Let’s get Britain on the rise.

‘Deficit, paid down. Tough decisions, taken. Growth, fired up. Aspiration, backed all the way.

‘We know what it takes to win in the tough world of today, to win for all our people, to win for Britain.  So let’s get out there and do it.’

He also revived his pitch of ‘compassionate Conservationism’, arguing his party had to represent everyone in Britain.

‘My mission from the day I became leader was to .. show the Conservative party is for everyone: North or South, black or white, straight or gay.

‘But above all – to show that Conservative methods are not just the way we grow a strong economy, but the way we build a big society.

‘That Conservative methods are not just good for the strong and the successful but the best way to help the poor, and the weak, and the vulnerable.’

And he defied critics of his decision to protect foreign aid from cuts, telling the Conservative party they should be ‘proud’ to have helped to vaccinate 130,000 children around the world.

On tax, Mr Cameron accused Labour leader Ed Miliband of thinking all workers’ income belongs to the state  who lets them keep some of it thought tax cuts.

He added: ‘We promised that those with the broadest shoulders would bear the biggest burden…
…and with us, the rich will pay a greater share of tax in every year of this Parliament than in any one of the thirteen years under Labour.’

Mr Cameron has often paid tribute to the Paralympics for its power in changing social attitudes.

He added: ‘I was trying to think of my favourite moment. Was it telling President Hollande that no, we hadn’t cheated at the cycling, we didn’t have rounder wheels, it was just that we peddled faster than the French?

‘No… for me it was seeing that young woman who swam her heart out for years, nine training sessions a week, two hours a time.

‘My best moment was putting that gold medal around the neck of Ellie Simmonds.’

He went on: ‘There are so many people to thank for this summer.  Those that won the bid, those that built the stadia, that ran the Games…

‘And those Games-Makers. You know, I’ve spent three years trying to explain the Big Society, they did it beautifully in just three weeks.’

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