Lots of confusion over blue badge entitlement
When will Welsh government departments, responsible for the latest guidelines to councils for blue badges, check the benefits situation and liaise with the Older People’s Commissioner.
I’m 81 and held a blue badge for around 20 years, automatically reissued every three years, usually a month before the current blue badge expired.
Despite several attempts to get a disability benefit, I was informed that once one is on old age pension, one is not entitled to any.
I started inquiries as to why a replacement has not been sent for my current blue badge, which runs out at the end of August.
Checking a Welsh government blue badge policy leaflet, I learnt only those with DLA or PIP were entitled. That rules out every OAP.
Having now spoken to a staff member in Cardiff council’s blue badge department, outlining my three disabilities, I am hopeful I may get one.
How many other disabled OAPs will fall into the same trap?
Why are highways involved rather than social services?
Why didn’t the Welsh Government do their “homework” before bringing in this policy?
They seem more inclined to push “ invisible” disabilities (and I have one of those, e.g. lung function) rather than obvious disabilities such as those that come with old age!
Jacqui Gasson
Caerau, Cardiff
Global rise of the demagogues
For hundreds of years, the political struggle of the British people had been a matter of conflict between their profound beliefs concerning human society. Feudal lords still cling to ownership of vast tracts of land and property, while Conservative voters cling to those same beliefs, that there should be many divided classes, where the rich are superior people, far above Tory voters’ own children, and schoolboys from Eton and Harrow make the best prime ministers.
While one cannot consider that intelligent, it has now been replaced by an even more sinister form of society in the minds of voters, the worship of demagogues. Previous right-wing demagogues, Mussolini, Hitler and Sir Oswald Mosley, did possess considerable powers as orators, but present demagogues, Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, can scarcely string five words together. They are almost incoherent.
That is their astonishing power over populist minds, that they make the most extravagant promises – “to make America great again” or “to make Britain the envy of the world” – without stating any trustworthy policies, or any intention to keep their word. Honesty plays no part in such politics, and success depends on the saloon bar attraction of flamboyant liars, widely admired by conformist nationalists.
Nobody believes anything. Politics is the same as “belonging” to a football club, or voting for celebrities on Strictly Come Dancing. We vote for our political party because we loathe the others, and emotions have damaged our ability to think intelligently, so Boris was selected as a mockery of a world statesman. TV’s Spitting Image has returned, in the flesh.
CN Westerman
Brynna
Why 100% Welsh?
Reading in the Echo that all new street names are to be in Welsh, I am asking why?
Not 50%/50% with English, which would be bilingually fair but 100%, even though English is the first language of 95% of Cardiff residents.
This is another example of the authorities in Wales trying to impose the Welsh language on reluctant English speakers, who are by far the majority, whether they like it or not.
David Gorton
Rumney, Cardiff
