Anna Morell from Disability Rights UK says every leadership team in every corporate and government board needs somebody with learning disabilities because they bring the common sense that is sometimes lost
Head in hands at reading that NHS Digital saw fit to use the term “mental retardation” in relation to people with learning disabilities last week.
Ciara Lawrence who works at Mencap said it “describes people like me as a second-class citizen, with no value to society. It’s insulting, and truly shocks me.”
During the pandemic, I sat round a virtual government table with Ciara and a host of Cabinet Office communications leads, as they sought to get messaging out about Covid to Disabled people.
All these high-flying kids from The Thick Of It, in the thick of it, with their fast, choppy language, full of acronyms, and business buzzwords, and there was Ciara, who very calmly and politely asked them to rephrase what they were saying so she could understand what they meant.