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You and Yours - Transcript 大象传媒 Radio 4 |
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TX: 06.03.09 - Disabled Leaders - Andrew Lee PRESENTER: PETER WHITE |
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Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 大象传媒 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WHITE In the last in our series of interviews based on Mary Wilkinson's book on disabled leaders, I've been talking with Andrew Lee. Born with a range of learning difficulties, Andrew has gone through just about every experience associated with them; being bullied as a child, dead-end jobs and being constantly patronised. And yet now Andrew Lee heads the national organisation 'People First', which is the genuine voice of people with learning difficulties, campaigning and speaking for themselves. So, how did he make this journey? Memories of those early, low expectations are still vivid. LEE While I was in Oswestry living on my own I went on to a youth training scheme. I was fed up of putting pens in boxes and the stereotypical. When I got there I was told well the only thing that I can give you to do is to actually sweep the driveway and the exciting bit was to actually man a shop that nobody actually came to. It got a bit boring sort of two days in, so I got on my bike and cycled home. WHITE And how typical was that - do you have a lot of experiences like that? LEE Yes my experience of school was a survival course rather than an educational process. Up until the time that I was at Penn Hall I'd had no education apart from my private tutor, my brother and I were fed but my parents did go without food on a regular basis. WHITE And part of that was to pay for that tutor wasn't it? LEE Yes, yes. WHITE There was another problem, wasn't there, with school which is that in common with a lot of people with learning difficulties you were bullied. LEE Yes. There used to be a school bus that I was put on and from that moment on pupils used to call all the traditional old names referring to disability, they used to throw pens at me and rubbers - anything that they could lay their hands on basically. WHITE How do you think you survived all that? How did you deal with it? LEE Well I bottled everything up and so how it showed itself was through my epilepsy, stress is a trigger for my epilepsy. WHITE Can I ask you a question about your - your situation and how you describe yourself because people listening to you will hear someone very articulate, able to talk about yourself, you make political speeches, you're a campaigner and some people will hear you and think you don't have a learning difficulty, now how do you feel about people thinking that, perhaps finding it hard to understand? LEE It drives me mad. I was at an event organised by the Department for Work and Pensions and the chief exec of a well known housing association patted me on the head and I stood up and I said - What do you think you're doing? - preventing myself from swearing in the process because there were 25 civil servants in the room. The problems that the gentleman had was that I was an example of everything that he was saying wasn't possible, that being a person with learning difficulties in a position of power, position to actually change things and I know there will be lots of parents listening that will say my son/my daughter wouldn't be able to actually do that and I would hope that hearing me today would actually be an inspiration to them, their son or daughter could achieve lots of things if they actually have the right support. So rather than believing the people that say this can't be done, this is not possible, bin all those thoughts and ask their son or daughter what would you like to do, what would you like to achieve, even if it is climbing a mountain then watching their son or daughter try it and achieve something, seeing a smile on their son or daughter's face and say yeah I can actually do it. That should give them hope and belief not just in themselves and what they've been able to achieve as parents but also in their son or daughter in actually doing something that thousands of people had said you'd never be able to do that. WHITE And presumably you feel you can say that because you've had those things said to you? LEE Oh if I had a penny for every time somebody turned round me and say - You'll not be able to do that - I'd be able to actually put the bank crisis right, you know. WHITE There's a lot of talk of legacy in Mary Wilkinson's book, what would you like your legacy to be? LEE I hope that a pupil in a school will hear me and say - Well I'd actually like to actually hold a job. WHITE Can I ask you how comfortable you think learning difficulties has been absorbed into the disability movement because it sometimes seems that physically disabled people are not always entirely comfortable with working alongside people with learning difficulties? LEE They're petrified but they don't want to admit it. It's a human instinct. They're petrified of actually someone with a learning difficulty proving them wrong. WHITE And just a personal question because one of the things that you've - people are always being told is a problem is people with learning difficulties having children, you're now on, I think, on your second marriage, do you want children? LEE Yes I do. But I do know from hearing a fellow campaigner at a community care conference that the system of information for parents with learning difficulties and disabled people generally is actually non-existent. WHITE But I think the reason why you haven't been able to have children - you couldn't in your first marriage - that's symptomatic, isn't it, of some of the attitudes there have been in the past? LEE Yes that's because doctors actually think that it's okay to sterilise disabled people, rather than actually giving them the actual opportunity to actually choose. WHITE Just to clarify - your first wife had been sterilised? LEE Yes she had, against her will and I think it was symptomatic around parents actually not expecting you to get married, to think about living on your own, to think about actually having a family. Just because we actually have a learning disability or a disability does not necessarily mean to say that we would not actually have the same hopes, aspirations as everybody else. Back to the You and Yours homepage The 大象传媒 is not responsible for external websites |
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