HM passport office - BLIND PREJUDICE?

HM passport office BLIND PREJUDICE?

What would you call a system that can (and does) exclude members of society from access to a particular right or privilege, based on physical characteristics alone? Without further detail, you might imagine that the term prejudice would be the best possible way of describing this. However, what if the process of exclusion wasn’t deliberate?

A government department decides to filter out certain people who, in this case, should otherwise be able to obtain a UK passport. This filtering process turns on the basis that some people (disabled people, in this case) can’t satisfy the criteria applied to getting a suitable photograph. This particular kind of photograph uses facial recognition technology, as part of the means of assessing its suitability for inclusion in the finished passport. It doesn’t stop there (goodness alone knows it should) and the other half of the systemic injustice involves the implementation of the facial recognition criteria, in a way that is inflexible. It’s just possible that you believe that this kind of thing couldn’t happen here and, of course, it shouldn’t. The fact that it is happening is a good reason for it to be stopped.

In my own (personal) case, I discovered that it was impossible to use a local photo booth to obtain a suitable photograph, in the process of my passport renewal. I am certificated as somebody living with a severe sight impairment (used to be called something easier to say, Registered Blind). This means I wear some very high prescription spectacles that have more than a tendency to reflect light within them and also make my eyes appear smaller than they really are. If I take these glasses off then my eyes do not look in the same direction as each other, neither are my eyes likely to look directly at a camera, for the good and simple reason that I won’t be able to see it.

When I couldn’t get the photo booth to accept any photographs that it took, I selected the best of a bad lot and submitted it, along with my passport application form (for renewal) on the understanding that there was a section of this application form that enabled me (or so it claimed) to include reasons why I had submitted a sub optimal photograph. Up until this point, I saw no reason why the application process shouldn’t be given a fair wind. After all, I had tried to get a suitable photograph, the odds of being able to do this were clearly stacked against me (by the use of some facial recognition software that, plainly, isn’t fit for purpose) and I had a very good reason for then going forward, from this point, with a photograph that didn’t satisfy the facial recognition software, currently used by the Home Office.

I was expecting delays in the process of me getting my new passport, as the renewal date just happen to overlap with some industrial action. Happily, I had no plans to go abroad any time soon and could afford to wait for as long as necessary. Then I received a phone call from the Glasgow passport office, about the photograph that I had submitted and the person calling me seriously asked me whether I could obtain another photograph, only this time with my spectacles removed? There are a number of reasons why this isn’t an adequate solution and, arguably the most important of these, is that I don’t look anything like I normally do, when I have my spectacles removed. Now, I’ve been asked, by people at passport control, to remove wraparound sunglasses and that’s fine. After all, sunglasses of this kind can deliberately obscure a part of your face. There was also the little matter of the eye alignment issue that I mentioned earlier, and so on.

Unless it could be explained by inflexible interpretation of a set of rules, I couldn’t understand why the Glasgow passport office representative, calling me, thought it was quite so important that I have a photograph that lived up to the gold standard imposed by their facial recognition software. I’ve yet to go through a passport control that wasn’t staffed and even if I was supposed to, these days, look at some sort of camera and then fail the recognition test, one look at my rather distinctive appearance, by a member of staff, running an eyes-on comparison with my passport photograph, would wave me through. It should be a simple as that and it isn’t. Aside from being personally annoyed, by the situation, I began to suspect that I was not alone and that this would be happening to other blind people, in the UK. No surprises, then, when this turns out to be the truth.

I told the lady from the Glasgow passport office that she was at perfect liberty to reject my passport application as unsuitable, solely on the grounds of the photograph that I had submitted an that my next course of action would be to get in touch with my local member of Parliament, with a view to highlighting what the Home Office are doing and how this conflicts with the provisions of the Equality Act (2010). After all, I’m being denied access to something, solely on the basis of my disability. In theory, this should be an open and shut case and any government department would recognise their culpability, in law.

There’s no real reason why it has to go this far. All the UK Home Office/passport office has to do is to decide to go easy on applicants who are unable to submit a suitable photograph based, in this case, on their disability.

You Say the word “disabled” to almost all ordinary folk and a wheelchair symbol pops up in their head. There’s no real reason why British government employees (the Home Office, in this case) will think differently (even if they have been on an awareness course). Se

nior British Home Office officials clearly have not thought through the extra problems that are likely to arise when taking a photo of a blind person and expecting it to conform to some sort of facial recognition gold standard.

It’s stating the obvious, I know, but the lives of blind people are already complicated and frustrating enough. A government department adding to this burden, when it need not do so, is something that us blind folks can do without.

I now have statements from a number of blind people, on Facebook, who have told me that my, recent, experience is anything but unique.

Some blind people have employed professional photographers and not all attempts to use this work around have met with success. It’s worth adding, at this point, that most blind people are in a lower income bracket and affording a professional photographer would make a not inconsiderable hole in their finances, which they won’t be reimbursed for.. Passport applications have been accompanied by letters from medical specialists and not even this, with a professional photo can turn out to be enough.

Do you think it’s time that blind people stopped accepting this? Why should you go along with the existence of flawed facial recognition software that can take no account of your eyesight condition. Why should you put up with inflexible passport office staff who apply rules so rigidly that you may be denied a passport?

I regret that blind people are banging their head up against a Home Office culture that believes it can do what it likes, regardless of its impact on members of society who are often not best placed to fight back against injustice. Although there are some people who can fight their own corner, a lot of blind people lacked the confidence to do so and often live with things like agoraphobia. I have written to Matt Stringer (CEO of the Royal national Institute for the Blind, concerning this issue. I don’t expect much by way of a constructive response. You might think that this organisation is capable of successfully campaigning on behalf of blind people in British society and you couldn’t be more wrong. RNIB couldn’t campaign their way out of a wet paper bag and, regrettably, it’s up to individuals to fight, against injustices such as this one, pretty much on an individual basis.

Here’s the email address of the Home Office CEO in charge of the Passport Office:

abi.tierney@homeoffice.gov.uk

abi.tierney@homeoffice.gov.ukl

abi.tierney@homeoffice.gov.uk

Bible Belt Buckles

Bible Belt Buckles A while ago, I read an article by somebody who joked about the number of places that made the claim to being “The Buckle of the Bible Belt.” The author of this comment wondered just how many buckles a belt might need. Multiple redundancies in trouser fastening, at that time, might have seemed like a precautionary principle taken to extremes. However, since events overtook the Southern Baptist Convention, starting in about May of this year and gradually gathering pace into what some critics are styling as an apocalypse, it does seem as though this particular belt might need all of the buckles it can get.

B&Q Customer Service General Email Address

You may have tried to B&Q and finished up going around in the circles that they have designed for you to be caught up in. If you've got a complaint to make, then you'll find it difficult with the pre-selected topics in the Contact Us page that the company provides for this. The only other method is to use a chat session that is hooked up to an automated response program of staggering inflexibility and uselessness. The alternative is to use the email address that I managed to get out of the company, by means that were slightly devious, but not worth going into: B&Qcustomerservices@b-and-q.co.uk Enjoy!

Volkswagen Tiguan, 'Lane Assist' the ghost in the machine!

imagine a so-called safety feature, that you have no idea is fitted to your car. You are driving along and arterial road or a motorway and your car suddenly decides it's going to lurch one way or another, for all the world as though some kind of unseen forces taken charge of it. Welcome to the not so fun-aplenty world of Volkswagen "Lane Assist." It's scary when your car seems to have developed a mind of its own and it scared the living daylights out of my wife! This is a feature that you cannot permanently turn off. If you can be bothered to fiddle about with the unnecessarily convoluted internal menu system, of the car, then you can turn the lane nanny off every time you get in the car and want to drive anywhere. As you might expect, you can complain to Volkswagen until you're blue in the face and this will probably get you nowhere at all. However, I couldn't resist toying with some imagery, ending up by conflating two well-known images together (see below)!

Blind Campaign Logo (?)

a few days ago I thought about something that might seem silly, at first, if you thought about it from a purely blind perspective. Why on earth would campaign efforts on the part of blind people need anything like a logo? Of Grohl, its visual representation. Why would a group of people who either can't see it all, all have difficulty seeing, need imagery of any kind? The answer was a simple one (at least from my perspective), imagery was a successful way of convincing other people of your objectives and it occurred to me that it didn't necessarily matter (that much) if everybody in the campaign could see what we were using as imagery. So it was, that I sat down and using my huge monitor screen set about designing the logo that you can see (or not) below. If you've logged on here and you are unable to see the image, then I'll describe it. It is three blind figures, all in silhouettes and all walking left to right. In the lead is a small boy, with a cane, behind him is a woman with a cane and following those two is a guy with a guide dog. There is a slogan underneath reads "We See a Future" and that's about it. I'm posting this on this blog site in the hope that the image may get picked up by Google and get used by blind groups, for the exact purpose that I designed it. Obviously, throwing open to public use in this way means that I don't care to try to make any money out of this.

BORIS FLIES THE FLAG

It does seem as though Boris Johnson never goes anywhere without a really big flag behind him! There's nothing quite like wrapping yourself in the flag, especially at a time of national crisis, when people feel less like being critical of pushing the national identity thing. Of course, having the flag behind you is not a new idea and so here's an old suggestion, based on a system of government that rose to power during a national crisis!

Perhaps Christians Ought to Be Sorry!

Imagine growing up in a society where Christianity wasn't really open to question and, if you were controversial enough to do so, then the chances are yours would be a voice that was deliberately ignored. I don't have to imagine growing up in a society like that, because that's exactly what I did. Clerics were seen as authority figures, there was no such thing as the Internet and so no means by which alternative ideas could flourish and take root away from a form of control that was universally applied and stifled nearly all opinion that would have been regarded as controversial. The same society, that I grew up in, had an unreasonable prejudice against Roman Catholics. To this day, I have no idea why this was and I can only assume that the same mistrust and prejudice was applied to Jews, although I confess I didn't see or hear any of this. Such was suburban life in south-east London during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

 

Looking back, there was an astonishing amount of Christian religious content in my primary school education. I'd like to think that (these days) you would never get away with state school education that included content like this as a huge part of its curriculum. If there were voices of dissent, I was certainly too young to know about them. The next school was not quite so overt in the amount of Christian content, but there was a religious assembly, every morning and attendance was mandatory. I can't have been the only person who quietly wondered about this. The only exception seemed to be a bunch of boys who occupied a rank closest to one of the main doors out of the school hall and these would file out, excused (by the headmaster) as "other denominations" and with what appeared to be a palpably peeved attitude. To this day, I'm not sure of all the groupings involved in this. I do know that some Jews formed a part of this group and I suppose it's just possible (albeit unlikely) that some parents had made it their business to make sure that their kids were excused religious assembly, because they were atheists.

 

I was dimly aware of a group of people who would relentlessly proselytise you, if you happened to have ideas that seem to wandered dangerously far from Christianity, although I've really only came into contact with these in early adult life. People who would stop me on the street and want to engage me in conversation about Jesus and so on. By this time I had started to wonder about just what right anybody had to get in anybody else's face with their religious beliefs.

 

I would have been unaware of the contemporary Christian religious history that had started to grow up around me. There wasn't the easy access to information afforded by the Internet and its unrivalled way of facilitating like-minded people getting in touch with each other. I would have been unaware that, as early as 1911 there had been a movement, in England, of a group of people who seriously regarded the Bible is something that contained no errors. That was the smallest and earliest beginnings of the group and it only seemed to pick up some pace at the end of World War II, presumably in the face of those people who, after the end of hostilities, hoped they would come back to a world that they could forge for themselves and I suppose at least part of this came to fruition with the electing of the first Labour government.

 

There was already a growing tendency, by the time I was in my early adult years, of people who were drifting away from Christianity for all kinds of reasons, some of them due to other religious alternatives and still others, that weren't organised, by their very definition, there were people who wandered off and went nowhere in particular (or maybe tried something from each of the growing panoply of alternatives, never really settling anywhere). Unnoticed, by me, a schism had opened up between the so-called high and low churches of the Church of England and I certainly wouldn't have been aware that the latter was well populated with what came to mean owners born-again Christians. This would have been the first of many attempts at reviving interest in Christianity, none of which seem to work to any great extent.

 

I can remember a poster advertising a Billy Graham rally that somebody had defaced with a toothbrush moustache and hair draping down over the forehead, in the style of Adolf Hitler. Some time later, a visiting evangelist named Luis Palau held a series of rallies, with the subtext of "bring your doubts." At the time I was making jokes about not having a suitcase big enough and, although this was still an age well before they even the earliest beginnings of the Internet. There was at least a common perception that it was now okay to have opinions that differed widely from Christianity. Indeed, Luis Palau had a huge rally at a rock concert venue at London's Chalk Farm. It was necessary to cross a bridge between the nearest London Underground Tube station and the venue and some wag had added some graffiti to this bridge that read "there's one born-again every minute!" Of course, the inference being that the only people taken in by these rallies would have been dummies!

 

The writing was on the wall in more forms than simply graffiti and defacing posters and there was a changing mood amongst clerics, who were getting noticeably angry about and because of the very idea that there could be people wandering about their lawful occasions and pretty much treating their churches as places that they could wander in and out of at will. There was, of course, the very beginning of an openly gay community, much to the chagrin of people like Mary Whitehouse and, of all people a deputy Chief Commissioner of police, named James Anderton, who had an openly anti-gay stance and, for quite some time was able to prosecute something of a fundamentalist Christian agenda without too many people objecting to it! Indeed, you would be forgiven for thinking that he ran the whole of Manchester, at one point!

 

There wasn't much of a need to organise, the paranoia with which the clerics responded with such that you would be forgiven for thinking that there was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to undermine Christianity, when the real truth was that a lot of the wheels were starting to come off.

 

Finally, the Internet did come along and a lot of the material that objected to the stance taken by born-again/fundamentalist/evangelical Christians, that studied their claims and exposed many of the institutionalised lies, came into being and have never really gone away. You could say that a large gulf opened up between those people who now felt free to self define as atheists and the evangelical That espoused views that started to sound increasingly desperate and appear to favour noise over substance. What substance there was, had foundations in some shaky and rather circuitous reasoning, that would convince you only if you were prepared to ignore some rather compelling evidence to the contrary (and this was now increasingly easy to find). It's fair to say that evangelical/fundamentalist Christians have had to close ranks to the extent of excluding a great deal of academia and many of the most vociferous proponents of the evangelical take on Christianity have published books that include numerous sideswipes at college professors that are usually not named (neither are the academic institutions that they come from) but are nonetheless characterised as blustering and ineffectual opponents of a truth that will overcome everything (even if that truth happens to crumble into dust if you subjected to fairly minor amounts of scrutiny.

 

I can't remember when I first heard the term "Apologetics" coined, in modern times and as a means of trying to encapsulates the thrust of the previous born-again/evangelical/fundamentalist Christian ideologies. I can tell you that I have met many people who now identify as apologists and then seemed to launch into an almost immediate definition of what an apologist is. It's possible there are some people, out there, who still don't know and still fewer who would readily identify such people without knowing the right label to use. Just the once, I did interrupt somebody by telling them that I was fully aware of what an apologist was and why apologetics exists.

 

For my money there is one inescapable truth coming out of Apologetics that does stand up to examination (apart from the singular lack of substance to what it represents). If apologetics is supposed to be something that you sign up for in order to defend Christianity, then it does seem to me that they may have overdone it a bit. If there was ever a group of people who richly deserved a long-running and comprehensive beating up, purely as retribution for all the years of having to suffer under its excesses, then it has to be the closest thing that Christianity has to offer by way of fascism. Despite having done just about everything to provoke a nasty backlash, most of what Apologist Christianity has received is nothing more extreme than some rather well placed reasoned argument, which it hasn't much liked (and, arguably, with good reason).

 

So, apart from apologetics seeming to consist mainly of Christians who preach to each other and sometimes pretend that they have got cogent arguments that go outside Christianity and can touch the hearts of nascent converts, what has apologetics got to offer. A rallying cry against an opposition that isn't trying its best to tear Christianity to shreds, given enough time, it will probably do that to itself. The most that can be said for those people who hold views that differ from Christianity (not all of them atheists) is that they might provide robust arguments to refute the claims of Apologist Christians who decide to engage them in debate. As the very best that seems to be on offer is the likes of Lee Strobel and William Lane Craig, the non-Christian community has not got a great deal to worry about. This doesn't leave a lot, saving just than one point, the irrefutable truth that apologetics does provide a platform for Christians to play the victim, to howl and scream about how it is that they are being ill treated by people who are, for the most part, slightly more than in different (but not by much) to the fundamentalists claims put up by Christianity.