Queen Babs speaks to the nation

Following a Queen’s Speech somewhat lacking in disability savvy, our own royal personage Barbara Lisicki delivers a radical alternative

My first major act in the alternative Queen’s Speech is to make the entire Cabinet and then the rest of the Labour government undertake disability equality training to bring them up to speed with our issues. Included in the compulsory session will be disabled and older people speaking on the subjects of being forced to live in institutions because of lack of accessible, affordable housing and community care support; how government bureaucracy perpetuates the poverty trap for millions of disabled people; disabled parents and their children describing the iniquity and immorality of forcing those children to become “carers” and asking why the state allows it to happen; and exposing why “care” and support for disabled people is one of the lowest paid, lowest status jobs that it’s possible to do.

The social model of disability will be explained and made available in easy-read and Braille versions and would, by law, form the basis of any future policy. We’ll get the heavyweights in on this one – Mike Oliver, Colin Barnes, oneself, and Lorraine Gradwell – while Dame Jane Campbell could oversee proceedings in her ermine robes.

Once the government has absorbed the facts, they will be made to sit a test on the Disability Discrimination Act.

Let’s take these three million homes that are to be built in the next decade and give them the universal designation of Lifetime Homes, and teach all those young people staying on in education skills like plumbing, bricklaying and electrics to speed up the whole process.

I will put British Sign Language on the core curriculum in schools. I believe this will signal a new enthusiasm for languages and make future generations better communicators.

I am placing Independent Living at the heart of a new legislative programme and making jumping through hoops unlawful. Except for circus performers.

And to promote generosity of spirit, I would triple the Arts Council budget and allocate it all to disability arts and cultural diversity.

Huge grants would go to that most joyous of musical theatre groups, Heart ‘n Soul, to create job opportunities for people with learning difficulties, so that they will be given real alternatives to packing screws into plastic bags or shelf-stacking.

And public art would be designed by disabled artists. Alison Lapper will be commissioned to make a giant marble sculpture of a naked Marc Quinn. I look forward to my plan being executed on the roundabouts of Milton Keynes. Then getting lost would be so much more entertaining.

How to pay for all this? Pull all the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Scrap Trident.

Stop building nuclear power stations. Factor in millions of people who won’t become disabled if all this happened. That’ll do for starters.