Should the UK adopt a new United Nations treaty on disabilities?

Yet another external treaty to cover internal issues!
Nice of them to let us know, wasn't it?
Don't we already have laws to prevent discrimination against disabled people and to protect their rights? Such as this. Does it not cover everything? It certainly appears pretty comprehensive to me. So why do we to sign up to yet another externally-created treaty?

It is far better than any such laws are made in our Parliament and discussed properly by our elected representatives, and tailored specifically to fit the UK situation. Then it can be modified to take account of the way in which our society works as needed. Rather than it being impossible to modify it.

Image: The FAIL Blog

The European Union certainly can't claim to be a benevolent supranational institution after this latest imposed tax - focusing as it is on the most vulnerable in society, no less.

"The popular mobility scooter, which has given many elderly and disabled people a new lease of life, has fallen prey to an EU-imposed tax...
Costing £2,500 on average and mostly imported from Taiwan and China, they are exempt from VAT for disabled purchasers and until recently, were also free of customs duty.
But now a decision by the European Union has led to import duty being slapped on each scooter brought into the UK and raised fears of a £250 price hike for disabled purchasers...
[T]he scooters - previously classified for customs purposes as a "carriage for disabled persons" - ...now [to be] treated as "motor vehicles for the transport of persons"." (The Telegraph)

To add extra taxes onto this sort of thing is the worst sort of imposed tax - one which will greatly adversely effect the most vulnerable in society, the elderly and the disabled. The people who need and use this sort of mobility scooter are often those who are also at the lower end of the economic scale, meaning that those are being taxed more are also those who usually have less money to start with.

Mobility scooters enable elderly people and disabled people to enjoy a far larger level of independence that they would otherwise enjoy, and enable them to have freedoms which would otherwise be denied them. To deny these people of this ability is indeed disgraceful.

The true measure of a society is found in how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable members. If that criteria is applied to the EU with this tax, then they certainly fall far short of the level that we do, and should, expect.

Source: The Telegraph

Conservative MP Anthony Steen has been castigated by disabled groups for complaining that there are too many disabled parking spaces. A photo of Steen's car parked in a disabled parking space at Newton Abbot railway station was sent to a local newspaper, a sapce in which he parked because the rest of the car park was full and all of the disabled parking spaces were empty. Anthony Steen said that:

"I should not have parked there and I am sorry for that but there was nowhere else I could go.
There were no cars in any of the disabled bays so I parked in the one nearest to the non-disabled parking spaces.
The number of disabled bays is disproportionate to the number of handicapped people living in the area.
I support making the life of every handicapped person easier, but we should not discriminate against the able-bodied."

He is right that there appears to be disproportionate numbers of disabled parking spaces. Whilst some must be supplied, the number always seems to be too high. I have never seen all disabled parking spaces used by disabled people. When the number of parking spaces themselves is limited, like it is especially at railway stations, the number of disabled spaces always seems excessive to me.

Yes, disabled people have a right to go out, and not, as Douglas Campbell, a spokeman from disabled transport group Mobilise, put it: "sit at home twiddle their thumbs, not have a job, and perhaps just do to the day centre in an ambulance every day." But that doesn't mean that their needs should be met at the excessive detriment of able-bodied people. Do they need some specialist parking spaces? Yes. Do they need so many? No. Especially since the amount of disabled badge fraud, particularly in London, it isn't even possible to know that all the cars parked in these spaces are in fact being used by disabled people.

Sources: BBC, The Telegraph