My hero Blair broke his promises to help my little boy - so now I’ll fight him a

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MAIL ON SUNDAY – REVIEW – 26th MARCH 2006

My hero Blair broke his promises to help my little boy - so now I’ll fight him as a Tory MP

By Hutchings

Hutchins found fame as the mother who angrily confronted the Prime Minister on live TV about the treatment of special-needs children such as her own son. Today she exclusively reveals how she is going to challenge him again.

Just over a year ago, in a small room away from any cameras, Tony Blair promised me he would personally sort out the many problems that had driven me, as the mother of an 11­year-old autistic child, to harangue him live on national television.

With my background in PR and as a radio broadcaster, I realised there was little point asking Mr Blair a polite ques­tion - I’d just receive some bland answer. Instead, I wanted urgent action. And at that time, as a lifelong Labour Party sup­porter, I genuinely thought that if only 1 could bring to his attention the problems facing families with disabled children, he would act. So I stood up in the Birming­ham studio and tried to hand the Prime Minister a picture of my son, .

That day, I was trying to speak out not just for myself and my family, but for the thousands of families around Britain suf­fering appalling stress from the closure of special schools, the forced inclusion of dis­abled children in mainstream classrooms where many are unable to cope, and the scandalous lack of respite care services.

I was also furious about the withdrawal of vital speech and language therapy ser­vices, the closure of early intervention nurseries for children with special needs, and the cruelty of forcing families to battle every inch of the way for decent education and health services for their children.

The night before, I hadn’t slept at all. And as the Prime Minister started speaking about education, my heart was pounding and I was squeezing my husband Stuart’s hand so tightly I was cutting off his blood supply. But I kept telling myself: ‘You’ve just got to do it. This man is a parent too. Surely he will listen to a mother’s pleas?’

Blair had begun talking about ‘naughty’ children disrupting classes, and how the Government was going to get tough on the problem. But many of these disruptive pupils are special-needs children who have been forced - thanks to the closure of their special schools - into ‘inclusive’ mainstream classes where they can’t cope, nor can the teachers dealing with them.

As I jumped up, I heard myself shouting at him: ‘Tony, that’s rubbish.’ But when I started to approach him, I was pushed back into my seat by one of the burly security officials and ordered to leave the studio. I refused. As men began moving towards me from all directions, Blair soothingly told me he would talk to me later, in private. So when the programme ended, I was ushered to a small room, along with Stuart and another mother, from Shropshire, who has had a long battle to get services for her autistic son. (The other mother is her friend Alison who lives in Telford)

The first thing Blair said to us was: ‘I really know a lot about autism, through personal family experience.’ Although I knew he had a relative with an autistic child, I was still shocked that he had said that. I live with an autistic child, but still feel as though I know almost nothing about the condition.

He asked me to list my concerns, I had only about eight minutes, but I made as many points as I could.

I told him I was appalled by the closure of scores of special schools and the lack of speech therapy and respite care for families. Cedar Hall, for instance, the wonderful special school still attends in Essex, had been under threat of closure for years.

I had also just heard from Social Ser­vices that they intended to reduce my meagre two hours of respite care a week because, they claimed, they had no money to pay for it.

I asked, too, why the Government had failed to compile a national database on the rapidly increasing number of children with autistic disorders and other learning and behavioural difficulties. How can we possibly know what public ser­vices are going to be needed in the future without such data?

I didn’t ask if he’d given his own son, Leo, the MMR jab, because I knew he wouldn’t give a straight answer. But I did ask why the Government wasn’t doing more research into the evidence that some children’s immune systems are so compromised that they are vulnerable to gut and brain damage from the measles virus in MMR.

My own son is a classic case. After a difficult birth in 1994 in Malta, where I was living with my first husband and working as a radio broadcaster, was on life support for nine days. He then suffered terrible allergies, asthma and eczema, and kept get­ting infections that required high doses of antibiotics; all signs of a compromised immune system.

By 18 months, he was doing really well, saying plenty of words and counting. But then he had his MMR, and it was like pressing the ‘delete’ button on a computer: all his words and number-counting just stopped. I told Blair that parents up and down the country were telling the same story.

And foolishly, I let myself trust and believe him when he looked me in the eye and said: ‘Right I’m going to deal with all these issues person­ally. If necessary, we’ll meet again. I’ll make sure this gets sorted out.’

I came out of that room on a high, telling myself: ‘This is great. What I’ve done might help to change everything for families like us.’

But deep down, I already knew I was deluding myself. As we were talking, I had this awful sense that the man before me was ... plastic. It was like talking to a human credit card. Blair was trying to act sincere, but I sensed he was just going through the motions, pre­occupied with what he perceived to be far more pressing matters. I sensed he didn’t really care at all.

And since that day, despite what he said to me, Tony Blair has done absolutely nothing.

This was a particularly harsh reality for me to face because I had been a supporter of the Labour Party all my life. Blair had been my hero. I’d read every biography of him and studied his essays on ‘New Britain’, published before Labour swept to power in May 1997. When Blair won, I thought he was going to be the panacea for all ills.

I truly believed a Labour govern­ment would do everything in its power to help the most disadvan­taged people in society. And chil­dren with disabilities-particularly those, like my son, who are not even able to speak for themselves - are the most disadvantaged of all.

Yet across the country, Local Education Authorities are forcing hundreds of parents to take their fight for special-school placements to appeals tribunals, costing each family and council taxpayers thou­sands of pounds. LEAs behave in this despicable way solely in the hope that parents might give up and accept a much cheaper mainstream placement because they can’t afford to fight or are too distressed and exhausted to keep going.

Yet most mainstream placements for disabled and learning-impaired children fail miserably, often because the youngsters are bullied and mistreated to the point where many end up severely depressed and on tranquillisers. I know of one autistic 12-year-old boy who was so distressed about being called ‘a retard’ at his mainstream school that he tried to throw himself out of a moving car.

Despite the enormous sums ‘invested’ in education and health over recent years, there has been little evidence of any increase in services for children with disabili­ties and their families; just extra bureaucrats paid large salaries to sit around in offices saying ‘No’.

After I got home from my con­frontation with Blair, I received a phone call from Downing Street asking me to put all my concerns down on paper for him to study. So I wrote a 12-page letter.

A few weeks later, Blair wrote back saying he had asked Educa­tion Department officials to look into the matters raised; basically a ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ letter. At the time, he was busy entertain­ing celebrity chef Oliver at No 10, trying to cash in on the suc­cess of ’s school-dinners cam­paign in the lead-up to last May’s General Election. Something about all this glibness just made me snap.

I thought: ‘This simply isn’t good enough.’ Despite being a dyed­-in-the-wool Labour supporter, I felt compelled to look elsewhere for answers. I was so disillusioned I called the Conservatives to ask for details of their special-education policies and to find out whether they proposed to keep special schools open.

I was referred to the office of the then education spokesman, Tim . I explained I was the mother from Essex who had chal­lenged Blair on TV about special ­needs education, and I wanted to compare the Tories’ approach. I was invited in for a meeting and it was a revelation: they already had in place intensive research and pol­icy ideas, and strongly supported special schools for those children who needed them. We talked at length, and it struck me they knew exactly what the problems were - and from a parent’s perspective, which is what impressed me most.

The Tories were not only saying they would keep special schools open; they were even willing to entertain the idea of listening to ordinary people like me.

So a few weeks later, when they asked if I would speak at a media conference on special-needs issues with the Conservatives’ then leader, , I thought: ‘Yes, I will. Eight years of Tony Blair has destroyed every belief I ever had in the Labour Party cham­pioning the rights of disadvan­taged people.’ I wrote a ten-minute speech, and how I delivered it with­out crying is beyond me. But I just knew I had to do it, for parents and disabled children everywhere.

It attracted enormous media cov­erage in the lead-up to the last Gen­eral Election, which I suspect must have angered Blair. I was gambling it might goad him into actually doing something, but I was wrong, because neither he nor anyone in the Government showed any inter­est or concern. The only response from Labour officials was snide suggestions that I’d been a Tory ‘stooge’ all along, and that my con­frontation with Blair had been a set-up. This was rubbish - and the final straw for me.

Soon after the Election, I met the Conservative Party’s newly appointed education spokesman, Cameron - now party leader, of course, and himself the father of a young son with disabilities - and last July I helped him and Baroness Warnock launch a pamphlet she had written explaining why inclu­sion is not always the best option.

Now I have decided to seek elec­tion to Parliament myself as a Con­servative Party candidate. I want to get to Westminster so I can be a voice for thousands of families with special-needs children all over the country. I also want to be an advocate for all those carers looking after sick and elderly rela­tives. We save the Government bil­lions, and it’s high time we got the help we are constantly promised but which is so rarely available.

I want to make a difference, and believe that can happen only when people with experience of caring attain positions of power. They are the only people who can under­stand what it’s like to be constantly fighting the system - all too often to the point of total despair.

Last September I passed my new party’s parliamentary assessment board, and am now an approved Conservative candidate. I haven’t been selected by a constituency yet, but hope I will make the party’s A-list of top 140 candidates, thereby giving me the opportunity of secur­ing a winnable constituency.

I don’t care where it is - I’ll go anywhere to carry on this fight. Not just for special-needs families, but for everyone deceived, dis­illusioned and let down by Blair’s dreadful Government.