I was in Bradford this week for the second part of Myles Scriven’s inquest. Myles was just 31 when he died in April 2023 at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary. The coroner heard from his final expert, Professor Beverley Hunt, from several witnesses from Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS FT on Prevention of Future Deaths and he heard submissions from all Interested Parties. Myles’s inquest will conclude next month when the coroner makes his conclusion and decides whether to issue any Prevention of Future Deaths reports.

I was wandering around Bradford, musing to myself about how little change or improvement there is in the life expectancy for learning disabled and autistic people, and how outrageous it is that the LEDER report has still not been published. I was thinking about the report published in 2023, commissioned by the NHS Race and Health Observatory and written by UCLAN, MMU, LDE and the Race Equality Foundation We deserve better: Ethnic minorities with a learning disability and access to healthcare.

It contains the utterly brutal statistic that the average age of death for learning disabled people from an ethnic minority is 34 years, which is a little over half the life expectancy of white learning disabled people at 62 years of age. If you don’t have a learning disability average life expectancy in England is between 79 and 82 years.

These are of course averages, there will always be people who live shorter and longer lives. Myles, who was white and lived in Huddersfield not Bradford, died at 31, half the average life expectancy for a white learning disabled person.

Back to Bradford City Council. They proclaim a focus and interest in health inequalities, indeed the page on their website discusses the impact of deprivation, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, but there is no mention of learning disability and autism. This doesn’t really surprise me, the health of learning disabled and autistic people so rarely climbs up a councils agenda to be deemed important enough.

What did surprise me was the blatant ableism that is clearly baked into the council, as demonstrated by this poster displayed on a lampost a few minutes walk from the coroner’s court.

First option for why someone might litter, because they’re “an idiot”.

Idiot is a deeply offensive and ableist term. The Mental Deficiency Act 1913 introduced four types of mentally defective people, idiots, imbeciles, feeble minded persons and moral imbeciles.

“The following classes of persons who are mentally defective shall be deemed to be defectives within the meaning of this Act: a) Idiots; that is to say, persons so deeply defective in mind from birth or from an early age as to be unable to guard themselves against common physical dangers”

The previous year in 1912, Edmund Burke Huey’s Educational Psychology Monograph Backward and feeble-minded children: clinical studies in the psychology of defectives, with a syllabus for the clinical examination and testing of children was published.

In it he referred to the work of the french psychologist Alfred Binet, of IQ testing fame, and he also recorded that the American Association for the Study of the Feeble Minded had settled on a classification system of idiots, imbeciles and morons. Idiot was defined as:

Those so defective that the mental development never exceeds that or a normal child of about two years.

Over a hundred years later, the City of Bradford MBC is ignorantly or deliberately using ableist slurs. I’m not sure ignorance can be an appropriate defence either really. How could no-one in the council question the appropriateness of these posters? I’m guessing Learning Disability Week last week past Bradford Council by.

I’ll hit publish on this post and contact the council press office and ask them for a comment. As I’m not a resident as far as I can tell I can’t make a complaint, and I really do what to draw it to their attention. If anyone has any other ideas please leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.