Colin Brewer, councillor for Wadebridge East, said he is not the "ogre" he has been made out to be
The Cornish councillor who was re-elected despite saying that disabled children "should be put down because they cost too much money" has again insisted that there may be a case for killing some disabled children with high support needs.
Speaking to Disability News Service, Colin Brewer said he was not the "ogre" he had been made out to be, adding that constituents in his rural ward had shaken his hand and congratulated him, despite his controversial comments.
Looking for analogies to support his view, Brewer compared disabled children to farmers' treatment of animals, telling the agency: “If they have a misshapen lamb, they get rid of it. They get rid of it. Bang!”
He continued: "We are just animals. He [the farmer] obviously has got a point… You can’t have lambs running around with five legs and two heads.”
Brewer said: “It [the lamb] would be put down, smashed against the wall and be dealt with.”
He said the financial "burden" of the disabled wasn't just his own personal concern”, adding: “If you are talking about giving services to the community or services to the individual, the balance has got to be struck.”
Brewer said: “I keep as far away from health in the council as I can.”
However he sought to justify his original comments by saying that that had suffered a series of strokes before the incident, which might explain why he “flared up”. "People have said I have changed since those strokes,” he added.
Independent councillor Brewer made the comments to Theresa Court, who works for Disability Cornwall, while she was manning a stall at the County Hall in Truro in October 2011.
Despite facing calls to resign, he remained defiant over his right to remain in his councillor role and gained 335 votes in the last election, beating the Lib Dem candidate by two votes.
He wrote a letter of apology to Theresa Court and said at the time: "I have no intention of resigning. I don't think I have done anything wrong. I have apologised."
Theresa Court told the Huffington Post UK earlier this year it was "quite frankly an insult that he had to be told to apologise after a year and a half."
She said the manner in which the letter arrived was like he was making a stand, with "a second class stamp and folded into no less than eight pieces."
Disability Cornwall said after hearing the latest comments that they were "a sad indictment of our so-called ‘civilised’ society that disabled children are increasingly discussed within a context of affordability, as if they were goods on a shelf that can be picked up and discarded at will, dependent upon what’s in the public purse."
They added in a statement: “Colin Brewer and others, it would appear, believe a disabled child has the same value as a deformed lamb and should be dealt with in the same way.”
Mr Brewer has not responded to a HuffPost UK request for comment.
HuffingtonPost
No comments:
Post a Comment