Alan M

Tourette Scotland have shared today that over £15,000 has now been donated in the past week, with more than 500 generous individuals showing their support for the charity and for John Davidson.

Thank you to everyone who has donated and shared messages of support. This will go such a long way for so many families living with Tourette’s.

As well as support from across the UK and Ireland, international donations have come in from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden and the USA.

Thank you once again everyone. Your kindness and support has been truly outstanding. 🫶

tourettescotland.enthuse.com/donate

What an absolute disgrace.

Cambridge University, supposedly one of the world's leading academic institutions, has managed to demonstrate a staggering level of ignorance about disability during its own so-called "inclusivity training".

John Davidson's involuntary Tourette's tic at the BAFTAs was presented in a discussion about "microaggressions", with the suggestion that explaining his disability wasn't sufficient to acknowledge the harm caused.

ARE YOU ACTUALLY SERIOUS?

John cannot control his tics. That's the bloody disability! What exactly do these people expect him to do? Apologise for being disabled? Take responsibility for neurological symptoms he cannot control?

The sheer arrogance of lecturing people about inclusion while demonstrating such spectacular ignorance of disability is breathtaking.

Nobody is denying that people can feel offended. But being offended does not automatically mean somebody else has done something wrong.

And apparently, even explaining an involuntary neurological condition is now considered making excuses.

If your understanding of inclusion is so catastrophically poor that you cannot distinguish between deliberate prejudice and an involuntary disability-related symptom, you have absolutely no business teaching it.

Perhaps Cambridge should spend less time lecturing others about inclusion and more time educating itself.

What an absolute embarrassment for a world-renowned university.

Another promise of “immediate action” and another route map.

GIRFEC says support should be based on need, not diagnosis. Yet families experience the opposite, and even diagnosed children are going unsupported.

Mainstream placement alone isn't inclusion. Without resources, specialist provision and accountability, it's just a policy ambition at the expense of children.

This article mirrors much of what I’ve been saying over the past week, and I think it gets to the heart of why this whole situation has made so many people uncomfortable.

First and foremost, John’s choice should be respected. He has been very clear that watching from a separate space is what feels right for him, and nobody else gets to tell him that his choice is wrong. Individual autonomy matters. There is no single “Tourette’s response”, and what is right for John does not automatically become the model for every other person with Tourette’s.

But respecting John’s choice doesn’t mean we shouldn’t examine the circumstances around it.

Our past experiences inevitably influence the choices we make today. If someone has spent years experiencing confrontation, judgement or hostility because of something they cannot control, that history matters when they decide where they feel most comfortable. That doesn’t diminish their agency. It is precisely why we should be careful about turning an individual choice into evidence that separation is somehow the inclusive solution.

That distinction matters enormously to me as the parent of a child with Tourette’s whose vocal tics can be extremely offensive sounding. We have always encouraged him that he belongs in the classroom, at events and in society alongside everybody else. He should never grow up believing that inclusion means he is welcome only when his disability is quiet enough, convenient enough or placed in another room.

And the article makes a point about BAFTA’s language that I completely agree with. They repeatedly talk about creating a “safe” environment and mitigating “distress and harm”.

Safe from what, exactly?

Who is unsafe because a person with Tourette’s involuntarily vocalises a word?

Someone can absolutely find a tic offensive, upsetting or uncomfortable. Nobody is required to pretend otherwise. But discomfort and offence are not automatically the same thing as being unsafe, particularly once everyone understands that the words are involuntary and do not represent the beliefs or intentions of the person saying them.

That is where education, understanding and acceptance are supposed to come in.

Inclusion cannot simply mean moving the disabled person when their disability becomes difficult for everyone else. Equally, inclusion shouldn’t mean stripping anyone else of their own agency. Everyone involved can make choices about how they participate. The person with Tourette’s should not automatically be the one expected to disappear.

That is why the individual has to remain at the centre of this discussion.

John has made his choice and it should be respected. Another person with Tourette’s may make a completely different choice, and that should be respected too.

The irony highlighted in this article is difficult to ignore: I Swear tells us that John deserves to be there as much as anyone else, and that the answer is education, understanding and acceptance.

Those principles are easiest to repeat when inclusion is comfortable.

The real test is whether we still believe them when it isn’t.

This article hits on something we have now experienced first-hand with City of Edinburgh Council.

What happens when an independent review finds serious failures, but the same organisation being scrutinised still controls what gets released, how it is interpreted, how the recommendations are implemented and what elected representatives are actually able to challenge?

Our son’s safeguarding review was completed months before we were given it. Its release was delayed while legal concerns were cited. Elected representatives raised questions. We eventually received the report, but we are still asking who actually decided to withhold it, under what authority, what changed before it was finally released, and whether elected councillors had any meaningful ability to intervene.

Then comes implementation.

Serious recommendations were made. Yet instead of a clear action plan setting out who will do what, by when, how progress will be measured and who will provide independent oversight, we are still having to chase basic answers. Ask perfectly reasonable questions and suddenly everything disappears into legal advice, internal processes or FOI.

At what point does that stop being accountability and simply become an institution controlling the scrutiny of itself?

This is exactly why the question of unelected officer power matters.

Nobody needs to allege a conspiracy. The structure itself should concern people.

If a council can commission an independent safeguarding review into its own failures, then retain control over disclosure, implementation, interpretation and the flow of information afterwards, where exactly is the independent accountability?

“Recommendations accepted” means very little if nobody can tell you what has actually changed.

And if elected representatives cannot force clear answers when serious safeguarding failures have already been independently established, then we should probably be asking a much bigger question:

Who is actually in charge?