The man in the photograph below is Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the main Palestinian Arab leader under the British Mandate. He spent the 1920s and 1930s stirring up violence against the Jews in Palestine. He pushed the lie that Jews were going to seize the Temple Mount and destroy Al-Aqsa, which helped set off the 1929 Hebron massacre where 67 Jews were murdered. After the British chased him out he went to Berlin, met Hitler, broadcast Nazi propaganda and helped recruit Muslims for the Waffen-SS. He wanted German support for an Arab army under his control to wipe out the Jews in the Holy Land. When Germany fell he was listed as a war criminal, escaped and was welcomed in Cairo as a hero by the Muslim Brotherhood! Wearing a “Palestinian poppy” on Remembrance Sunday is just hijacking the symbol of the men who fought the very regime he championed.

There is a well known maxim that a civilised society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. The grooming gang scandal inquiry now unfolding is holding a mirror up to the institutions of this country and what it reveals is devastating: cowardice, avoidance and moral failure in the face of the horrific abuse of one of the most vulnerable groups in society, white working-class children in care. But there is a strikingly similar picture when we look at how this country treats another vulnerable, largely voiceless group: people with learning disabilities and autism. The most recent LeDeR report contains some genuinely disturbing findings. Adults with a learning disability die, on average, around 20 years earlier than the general population and for those with severe or profound learning disabilities the gap is even wider. Around 40 per cent of these deaths were judged to be avoidable. Not rare tragedies. Not medical mysteries. Avoidable. Families raising autistic teenagers and caring for autistic adults are, time and again, completely failed. Support is patchy at the best of times and during lockdown much of it simply vanished. Respite withdrawn. Services paused. Families left isolated and overwhelmed, expected to cope indefinitely with little recognition and even less help. This is where I want my hard-earned taxes to go: supporting the decent people of this country who, in daily acts of quiet heroism, carry enormous caring responsibilities and who are so often let down by the very institutions meant to support them. Someone wise once said that people with learning disabilities are “teachers of tenderness”. Boy, do we need more of that! I realise that an incoming @reformparty_uk government would face an enormous programme of work. Even so, confronting these failures head-on would be a powerful signal that something fundamental has changed, that we are at last prepared to take responsibility for how the most vulnerable in this country are treated. @Nigel_Farage @GoodwinMJ @RobertJenrick can you give this the priority it deserves? autistica.org.uk/news/leder-…