A SURVIVOR of the July 7 bombings in London has spoken of the prejudice he experiences in his life as a disabled person as part of a hate crime awareness week.

Dan Biddle, who lives in Abergavenny, recorded a short video with Gwent Police in 2015 and the clip was re-posted on the Gwent Police and Crime Commissioner’s Twitter page on Thursday.

The item was one in a series of videos to promote Hate Crime Cymru 2017.

“I’m disabled and I acquired my disability as a result of the July 7 terrorist attacks in London, which resulted in me losing both legs, an eye and a catalogue of other injuries,” he said in the three-minute long video.

Throughout the video, Mr Biddle held up cards with the words – everything is free, won’t work, can’t and I exist – over the course of the clip.

Starting with everything is free, he said: “This is one of the assumptions that people mention to me quite a lot. They seem to imagine that once you become disabled that everything in life becomes free.

“Well in fact that’s quite the contrary.

“Wheelchairs – I use a specially adapted sports chair. It’s not free.

“Any accommodation that I live in isn’t free.

“Council tax isn’t free – I still pay tax even with the point of getting a motor ability car, I still have to pay money towards a car.

“But there is this big kind of idea that once you’ve got a disability life becomes so much easier because everything is handed to you on a plate.

“It really isn’t the case.”

Moving onto won’t work, Mr Biddle said: “The assumption is that we won’t work because we get benefits, because we get different assistance throughout our life.

“That’s not actually the case. I myself work. I’ve worked since I’ve been disabled which has been 10 years now.

“I’ve worked ever since I acquired my disability.

“There’s a lot of disabled people out there who are working and who want to work but can’t and a lot of that comes back to prejudice publicised by the media.

“And it puts employers off employing disabled people.”

That card was followed by can’t, and he said: “This is a word that I find is used often when people refer to disabled people.

“They can’t do this and they can’t do that.

“We have various situations – me and my wife - in daily life where I drive as I can get out of my car and people will come up to me and say well you can’t possibly drive and yet they’ve seen me pull into a parking space.

“The fact is we can do a great deal more than people give us credit for.

“It is just easier to look at us as weak and vulnerable and we can’t do this and that’s really not the case.”

Ending with I exist, he said: “There are many incidences when I’m out with my wife at a restaurant and the waitress will come over to the table.

“They’ll take my wife’s order and they’ll say what does he want and I’ll be sitting right there.

“It’s one of those things where it’s disrespectful and it is quite hurtful when you are sitting there because it’s as if as a person I don’t matter as much as the people around me.

“We was at the local tip just disposing of some rubbish and because the layout of the tip is very difficult for me to get out of the car and do things like that.

“So my wife takes the rubbish out of the car and we are talking as she is doing it and then we get a volley of abuse from the woman in the car next to us and I’m called lazy and I’m called that I’m disrespectful towards women.

“Then all these different tirades of abuse, even to the point when my wife gets my wheelchair out and shows her that I’m disabled, and again we are just met with a tirade of abuse.

“People look at disability in a negative light - pretty much 90 per cent of the time – and that just highlighted how bad it can be.

“One of the things that people don’t often realise is that me being disabled doesn’t just affect me.

“It affects my wife and it affects my daughter. When my daughter goes to school, it’s not just my daughter going to school. She’s the girl in that class whose dad’s got no legs.

“When my wife goes out and about town on her own and she meets people, she’s not just my wife, she’s either my carer or she’s the woman that’s married to the terrorism survivor who hasn’t got any legs.”

“It is much more far reaching than people would ever kind of contemplate.

“They look at a disabled person and thinks the disability stops there with them.

“Although the physical disability or the mental impairment may stop with that person, the effects of that disability are far more far reaching than people can ever imagine.”