Thursday, September 03, 2015



UK: Must not call retards retards

A veteran town councillor who described children at a special school as 'retards' is being called upon to quit by angry parents.

A petition has been launched demanding Independent councillor Bob Farrer, 72, who sits on St Neots Town Council and Huntingdonshire District Council, to step down from his elected posts.

Mr Farrar was previously a UKIP representative after defecting from the Tories but is now an Independent councillor for the Eaton Ford Ward in St Neots, Cambridgeshire.

At a meeting of the Swimming Pool Trust in St Neots last Thursday, Cllr Farrer, who has been a councillor for 22 years, referred to new special needs school, The Trinity School, as 'a new school which is going to be for retards.'

The Trinity School, a maintained special school will occupy the old Huntingdonshire Regional College buildings in St Neots and will cater for children with a variety of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties.

The petition, which has already garnered more than 2,100 signatures, says: 'For an elected official to refer to children with special needs as 'retards' is wholly unacceptable.

SOURCE

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

PC may be hard to keep up with, but using "retards" in that way shows the 72 year-old is well past his sell-by date as an elected official!

stinky said...


"Retard" and "retarded" were formerly the words taught in schools as the PC-preferred alternative to older terms such as "idiot." Today's terms will inevitably meet the same fate.

Bird of Paradise said...

How come retarded people are more intellegent then the political hacks?

Anonymous said...

Reminded of Shakespeare, I am!

"A rose by any other name...."

Yoda

Olaf Koenders said...

I'm with Stinky. We always used the term "retarded" in decades gone by. It's much older than "special". Besides, what makes them "special"?

".. better, greater, or otherwise different from what is usual."

Definitely not the former two.

It's like morons taking offence at "disabled", when they clearly are, but demand to be known as "differently abled". Give it time and these feel-good terms will be obsolete and railed against as well.

Anonymous said...

Like what's the difference between "colored" and "of color"?