Fight to beat deafness would honour champion of so many

AT THE next meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, we will be commemorating the life and achievements of Lord Ashley of Stoke.

We will bow our heads in silence and give thanks for his service to the party.

I never met the former Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent South, but all week colleagues have been sharing with myself and MPs Rob Flello and Joan Walley, their memories of Jack Ashley.

Time and again, what fellow MPs say is how few of the obituaries that have marked his passing brought out his extraordinary charisma and charm.

His big personality is well-remembered in Parliament; as is the bravery and determination with which he managed his crippling deafness within the House of Commons.

In today's Parliament, disability is much more openly acknowledged – with David Blunkett's guide dogs, Dame Anne Begg's wheelchair, and a wide array of disabilities born by members of the House of Lords.

It is by no means perfect, but Westminster is now a great deal more accessible to the disabled.

And so the question comes of how to honour Jack Ashley's life.

Given the remarkable breadth of his political career, there could be any number of issues to focus on.

First and foremost, there was his struggle against poverty: growing up as the child of a widowed mother in Widnes, the future MP knew poverty first hand and never stopped battling to improve the life chances of the very poorest.

He also understood the complex inter-relationship between poverty and disability.

In North Staffordshire, there was his determination to keep the industries of the Potteries alive.

He fought hard for the coal miners during the strikes of the 1980s and struggled valiantly against the closure of Shelton Bar steel works.

Then there was his all-encompassing work against social injustice. He fought for the victims of rape, to ensure women could have their names protected in court.

He raised the issue of domestic abuse and battered wives. He fought fuel poverty. He took on the British Army over allegations of bullying. And he kept up the pressure for proper compensation for victims of thalidomide.

Every one of those issues continues to have resonance today.

But what ultimately defined his political career was the deafness which struck him down in 1967, the year following his entry into the Commons.

In the wake of a minor operation to restore full hearing on a punctured eardrum, an infection destroyed his hearing, leaving only the noises of tinnitus.

Despite efforts to repair the damage and a crash course in lip-reading, by Easter 1968 he had decided to quit.

"I was an MP with a safe seat and fair prospects. Now I have no future ... One lives in a glass cage. You see lips move, but there's no sound. You see babies cry, but hear no crying."

Of course, he didn't quit. Instead, he became a heroic fighter for those with deafness, from the teaching of deaf children to the establishment of the charity Defeating Deafness.

And here is somewhere we might be able to make a difference. Because in 1993, Jack Ashley began to hear again, thanks to a cochlear implant. These are miraculous things, basically bio-ears, which can, within certain limitations, restore a pretty good variant of normal hearing.

If you are born deaf or become deaf as a child they are particularly effective. But in cases of deafness resulting from meningitis infection they need to be acted on fast.

In post-meningitis deafness there is only a small window of opportunity before the inner ear starts to ossify (turn to bone). Once that happens, a cochlear implant becomes impossible and you are profoundly deaf for ever.

But cochlear implants are complex and expensive operations particularly for young children, coming in at some £90,000.

Getting approval for the procedure requires sign off by a healthcare trust, which can take weeks.

All of which means it could be too late.

A few changes to procedures for cochlear implants post meningitis could mean safeguarding the hearing of many deaf children.

That seems a fight worthy of Jack Ashley.