Steel-clad castle - an icon of inequality?

A statue of Nye Bevan looks over towards Cardiff Castle from its plinth at the end of Queen Street.  I walked past the other day and wondered what he would have thought if he was alive and standing there - as the huge metal barricades block his view of the Castle and other iconic buildings, causing traffic jams throughout the region, closing schools, requiring nearly 10,000 extra police officers and costing an unspecified fortune - and all in a part of the UK where the NHS he worked so hard to put in place, and most other public services, are close to financial breaking point.

When we first heard that Obama and the NATO entourage were coming to Cardiff it did seem quite exciting. We were told the region would benefit financially through a boost to trade and extra funding.  But now it's hard to see how that can possibly happen when we're all advised to avoid travelling and keep well away if we can.

Will any of the regular people of Wales catch a sight of the President or any other world leader as they purr along behind the steel and are ushered inside to enjoy their high-end Welsh cuisine? Very unlikely. Will the delegates pay any attention to the demonstration outside calling for economic justice and peace? The beheading of an American journalist is nothing other than horrific and appalling, but why is it so much more appalling than the indiscriminate killing of hundreds of "nameless" mums, dads, children and siblings each day in the middle east, and the misery reported on almost every page of my newspaper today from all around our globe?

Yes, our world leaders need to talk to one another. They need to listen to one another, and more importantly they need to actually listen to the people of the world and not barricade them out of earshot.  It's hard to believe in Western leaders who preach about freedom and democracy from fortified castles, and carry on cashing in from arms sales around the world.  It's hard to give money to international aid efforts with enthusiasm, when we suspect that global corporations hover overhead like vultures ready to sign lucrative contracts and cash in on the suffering and rebuilding efforts.

What is about to go on here in Wales feels like a large-scale parallel to my week-in-week-out struggles to be listened to when I talk about the injustices faced by children with disabilities, the rationing by prevarication and bureaucracy, and the unnecessary exhaustion faced by their families.  Richard Dawkins' comments on Twitter about the supposed moral obligation to abort a foetus with Down's syndrome have provoked outrage, but "it's so sad" is still a common response to children with disabilities.  He maintains, whilst pretending to apologise, that his view is logical.  But the real problem for him is that he has clearly never known anyone, intimately, with Down's syndrome and  appreciated their value. In fact, as several special schools across the Vale of Glamorgan close and reopen on a single site in Barry, following a similar pattern in Cardiff, it's starting to feel like we have made a U-turn in society and are now on the road away from disability equality.

Rather than a beacon of hope, this steel-clad NATO summit increasingly looks like a miserable monument to all that is wrong in our increasingly unequal, violent and distrustful world.