Feature

If not this time, then next time

The government’s belated response to the demands of people with disabilities is half-hearted and inadequate, argues Dougie Herd

The government has published its White Paper on ending discrimination against disabled people, and the Disability Discrimination Bill promised in the Queen’s Speech, hailing both documents as ‘a historic advance for disabled people’.

William Hague, minister for disabled people, said they ‘set out a comprehensive package of anti-discrimination legislative proposals and measures’.

Not true says this disabled person. Not so says the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People. Not historic and hardly an advance says the ‘Rights Now Campaign’, a UK-wide umbrella organisation bringing together both organisations of and agencies for disabled people in support of the Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill, which was last introduced by MP Roger Berry and which was proposed again on 9th February by Harry Barnes.

The much-heralded, long overdue and deeply disappointing government White Paper promises a number of measures:

• ‘A statutory right of non-discrimination against disabled people in the field of employment.’ The three per cent ‘quota system’ of the 1944 Employment Act will be abolished. (This will shift responsibility for prosecuting offending employers from the Department of Employment to individual disabled people, with no recourse to legal aid. Under the guise of moving towards a fairer settlement for disabled people, the combined effect of these proposals will be to worsen an already bad situation.)
• ‘A statutory right of access to goods and services.’ This will be subject to a new government power to set an upper limit on the cost of alterations and the admissibility of alternative means of offering services, rather than removing barriers to access.
• ‘The elimination of any potential discrimination in financial services.’
• ‘The creation of a National Disability Council to advise the government on issues and measures relating to the elimination of discrimination.’ (The British Council of Organisations of Disabled People, with more than 100 affiliated groups, must wonder what role it has, if not to advise on the aspirations of disabled people. The ‘advisory’ nature of the government’s proposed National Disability Council sits in stark contrast to the statutory role and powers of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Commission for Racial Equality.)
• Transport guidance; ensuring that new buses will be of low-floor construction and extending the right of access to transport infrastructure (but not to existing vehicles).
• Guidance on access to new schools and ‘consultation on imaginative ways to encourage schools to make themselves more accessible’.

William Hague’s White Paper and the government’s politically clever, minimalist Bill are neither an advance nor historic. But the process of which the government’s inadequate response is part may deserve just such descriptions. Final judgement must await the outcome of the political debate which will continue inside and, crucially, outside Parliament. That the debate about disability is taking place inside a political forum is, in itself, a historic advance.

Traditionally, disabled people have been linked with illness, deficiency and abnormality. For hundreds of years society has seen disabled people in medical terms: problems to be dealt with, symptoms to be analysed, conditions to be cured. From Charles Dickens’ irresistible cripple ‘tiny Tim’, until Desmond Wilcox’s painfully similar treatment of PC Philip Olds, and beyond, we have been asked to pity and help these unfortunate and tragic souls. If we can’t cure them, conventional wisdom informs us, we can at least care for them in the community. ‘No’ says an active, able and increasingly confident disability movement.

A politics of disability has emerged. This new politics draws unashamedly upon the experiences of movements that for a short time were known as ‘the new social forces’, adding their analyses of society to that of class-based economics. The demands of the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the successes of feminism in the 1970s have provided disabled people with frameworks for analysis and models for development which could better explain our experience than could any number of well-intentioned men in white coats.

Anyone with a personal or professional interest in the situation of disabled people needs a more coherent and credible explanation of disability than the medical model current until now. It cannot be argued, for instance, that those disabled people who chained themselves to buses in London’s Oxford Street last year were genetically pre-disposed to protesting. Similarly, when activists staged a 24-hour occupation of an inaccessible council house with no heat, light or power as part of a protest in Edinburgh at the introduction of VAT on domestic fuel, we cannot explain this activity by reference to symptoms associated with incurable medical conditions. Something more fundamental is going on; disabled people are relocating the so-called problem of disability.

1994 was the year in which a newer approach to disabled people and their interests began to break free of the cloistered discussions of an ‘enlightened’ few. Parliamentary Early Day Motion 303 — calling for the introduction of comprehensive civil rights legislation — enjoyed more support than any such motion in Parliamentary history. The Morris Bill became the Berry Bill and produced a great brouhaha in the House of Commons when it emerged that ministers of state directed civil servants to advise backbenchers, who then denied that such ‘advice’ had been received. In Lady Olga Maitland’s case, apologies for misleading the House had to be offered.

In March 1994, the biggest ever lobby of Parliament by disabled people encouraged deepening support across the political parties for legislation and, prior to his untimely death, Labour leader John Smith was forcing Nicholas Scott — the now knighted but sacked former minister for disabled people — to retreat from the old-fashioned mantra that ‘education and persuasion’ were better than the force of the law. In short, 1994 was the year that disability became politically ‘hot’.

It is within this context that the government’s White Paper and Bill need to be viewed. What lies behind the government’s proposals? The saddest and most likely explanation is that William Hague’s job is take the disability issue ‘off the boil’. To reverse the cliché about justice; even though discrimination may be too costly to be done away with, it must be seen to be done away with — or at least look as if the government intends it to be.

This government — of all governments — does not want to eradicate discrimination against disabled people. It is ideologically opposed to what it sees as bureaucratic regulation. Legislation which supports ‘equal opportunities’ is anathema to the party which brought us the ‘me, me, me’ economy of the 1980s.

It may no longer be possible, however, to resist the political pressure for comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation. Nothing is inevitable but there exists in Britain a dynamic, varied and increasingly confident movement of disabled people, their organisations and allies, which is committed to achieving irreversible change. It is better to see the government’s proposals as a measure of how effectively the case for more comprehensive legislation has been argued.

The minister for disabled people has been boxed into a corner by effective campaigning inside and outside Parliament. This disability rights lobby understands there is light at the end of the tunnel and knows that it is not an on-coming train. For when President George Bush signed the comprehensively effective (and now praised) Americans with Disabilities Act and made the clarion call to ‘let the shameful walls of exclusion come tumbling down’, it wasn’t just in the US that people listened.

Disabled people in Britain were already making demands upon our own communities. Experience in America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden serves merely to reinforce the belief of activists here. Civil rights, social justice and economic independence are our non-negotiable demands in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Her Majesty’s government may not realise that its inadequate response is already too little, too late. In 1986, when the late Donald Sutherland MP proposed the first Private Member’s Bill to outlaw discrimination against disabled people, he received virtually no support. Eight years on, even the minister for disabled people has been forced to concede that legislation is needed and that the government must act. Its reaction is half-hearted and cosmetic. Crucially for disabled people, though, it reveals a weakening of the government’s stance.

As 1995 opens, the demand from disabled people remains the same: ‘Civil Rights Now!’ That is not what the government proposes so we shake our weary heads, resolve to return to the fray and reassure ourselves of the outcome which awaits us if we persist. If not now, we argue, then soon. If not this time, then next time.