Abstract
The Disability Discrimination Act was 20 years old in 2015 and received much attention, being presented as a cause for celebration. In what follows I suggest that this is far from being an accurate assessment of its impact and go on to suggest that it was not achieved as a result of a broad consensus but rather the product and ultimate betrayal of the hopes and dreams of disabled people ourselves. As such, my version of this history has important lessons for disabled people ourselves.
Keywords:
The year 2015 marked the 20th anniversary of the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act and since then I have noticed a tendency to rewrite the history of what actually happened. Twenty years after its passage, the legislation is almost exclusively being presented as a cause for celebration not just in the media but also by also by politicians, some activists and even some organisations controlled and run by disabled people. In this version of history the Act itself is seen as the glittering prize at the end of a campaign for disability rights lasting decades in which everyone was heading in the same direction.
As an active participant in the events leading up to its passage myself, this is not how I remember it. In what follows I therefore provide my own version of the history of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 which suggests that the campaign was often bitter and divisive and that politicians and the disability charities were frequently dragged in directions they simply did not want to go. I go on to suggest that this is not simply a sterile and pointless debate about something which happened many years ago, but has important lessons for disability politics today.
As Britain emerged from the first ‘age of austerity’ after the Second World War, disabled people found themselves suffering from benign neglect. As the postwar economy picked up and the welfare state began to make an impact on people’s lives and their living standards, disabled people still faced a stark choice between coping on their own and with help from their families or going into residential care. The disability charities who were around at the time offered little in the way of alternatives and were locked into this view that disabled people either coped on their own or went into care.
While many disabled people meekly accepted this state of affairs, by the 1960s mumblings of discontent were beginning to emerge. The Disablement Income Group was formed around this time to promote the idea that poverty was the main problem which disabled people faced and a national disability income was the solution. Following a letter published in the Guardian a new organisation emerged called the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, which argued that poverty was not the cause of disabled people’s problem but a symptom of a much wider problem; namely that disabled people were excluded from society by a whole range of barriers that they faced.
The British Council of Organisations of Disabled People (BCODP) developed this idea of disabling barriers into a full-blown platform for social change when it was formed in 1981 to give a national voice to the rumblings of discontent of disabled people which had been growing louder year by year. The BCODP promoted an integrated strategy for change comprising developing the social model as the means to understand disability, properly enforceable civil rights legislation to end discrimination against disabled people and independent living, by which they meant being in control of their own services and not managing without any help from the state.
The government, political parties and disability charities were all taken aback by this radical platform for change and their original position was to deny its relevance and to suggest that these were just the ideas of a few radical disabled people and they would soon disappear. They became even more disturbed when this radical minority reached more than 100,000 full members and many showed themselves to be willing to take to the streets for non-violent direct action in support of their ideas.
This disability establishment gradually came to realise that they must take these ideas seriously, although the government of the day stubbornly refused to acknowledge the fact that discrimination was a daily problem for many disabled people. It was not until the BCODP undertook a research project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and produced a book in 1991 documenting the extent of discrimination which disabled people faced in their daily lives that the government changed their minds. They could hardly do otherwise because the evidence in the book was based on their own statistics.
In the early 1990s a number of civil rights draft bills were drawn up in the hope that a private members bill might be the way to get legislation onto the statute books, but with little success. Eventually the government produced its own draft bill which made its way through parliament, and in 1995 the Disability Discrimination Act became law.
From the outset the flaws in the legislation were obvious and concerned both the way it defined disability as an individual, medical problem and that ‘reasonable accommodation’ was central to its making proper enforcement virtually impossible. The Act even endorsed discrimination in cases where it was deemed either too difficult or too expensive to make the changes necessary to end discrimination.
This effectively split the disability lobby. Those organisations like the BCODP and others controlled by disabled people wanted nothing to do with it and argued that the campaign for comprehensive, fully enforceable civil rights legislation should go on. The disability charities, on the other hand, argued that this was the best on offer for at least a generation and that they should be fully involved in order to make the best of it. Some disability activists also took the latter course and became members of the Disability Task Force, which soon became the Disability Rights Commission whose responsibility was to monitor and evaluate the Act.
The Disability Rights Commission also had an enforcement function and while some cases did come to court, on the whole it saw its job as trying to educate and persuade people and institutions not to discriminate. The New Labour Government when it came to power shortly afterwards showed no more inclination to enforce the law than the previous government had, and eventually the Disability Discrimination Act became subsumed under broader equalities legislation and the Disability Rights Commission was integrated into the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.
When new governments came to power in 2010 and 2015 like their predecessors they failed to encourage the legislation and, in reality, sought to erode disabled peoples’ rights even more. The recent decision in the British referendum to exit from Europe further erodes disabled peoples’ rights particularly because we will no longer have recourse to the European Court of Human Rights.
My version of this history therefore suggests that, far from being the landmark legislation which many people now claim, it was little more than a betrayal of disabled peoples’ struggle to be fully included in society and any reading of disability history since the millennium supports this view and it is clear that discrimination against disabled people is still alive and well in twenty-first-century Britain.
So it is important that the dominant, celebratory version of this history is constantly challenged not just to prevent some careerist individuals from wrongfully claiming their place in our history, but more significantly so that disabled people and our organisations really understand the lessons that my version of this history have taught us.
To spell out what these lessons are: to begin with, that we can take pride in our own achievements; additionally, that we should beware those individuals and organisations who claim to be our friends but are merely promoting their own interests and agendas; and finally, that no matter how bleak the future looks, we built our own political movement once and we can certainly do it again.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.