Mike Phipps reviews Ramping Up Rights: An Unfinished History of British Disability Activism, by Rachel Charlton-Dailey, published by Hurst.

“The erasure of both disabled people and their champions throughout history has been so pervasive that entire generations of young people have no idea who came before them,” writes disability rights journalist Rachel Charlton-Dailey at the start of this much-needed history of campaigning.

Only in the 20^th century do we start to find reliable sources showing disabled people working together to enact change for themselves. May Billinghurst, a social campaigner widely known as the “Cripple Suffragette” as she used a tricycle wheelchair, started the Greenwich chapter of the Women’s Social and Political Union and was arrested multiple times.

At the end of the 19th century, the first larger movements organised by disabled people for disabled people appeared. They included the British Deaf Association – founded in 1889 after the Royal Commission on the education of deaf children completely failed to consult any deaf people – and the National League of the Blind, which was registered as a trade union in 1899. The latter rose to national prominence in 1920 with the Blind March, which kickstarted similar protests like the Jarrow March of 1936 against unemployment. “Because the national blind rights movement had coalesced around issues of economic hardship and working conditions, there was a strong link between this side of disability activism and the labour movement,” Charlton-Dailey tells us.

Not until the 1960s did disabled people take to the streets and fight publicly for their rights again. In the postwar decades, people with different kinds of disabilities came together to form a united, ‘pan-impairment’ movement. In 1965, the Disablement Income Group started to campaign for a full income for all disabled people. The Group changed British understanding of those with chronic conditions and all disabilities.

The 1960s also saw the thalidomide scandal. The prescribing of thalidomide resulted in the biggest man-made medical disaster ever with thousands of miscarriages and over 10,000 babies born with limb differences. Yet no individual or company was prosecuted over the disaster, despite the campaign mounted by the Thalidomide Society, which was established in the UK by parents of babies affected.

Other groups active at this time included the Disabled Drivers’ Motor Club, for whom we can thank the Blue Badge Scheme. But as the author notes, “The fact that ‘even’ a group with a specific focus like the DDMC has never run out of access, inclusion and equality issues to tackle shows what a terrible base the postwar disability rights groups were starting from.”

In 1973, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation began to campaign for the integration of disabled people into the community. It promoted a social model of disability which focuses on the barriers and attitudes which make it difficult for disabled people to live their lives to the full. 

By the late 1980s and early ’90s, the disability rights movement was in full swing and increasingly engaged in direct action. “Rights, not charity” was one focus, targeting telethons and the like, which patronised – and excluded – disabled people, while raising money for the ‘needy’. Another focus was access to public transport, a campaign championed by the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of disability rights activism will know that this is not a story of linear progress. Although severe cuts to benefits came in the austerity years after 2010, the ground was laid in the early 1990s, with increasing government and media noise about benefit scroungers and tougher eligibility tests. This led to the Work Capability Assessment, which gave more powers to job centre advisors to decide whether claimants were fit for work. Work and Pensions Secretary Peter Hain told the press, “We must rip up sick-note Britain.”

In response to the Cameron-led Coalition’s attacks, a group of activists founded Disabled People Against Cuts in 2010 whose campaigns reached a wide audience. Meanwhile the hostile rhetoric intensified: the use of the words ‘scrounger’, ‘cheat’ and ‘skiver’ in press articles about disabled people almost trebled between 2004-5 and 2010-11. This prepared the way for the Welfare Reform Act, which introduced tougher benefit sanctions and the Personal Independence Payment, which was s explicitly designed “not to be enough to live on”. DPAC responded with multiple protests, particularly around the deeply flawed assessment processes.

Research by the University of York found that cuts to healthcare, public health and social care were linked to over 57,550 deaths between 2010 and 2014, with many more tens of thousands dying as a result of being deemed fit for work. John Pring has written about this extensively in his book The Department.

As media interest gradually grew, DPAC and other organisations persuaded the UN to look into the way the UK government was treating disabled people under the 2008 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In 2016 the United Nations Committee found that the UK had committed “grave and systemic” violations of disabled people’s rights. Eight years later it reported there had been no progress – if anything, things had got worse.

Boris Johnson’s government’s corrupt and cavalier attitude to the Covid pandemic hit disabled people especially hard. By November 2021, 59% of all Covid-related deaths in England had been people with disabilities. Even when the vaccine became available, older people regardless of conditions were prioritised over disabled people regardless of age.

Today there are 16 million disabled people in the UK and they are more likely to live in poverty: over a third of disabled people fall into the lowest household income category. The majority of people using food banks are disabled.

Beyond official policy, there is a lot here about backward social attitudes, encouraged by an ableist media and the way disabled people are often portrayed on TV.

Accessibility remains a central issue.  It’s estimated that a wheelchair user can visit fewer than one in ten homes in England. Meanwhile around 1.8 million households in England are in need of accessible housing. While public transport has seen some improvement – over 60% of train stations now have step-free access – it’s discouraging that only 20% of new builds incorporate step-free access into their plans.

The situation in education and work is equally alarming. While disabled students make up only 15% of the school population they account for nearly half of all school exclusions. As for employment, the Labour government’s policy towards disabled people has been dominated by its efforts to kick over 400,000 disabled people off Universal Credit and force them into work with little support.

The book ends with a powerful argument against Kim Leadbeater’s Bill to legalise assisted dying for the terminally ill. The author fears “that it could become a slippery slope to disabled people being forced by coercion or circumstance into ending their own lives, and that it would enshrine in law a cultural assumption that disabled lives aren’t worth living.” The campaign against the Bill is backed by all 350 Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations in the UK.

“I want to live in a world where disabled people are considered human beings and that our disabilities aren’t something to overcome, but something that is accommodated so we can live our lives,” concludes Charlton-Dailey. “Until that day comes, we’ll be here fighting.”

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.