Witcher

"Down the centuries there have been many answers to the perennial question: “How do you solve a problem like disabled people?”. Some didn’t mess about. The ancient Romans drowned children with impairments in the Tiber. The Nazis took a similarly uncompromising view of us, as ‘useless eaters’, unworthy of life. So they killed an estimated 240,000 of us, out of public view when the public protested. We’ve been segregated into hospitals and mad-houses, put into ‘idiot-cages’ in town centres, branded as evil, cursed, unnatural changelings. Conversely, others saw us as objects for charity, to be pitied and cared for. They even on occasion elevated disability to a holy state. We have found ourselves cast as heroic (yet still tragic) survivors; our purpose to entertain non-disabled people and make them feel good about themselves; eternally grateful they’re not us!

The answers to the problem that we clearly are have ranged from care, control, contain, through to kill. Whether sinners or saints, a focus for contempt, amusement or inspiration...we have always been ‘other’; different; not ‘normal’, and certainly not equal. It’s almost as if they don’t like us very much.

However...Disabled people worked out that maybe they weren’t the problem that needed to be solved! Instead, the problem was that society doesn’t accommodate people with impairments. It wasn’t having impairments that necessarily disable people but things like negative attitudes towards us, inaccessible buildings, communications, transport, and the inflexible way employment and services are organised. If those ‘social barriers’ were removed, even though we’d still have our impairments, would we necessarily be disabled? Known as the social model of disability, it was a lightbulb moment in disability history, that illuminated a new understanding of disability, a vision to aspire to, and route to getting there by removing social barriers. There was an alternative to care/ contain/ control/ kill. Now equality was firmly on the agenda (or so we thought).

To realise that you’re not the problem, that you’re constrained by oppression not by your own innate inferiority, is where liberation begins. Without belief in your own worth you become complicit with those whose interests it serves to deny that worth. So, ‘rights not charity’ became our mantra. And we got some rights too, with the Disability Discrimination Act (now the Equality Act), which brought rights to reasonable adjustments to remove social barriers. It means that those causing the barriers found themselves cast as the problem, which they then had to take action to solve by changing their practices. Strangely, that didn’t seem to mean they liked us any better!

We emphatically still have not won the war for equality. In fact, perhaps we have given our enemies, sometimes masquerading as our friends, some new weapons to attack us with and some new words with which to rebrand our oppression.

In the days before the social model, and for some years after, as far as the welfare state was concerned disabled people were the ‘deserving poor’. Unlike the undeserving non-disabled who could (allegedly) help themselves if they only chose to pull their socks up, disability rendered us helpless. It was our misfortune, not our fault. Of course we could never work and would therefore always need to be looked after and protected.

That’s not what many of us wanted and it wasn’t true. The social model had revealed that what stopped us working was not necessarily our impairments, but discriminatory attitudes, inaccessible workplaces and inflexible working practices. We had seen how even well-meaning protection could become unjustifiable disempowerment.

Now we’ve made reasonable adjustments to remove social barriers, they said, what’s to stop you working? We’ve been swayed by the force of your argument. We agree you can work, just like you always said. What puzzles us is why now you don’t believe it. Maybe you never really did want to work in the first place. Or is it lack of skills and job-readiness. Maybe you just lack confidence and what you need is a firm-but-fair push. Sometimes it’s kind to be cruel.

Unfortunately, confidence cannot raze to the ground the many social barriers that still patently exist. Failing to acknowledge that isn’t kindness. Just cruelty.

At the heart of the problem lies the fact that they still think we are the problem. It’s us who have to show why we can’t work, not employers why they can’t do more to enable us to work. It’s us in the glare of the interrogatory spotlight, forced to perform our incapacity and dance to their tune. It’s not employers...who are minutely grilled as to why adjustments aren’t reasonable, on peril of losing the income they need to survive.

How can it be that whenever we think we’re moving towards equality, and new tools make it more possible, somehow we seem to end up further away?

When we’re told that governments have to make difficult decisions at times of ‘austerity’, some of us may suspect it’s not them for whom their decisions will prove to be difficult. What inevitably comes next is the drive to focus public resources on ‘the most vulnerable’. The entrance criteria become ever harsher for membership of this club no one wants to join. To qualify you must have plunged so far down into the abyss of destitution there’s no way back. To qualify for ‘help’, those teetering on the brink must first fall – or jump – in. To desperately grapple to climb out only takes you further away from support. To not desperately grapple to climb out only makes destitution your choice.

As the frontiers of the state are rolled back, as wealth fails to trickle down but instead floods upwards and outwards to off-shore tax havens, essential public...support systems collapse before our eyes...While the numbers apparently judged deserving to be poor sky-rocket, the numbers of the poor deserving of support conversely dwindle – and not just because of the tightening of definitions. Poverty kills. So too does despair. The Disability News Service reported...on research linking the Work Capability Assessment to 600 suicides.

Is self-destruction to be the only way out from the living hell created for disabled people by failure to remove social barriers, support independent living and honour our human rights?

It may be hard to accept that, while disabled people may no longer be drowned in the river, that doesn’t seem to mean killing us is necessarily a thing of the past.

It’s high time we reminded ourselves that another way is still possible. There’s nothing inevitable about disabled people’s poverty, inequality or ‘vulnerability’. They are imposed on us by a society that has the tools and the resources to prevent them but chooses not to use them.

However, in Scotland, we’ve seen a glimmer of hope for a very different approach. The Scottish Government has committed itself to delivering a devolved benefits system based on dignity, fairness and respect. The founding principles of the system include that it is a human right and must be designed with the people of Scotland. And warm words seem, for once, to be translating into action. People who rely on benefits have not just been consultees but directly involved in shaping the system and its component parts, via ‘Experience panels’ of over 2400 people. They were co-designers of a Charter, with annual performance reports to Parliament and an independent oversight body. By directly involving the people who use social security in setting expectations, designing the monitoring framework and assessing whether those expectations have been met in practice, standards are driven from the ground up. Their most recent verdict on performance was positive.

Ultimately what this represents is a rebalancing of power. Because the very unequal distribution of power is, at root, what the problem is all about and that is what must be solved.

But will devolved social security solve poverty? Can it deliver dignity, fairness and respect, not just in terms of how benefit is delivered but through providing an adequate income. Over the years we’ve seen how longstanding themes throughout disability history – care/ contain/ control/ kill – don’t necessarily go away but get repackaged in ways that make them publicly plausible and acceptable. Where that isn’t possible, they can still happen, behind closed doors, by inaction as much as by action, out of public sight and mind.

It is important to understand that while much of it plays out as cruelty, that is not necessarily the intention. Discrimination can still result from a positive desire to help, and often out of a complete lack of awareness of the consequences. That’s why there really is hope that co-production and collaboration as equal partners can offer a way forward. But it does mean a rebalancing of power and resources. It also means acknowledging that we are all interdependent on each other. Yes, a disabled person could even be your boss! It means an end to disabled people being forced to make wildly unreasonable adjustments while those responsible for our exclusion fail to make adjustments they could often easily and cheaply make. It also means all of us accepting that, even if everyone concerned makes reasonable adjustments, some people are never going to work. And that doesn’t mean that those people are not equally human and should not have equal human rights. Until that acceptance comes, the holy grail of equality will never be attained. Until then all we are ever likely to get is the reframing and rebranding of oppression.

That is why we have come to distrust governmental warm words, even those that are familiar because they are ours! We’ve seen how words like ‘independence’, ‘care’, ‘work pays’ can play out as the polar opposite. We’ve also seen how their governmental words do not always translate into action, and how our own actions can be massively misinterpreted, in ways that would be hilarious if the consequences weren’t so devastating.

You can wave your arms about? If only you believed in yourself perhaps a glorious career awaits you as an international orchestral conductor! Or maybe a lollipop lady. Or scarecrow? There are so many ways you can make a useful contribution to society. If you can, it’s only fair you should.

Convincingly demonstrate your incapacity? You should be an actor! You’d win awards!! An Oscar, maybe. Obviously not an award of benefit. You clearly don’t need any more help to survive. You’re not dead, are you. You are literally the living proof''.


Dr Sally Witcher