In this guest blog, Colin Cameron reflects on the Disability rights progress, and setbacks in the UK. And the enduring tensions between activism and policy.
The Broken Promise of 1995: Disability Rights Progress and Setbacks
There was a lot of feeling of disappointment back in 1995. Where the Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) had campaigned for civil rights legislation, we got anti-discrimination legislation, and without any means of enforcement. (It wasn’t until 1998, I think, under Blair’s Labour government, that the Disability Rights Commission was established.) Even then, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) only did about half of what disabled people had campaigned for.
Half-Measures and Medical Model Framing
DDA was taken to stand for Doesn’t Do Anything or Does Damn All (see Swain, French and Cameron, 2003). Whereas disabled people had campaigned from a social model standpoint, the DDA established in law (it codified for the first time) a medical model definition. It identified disability as the outcome of impairment: as individual deficiency, as something people ‘have’. While it made certain legal requirements in terms of reasonable adjustments, these were seen as being about making accommodations for the greater inclusion of people ‘who have something wrong with them’.
The Lingering Shadow of Tragedy Narratives
As Swain and French (2000) pointed out, even in an ideal, fully accessible world disabled people could still be regarded as the victims of personal tragedy. Some things have changed, and there’s a bit more access to some places for disabled people. But fundamentally little has changed: certain rights, e.g. to self-directed support and to support to meet the extra costs of living with impairment in a disabling society, have even been withdrawn and have moved backwards. Tragedy narratives still permeate mainstream culture.
Academia vs Grassroots Priorities
Certain Disability Studies academics, disabled and nondisabled, have made great careers for themselves and been applauded by legions of caring professionals for dismissing and discounting the social model. But it was upon this understanding, the simple distinction between impairment (something somebody has, an embodied characteristic, part of making them who they are) and disability (to do with the way society responds to impairment): that the DPM organised itself in its days of strongest campaigning.
Complacency in Partial Progress
Those who have turned it into an abstraction to be critically debated haven’t exactly progressed the movement very far. Though, they might have increased the size of their own bank balances. Of course, there’s another point, too. While disabled people are able to get to more places than they used to. While there is a bit better access and a bit more inclusion. They are less likely to get angry about being completely shut out. It might have been JFK, or maybe it was someone else, who said: ‘The best way to kill a social movement is to give them a bit of what they want.’
Read more about the Affirmation Model of Disability here (PDF)
