“If you compare it to other groups, like the suffragettes or trade unionists, how disabled people gained their civil rights has really been a hidden history,” says Chris Burgess, curator of exhibitions and collections at the People’s History Museum in Manchester.
But that’s all about to change. The disability charity Scope has collaborated with the museum to collect and preserve archives that chart the fight by disabled people for their rights as citizens – from iconic images of activism, posters, banners, campaign badges, t-shirts to personal memoirs. The People’s History Museum is showcasing the DDA archives alongside original artwork, stories and poems by disabled artists and activists from across the country in a special exhibition.
Burgess says it aims to tell the story of a campaign movement that’s been largely ignored up to now. “If it is covered, it’s often not about people demanding change, it’s about ‘welfare’ or rights being ‘given out’,” he says.
The exhibition also celebrates the Disability Discrimination Act, which this week marks its 20th anniversary, and the activists who made the law a reality. With the passing of the landmark DDA, for the first time in Britain the law provided disabled citizens with access to the workplace (employers were required to make “reasonable adjustments” to work and premises) and, through later amendments, to education and transport.
For disabled people – who, culturally, are routinely perceived as “helpless” or “passive” – it feels particularly important to recognise that anything we gained, we fought for. As the bright red tapestry hanging at the exhibition reads: “Nothing about us without us”.
Looking through the artwork and the collected archives, the sense of disabled people actively battling for our rights is unavoidable: from campaign T-shirts with the slogan Piss on Pity scrawled in pink writing to images of crowds of disabled people marching through the streets of Manchester or outside Whitehall.
Perhaps nothing is more striking than the photographs of the direct action DDA activists undertook: black and white images of disabled people handcuffed to buses, hanging their bodies – proudly, visibly affected by various disabilities – in the road.
This was a matter of not only political, but personal, empowerment. In the summer of 1992, with wheelchairs and placards filling the street, disabled activists descended en masse on the television headquarters of Telethon ’92 – ITV’s then annual 28-hour fundraiser. The protesters, angry at what they saw to be the programme’s damaging depiction of disabled people, did not fit the pitiable, tragic stereotypes of disability. These were citizens angrily challenging a country that, however well intentioned, was willing to grant charity handouts to disabled people, but not equality.
For the then 28-year-old Adam Thomas, who had been paralysed after a motorcycle accident in 1981, seeing the images of the protest flash up on that night’s news was a revelation.
“I watched these so-called poor cripples and I thought, ‘How amazing is that?’” he says. “We were the only group of people in Britain who still had no basic rights in law.”
Thomas, now 51, in some ways counted himself as a very fortunate disabled person; his employer adapted his workplace for a wheelchair, despite there being no legal duty to at the time. But as he tried to navigate outside this rare environment, he became increasingly angry, he says. “Every time I wanted to do something – use public transport, go to a concert – I couldn’t,” he says. “So many parts of my life, I was being barred from.”
What followed for Thomas – and a growing body of British disability campaigners – was a fight for their fundamental rights. As he puts it: “A few disabled people could gridlock central London. It was like it gave you control of your life.”
By the early 1990s, – inspired by the Telethon ’92 protest and a spell volunteering for a local disability group – Thomas would spend afternoons lobbying inside parliament with a leading disability organisation, after spending mornings taking part in direct action outside (led by Direct Action Network, the chief disability protest group at the time) – action that, he says, had the effect of “constantly keeping the issue in the press”.
The political establishment was finding itself being rocked by a group of disabled people. “The police would use fencing at protests and one by one, they’d pick you up in your wheelchair and put you in the pen. They left you there for hours – people needed the toilet and they wouldn’t let you out,” says Thomas. “I saw one policeman dragging a woman with brittle bone disease. She was screaming, screaming.”
Today’s activist groups such as Disabled People Against Cuts show that the spirit of the DDA campaigners has not died. In June, around 30 protesters – including about 10 using wheelchairs – clashed with police inside the House of Commons after they tried to storm the chamber during prime minister’s questions to protest against the scrapping of the independent living fund.
At a time when government policies – from the bedroom tax to the impending new cuts to sickness benefits – are disproportionately hitting disabled people’s services and social security, and the “disability employment” gap is barely shifting (it will still take at least 20 years for the gap to close if it continues to narrow at the current rate), it would be remiss to believe that the fight for disabled people’s equality is over.
Scope has released a poll which reveals that just 40% of disabled people say the UK is a “good place” to be a disabled person. Almost two-thirds say they are treated differently because of their disability, while the same poll shows discrimination in shops, cinemas and theatres – as well as by employers and potential employers – is still rife.
“Campaigning to get the DDA passed into law was a hard-fought struggle and the law has made a real difference to the lives of disabled people, including my own,” says Rosemary Frazer, campaigns manager at Scope. “But we still need to see more progress.”
Gemma Steele, associate solicitor at Browne Jacobson, says many shops, for example, are still without ramps because considering whether an adjustment is “reasonable” means looking at factors like the cost, whether the change can actually be made, and the size of the organisation making the change. “To enforce the law, the disabled person affected must sue the company in the county court. Not only would they have to pay court and legal fees to do so, but awards have historically been low,” she points out.
It explains Thomas’s comment: “I recently went to a town where I couldn’t get into a single shop. You think: ‘Have you not heard of the DDA?’”
Disability Discrimination Act: celebrating 20 years is at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, until 19 November
