Pat Stack Archive | ETOL Main Page
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995, pp. 14–15.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
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The Tories’ attacks on disabled people have provoked anger and outrage. Pat Stack examines why this discrimination and prejudice has sparked such a militant movement |
The government’s new proposed law on the disabled is a blatant attempt to prevent the re-emergence of a private members bill on the question. The proposals fall a long way short of the demands of disabled activists, and are nothing like as comprehensive as the bill blocked by the Tories last year.
Little is being offered. While the bill talks of making workplace discrimination against the disabled illegal, it is unlikely that it will be any great threat to employers.
Again, while it now says there must be greater provision of access in the areas of public transport and public buildings, owners of such buildings will not be required to alter entrances or premises – which makes the whole thing a nonsense.
Disabled activists remain bitter about how the Tories wrecked the Disability Civil Rights Bill last summer, and are not likely to be appeased by this compromise.
It wasn’t just that the bill was scuppered but that it was done in such an underhand, dishonest, deceitful way.
Discrimination is a fact of life for people with disabilities. The majority of disabled people are in poorly paid low skilled jobs. If you are disabled you are three times more likely to be unemployed and six times more likely to be turned down after submitting a job application than if you are not disabled. If you say you are disabled in your job application then you are six times more likely not to be interviewed. If you get to an interview you are six times more likely to be rejected for the job than if you are able bodied. Disabled men earn 81 percent of the wage of able bodied men, disabled women 88 percent of the wage of able bodied women. Some employers will only employ disabled people if they agree to do the same job for less money than able bodied workers.
A survey of employers in local government showed only 4 percent actively encouraged disabled people to work for them, while 6 percent admitted that they would not employ disabled people under any circumstances whatsoever. Another study showed a young disabled woman was the only student in her university class to receive a first class degree. Six months later she was the only one out of that class still without a job. In government workshops for the disabled the average pay is £90 per week.
Living costs tend to be higher for disabled people because of needs such as transport, clothing and facilities in the home. It is estimated that two thirds of all disabled people are living below the poverty line. One third of disabled children living at home and two thirds of those in residential homes receive segregated special education. The special and segregated schools are merely adjuncts to medical treatment. They therefore have low expectations of the children involved and poor educational facilities. In part this helps to explain why the percentage of disabled students in higher education per head of the student population as a whole is 0.3 percent.
Most disabled people earn far too little to buy their own houses. Councils offer very few adapted homes for disabled people, so many are driven into residential homes and are further segregated from the rest of society.
Every day every disabled person hits a number of stumbling blocks which make it more difficult for him or her to lead a full and normal life. The most obvious and easy way to travel around London is on the Underground. Around 90 percent of the London Underground does not have lifts but escalators which are impossible for most disabled people. That’s one of the major means of transport in London cut out. Buses are inaccessible – difficult to get onto, difficult to get off and bus conductors have the right to refuse wheelchairs. If you can’t afford a car you are restricted to special facilities like ‘dial a bus’.
Many workplaces or colleges have little or no disabled access. Theatres, cinemas and restaurants have no access. You can get into pubs but try getting a wheelchair into the toilet in most of them. One London cinema recently described disabled people as a fire hazard.
Even the very basic right to vote is very severely hampered for disabled people. At the last election only 12 percent of polling stations had facilities for the disabled.
The Civil Rights Disabled Persons Bill sought to make illegal such discrimination and to make the right of access compulsory. The bill was killed last year by Nicholas Scott – supposedly the minister responsible for care of the disabled. He blocked the bill by a wrecking operation where Tory backbenchers were supplied with questions prepared by Scott’s civil servants in order to talk the bill out.
The real reason for the defeat of the bill lies in who campaigned against it. The two main lobbiers against this bill were the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors. British capitalism was saying that we are not going to spend money to solve these problems. We know we may be discriminating against a section of the population – so what? Profits are more important to us. They deliberately inflated the cost of the bill by saying that to put the whole thing into practice would cost £17 billion. According to campaigner for disabled rights Victoria Scott, the CBI doubled the likely costs in order to frighten people off.
The same hypocrites are willing to put their hands in their pockets for tax deductible charity donations but will not put hands on their profits to solve the problem.
The outcome of the fiasco round the bill is an increasing militant disabled movement which is saying enough is enough. We do not want charity, pity or sympathy but basic rights.
This movement is in response to genuine oppression. But what is the nature of that oppression? From a mildly annoying, ‘Does he or she take sugar?’ attitude, right through to the horrors of the Nazi regime – where a hundred thousand ‘inferiors’ were butchered by the Nazi regime – at different levels that oppression is real.
However, disabled oppression, unlike that of women and blacks, is not the systematic oppression of a whole race or sex. The numbers of disabled as opposed to women or blacks are too small, and too randomly dispersed to make it an effective form of systematic oppression.
Women’s oppression is rooted in the capitalist family and the way in which women serve as a cheaper section of the workforce. The roots of racism are slavery, colonialism and the way in which blacks have been used and treated ever since. Disabled people do provide a cheap workforce but not as easily, efficiently or in the same numbers, and they cannot be used in the same ways as blacks or women.
As a relatively small section of the population, they are not nearly as effective a group to be used to divide and rule workers. So while Hitler did murder 100,000 ‘inferiors’ he could not use people with disabilities in the same way that he used the Jews as a scapegoat for the ills of the whole of society.
In addition, while black and female labour forces play a vital and integral role in capitalist society, the disabled are marginalised and placed on the fringes of the workforce and so on the fringes of society as a whole.
The roots of disabled oppression reflect the morality of capitalist society itself. Disabled people are seen as being unprofitable, and not easily exploited because the capitalists have to spend more money to exploit them. It is more efficient for capitalism to exploit someone fully sighted, or with two good hands, than it is to exploit a disabled worker.
Therefore the way in which capitalism treats the disabled is not key to the development and well-being of capitalism itself. These are important distinctions, but ones many on the left refuse to make.
Indeed, there are those on the left who have created a sort of rogue list of oppressions. The National Union of Students’ conference is a staggering example of this. The more oppression points you have the more political credibility you have.
I remember at NUS the chair would announce that the next speaker is disabled, at which point the whole hall would have to go quiet and the speaker could talk the biggest load of rubbish and no one would say a word. I remember it happening at my first NUS conference – the usual hush which I hadn’t experienced before. I started to speak and attacked the president of the NUS. Half way through people began heckling and at the end of it this president came to me and said my speech was dishonest. I knew then I’d cut through all the bullshit, the ‘Does he take sugar?’ and ‘Let’s be nice to him’, because of my politics.
Some people say that you’re not disabled, you’re ‘differently abled’. It’s rubbish. I would have loved to have been able to dance, play the guitar and play for Ireland in the World Cup. None of these things were available to me because of my disability. We should recognise what we face in society. We don’t bend to it, don’t bow to it, don’t cringe before it and fight against it. We aim to lead as full but normal a life as is possible. We want to overcome every obstacle that can be physically overcome without playing word games that pretends that something is what it isn’t.
The fight taking place now represents a real change in the movement because it represents a notion that people don’t want to sit around discussing what is the nicest word to call someone, but what is the best way to tear the head off these wretched Tory bastards who are depriving us of our rights. This is a fantastic step forward for the movement.
As with all movements of the oppressed there is a class basis to it. If Rupert Murdoch had a disabled child, that child would face very few obstacles in its life compared not just to me or working class disabled people but to most able bodied people. Much of the oppression and discrimination disabled people face is based at the workplace. We should demand of the unions that they fight over these issues. The bosses should pay for facilities. Not one member of the workforce should be thrown out of work or refused a job because some part of them does not apparently work properly.
What about disability in a socialist future? In such a society sexuality is entirely your own affair. The colour of your skin is of no interest to anyone. Much of the disability that does exist will be eradicated. There will be all the facilities necessary to make life better for the disabled. But there will also be a change of priorities. The research that goes into weapons of destruction could be turned into medical research. The accidents caused at work, in the air or on the road are greatly increased by the drive to make profits.
Not that all disability will disappear – accidents will happen and there will still be things that we have to try to crack and defeat. But so much of what exists today arises out of poverty. In India or Africa most people with disabilities are disabled because of poverty and nothing else. In the SWP there are gays, women, blacks and people with disabilities. What separates us and annoys so many of the tokenists is that we understand our oppression – why it’s there and where it comes from. We don’t look for sympathy, we look to fight the system that produced this oppression in the first place.
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