05: Changing Attitudes / Looking Outside the Movement

How have attitudes towards Disabled people been affected by disability activism – both positively and negatively? And how has the ‘of’ and ‘for’ debate, including the ideological differences between ‘of’ and ‘for’ organisations, impacted on the agenda for change?

“I think we’ve spent so much time on trying to improve attitudes and trying to make awareness training, belittling ourselves in the process.”

Ian Popperwell

“Come 2010, with that whole agenda around disabled people being ‘idle scroungers’ or ‘fraudsters’, the incidence of hate crime went up over a hundred per cent over a couple of years.”

Laura Welti

“It wasn’t just about the transport. It was about influencing the way that people thought about the world and thought about things.”

Meryl Gaskell

From non-disabled people using ‘a different kind of voice’ when talking to a blind person, to a professional woman and wheelchair user being patted on the head in a business meeting, to Disabled people being called ‘idle scroungers’ and ‘fraudsters’, Ian Popperwell, Laura Welti and Meryl Gaskell consider attitudes towards and about Disabled people – what they were, what they are, and whether change is still possible.

The ‘first wave’ of disability activism gave the Disabled community a legacy of practical change, from aspects of the law to equipment and physical access. But what about public attitudes? In his experience, says Ian Popperwell, public thinking regarding Blind people has, in general, remained stubbornly fixed. He says: “Throughout my life – I’m 58 – I think people’s attitudes have changed very little. I think people have learned to disguise them very well. The people who can’t speak to me on their level, the people that talk to me in a different kind of voice if I go into a shop, are in about the same proportion as they were when I was a child.

“I’m not sure I believe that attitudes can change anymore. I really don’t. I don’t think it’s about class, it’s about personality – there are people who meet me and can’t talk to me, and other people can. We’ve spent so much time on trying to improve attitudes and trying to make awareness training, belittling ourselves in the process.

“I’ve seen loads of people who are basically good, but don’t understand about disability and maybe say a few wrong words or don’t feel quite comfortable with those people, and as soon as they have some training, they’ll just get it quickly. But the people that have dreadful attitudes, I don’t think there’s much that’ll change them. I hear people in the organisation that we’ve got in Bristol at the moment using the same words that they used 20, 30 years ago. I just want to see things move on a bit.”

Laura Welti, on the other hand, has a sense of a fluctuation in public attitudes towards Disabled people. She says: “Come 2010, with that whole agenda around Disabled people being ‘idle scroungers’ or ‘fraudsters’, the incidence of hate crime went up over a hundred per cent over a couple of years. So it clearly got a lot worse then. But I think we have to distinguish between certain generations, and between power and community. I think the government has become much more hostile than it used to be. However, I find personally that people, particularly those who have been to schools that had Disabled pupils there as well, their attitudes are rather better than attitudes have been in the past. Still got a way to go to properly understand, but they’re more open, I think, to understanding.”

So what more is required to improve things? She says: “Well, governmental leadership. The reason things got so bad in terms of hate crime was precisely because the government, in combination with the media, presented us in such a way that people believed them. For example, the Disability Living Allowance: the government were saying, ‘Well, this benefit that we want to replace, it’s because people weren’t even assessed as to whether they needed it’. Well, that doesn’t apply to any Disabled person I know. You have to apply, you get reviewed, you either get turned down or you get accepted. Nobody just says, ‘Oh, so you’re a Disabled person? Oh, yeah, here you go, here’s some money’.

“What they did was make the public believe that virtually half the people getting disability benefits didn’t actually deserve them or warrant them. And that had a huge impact, not just in terms of what people think of as hate crime, but in those daily, what we these days call ‘microaggressions’. And particularly around 2010 to 2014, people would be challenged by complete strangers on the street. I remember getting to the door of a cafe to go in [in my wheelchair] and someone was coming out, and he just stopped in the doorway and said, ‘Do you need that? Can’t you walk at all?’ And I said, ‘Well, not more than a couple of steps’. And he said, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be using that then’. That was happening quite a lot.

“If government isn’t going to put its weight behind the legislation and to model the kind of behaviour that would be appropriate to Disabled people’s rights, then I can’t see it improving. We need that to happen first and foremost, which partly means getting a lot more people into power, positions of influence in companies, in government, in the public sector.”

Those ‘positions of influence’ are applicable everywhere in public life. Meryl Gaskell explains how Disabled people’s key involvement with transport provision in Bristol has been a game-changer. She says: “If it’s services for other Disabled people, my experience is that it just makes it a much better quality service and has much more relevance. It’s the perspective, it’s the expertise, it’s the lived experience. It just enhances anything that you’re doing. It gives a quality to it.”

That’s not to say that this involvement went unchallenged, Dial-A-Ride being a case in point. She says: “We had a lot of criticism because the management committee, the people who managed Dial-A-Ride, were all passengers, they were all users of the service, and people were saying, ‘Well, they can’t run the service’. Well, they didn’t do bad, did they, attracting over £7 million of funding for the service over a period of 14 years for the expansion plans.”

But did she see any change in the way that people treated Disabled people as a result of having to work with them? She says: “I think so. Very early on, I went to a meeting with the Chair of my committee – she’s over six feet tall when she stands up, but she’s a wheelchair user. One of the Councillors patted her on the head. I couldn’t believe it. She was a professional woman in her own right. Over the course of time, we got away from that sort of patronising attitude and I think people respected who they were talking to much more.

“Also, I think it rubbed off. The people who used the services became more vocal and talking about their rights and expecting their support needs to be met. So I think it wasn’t just about the transport. It was about influencing the way that people thought about the world and thought about things.”

Rights not charity

“I went on some of the anti-Telethon demos in London, and people were very aggressively hostile to us, because they didn’t like that ‘helping Disabled people’ attitude being challenged.”

Alun Davies

“There clearly was and still is, and probably always will be, a conflict between the ‘of’ and the ‘for’.”

Roger Berry

From being punched in the face and called ‘an ungrateful B…’ at a Children in Need demo to the tricky business of collaboration, Alun Davies and Roger Berry consider the challenge of the different ideologies of the ‘of’ and the ‘for’ organisations.

Alun Davies recalls the ideological ‘of’ and ‘for’ conflict of the early ’90s very well. He says: “There was a lot of resistance from traditional charities who were very much run by non-disabled people, [and] took a medical, charity model perspective. In our view, [they] opposed the self-control, self-organisation and self-determination of Disabled people. And they were very vehement and very aggressive in their defence of the status quo. They didn’t take lightly to Disabled people saying that we should be controlling and running those organisations and that only Disabled people should be speaking for themselves. And we were also challenging the dominant medical model of disability, which was very much ingrained within the education movement in terms of special needs, and within the medical profession in terms of the ideology of focusing on people’s impairments and curing [them]. [We were] challenging the charity model, because what was then Children in Need and Telethon in the early ’90s were traditionally negative, extremely offensive portrayals of disabled people as victims of their impairment.

“I went on a couple of anti-Children in Need demonstrations in Birmingham, during one of which I got punched in the face and told not to be such an ungrateful B…. I went on some of the anti-Telethon demos in London, and again people were very aggressively hostile to us, because they didn’t like that ‘helping Disabled people’ attitude being challenged. So there was a lot of negativity and aggression towards us, we were operating in a very hostile environment. And I think because of that our approach was quite hard.”

One of the effects of that approach was, as Alun recalls, that the radical Disabled people’s movement was left “a bit out in the cold” by “more moderate and mainstream organisations”. He says: “We struggled anyway, because trying to get funding for community development campaigning work was always difficult. We were helped by the Platinum Trust, and that did fund political organisation between development organisations, and we were helped by the fact that we worked very well with our local authorities.”

That work with local authorities involved setting up consultation structures that, he stresses, “were very clearly both democratically controlled by Disabled people and transparently accountable to Disabled people”. He explains: “We worked with Avon County Council to set up what was then the Disability Equality Advisory Review subcommittee, which had elected places for Disabled people on it. And we then worked with Bristol City Council to set up the Disability Equality Forum. We also worked with Bristol City Council for them to set up the Physical Access Chain, which was a group of Disabled people involved in access issues. So we were very clear about what our role was: to enable and empower Disabled people to represent and speak for themselves and to be consulted.”

However, there were compromises – he says he “accepted reluctantly that non-disabled people led charities” had to be part of those discussions – but not carer-led organisations. “We always argued that carers have an important voice and a unique voice, but it is to represent carers, not to represent Disabled people’s organisations. For example, we took a view that Mencap wasn’t a Disabled people organisation. It was an organisation for carers. The problem at that time was that carer organisations and organisations primarily led by carers were perceived to be the legitimate voices of Disabled people, which clearly they weren’t, because they weren’t run and controlled by Disabled people.”

Roger Berry feels that “there clearly was and still is, and probably always will be, a conflict between the ‘of’ and the ‘for’ organisations”. He says: “Disability Rights UK, for example, of which I was a [founding] trustee, is an organisation of Disabled people. Disabled people have the vote [at general meetings], non-disabled members do not. The vast majority of trustees under our articles have to be Disabled people.” In contrast, he continues, organisations that place control in the hands of non-disabled people – such as Scope – and which fall into the ‘for’ category, may have more money because they’re skilled at finding donors who will give them enough money to provide services, provide help and assistance for Disabled people, but they can’t speak for Disabled people. Not [always] because people are consciously trying to achieve different things, but if you speak for Disabled people, you clearly have an authority. That tension is always there.”

But it is important, he feels, to avoid allowing that tension to be a barrier against change. He says: “In terms of campaigning, I think both in terms of the Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill and to date, there [has been] an enormous amount of cooperation. When organisations can work together, they can achieve far more than if they’re fighting each other.”