Activism is, on the one hand, about unity and mutual support, but it inevitably also embraces conflict – even among those working primarily towards the same goals. What was the effect of these very different forces on the personal journeys of Disability Rights activists?
Unity
Paul Sullivan sums up the positive impact Disability Rights activism had on him: “The thing it meant for me most personally was friendships. I met really interesting, intelligent campaigners in Bristol… they opened up my understanding of the barriers that we face and the way to challenge discrimination, work for inclusion. I’ve never become a radical. You won’t find me shouting and screaming too much. But I did change in my understanding and increased my friendship group, and became aware of a wider range of people with different impairments and different degrees of impairment.”
Similarly, Penny Germon recalls that when she turned up at a meeting of the newly-formed Avon Coalition of Disabled People in the late 1980s, she had “never been in a room full of Disabled people before” – here were people who took the time to explain the Social Model to her, people she could connect with in terms of her own sense of exclusion and discrimination. She says: “It changed my life. I didn’t know that you could work in something that was political with a small ‘p’, that was about people changing their lives, and having an impact on the world.” That single, life-changing moment is familiar among disability activists. Alun Davies says: “I first became aware of Disabled people’s politics in 1986. I was a student at Birmingham University, and… in October ’86 I attended a lecture by the then-manager of the Birmingham Disability Rights Group, who talked about the Social Model of Disability and the Disabled People’s Movement. And that one lecture basically got me hooked. It was very much a Damascene conversion into understanding my experiences as a Disabled person, and identifying with a society that disabled me on the grounds of my impairment rather than my impairment being the issue.”
Will Bee recalls his own, similar and sudden moment when he “awoke to disability rights”. It was 1980, the year before the International Year of Disabled People, and he was to give a speech to a National Union of Students conference on behalf of what was then the National Bureau for Handicapped Students, later SKILL. The night before the event, the treasurer of the Sheffield University Student Union – a non-disabled person, but “steeped in both race and gender equality” – said to him “’Will, you’re being far too apologetic. You’re not part of a separate world. It’s a right to go to university, and you should be thinking of it in that way’. It was a transformative moment.” He re-wrote his speech, and says the one he delivered was “much more about open your doors, let us in”.
The opportunity to talk to other Disabled people within the Coalition, to learn their stories, was, says David Mendelsohn, a “revelation” to him in terms of his own self perception. He says: “it opened up a new door, a new way to see myself. I think that was a positive thing, because that enriched my identity”. And the opportunity to simply ‘just be’ with other Disabled people was in itself impactful: Liz Crow recalls a moment where she was with “a group of Disabled women sitting around the pool, all wearing swimming costumes, all with our different bodies, and just the ease of it. That was the most extraordinary and beautiful and exhilarating thing”. The sense of unity also meant that the “brick wall” challenges – “whether it was going to college or getting somewhere to live or going into a shop or a cinema” – could be shared. Here, she says, was an alternative to “being alone, and it feeling like the loneliest place on earth”. She continues: “Of course, that’s why, when we came together it was just so absolutely extraordinary. We were fighting our corner collectively, but I guess we also started to fight each other’s corners. It’s always easier to advocate for somebody else than it is for yourself”.
Ultimately, then, activists were motivated and empowered by both the foundation of friendship and their common goals. Ian Popperwell sums it up: “There was a real kind of comradeship and [it] felt like we were changing things”. Meryl Gaskell adds: “The Disabled People’s Movement was incredibly supportive. It was very, very active in Bristol. We were all very supportive of each other and encouraging and there was a lot of celebrating, lot of fun.”
Discord
The unity was not, however, universal, and, ironically, the Social Model was at the root of internal discord within the Movement – specifically, the sharp distinction it made between impairment and disability. Ian Popperwell says that initially, he simply felt grateful for the way the Social Model’s theoretical basis “took away my sense of inadequacy as a Blind person and meant that we could put the responsibility onto society”. But he acknowledges that the Social Model “denied the existence often, and certainly the meaning and impact of, impairment. I think that was a mistake”. He says: “There was lots of internal conflict as you always get between people who are more radical than others or people who seem to get the issues more than others”. Acknowledging that he was “part of” that conflict, and regretting that at times he was “very critical and aggressive”, he says: “We could have been supportive of each other, not just around the discrimination we faced, but how our impairments impacted on us… rather than denying or ignoring them because they were the things that the charities, the social workers and the medics were all [interested in]… We lost something in being able to reframe impairment in terms of Disability Equality… We didn’t always make many friends”.
Laura Welti recalls that some of the low points for her were in the wider context of “relationships with different individuals or organisations”. She says wryly: “We had some fun internal challenges”. She explains: “I think probably like most environments, some of the most challenging things have been personalities. When you’re running an organisation that is pending payment, you need your trustees to be people who are engaged actively with the needs of people who are different from themselves, not just the things that directly affect their lives as well. And that’s been quite challenging at times. I think I got myself a bit more caught for dealing with the stresses of engaging across the Council, because when you’re almost every day finding something isn’t quite what it should be, you get to the point where you lose patience quite a bit. And that’s okay. But I think it also put off some people perhaps from listening as well as they could have done.”
Alun Davies acknowledges that his own “ultra ultraist”, “confrontationalist approach” was itself sometimes a barrier to communication. For example, in terms of delivering Disability Equality training, he realised that a soft approach encouraged a more receptive audience, and admits that he began to include humour – and discovered that the feedback “got 100 per cent better”. In his time in the management of the Coalition from 1998 to 2003, he similarly began to realise that “working with people was more effective than shouting at them all the time”. He says he “began to develop a more partnership approach, which wasn’t always easy, because at that time, I had a lot of personal anger in my politics. There were times when I wasn’t an effective operator. There were times when I was very unpleasant to people, and those people I’ve subsequently apologised to, because it wasn’t nice what I said and how I behaved.
“What I’ve learned from my own personal journey, the confrontationalist approach served a certain use at a certain time, but I wish I’d stopped it sooner. And even with a confrontationalist approach, you don’t need to be personally abusive, which is what I could be, and personally dismissive and quite a hard person. I don’t know that that’s a requisite of activism – I hope that you can be an effective activist without being those things.”
But as to conflict between organisations, one of the joys was that sometimes, ideological differences were set aside to bring about change for a common goal. Alun says “One of the things I’m personally proud of is that in Avon we brought together a broad-based campaigning group to campaign for anti-discrimination legislation, and virtually all of that group was made up of the traditional non-disabled people-led charities, who normally wouldn’t have worked with the Coalition in a hundred years. But we brought them together and we, for example, got them to chair it. But the point was we wrote the policy papers, we organised the campaign, so the actual campaign and its politics were very much led by the Disabled People’s Movement. But we effectively had traditional, non-disabled people led charities signing up to a radical approach, which made it easier for us to then operate.”
When Alun left the Coalition in 2003, he says he “was very much becoming a moderate”, although he stresses that his beliefs in the Social Model are “just as ardent now as they were back in 1986. To this day, I still think if you genuinely accept the Social Model, you cannot identify according to your impairment, and you cannot support segregated services.” However, his voyage of change is illustrated by the fact that he now works for Thomas Pocklington Trust, a traditional, non-disabled people-led charity which, although employing 40 per cent of people with visual impairment, is “the kind of charity who 30 years ago I would’ve quite openly, mercilessly attacked”. But, he says, the role enables him to do what he loves. He says he now realises that “what I was put on this planet to do was to enable, support, facilitate and empower Disabled people to speak for themselves. That’s what I’m about, is using my skills, experience and knowledge to enable support and empower Disabled people to bring about positive change, to improve their lives, to represent their views, to be their own spokesperson, to be their own voice, and that’s what the Sightless Councils are for me, and that’s what the Disabled People’s Movement has been for me”.
He was awarded an MBE for he work for his work in the Disabled People’s Movement, but says the greatest honour of all has been the privilege of working with the people he has met along the way. He says: “I have been honoured to meet some fantastic people, both locally and nationally. Comrades who have given their lives to the movement.”
He concludes: “I am really proud to have been part of that movement at the time we were around. We were a band of sisters and brothers and comrades. Yeah, we disagreed, yeah a lot of us didn’t like each other. As with any political movement, there were lots of internal scraps. We spent as much time fighting amongst ourselves, as we did fighting… but in the end, we knew what we were about. Those sisters and brothers who were on the streets for the anti-Telethon demos, and after the BCODP conference in Manchester in 1996, when we… occupied two buses, a couple of cop comrades, wheelchair users, blocked two buses and stopped them, and attached ourselves to the wheels – we were doing that real stuff.”