Making numbers count for Cameron

May’s Hardest Hit march in London should be seen by disabled people, says Andy Rickell, as a wake-up call to the coalition Government

Attending the Hardest Hit march in Westminster on the 11th of May was great. Certainly the largest demo I ever attended. There must have been 3,000 people taking part, I reckon, making it one of the biggest political demonstrations by disabled people in the UK, ever.

The key thing with a demo is always the numbers – it’s the raw end of democracy where it’s all about a show of strength. Politicians will always take note of a lot of voters, particularly if the demonstrators can get good media coverage of the event, which is what happened. Even Tony Blair was reminded that foxes don’t vote when confronted by a million Countryside Alliance demonstrators plastered across prime time TV!

Here at the Vassall Centre Trust, I did my bit to chivvy up local media interest, and secured a two and a half minute item on the ITV West evening news about a group of disabled people from Bristol attending the march, two live interviews on BBC Radio Bristol, and an article and photo in the Bristol Evening Post based on my press release – that’s influenced another 500,000 voters or so! It’s all part of reminding the politicians that we can cost them votes if they fail to be reasonable in the decisions they take.

That all came at a price – having to run around after a camera crew, desperately trying to get a signal to do the radio interview from the march, and it would not be the first time I have ended up doing an early morning interview in the nude! But a voter listening to the radio is as good as a voter at a demo, if our goal is about influence.

It was good to see a lot of people associated with the traditional disability charities. If I had had to characterise them previously I might have said that those organisations tend to keep their heads down unless they feel there are sufficient numbers to make it safe to put their heads above the parapet. Either they were feeling a bit braver, or they thought there was safety in numbers. It certainly makes a change from the two lobbies BCODP called whilst I was CEO, with 200 brave activists freezing off their extremities to push for publication of the 2005 Disability Bill. So it was good to see those charities, alongside the usual suspects and colleagues – it always seems a good chance to chase up unanswered emails at these events!

And that’s before we get to the actual subject of the march. The message needs to be simple, and it was – disabled people are the Hardest Hit. However you dress it, cutting state expenditure across the board inevitably hits disabled people hardest because we rely on the state most as a group. As disabled people were the poorest of the poor even in the good times, and working age disabled people became poorer under the last Labour government, the only truly fair approach would have been to ring-fence support for disabled people. If you think about it, the incoming Government ring-fenced support for pensioners – and why? Because they vote!