Knowing our own strength

As definitions of disability become wider and more inclusive, Professor Peter Beresford argues that an increase in numbers should turn us from an easy target for cuts into a powerful lobby

A fierce but concealed political debate has been taking place about disability. This Government, (more so even than its predecessors) is determinedly challenging the nature and scale of disability in the UK. This issue has so far been presented in terms of welfare reform, but be clear that underpinning it are a whole set of hostile assumptions about disabled people.

The unstated message is twofold. First, we the Government don’t believe that there are all these disabled people in the population. Numbers are inflated by a host of scroungers and fraudsters. Second, we will reduce these numbers by forcing people off support and disability and related benefits into employment, and by adopting methods for medically testing them that have more to do with our ideological objectives than with their health or impairment status.

It is notoriously difficult to calculate numbers of disabled people. But what we can say with some confidence is that the number of people with impairments – physical, sensory, intellectual – or related to mental health problems and other long term and end of life conditions, is large and rising. It is rising because of improvements in the survivability of infants and other people with impairments into older age, and because of the significant increase in older and very old people, the groups acknowledged to include the largest number of disabled people, it’s likely that anything from a quarter to a third of the population are disabled.

So when politicians, like the current Coalition cabinet, pick on disabled people as a powerless and unimportant constituency, the reality is that it’s going to be more and more difficult for them to maintain the discriminatory mindset that disabled people are a marginal minority that can’t hit back. They are going to have to recognise the diversity of disabled people. There are going to be more and more of us around. Who knows, we may end up being the majority. Now there’s food for thought!

But it is not only reactionary and disablist politicians who must internalize this reality. We must too as disabled people. We are a very large interest group and we have to see ourselves much more as such. It was the vital legacy of the disabled people’s movement that it set us on this road.

Now, perhaps, at a time of an appalling increase in political oppression and discrimination, it’s time for us to renew our thinking and determination about this.

It’s a reminder that we need to regain our confidence as a group and as a movement.

But, also, it is a reminder to government that they will need to think again if they decide to attack us and our rights and needs. The Condem coalition needs to remember that when it takes us on, it is now almost certainly taking on many households, most families and every street. We only have to remember that we have the growing power of numbers to change politics.