The road to unenlightenment

What’s not entirely clear is whether, on at least one recent occasion, The Guardian – keeper of the nation’s sense of proportion – lost the plot completely or was operating at a post-modern level beyond the ken of most ordinary mortals. Whichever, it left disabled people who contacted Disability Now gasping with mingled outrage and astonishment, and the paper itself came very close to disappearing up its own logical orifice.

Stewart Dakers’ grittily real take on life comes from the estate on which he lives, hence the title of his column Real Estate. A recent piece featured Dave and Sue, a couple with learning difficulties, and was headlined: “My dislike for this woman goes beyond her disability”. The conclusion he appeared to reach was that in coming to recognise what seemed to be pretty intense dislike for Sue he was in some way acknowledging her as other than a disabled person. Fair enough? Hmm!

The problem arose with how he reached this Damascene revelation. He described Dave and Sue as having “each cobbled together a life of sorts”. He said how “ten years ago they’d have been called retards”; ten years ago, British Asian people were given equally offensive and objectionable sobriquets. Should a Guardian columnist use them in cold blood today? Fellow members of the club to which Dave and Sue belonged were referred to as “obese…and twisted…babblers and dribblers”.

Dave and Sue went on to do the sorts of things everyone aspires to and many do: get engaged, married, buy a house, have sex and a child. And that’s when Dakers’ dislike, and that of fellow estate residents, really manifested itself. Dakers quoted one reaction. “How come a couple of spastics can afford to buy what I can hardly afford to rent?” Dakers himself said that “it wasn’t that they shouldn’t marry each other, it was that they shouldn’t marry at all”.

Society Guardian editor Patrick Butler went on his blog to justify the piece, saying that it challenged attitudes towards disability on the estate and in Dakers himself. Since when did the reporting and presentation of naked prejudice represent a challenge to it?