As 2012 draws to a close the stand out memory I have of the year is when I participated in the Torch Relay for the Paralympic Games. I have the torch I carried at home at home on my lounge wall. I often look at it and think. Is the flame of attitudinal change towards disability-that the games was billed to be, still burning brightly, like the torch I carried, or has it been dimmed to fade away?
To answer this question I have begun to think more and more about what it means to be disabled, so in this blog I will explore what I think disability is and how it is viewed in Britain, then in a second one I will say how this can be changed.
I think disability is a condition and a mindset. My condition is
cerebral palsy and yet in my mind I am not disabled. I do not think of myself as disabled but in reality i am. I would love to play sports with my friends. in my mind i am scoring the winning goal for Aberdeen in the champions league final but i know my condition will never allow me to even get close to it because i am a safety hazard on the sports field.
What I have just done is framed my
view of disability for you and being framed as a disabled person is
something which many people do not like including me and yet for some
people its who they are. The media put activists firmly in that box
of being disabled first,then being people I recently went to speak at Kent University and if the local paper reported the event i would wager that the first words will be disability
activist Mark Cooper came to talk to students at Kent University In
reality mark cooper came to Kent today to talk students about
disability
The Mindset of disability is
something, which politicians struggle with. Any politician now will
say that discrimination for disabled people is wrong and that British
society should have freedom and fairness for all but in reality,
society is free for some and for others it’s a prison from which
they find it hard to escape.
What politicians of all parties have
done is not understand that disability is both a mindset and a
reality. They have focused too much on the mindset that society
should be free for all and not on the realities of how to make it
happen.
In technical jargon they subscribe to
the medical model of disability, which means that a disability is an
issue, which the individual can tackle with help from the state
through benefits. When they should look at disability through the
lens of the social model it paints a different picture one where the
barriers faced by disabled people are the barriers faced by society
as a whole so the best thing to do is to remove them.
Getting disabled people back into employment is an example of what i mean
Successive governments have dealt with
the problem by arguing that too many people are on benefits so they have changed the criteria for a benefit. But this only says that the claimant is fit for work it doesnt actually get them into work.
The work program was meant to provide tailored support to help people back into employment, it has not worked because there are too few advisors for the case load, and they do not have the time they would like to work with each participant. There are 870,000 participants but of those only 31,000 have found work for 6 months or more. Finding a job is like having a disability no two unmeployed people are the same.
Decison Makers need to be braver on the issue So far they have used the
medical view of disability and just put a stent in the heart of
welfare reform when in reality what it needs is a bypass. If they
opened up the heart through the eyes of a social surgeon they would
see that the way to get disabled people back into work is to have a
look at the underlying problems of each case For example I have been
on the dole for 2 years and am fit and willing to work. The support I
need is not how to write a CV or do an interview but it’s to be
able to move house. I live in Edinburgh and found a job in London
which I was offered and accepted but could not start because I could
not find an accessible place to live. For other people the help they require maybe transport. So society could help us by making it easier for disabled people to move home or travel to work
So how is disability viewed in the UK at the end of this Paralympic year. The answer unfortunately is disability is still an issue which the individual needs to deal with rather than society as a whole. How this view can be changed will be the subject of my next blog.
