Having heard from a few people that there was going to be a demonstration by people with disabilities against cuts to services and benefits, I thought it’d be a good idea to nip down to Trafalgar Square and see what was happening. Head full of scenes from previous demonstrations, I put on an extra jumper and packed supplies of chocolate in preparation for being kettled.
As it turned out, it wasn’t that kind of demonstration. The demonstration, organised by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) was a relatively small affair protesting against cuts in housing benefit specifically and wider cuts for people with disabilities in general.
The demonstration first protested in front of Downing Street before moving on to Trafalgar Square to stage a nativity scene. You can see the donkey and the innkeepers with the names of various local authorities in the photos.
The slogan most chanted by the protesters was ‘Save our benefits, save our homes’, arguing that cuts proposed by government, taken as a whole, put people with disabilities at far greater risk of exclusion.
Protesters were told to refrain from shouting and chanting as the demonstration had not been authorised by The Greater London Authority.
The organisers claim that this is the first of a series of days of action across the country. Brilliantly, people wove through the crowd handing out festive mince pies with a cheerful smile.
It’s interesting to contrast the size of this demonstration with the size and visibility of recent demonstrations about university funding, or the range of flash-mob style actions against high street retailers perceived to be involved in tax avoidance.
I don’t think that it indicates any degree of apathy or detachment amongst people with disabilities, but I think that it does suggest certain differences between any campaign to fight benefits cuts and the campaign against changes in university funding.
One very obvious difference is that students have been better networked. The ease with which large number of people have mobilised is a combination between the fact that university is a place that you and lots of people go to at the same time and the fact that within that there are huge numbers of social and official connections. Add to that the use of mobile phones, social networking and all of the low-cost technology for producing your own media with a very strong overall sense of how the media works, and you have almost perfect conditions to mobilise a large group of people around a particular idea.
Students also have one target for their ire, at least in an overall sense. They are unhappy with the removal of funding from the university system and the suggestion that the balance should be made up by money taken from students future earnings.
In contrast, we people with disabilities are not concentrated in large numbers in particular places, nor do we have the experience of being around large numbers of other people in the same boat as us on a regular basis. Often, we don’t feel ourselves to be part of a wider movement of people, even though we are affected in similar ways by changes to policy and practice in the provision of support.
People with disabilities, including those with mental health difficulties, should they be unhappy with the direction of government policy, are often fighting on a number of fronts which can make it difficult to focus efforts and to engage people. The nebulous phrases ‘disability issues’ covers everything from wheelchair accessibility to employment law reform through medical treatment options to political debates about the meaning of disability. Factor into that the huge variety of ways that people can be disabled, and you have what looks from the outside like a significant minority of the population who experience similar difficulties but who have little in common with each other.
What makes things complicated is that disability isn’t a single issue. Disability in a political sense is the sum total of the life experiences and situations of a huge variety of people. People have varying ideas of what it means to be disabled.
What is common is the sense of living in a world that is harder to navigate than it is for someone who does not experience a disability. I won’t go into the different ways that disabilities pose people challenges in life, mainly because the Office for National Statistics Life Opportunities Survey has done that job extremely well.
Once people accept that a disability is something that makes more difficult doing things you might expect to do, then it becomes easier to see how changes in benefits and government spending might greatly affect those who are currently, quite rightly, receiving a range of support to help them to have what anyone in society might reasonably expect to have.
Students and their supporters have a message that is easier to communicate and which is easier to either agree or disagree with. A campaign by disabled people is more tricky to sell, because it can often take an understanding of the ways in which services and benefits help and support people to be able to see the effect of removing or altering those services and benefits.
It has been noticeable how much less sure footed politicians of all parties have been in discussing the effects of changes to benefits and the implications of cuts to services, which I’m sure reflects the situation in the public at large.
This raises a number of questions.
What would a mass movement of people with disabilities look like? How would it function? What would it do?
And, as importantly, how would people feel about it?
Here’s a video from the day that was posted on twitter:
Mark Brown is editor of One in Four magazine.
