Proud to be Disabled - Introduction

Proud to be Disabled

 

Personal reflections of the UK Disabled People’s Movement

Transcription of a 60 minute documentary film by Birmingham City Council Equalities directed by Paul Green, introduced by Clair Lewis

Featuring Ken and Maggie Davis, Mike Higgins and Linda Laurie, Tom Comerford and Jane Campbell in interview with Pete Millington

Produced by Barrier Free Sound and Vision

Introduction

The history of disabled people as a political community began in the UK in the 1970s with the first stirrings of a new liberation movement.

The first and foremost principle of this movement was a shift from medical interpretations of disability to a social model view.

To be disabled according to this model was being prevented from being as able as you can be by environmental barriers and the attitudes of others around you.

This new thinking started disabled people on a long quest to be recognised as a culturally distinct group in their own right. To disabled people the sense of having a culture was born out of the common experience of discrimination we share with one another. It’s also derived from a sense of pride in our identity.

This is our history, the journey of our experiences.

On the 20^th September 1972, a letter appeared in The Guardian newspaper that was to have a lasting effect on the way disabled people came together and thought of themselves as a community. The author of the letter was Paul Hunt and in it he called for a united struggle by disabled people against the discrimination they experienced in all areas of their lives.

At the age of 19 Paul had gone to live at Lee Court, the very first Cheshire Home to be set up in this country. Until then he’d been living in a hospital for the terminally ill. A depressing but common experience for disabled people at the time. At Lee Court, Paul joined a community intent on developing their own skills and gaining more freedom. At first this independent outlook was encouraged, but it was not long before those in charge of the home began to impose increasingly rigid restrictions on the residents.

An important struggle for choices and rights began inside the home that eventually was to extend far beyond the confines of its walls. Paul eventually moved out of Lee Court and became active in the newly formed Disablement Income Group.

D.I.G. was a single issue group campaigning for increased state benefits for disabled people. But Paul soon came to believe that uniting over a single issue was not the way forward for disabled people, it only addressed one of the symptoms of discrimination rather than the root cause.

Paul’s letter brought an amazing response from disabled people all over the UK. The people who responded to Paul’s letter were to form the core group of a new and radical organisation, the Union of the Physically impaired Against Segregation (U.P.I.A.S.) which held its first meeting on 3 December 1974.

U.P.I.A.S led the first important debate on the definition of disability, describing it was a form of social oppression and casting off the old definition of disability as a medical and personal problem.

Ken and Maggie Davis were two of the people who originally responded to Paul’s letter in 1972.