When I was 9, I had an obsession that wasn’t very relatable to other little girls. While they loved Boyzone and the Spice Girls, I had a less conventional idol: Emmeline Pankhurst. That Christmas, I’d received a set of history books, and one of them was about “modern history”. Seeing the suffragettes fight for women's rights sparked something inside me. I refused to let boys at school talk about me as if I didn’t matter, because I was “just a girl.” The suffragettes' philosophy to fight for women's rights guided me through life.
It wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I learnt about the “cripple suffragette”.
Rosa May Billinghurst, known primarily by her middle name May, was a pivotal figure in the suffragette movement. She used a tricycle wheelchair, which she often propelled towards police on protests using crutches. She also hid rocks under her blanket to smash windows, for which she was sent to prison. However, she used her disabilities to her advantage, and when the guards refused to let her do hard labour, she spent her time behind bars campaigning.
I wrote about May and so many other badasses in my new book Ramping Up Rights: An Unfinished History of British Disability Activism, mainly because I was desperate to learn more about disability rights history myself. I felt ashamed when I shared a stage with the absolute legend that is Barbara Lisicki and realised I knew next to nothing about the battles she and DAN (Disabled People’s Direct Action Network) had fought to get me and other disabled people my age our rights.
But then I realised that wasn’t my fault. I learnt next to nothing about social history in school, I don’t even really remember learning about the American Civil Rights movement. Growing up, I saw next to nothing about disabled people; the only times I can remember seeing them in the media are when a nondisabled parent in a soap or drama found out their child was disabled, which focused solely on how hard it was for them. The other times were when disabled people were painted as frauds and benefit scroungers, and that disability was the worst possible thing that could happen to you.
Due to the ways disability was portrayed, I grew up ashamed to be disabled and wouldn’t identify as such until my mid twenties. Even then, I had a complicated relationship with the label until I found my community in my thirties.
Now, through my work, I want to make sure that other disabled people don’t feel ashamed of who they are, and that starts with education on where we’ve been.
The fact that disability rights history is so hidden isn’t a coincidence; it’s part of a campaign that’s been going on for decades to turn the public against us.
After the support the disability rights activists of the ‘80s and '90s got in fighting for the Disability Discrimination Act, our right to get on buses and successfully stopping the ableist pity fest Telethon, the New Labour government of the time realised that the public was fully on the side of disabled people – and they knew that if they wanted to bring in cruel benefit reform they had to change that. Researchers Linda Piggot and Chris Grover concluded that “without a discourse of villifying sick and disabled claimants, it was difficult in 1997 for the government to construct a ‘convincing story’ to justify large-scale cuts in social security.”
Although the Tories had started attempting to turn the public against welfare claimants, the Labour government truly set the groundwork for it, meaning by the time the Tories were in power again, they were able to dig in deeper and deeper and kill more of our community.
And now here we are again with a Labour government who want to enact the cruellest disability benefits cuts ever that would see hundreds of thousands pushed into the worst possible scenarios of hunger, desperate poverty and even death – and the government think they can get away with it because with the media they’ve made us the scum of the earth.
It’s vital now more than ever that disabled people know that our voices hold power, and with collective action, we can fight for change. Without disabled people protesting and standing for what's right, we wouldn’t have the right to work, live independently, use public transport and be supported by the state in the first place. The government likes to act like these were freedoms graciously afforded to us, but they were all hard-fought for.
Now, thanks to the cruel cuts, many of these freedoms could be rolled back, many disabled people won’t be able to afford or have the extra care to live independently. It’s also estimated that these cuts will affect 280,000 people already in work.
While our history is vitally important, so too is knowing not only how to fight now, but that there is a fight to join at all. The welfare cuts have left many disabled people feeling isolated and like there is no way for them to fight back, but as the second half of my book discusses, disability rights actions aren’t a thing of the past.
Since the cuts were announced, Disabled People's Organisations have been working flat out to ensure that disabled people are heard. And not just in huge rallies around the country thanks to Crips Against Cuts and Disabled People Against Cuts, but also online too as many disabled people can’t protest in person.
Disability Rebellion has emerged and hosted numerous online actions. The remote arm of CAC even took down the DWP server for an afternoon back in March with a mass “message bombing” campaign. As a co-founder of Taking The PIP, I helped rally over 130 well-known disabled people to call on Starmer to stop the cuts.
Successive governments have tried their hardest to turn the public against disabled people, but we refuse to be voiceless and go down without a fight. Only by learning where we’ve been do we learn how to keep going. While my book covers over 100 years of disability rights battles, the fight is far from over, and we need as many disabled people as possible to fight alongside us.
Rachel Charlton-Dailey is a journalist and disability rights campaigner who is part of the ‘Taking the PIP’ campaign. Her new book, ‘Ramping Up Rights: An Unfinished History of British Disability Activism’, is out next week (C Hurst & Co, £14.99)
Scope is calling on the government to listen to disabled people and fix the broken benefits system.
.jpg)
