What IS the Disability Rights Movement?

What are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Who are we going with?

Fear not, gentle reader, your RADAR blogmaster has not simply been hit by a wave of existential angst. RADAR is holding the second in its series of debates on issues affecting disabled people and the disability rights movement, and the motion up for debate is as follows: This House believes disabled people and our organisations will only achieve social justice by collaborating with organisations run by non-disabled people. (Click for details).

First a flashback (cue wobbly screen effects): For many years the disability movement, such as it was, was dominated to the point of exclusivity by organisations "for" disabled people. I have on my desk a prime example, from RADAR's dim and distant past, in our immediately-post-World War 1 incarnation as The Central Council for the Care of Cripples. The Journal of this organisation, "The Cripples' Journal" (oddly titled, when you consider it was written and read exclusively by doctors and carers) for 1929 has an article entitled "The Future of the Cripple". In this article, the only person not asked to express an opinion on the future of the cripple is the cripple himself.

Much of this article, as with much of the rest of the articles, would strike modern readers as utterly horrendous in its outlook, attitude and tone (although it's not all bad; referring to expressions of pity towards disabled people, the author of the above article says "Such remarks hurt more than a lash with a whip, and unfortunately the police have no powers to deal with those who are brutal enough to make them." - a point that 80 years later we are still having to make).

After decades of enduring this medical model at its most oppressive, disabled people took matters into their own hands and formed their own organisations - organisations run by, fighting for and answerable to disabled people themselves, and dedicated to the proposition that disabled people know better than any doctors or experts their own rights, needs, feelings and lives. Thus from the thankfully burned-out ashes of organisations like the Central Council for the Care of Cripples RADAR, and other organisations "of" disabled people, were born.

In the following decades, a divide has existed, with good reasons, between organisations run by disabled people, and organisations run for disabled people - healthcare providers, social care and other service providers - and a lingering suspicion of their motives has coloured the actions of the disability rights movement. The question for the movement now is what are the benefits and dangers of including such organisations within the movement and its work. Is there a danger that as Government increasingly turns to such organisations to provide social services, disabled people risk being sidelined once again if we don't put aside past divisions and work together?

Or is there a greater risk that allowing service providers and experts an ever greater voice in the disability rights movement will lead to a return to the bad old days, when individual needs, rights and voices were drowned out by the requirements of the service providers - pyjamas on at 9 o'clock for the shift change in the care home once more?

A further question lies in the ever more complicated politics of identity. We live in a world with multiple equality strands; disabled people, like anyone else, can belong to multiple identity groups - ethnic minority communities, sexuality, gender, age and any combination of the above - and can therefore be affected by a kaleidoscopic range of discrimination and rights issues. This was the guiding logic behind the creation of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), and its absorption of the Disability Rights Commission - that working across the equality strands avoids a narrow representation of disabled people, enables recognition of multi-layered causes of inequality and avoids the potential divisiveness of pure identity politics.

Or does this lead to a dilution of the disability voice? A major criticism of the EHRC has been that disability has slipped down the agenda, to be replaced by an obsessive attention to multi-strand issues. How does the disability movement respond to this? Do we broaden our focus, seek allies from other equality strands and work with other organisations, including partners from business, media and Government? Or do we continue to entrench as a unique movement, raise our standard high and ensure that disabled people, and disabled people alone, are responsible for shaping the future of disability rights?

Those are the questions RADAR hopes to tackle. It's a big ask, but it needs asking, because unless we resolve who is or is not, who should be or should not be, part of the disability rights movement it will become increasingly difficult to maintain the momentum of the past thirty years and avoid a creeping return to service providers, not disabled people, being the ones whose voices are heard.