The Disability-Research Discussion List

copied from  http://www.city.ac.uk/whatson/low.htm (it's missing the offensive ad libs).


  Have Disability Rights Gone Too Far?
Professor Colin Low, CBE
City Insights Lecture, 3 April 2001
Vice-Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen,

I was naturally flattered to receive the Vice-Chancellor's invitation, but also a little taken
aback. "Dear Clive" it began, presumably mistaking me for Prof. Clive Holtham, who preceded me not
only chronologically, but also alphabetically in this series. Sorting out the University's
mail-merge system still left me with a certain sense of apprehension however, since I realised that
I am probably one of those academics whom J. K. Galbraith rumbled all those years ago as having
built a successful career on their unpublished works, and I figured this must be a cunning ploy of
the Vice-Chancellor's to check up on what I was doing. Still, there seemed nothing for it. The
Vice-Chancellor wanted something fascinating in topic and delivered with panache, and anyway, it
would give me a welcome opportunity to acknowledge publicly the link of now some two decades'
standing which has existed between City University and RNIB. All this bespeaks just the sort of
partnership relationship to be looked for from forward-thinking institutions in the academic and
voluntary sectors at the beginning of the 21st century, adding the values of academic rigour and
objective study to those of social relevance and concern.

As Michael Howard used to say whenever he visited a prison and was asked to address the inmates,
I'm delighted to see so many of you here tonight. But if it's not too invidious to say so, can I
say what a particular pleasure it is to see Prof. Donald West of the Cambridge Institute of
Criminology, who was my supervisor there more years ago than probably either of us cares to
remember. And before I go any further, I should also like to express my appreciation to the King's
Fund, the Baring Foundation and the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust for helping to create the
space at City University for me to think about the matters I want to discuss with you this evening.

I thought long and hard about the title of this lecture. At length I came up with "of disabilities,
models and monoliths". But when I gave this to the External Relations people at City, they thought
for a moment, then said: "how would you feel about `have disability rights gone too far?" " - you
can see their point! To judge from the little flurry of interest on the Internet, some consider the
very question inadmissible. But I don't think so. It will be one of the leitmotifs running through
this lecture that the disability movement needs to be more self-critical - self-aware even - about
the positions it takes. Closed systems of thought which regard themselves as self-validating and
cut themselves off from any internal self-questioning or external challenge are not ultimately
built on very sure foundations. Des Wilson always used to stress the importance of giving full
weight to the arguments of your opponents before you could hope to be any use as a campaigner. So I
said I could go with the title as a peg on which to hang a lecture. The models and monoliths will
remain important to the answer, but they will have to yield pride of place to the question. And
that's as it should be. People should wait for the answer before condemning the question.

And so, with such panache as I can muster, "have disability rights gone too far?" At one level, of
course, the answer is obviously "no". The disabled are clearly one of the more disadvantaged and
under-privileged groups in our society. *1 The disablement Income Group in the mid-60s and Prof.
Peter Townsend when he founded the Disability Alliance in 1973 established that by common consent
and placed disability firmly on the social policy agenda for the first time, and things are not
substantially different today. At the last count some seven times more likely to be unemployed and
on benefit than non-disabled people, *2 disabled people are clearly, in the language of today, the
victims of social exclusion. Over half of all disabled people have incomes that are below the
poverty line, and amongst disabled people with children, this rises to 60%. *3 Disabled people are
twice as likely as non-disabled people to have no qualifications, *2 and only 40% of disabled
people of working age are in paid employment. Parents of disabled children are less likely to work,
and when they do, their earnings are lower than those of parents as a whole. Homes with chronically
sick or disabled people in them are amongst those with the highest deprivation rates, and parents
with disabled children have a lower socio-economic profile than other families. *3

So for the avoidance of doubt in view of what I shall later say, I believe that disabled people do
have rights - importantly the right to be treated as equal citizens, given equality of opportunity
and not discriminated against. Furthermore, they have the right, as far as possible, to fulfil
themselves in mainstream activities, by receiving mainstream services delivered in the normal way,
as part of the mainstream of society. I believe that these rights are sufficiently unfulfilled that
they need to be backed by law, and that we have some way to go before law, practice and
understanding have developed to the point where these rights can be said to be fully delivered in
practice.

I can beat the drum in support of this position as well as anyone. I could make out that the title
of this lecture was just a Socratic device for introducing another ringing endorsement. But that
would be disingenuous, and honesty compels me to be more up-front. For while I do unreservedly
subscribe to the rights agenda as an important component of disabled people's struggle to be
recognised and given a fair deal, it also seems to me that the civil rights paradigm for addressing
the problems of the disabled has serious limitations. In truth we here encounter the first of our
monoliths - often distilled in the slogan "disability is a rights issue" - which inevitably means
in my book that it will itself be disabled. For it is the central contention of this lecture that
monolithic or one-dimensional analyses and prescriptions are inherently unable to do justice to the
complexities of the phenomenon that is disability. As for this one, flawed in its philosophical
underpinning, it both proceeds from and reinforces a particular cast of mind - negative and
adversarial. As it sweeps all before it, it throws whole orphanages out with the bath-water, and
its excoriation of alternative perspectives leads to error in its policy prescriptions. And all
these features conspire to produce an intellectual and campaigning style which is repugnant. In
short, it stakes out a position which in the Communist Party was always identified as being on the
ultra-left. It is a sad fact of equality politics generally that liberals and mainstream
progressives have been so variously bemused, beguiled and intimidated by the blandishments and
menaces of the left that they have been all too ready to engage in appeasement with it. The
politics of disability are no exception. But i don't see why the radical ground should be ceded to
the Red Guards of the disability movement. My answer to the question at the head of this lecture is
therefore "no", but my contention is that there is need of a good deal more subtlety and
sophistication in the way rights are pursued than we commonly see at the moment. The creation of
some space for a mainstream radical position, largely by means of a critique of the pseudo-radical
position just identified, will therefore be the work of the rest of this lecture.

Turning first, then, to the philosophical under-girding, we run slap into the second of our
monoliths, the so-called social model of disability. If I had to give one tip to anyone dabbling in
the field of ideas, it would probably be never to refer to anything as the "so-called" model or
school of anything. I've probably got into more trouble over the years for this than anything else.
People always assume it has a pejorative connotation, but in truth I just mean "here's an idea
which may be new to you and this is what it's called"; and that is how I should be taken to be
using the expression whenever I use it again in this lecture.

The social model of disability is a conceptualisation which the disability movement has developed
over the last three decades or so in contradistinction to the so-called medical model of
disability. In order to understand these distinctions fully, it is necessary for me to subject you
to a short excursus on terminology, which is very complicated, confusing and confused in this area.
Most of the difficulty stems from the ambiguity with which the term "disability" is used.
Unfortunately, it is used in no less than four different senses: First of all, it is used
non-technically, in the way that it is used in general parlance today, to refer to the global
phenomenon, disability, the particular form of disadvantage we are dealing with. But since most
people are agreed that that global phenomenon is a compound phenomenon, it is also used in a
technical sense to refer to just one strand of that global phenomenon. The analysis of the global
phenomenon in commonest use today is that of the World Health Organisation, who in 1980 came up
with an International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps (ICIDH).
Recognising the scope for confusion in using "disability" to denote both the global phenomenon and
a sub-strand of it, they used the term "disablement" as a "generic descriptor" as Prof. Philip
Wood, the Classification's author has called it, for the global phenomenon.

Turning to the components of the Classification, "impairment" refers to a loss or abnormality of
psychological, physiological or anatomical structure or function. "Disability" refers to the
consequent inability to perform normal activities. Thus "impairment", at the lowest level of
analysis, is concerned with specific functions of the body or mind. "Disability" is concerned with
compound functions or activities, such as walking or seeing. "Impairment" refers to the various
mechanisms which give you the power to move your legs purposefully in an upright position and the
fact that they are not working. "Disability" refers to your inability to walk. "Handicap" refers to
the disadvantage resulting from the interaction between a person's impairment or disability and
their environment. *4

So far so good. The only snag is that "disablement" has never really caught on as a generic
descriptor, and a significant section of the disability movement prefers a twofold classification
which distinguishes simply between impairment", corresponding broadly to the WHO's "impairment" and
"disability", and "disability", which corresponds broadly to the WHO's "handicap", except that in
the latter case there is a difference of emphasis between the WHO and the disability movement - for
the WHO it is the individual who is ill-adapted to fit into the environment, whereas for the
disability movement it is the environment which is ill-adapted to accommodate the individual. The
upshot of all this is that the meaning of "impairment" is reasonably clear-cut. It refers to
physical and mental functions, simple or compound. But the meaning of "disability" is not. On the
one hand it is used to refer to the global phenomenon, or disadvantage, with which we are dealing,
and on the other to the disadvantaging interaction between an impaired individual and his
environment. To cap it all, it is often used loosely and interchangeably with "impairment" in this
latest sense, the disability movement's "impairment/disability", when it would be more accurate and
less confusing to stick simply to "impairment", as when we talk about "learning disabilities" or
"disabilities of sight". Confusion reigns supreme when we talk of "multi-disabled visually
impaired" or simply "MDVI" children! Got it? I shall try to confine my use of "disability" to the
global phenomenon and the disability movement's antithesis with "impairment", or if you prefer
"impairment/disability". But I fear I shall probably slip into most of the other usages at one time
or another, so I shall just have to hope that the context will make clear on each occasion which I
am using.

The medical model of disability can take a variety of forms depending on whether it emphasises
biomedical abnormality per se (ICIDH impairment) or the consequent functional limitation, such as
the inability to walk, see, etc (ICIDH disability)notwithstanding the fact that it is called the
medical model of disability, the key organising concept for the medical model is, for the
disability movement at any rate, impairment. The dominant consideration in disability is mental or
physical defect, giving rise to a very negative stereotype of the person with a disability. This
too is a monolith. People with disabilities, especially those with the same impairment, are lumped
together, all viewed in terms of their impairment as passive, helpless, tragic victims and not as
ordinary human beings at all. Impairment, not humanity, comes to construct the identity of the
person with a disability, and people with disabilities come to be seen as pathetic objects of pity
and care and not as conscious actors in their own situation.

There are just two points I want to make about the medical model - it is neither exclusively
medical nor a model. The essence of the distinction between the social and the so-called medical
model is that the latter sees disability as fundamentally about something to do with the
individual - as principally a function of the person's individual characteristics. These will often
be medical, but they need not be. Even more to the point, the typical response suggested by this
way of thinking is to seek to change the individual in some way. This may be by treating his
medical condition, but by no means necessarily so. For example, it might take the form of training
in something or other, such as mobility, or living skills or in using access technology. You can
see why this whole orientation to disability has attracted the medical label - from the key role
doctors have had in mediating it - but for all these reasons, I prefer to think of it as an
"individual" rather than a specifically medical model, in that the focus is on the individual
rather than society as the locus of a range of problems, not necessarily all medical, and because
of the concern to transform the individual rather than the environment in which he or she is placed
by a variety of means, not just medical.

The medical or individual model is not a model in the sense that it has ever been consciously
constructed as such. Of course we all know doctors whose horizons do not extend beyond the door of
their consulting-room. But it is doubtful how far the medical model has ever really been espoused
as such or in pure form. Even those who have tended most to the view that disability arises out of
a medical condition of some sort have usually recognised the social dimensions of the problem in
some degree and sought to address them. As Jerome Bickenbach has put it, the medical model is
really the default position - more part of the mental furniture of commonsense than something
consciously constructed by anyone. *5 In fact it would probably be nearer the truth to say that it
has been constructed by advocates of the social model as a kind of Aunt Sally against which to
elaborate their own theories. All the same, it reflects a reality in the experience of disabled
people.

To this medical or individual model, then, as I have said, disability activists have counterposed a
social model of disability, which sees disability not as something to do with the individual, but
rather as something to do with society, maintaining that disability is a function of social, not
medical or individual factors at all, such as prejudice and discrimination. These are often
referred to as barriers to full participation in society erected against disabled people by society
itself, and can be attitudinal or material - physical, economic, social, cultural or political. As
the Union of the Physically Impaired against Segregation Editorial Collective declared in 1981: "it
is the way our society is organised that disables us"; and again: "disability is not something we
possess, but something our society creates." *6 As Rachel Hurst, a leading disability activist, has
put it: "disability is something that happens to you, not something you have." *7 This is why the
disability movement insists on referring to "disabled people" rather than "people with
disabilities", which is a medical model formulation. Even more pointedly, other writers have spoken
about disability being "caused" by unsupportive social and physical environments. For example, Vic
Finkelstein, a leading thinker about these matters, has written: "the cause, then, of disability is
the social relationships which take no or little account of people who have physical impairments."
*8

There are at least four ways in which one could understand statements like these. First, one could
think of the conditions of society, for example if they were particularly harsh, as literally
causing the medical conditions which give rise to disability. A good example of this was contained
in an article by the Anti-apartheid Health Committee in June 1981, which was headed "Apartheid
disables". It stated that it was apartheid policy which was responsible for so much disability in
South Africa. "The very diseases which disable" it said, "tuberculosis, polio, malnutrition,
trachoma, are rife in the black population because of the poverty and appalling living conditions
of apartheid." Finally it cited statistics for death and permanent disability as a result of
industrial accidents some four to five times higher than in Britain, though the population of South
Africa was half as great. *9 More recently, a team of optometrists from City University had
considerable success in relieving the scourge of visual impairment which had afflicted the
population of Albania for many years because of the lack of facilities for manufacturing spectacles
under the Communist regime. *10 However, it is doubtful whether proponents would acknowledge this
as a legitimate construction of the social model of disability. In a paper given a few years ago to
a conference convened to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the journal "Disability and Society",
the disabled sociologist Paul Abberley denied the contemporary relevance of Engels' use of similar
kinds of evidence to criticise the inhumanity of the industrial revolution, on the ground that this
colludes with a negative valuation of disability in line with the values of industrial capitalism.
Talking of the withering away of impairment with the State in a society progressively abolishing
the injurious consequences of production for profit, he says "Of most significance for disabled
people today, it is an issue whether such a situation, could it occur, would be desirable. As long
as there is a general eugenicist consensus between left and right that impaired modes of being are
undesirable, disabled people must challenge such views as in essence genocidal." *11

Second, disability can be seen as a function of social definition. We can say that disability is
"socially constructed" in that just when a person deviates sufficiently from the norm to be
regarded as disabled, what constitutes normal activity, and just when an impairment becomes a
disability, are all matters of definition presupposing social norms. In this incarnation, the
social model of disability has much in common with labelling theory in the sociology of deviance,
which famously asserted that "Deviance is not a quality that lies in behaviour itself but in the
interaction between a person who commits an act and those who respond to it"; or again even more
famously "Deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label". *12 Some people question this,
however, and insist that disability has an objective quality, unlike behaviour - homosexuality say
or the behaviour which is considered to constitute crime - which is infinitely capable of
interpretation. There are certain fixed points in the real world which are non-negotiable against
which at least the central cases of disability inevitably become a departure from the norm. *13
"Not so" cry the social constructionists, "the inability to walk is only a disability in a
leg-dominated society"! *14 Many will remember Vic Finkelstein's celebrated picture of the society
almost entirely made up of people in wheelchairs where everything - both the physical environment
and social relationships - is structured in line with their needs and perceptions. In such a
society, Finkelstein argued, it is the conventionally able-bodied who would become disabled. *8 I
have come across an anthropological study of a small island community where all the inhabitants
were deaf which seemed to bear out Finkelstein's fantasy, *15 and of course most recently there is
the "Talk" video with which the Disability Rights Commission launched its "Actions Speak Louder
Than Words" campaign, which illustrated the relativity of conventional norms by depicting an
able-bodied person in a variety of situations where disabled people were in control. The point to
note, however, is that the first and third of these examples were imaginary and the second was a
one-off.

Third, disability can be seen as a product of the way human beings have chosen to construct their
environment, arrange their society and conduct their affairs, eg by using steps to make changes in
level in a way that excludes people in wheelchairs, the spoken word for communication in a way that
excludes deaf people, and the written word in forms that exclude blind people.

Fourth, disability can be seen as the result of the way disabled people are treated by non-disabled
people - shut up in homes, sent away to special schools, turned down for jobs, and so on.

The social model represents what is often called a paradigm shift in thinking about disability. To
give credit where credit is due, it has done much good in providing a vehicle for disabled people
to combat the legacy of segregation, custodialism, enforced dependency, discrimination and denial
of citizenship rights in the form of a proper say in their own affairs. In forcing the principal
focus away from impairment and on to the discriminatory attitudes, rank prejudice and inaccessible
schools, workplaces, transport systems, information systems and leisure facilities disabled people
have to contend with every day of their lives, the social model has projected into the foreground
the rights, normality and ordinary humanity of disabled people. In this it has served a strong
expressive as well as an instrumental function: it has enabled disabled people to feel better about
themselves. But all revolutions go too far and stand in need of correction. I shall return to the
expressive dimension in due course, as it possibly accounts for some of the social model's worst
features in practice. But for the moment I wish to concentrate on an examination of its logical
basis, for here two fatal flaws immediately become apparent.

The first is the tendency of the social model to make itself true by definition. In the last two
senses in which disability was said to be caused by society - when disability was portrayed as the
result of environmental and social arrangements and adverse treatment by society - disability is
pictured as a product of what is often termed discrimination or oppression. Increasingly, however,
whose who use "disability" in this way display a tendency to equate disability with discrimination.
Sometimes they do so explicitly, as when the Union of the Physically Impaired against Segregation
says: "We are led .. to recognise .. first, we are members of a distinct group with our own
particular physical characteristics (physical impairment); and second, that society singles this
out for a special form of discrimination (disability)." In other words, disability is defined in
terms of society's response, so that disability is not just something brought about by
discrimination, but discrimination is incorporated into the very meaning of disability itself -
discrimination is just what disability is.

This conflates concepts which ought to be kept separate. Disability is something logically distinct
from and prior to discrimination. How else could one talk about discrimination on grounds of
disability? Discrimination is a matter of fact to be established, not something inherent in
disability. One has to have independent criteria for the two. It is as if one were to confuse race
with racism.

This conflation of the notions of disability and discrimination makes of the social model of
disability a tautology. It is necessarily true given the meanings of the words and not as a matter
of empirically verifiable fact. This is a use of what H. L. A. Hart called the "definitional stop"
*16 to prevent enquiry into that which one most wants to know about, namely, the inter-relationship
between the two. It begs the all-important question how far the disadvantage disabled people
experience stems from the way they are treated by society or the medical condition they suffer
from. This remains the central question in disability theory today, though largely unappreciated as
such. When Finkelstein writes: "... the single factor that unites us together in our struggles is
that it is our society that discriminates against us. Our society disables people with different
physical impairments", we think he is making a contribution towards resolving this question with a
claim of fact which is capable of being tested empirically. But if these two sentences simply mean
the same thing and add nothing to one another, the argument is no further forward. One cannot
settle questions of this kind with a definition.

This is not just a piece of arid logic chopping. It has consequences in the real world. The
disability movement has been very keen over the years to get full-blown social model definitions of
disability into disability discrimination legislation. Some statutes have succeeded in including
elements of the social model. The Americans with Disabilities Act famously includes perceived
disability. Our Disability Discrimination Act did not go that far - though it did include severe
disfigurement as a nod in the direction of the social model - and the Disability Rights Task Force
set up by the present Government to recommend improvements to British legislation failed to find a
way of doing so. More significant, however, is the way the Task Force came to grief over its
attempts to find a full-blooded social definition of disability that was operable in practice. We
played around with formulations like "a physical or mental impairment or health condition, the
consequences of which are that a person is substantially restricted in his or her ability to
participate in any aspect of society", but all such attempts were inevitably doomed to founder on
the logical reefs to which I have drawn attention in the last few minutes. A brave attempt to do
something similar is to be found in the recommendations of the Irish Commission on the Status of
People with Disabilities (1996). It ran: "a person with a disability means a) a person with a
physical, mental, intellectual, emotional or sensory impairment and who, due to a lack of
receptiveness and adaptability in existing social structures and otherwise, encounters obstacles to
the participation on equal and equally effective terms with all others in all aspects of the life
of the community ..". Needless to say, this did not find its way into the legislation which
followed shortly afterwards and in fact the definition enacted was about as medical as they come.
This ought to be an object-lesson to all would-be social reformers: if you come up with
recommendations which are off the wall, you are likely to end up with something worse than the
number you first thought of!

One slightly mischievous observer has commented that the problems are largely semantic and that we
could get round them by simply dropping the terminology down a level. Instead of talking of
discrimination on grounds of disability, we could talk of disability on grounds of impairment.
Strictly speaking, we would then have the Impairment Disability instead of the Disability
Discrimination Act, but as the meaning of that might not be immediately apparent to an expectant
public, it could instead be called the Impairment Rights Act, or IRA! All the same, it should be
observed that this just substitutes one problem, a much larger one, for another so far as the
disability movement is concerned. For a piece of mystification which whisks the individual element
from view by sleight of hand we would have substituted a formula which left it plain for all to
see.

The second fatal flaw confronting the social model of disability is its exclusivity, its monolithic
or uni-dimensional qualities and its colonising tendencies. At its most extreme, it maintains that
disability has nothing to do with the individual whatsoever, but is instead a condition of society
which operates in such a way as to exclude people with physical and mental impairments from
participation in the mainstream of social activity. It will be recalled from our discussion of the
World Health Organisation's Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps that
disability, in its global sense, is inescapably a compound phenomenon to which individual and
social elements are both integral. The last word on this has probably been said by Jerome
Bickenbach, who has spelt out a number of features which characterise what he calls interactive
models of disability - the only ones he sees as viable: *5

 Disability is a complex phenomenon, neither solely an attribute of a person, nor a creation of the
social environment;
 There are different dimensions of disability (eg body level, person level, societal level);
 Dimensions of disability are distinct, and no dimension is fundamental;
 No two dimensions can be reduced to just one;
 They represent different perspectives on the same phenomenon;
 Trying to reduce disability to just one dimension will always distort it;
 Disability is an outcome of an interaction between features of persons and features of the
environment;
 The nature of the interaction between person and environment will differ depending on the
dimension of disability.

Interestingly, in view of what was said earlier about the social model tending to assume its own
conclusion and make itself true by definition, Bickenbach goes on to say that models are
theoretical constructs for organising and interpreting information and shaping research hypotheses.
We shouldn't push too much theory into them to start with and then look to them for answers. We
should beware causality in a model, and above all, models should not be used to determine or
pre-empt the results of empirical investigation.

In face of all of this, I don't see how it is possible to defend the social model of disability -
at least in strong form. On that analysis, there would be no place for hearing-aids for deaf
people, glasses for people with poor sight or wheelchairs for people who cannot walk. That is not
to say that I would necessarily endorse every medical intervention that has ever been suggested.
That would be to make the mistake of social unilateralists and turn "some" into "e". Individual and
social models are not mutually exclusive. Indeed individual and social dimensions are both
essential to the construction of an integrated model of disability, which must be the common task
of disability theory today.

Of course it will be objected that I am constructing an Aunt Sally position which nobody actually
holds simply in order to knock it down. All that the social model is doing, it will be said, is
denying that there is only an individual dimension to disability, and asserting the need for the
social dimension to be taken on board as well. To be sure, the social model does have weaker or
more moderate forms. But it is hardly rocket science. As I have said, it is doubtful whether the
individual model has ever been expounded in strong form. Organisations concerned with improving the
situation of disabled people - certainly organisations concerned with improving the situation of
the blind - have always seen the need to campaign for a better social response to the individual
circumstances of disability. I have never heard anyone insisting that disability is only an
individual affair. But it is undoubtedly the case that the assumption that disability is an
individual condition, to be addressed by intervening to change the individual, has underlain much
professional practice and commonsense public consciousness. To that extent, efforts to reassert
social dimensions of disability at the expense of the individual have been justified. However,
these have usually taken the form of mistakenly, in over-reaction, asserting the social model in
one or other of its stronger versions. In a kind of reductionism, "not only individual" has become
mistranslated as "only social", and "the individual is not everything" has become "the social is
everything". *17

I want to say some things about the stronger forms of the social model in a moment, but first we
should be aware that they often come disguised as one or other of the weaker versions of the model.
Thus social model theorists have increasingly taken to insisting that they do take account of
impairment. But if they do, this is either purely formal, or else it is incoherent, disingenuous or
not a version of the social model at all. In a purely formal sense, adherents of the social model
are obliged to take account of impairment, in that an individual dimension is inextricably
involved, for disability is a form of social oppression visited uniquely on impaired people - not
just anybody. The individual circumstance of impairment is thus intrinsic to the social condition
of disability. Remember what the man said: "Our society disables people with different physical
impairments". That's just what disability is. As stated, this is a purely formal point, but there
are nevertheless good substantive reasons for making it. Sometimes it is suggested that the sort of
barriers disabled people face, such as steps and inaccessible transport, constitute barriers or
forms of discrimination against other people too, such as women with prams. If one wants to single
out disability discrimination as a distinctive form of discrimination, as advocates of the social
model normally do, it is therefore essential to ground it in impairment.

One could argue that disability discrimination should not be distinguished from other forms of
discrimination in this way, but I can think of at least two good reasons for doing so. The first is
that disability is not a clear-cut category like other grounds of discrimination such as race or
sex, so that you either have it or you don't. It is a continuum, and judgments are required as to
where the line falls between having it and not having it. The second argument is even more telling:
in most conceptions of disability discrimination, it is obligatory not just to refrain from
treating disabled people less favourably than non-disabled people, but also to make reasonable
adjustments in order to accord them access to employment, services and so on. In this, disabled
people are being accorded a form of social response not generally accorded to other subjects of
discrimination, and for this reason alone, a separate category of discrimination, based on
impairment, would seem to be essential.

A number of disabled writers, have stressed the importance of impairment, while professing still to
be strongly wedded to the social model. This is incoherent, as is the response of those who have
affected to take their point. No less a person than Mike Oliver, a leading disability theorist, has
himself toyed with the idea of a "social model of impairment", *18 but as Janet Read of Warwick
University has argued, such a notion is unintelligible.

Of course the protestations of simply wishing to focus on the social without denying the importance
of the individual may be genuine. Perhaps that is the case with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
Perhaps their position is a genuinely weaker version of the social model and I was wrong to dismiss
it as no longer a social model at all. But in that case I think it would be less confusing if they
were to say that they were particularly interested in the social dimension of disability rather
than that they espoused a social model, for the term "model" is inherently holistic and inclusive.
If someone offers to show you a model of a house, you don't expect just to be shown the west wing!
One case where a claim that their adoption of the social model is dictated by their role is
undoubtedly genuine is that of the Disability Rights Commission (DRC). That is their role - to
promote and enforce the rights of disabled people under disability discrimination legislation. So I
had no difficulty subscribing to that - well not too much anyway. But I still could have wished
they had called it the social dimension of disability.

To finish with the social model once and for all, there are just three final points I would wish to
make. First - and this is another formal point - one should probably think of the individual and
the social as a continuum. It can be difficult to tell whether something is an individual
limitation or the result of a social barrier. Is someone's failure to learn the result of
individual inadequacy or the absence or poor quality of teaching, or a bit of both? Is someone's
difficulty with mobility or self-care a function of their impairment or the unavailability or
inadequacy of training? There is virtually no physical or mental limitation which could not be
reconceptualised as proceeding from some deficiency in the social environment or in social
provision. *20 I had a conversation with someone from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation sought to work
this trick by maintaining that every disadvantage was social because it gave rise to a right that
it be remedied. But you cannot make the individual social - make black white - simply by describing
it as the subject of a right. In any case, we should be reluctant to set off down this track,
first, because it will induce to greater clarity of thought and action, eg in deciding who is
responsible, if we call a spade a spade. If I fail to provide you with a hearing-aid, I am not
socially disabling you but failing to alleviate your impairment. And second because, remember, we
should not be using models to pre-empt enquiry into the very issue which is at stake, namely, the
relative importance to be attached to individual and social factors in any given situation?

The second point is this: At the end of the day it all comes down to whether or not you accept that
an impairment as such is a disadvantage. As my friend and colleague Bill Poole has pertinently
observed with respect to blindness: "to believe that it is a handicap that is socially imposed and
does not arise out of the condition of blindness itself .. seems to me to lead inescapably to the
view that cure and prevention are unnecessary or diversionary, and infliction unobjectionable." *21
No-one would choose blindness if they could avoid it. It is something endemic, affecting every
aspect of life. For as far ahead as anyone can possibly see, nobody would choose to work or study
by the methods blind people use if they had the option. Even when every accommodation that can be
conceived of has been made, there still remains an irreducible minimum of disadvantage attributable
to the individual circumstances of disability which has to be contended with. That is not of course
the same as saying that this is an insurmountable catastrophe.

There is just one final dug-out in which the implacable social modeller can be found. It is
sometimes asserted that a concentration on the social is justified - is all that is possible even -
because the individual dimensions of disability are private - something those looking in from the
outside as opposed to the individual concerned - cannot know anything about - or at any rate cannot
do anything about. But that is surely nonsense. In the first place, it does not deny the importance
of the individual dimension, it just says there is nothing that can be known or done about it. But
that is not true. People speak and write endlessly about their disability - how they feel about it,
what they can and cannot do, how it has affected their life, blighted their life, enhanced their
life and so on. And regardless of what disabled people tell us, there is much that we can discover
for ourselves - by observation and research for example. The assertion that there is nothing we can
do about the individual circumstances of disability is true only for those fixated, as those who
make it often are, on political and collective action. The options of medical intervention and
training would be obvious to anyone not committed to ruling them out in principle. *22

So to sum up this long disquisition on the social model, if propounded in strong form it is wrong,
and if in one of its weaker versions, it is what I think it was C. Wright Mills described as "trite
but true". *23 Either it defines impairment out of the global phenomenon, disability disadvantage,
we are considering, and is thus true by definition, or it doesn't, in which case it can only be
valid in weak form. In the Commission discussion we had on the subject, one of the Commissioners
said he agreed with some of what I said, but that, as he saw it, the social model was just
commonsense. In any case, he added, it is necessary to exaggerate in order to compensate for the
previous over-emphasis on the medical. I can accept that too. But I would have to say that, if the
social model is just commonsense, then so is the medical. The social model of disability is what I
call a heresy. By that I mean a doctrine which, while undoubtedly containing important truth, also
contains significant falsehood which, despite having deceptive attractions and being an
understandable reaction against previous error, is yet significantly distortive of reality in ways
that are potentially damaging to disabled people. There is a lot of agreement round a social
perspective on disability. But if people continue to maintain that it's exclusive, they will not
connect with the common experience of ordinary people - disabled and non-disabled alike.

The social model has made a permanent difference. We will never think of these things in the same
way again, and that's in many ways a good thing. But it doesn't mean that there is nothing of value
in the ways we had of thinking about them before. I am very interested in music. There has been a
similar revolution in our lifetime in the way we understand, think about and above all play and
listen to baroque, classical and even to some extent romantic music which has uncanny parallels
with the debates in the field of disability I have been talking about this evening. The Messiah as
played today is no longer the same piece of music as that laboriously ground out by a cast of
thousands in our youth. After it has had the attentions of a Gardiner, a Norrington or a
Harnoncourt, we will never listen to Bach and Beethoven with the same ears again. But that does not
mean that the great luminaries of the past no longer have anything to say to us - Beecham,
Klemperer, Furtwangler, Karajan - well perhaps not Karajan!

My view of these things tends to be one of horses for courses and of rendering unto Caesar those
things which are Caesar's. If your boss refused to let you bring your guide dog to work, I imagine
you would send for a Disability Rights Commissioner in preference to a doctor. But If you suffered
a massive heart attack, I doubt if the first thing you would want to do would be to send for an
expert on the social model of disability.

You may feel that I have laboured these points inordinately, but I felt it necessary to do so
because they underlie so much of the rest of what I want to say, and also because I have been
making them for nearly two decades now, and nobody seems to be listening. I remember when I first
got on to this about 1983 saying to my great friend and mentor, Martin Milligan, to whose memory I
should like to dedicate this lecture, that I thought thinking about disability was taking a wrong
turning. "Yes" he said, "things always go too far but they correct themselves in time". Nearly two
decades on, I see no sign of this happening. In fact they seem to me to be getting worse.

Not so long ago, someone told me, in terms which suggested she felt sorry for me more than anything
else, that nobody thought the way I did any more, and by way of helpful illustration, she added
that my disability was not something I possessed - "like my stubbornness or my pig-headedness"! The
social model, and the errors in thinking it begets, seem to have spread like a poison through the
sector. You can't turn round without encountering them, and no day goes by but what I do. Go to any
discussion on disability, and you will find that it is sufficient just to label something as
medical, often incorrectly, to dismiss it. We have seen how the Joseph Rowntree Foundation looks
for all the research it funds to be conducted within a social model paradigm. At a seminar I ran to
discuss these topics a few years ago, the idea that all research on disability should proceed from
the social model as its foundation premise seemed uncontentious. "But this is no worse than the bad
old days when the medical model held sway" you will say. No indeed! they are as bad as each other.
I didn't spend my youth contending against medical heresies to be saddled with social ones in my
old age.

Even in my own organisation, RNIB, the virus is out of control in certain parts of the
organisation. Only the other day I caught someone calling for a social model definition of
blindness. This suffers from the same incoherence as Oliver's call for a social model of impairment
to which I have earlier referred. The trustees don't want this. We've taken committee reports
making clear that this is not our position. But it doesn't seem to make a blind bit of difference.
Officers just carry on their sweet way as if nothing had happened. So you can see why I feel the
need to speak a little louder.

How is it that such a half-baked notion has taken such a hold? Here we are inevitably in the realms
of speculation, but I think it goes back to the fundamental question I posed earlier about whether
you accept that an impairment as such is a disadvantage or at any rate something negative. I don't
think the adherents of the social model, at least in strong form, can accept this. In this they are
the victims of a piece of word magic which, however, as so often reflects some kind of archetypal
reality. Disabled people, in their impairment, it is often said, have something wrong with them. In
a more primitive age, stretching back to the dawn of consciousness, when people were even less
conversant with the fact-value split than they are today, this sense of wrong was often also taken
to connote a moral wrong, and people with imperfections were often thought of as incarnations or
visitations of evil or the focus of other superstitious beliefs. As we know, such beliefs have not
entirely died out to this day - but then, football is a fertile breeding-ground for superstition.
In parentheses, we should note that impaired people were often also seen as the repository of
mystical or superhuman powers. Such people obviously exemplified the need for a radical separation
of good and evil in primitive thought. The ambiguity of "wrong", though it may largely have
disappeared from official representations of disability today, is obviously still at work at an
unconscious level, informing the uneasiness which still persists about disability and contributing
to the oppression disabled activists discern. It's always risky to engage in amateur psychology,
but it seems to me that disabled people internalise this oppression, or negative valuation, focused
on their impairment. This they find difficult to live with, and so they deny the impairment and
project the problem outwards onto society. This has two consequences - an unrealistic valuation of
impairment and a very negative stance towards society.

Thus people are unphased by Poole's "inescapable conclusion" that cure and prevention are
"unnecessary or diversionary" - though I have never actually heard anyone recommending infliction
as unobjectionable. This is another piece of mistranslation: "prevention and cure are not the
be-all-and-end-all" (correct), becomes "prevention and cure are inadmissible" (wrong). This
mistranslation is in turn based on another: You remember my saying that the fact that there is an
irreducible minimum of disadvantage attached to impairment is not the same as saying that it is an
insurmountable catastrophe. That's why prevention and cure are not the be-all-and-end-all. But in
the social model, "not necessarily devastating or the end of the world" gets translated as
"actually positive or a good thing". Sometimes one gets the impression it's the best thing since
sliced bread. *24 Thus a recent conference on disabled people, bioethics and human rights declared:
"We believe that a society without disabled people would be a lesser society. Our unique individual
and collective experiences are an important contribution to a rich, human society. We demand an end
to the bio-medical elimination of diversity .. or bio-diversity." I am not in favour of getting rid
of disabled people, but I do think there is some confusion here. We can probably come by the
richness contributed by disabled people by other means. But even if we couldn't, I suggest that
that richness, and the reason for valuing disabled people, has more to do with their humanity than
their disability. If this were not so, there really would be an argument for infliction. The case
most often cited in this connection is that of Beethoven. But surely Beethoven's value lies in the
fact that he was Beethoven, not that he was disabled.

Hand in hand with efforts to construe impairment positively goes the rejection of anything which
might appear to reflect negatively on impairment. You remember Abberley's rejection of the fact
that it created impairment as a ground of criticism of industrial capitalism because that would be
to collude in a negative valuation of impairment. This is the source of the suspicion of prevention
and cure. Thus a participant at the conference just referred to stated: "Terminating a foetus that
is potentially disabled diminishes the lives of people who have that particular disability [sic]".
This does not follow, and it certainly puts feminists in a difficult position. Sometimes one gets
the impression that you can have an abortion for any reason except a good one; and if the medical
model of disability is an evil doctrine, as I have seen it described, then I would have to say that
so is a doctrine that would withhold cochlear implants from young children who could benefit from
them.

All these arguments exemplify what I have earlier termed the expressive function of the social
model - they enable disabled people to keep at bay the fault they feel has unfairly been imputed to
them personally. That is why one can so often hear disabled people saying with such determination
"at all costs we must hold on to the social model". I am glad if such a defence mechanism enables
people to feel better, but my analyst always used to tell me that such devices were ultimately a
fragile bulwark against reality and they always crumbled in the end. I'm not so sure about that,
especially if they can find reinforcement in social/political/intellectual groupings that provide
mutual succour for one another. Even then, they can prove quite precarious, as when reality breaks
in in the form of one of the group displaying an unfortunate tendency to independent thought. This
leads to the luckless offender being driven out into the desert and the wagons being drawn into an
ever tighter circle round the camp fire, as has lately happened to Dr. Tom Shakespeare after he
wrote (but had difficulty publishing) a courageous article in which he changed some of his views
about the social model, and tried to develop an objective critique of developments in genetics
instead of one just based on emotion.

As I have said, the social model mind-set begets a confrontational stance towards the rest of
society. The following is not untypical: "Disabled people know only too well they are not welcomed
in society"; and again: "Medical intervention in reproductive technology and genetic engineering
(and genetic counselling) are all geared towards eradicating disability. .. Society is not prepared
to build access to buildings for wheelchair users, provide information in braille/large print,
provide sign language interpreters and teach sign language as a standard second language for all.
Everywhere there are architectural barriers designed to keep us out of society". *25

As can be seen, this has both an attitudinal and a structural component. Both seem to me to be
over-done. I often go on holidays abroad with groups of anything up to thirty complete strangers. I
have been very struck of late by the matter-of-fact but helpful response my disability elicits. I
think the worst thing that ever happened was probably when someone remarked to my wife "He's really
quite intelligent when you get talking to him, isn't he?" I won't tell you what my wife replied. At
all events, I think I encounter as much incomprehension from other disabled people as from the able
bodied.

On the structural front, though everything in the garden may not be lovely, it is hard to maintain
that it is all bad when disability is on the agenda of public policy and provision as never before.
The Government will now meet the extra expenses you have as a student. It will pay for the special
equipment and support you need to do your job. The accent is now on educating disabled children in
mainstream schools if at all possible. So much information is being produced in an accessible form
I haven't a house big enough to store it all. When I go to a meeting (in a subsidised taxi), I will
have had the papers beforehand in a form in which I can read them. When I go to the theatre, I can
have a commentary on what is going on. None of this was the case when I was starting out. To cap it
all, the European Union has undergone a complete transformation in philosophy and policy towards
disability in the last ten years: Where before it was all a question of specialist help and
support, now the accent is firmly on removing social barriers, mainstreaming and combating
discrimination.

The essential negativity of the social model's approach was never so forcibly demonstrated to me as
when I had the job of chairing the steering committee for a National Disability Council project to
try and tease out what opportunities might be disclosed for disabled people by Labour's
modernisation agenda. The work was carried out for us by Ian Christie on behalf of the think-tank
Demos and the great attraction of the project was that it was, in the words of one of the steering
group members, "solutions focused". But this was not a commendation in the eyes of the
representatives of the social model perspective whom we were keen to have on the group. One
declined to join and the other soon walked out on the ground that the report did not focus
sufficiently unrelentingly on the irredeemably dire situation of the disabled. What was even more
extraordinary, though perhaps not in view of what I have earlier said, was that the representative
from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a great philanthropic institution, walked out in sympathy with
them. From that day to this I have been at a loss to understand the poor reception which Christie's
report has had, extending from unconcealed hostility on the part of the card-carrying members of
the disability movement, in spite of his bending over backwards - too far in my view - to take on
board the insights of the social model, to lukewarm suspicion on the part of the big charities. I
can only conclude it is because he did not go through the motions of recycling the tired old litany
of gripes that those in a position to change anything must have long since tired of hearing. I have
to question whether this is wise, however, for I have to tell you that No. 10 is paying much more
attention to Christie than it is to any of you. Christie owes nothing to the disability movement. I
suppose on reflection that's his problem. But it seems a great pity that his analytical skills and
influence should be lost to it.

This incident also illustrates well the intellectual arrogance of the leaders of the disability
movement. We held a conference to discuss Christie's report at which we naturally invited the
leading thinkers of the disability movement to speak. Mike Oliver, positively oozing smugness and
hauteur, came along and dismissed Christie's efforts with Olympian disdain. Picking on a careless
reference to "the social model of impairment" in an earlier draft, he excoriated the report's
authors for their third-class understanding of the social model of disability, and for setting up
an Aunt Sally position, "which no-one has ever held", simply in order to knock it down. But hang on
a minute! Wasn't it Mike who earlier appeared to endorse the idea of a social model of impairment
himself? *18 And wasn't it Mike who said "disability is wholly and exclusively social" *17 and
"disablement is nothing to do with the body - it is a consequence of social oppression"? *26 I was
reminded of a literary friend telling me of the propensity of post-modern critics to keep changing
their position and then disowning in the strongest possible terms what they themselves had said
only a short time before. As an illustration, he cited the critic Terry Eagleton, who was in the
habit of saying things like "no-one could possibly hold such-and-such a view", or "no-one could
possibly say a thing like that" or "I know of no-one who has ever advanced a position like that",
to which the appropriate answer was usually "well yes, Terry, actually you did - a couple of years
ago"!

I had encountered a similar kind of obscurantism a couple of years earlier at the Disability and
Society conference, when the stock response of the leaders, sitting up at the back, to anything
they disagreed with seemed to be "well what can I say? Crap is crap"! You may gather that I
entertain a not dissimilar opinion of many of the views I have been discussing this evening, though
I would hope to have been able to express it with a little more delicacy and depth of analysis.

I hope you can see where all this is leading. If you believe that the essence of your problem lies
with a malformation of society and has nothing to do with you, you will naturally tend to see
yourself as no different from other people and entitled to the same as them as a matter of right.
We are therefore getting close to the matter of rights. But I must first briefly acknowledge
certain implications, or at any rate applications, of the social model which can be productive of
wrong turnings in policy if we are not careful. The first is the attempt to revise the WHO's
Classification so as to substitute the terms "activity limitation" and "participation restriction"
for "disability" and "handicap" respectively in a vain attempt to avoid all negative associations,
and to decouple the levels of "impairment", "disability" and "handicap" completely. There are two
things wrong with this: In the first place, as will readily be apparent, it abandons the formal
link between disability and impairment, so that the discriminations and oppressions experienced by
disabled people are no longer distinct from those experienced by anyone else. Thus the difficulty a
person has in washing himself due to paralysis becomes indistinguishable from that experienced by
his brother in Botswana who does not have a plentiful supply of clean water; or the difficulty I
have in reading becomes indistinguishable from that of my American cousin when the lights go out in
California. The second thing wrong with the ICIDH-2 is that it underwrites the disinclination of
administrators since the days of the Warnock Report to classify people in terms of their
impairments, most recently evident in the work of the Tomlinson Committee on further education.

It is no doubt the case that classification by impairment category was too rigid and inflexible in
the past. No-one should suggest that there is a one-to-one correspondence between a person's
impairments and their needs. But it surely goes too far in the opposite direction to suggest that
there is no relationship at all, and that it is quite immaterial whether someone is deaf, or blind,
or obliged to use a wheelchair.

The down-grading of impairment begets another tendency of the social model, namely, the drive
towards genericism. As little as fifty years ago - forty even - the concept of "disability" hardly
featured on the social policy agenda. That is not because it wasn't given enough priority, but
rather because it scarcely existed. The blind, the deaf, the mentally ill, the mentally
handicapped - these were all completely separate categories of social concern, and people would as
soon fly to the moon as lump them all together. Now things are very different, and it suits
administrators' book to deal with us all together. Indeed we often have to band together into
coalitions of ill-assorted bedfellows in order to get a hearing. The social model materially
assists this tendency. The reflex equation of impairment with the medical means that it is
instantly dismissed from the case. Impairment-specific organisations such as RNIB whose business it
is to represent the needs of a particular impairment group tend to be viewed with suspicion. This
is disastrous. The needs of the blind and the deaf are as different as chalk and cheese. The fiasco
of generic social services departments ought to be enough to make us wary of going any further down
that route. It is not even coherent. There is no earthly reason why the social model should not be
capable of encompassing impairment-specific barriers. But as I say, the knee-jerk equation of
impairment with the medical seems to preclude it. The height of absurdity was reached when the DRC
was recently contemplating commissioning some research on the costs and benefits to service
providers of making different kinds of adjustments for disabled people. Until I intervened, it was
proposed to omit any questions about adjustments for different impairments on the ground that that
might medicalise things too much. This is not just nonsense - it's nonsense on stilts. Without such
questions, one wonders what exactly they would be researching into.

I now come to the concept which lies at the heart of the civil rights agenda - discrimination. I am
certainly on board with the reality of discrimination.

I am probably as gung-ho as anyone on the DRC's Legal Committee, but I do think there are certain
things one needs to bear in mind in relation to claims of discrimination. You sometimes get the
impression that they are regarded as self-validating:

First, as regards general claims of discrimination, it is important to remember that discrimination
can be positive as well as negative. Writing of how the matter strikes him personally - and in this
his observations are not greatly at variance with my own - Selwyn Goldsmith, the disabled
architect, says: "My experiences do not tally with the images fostered by disability rights
activists, that disabled people are an oppressed minority in society, that they are victimised, and
that they are subjected to widespread and unwarranted negative discrimination. .. I am not as a
rule averse to privileged discriminatory treatment, and in my experience as a building user with a
disability the benefits of positive institutionalised discrimination often outweigh absolutely the
constraints of the negative. I am a regular customer of shopmobility schemes which give me at no
cost a scooter to ride around in. The orange badge on my car brings with it massive advantages that
I readily exploit; on urban streets I can usually find a convenient place to park with impunity,
without paying and with no fear of wheel-clamping. I welcome the reduced prices that come with
being in a wheelchair on visits to Covent Garden and other theatres. I do not mind being patronised
by Wandsworth Council; their decree was that registered disabled people should not have to pay to
go swimming, and I know that if I were to argue the issue with the friendly staff at the Latchmere
in Battersea they would feel offended. I do not protest if, when in a wheelchair, I am moved to the
front of a queue. This has happened on numerous occasions in Britain."

Kevin Carey puts the point even more sharply when he asks: "How far do people want to be equal and
how far would they really prefer to be privileged? I put this question every time my wife and I go
to the English National Opera and sit in the best seats for £25 the pair because I'm registered as
disabled." Perhaps this is the sort of speculation which can only afford to be indulged in by opera
buffs! Incidentally, in preparing this lecture, I came to realise that there are four reasons why
work is neglected: The first, as in Shakespeare's case, is because it is suppressed. The second, as
in Christie's, is that it is wilfully misconstrued. The third, as in Selwyn's, is because it isn't
read; and the fourth, as in my case, is because it hasn't yet been written!

Secondly, sticking with claims of generalised discrimination, one frequently comes across
statements like "disabled people are twice as likely as non-disabled people to be unemployed,
under-qualified" or whatever it might be - indeed one has come across them in this lecture - as if
that by itself proved that disabled people are discriminated against. Here it is crucially
important to remember the difference between disability and race and sex discrimination, where the
disadvantages are much more a matter of imputation than substantive difference. There is of course
the matter of reasonable adjustment, but it will not always be possible to cancel out all the
effects of disability which make for a legitimate difference. This is why impairment remains so
important.

Third, sometimes an adjustment is so novel and comes as such a breakthrough, that its presence
seems more like a bonus than its absence does a piece of discrimination. This is probably a
personal reaction, but it's how audio-description in the theatre still strikes me today. At all
events, it serves to show that discrimination is context-dependent. To take an absurd example, you
couldn't say that blind people were being discriminated against by not being given information in
braille before braille had been invented.

Fourth, turning to individual claims of discrimination, it is important to be prepared to test the
claimant's story. It cannot always be taken at face value. Sometimes what unquestionably feels like
discrimination to the person on the receiving end is less obviously so on a more objective
consideration. As somebody recently said, when people don't get a job and claim that it's because
they're disabled, sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. One has to remember, too, that if
patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, discrimination is often the first. One has to be
alert for claims of discrimination being used as a cover for stupidity and incompetence.

Turning to the impact of the civil rights agenda on two of the more important areas of policy, its
pernicious effects can be seen in the Special Educational Needs and Disability Bill which is going
through Parliament as we speak. I have been a campaigner for more inclusive education for disabled
children all my adult life, but it has never seemed to me a likely prospect, in the present state
of our education system, that we would be able to dispense at an early date with special schools
for a hard core of children with particularly severe and complex difficulties. As Prof. Brahm
Norwich said in his inaugural lecture at London's Institute of Education, special education is
pre-eminently an area of policy where multiple values are in tension, and the balance has
constantly to be negotiated between those of inclusion and an effective education for the
individual child. A mixed economy is indeed the Government's policy, and the legislative framework
which has been in place for nearly a decade now contains a number of safeguards against
inappropriate inclusion - to do with the needs of the child, the needs of other children and the
efficient use of resources. There are those, however, unencumbered by the burden of competing
values, who would like to see inclusion the invariable rule as a matter of right. They have long
campaigned to have the safeguards swept away, and in the present Bill, they have almost got their
way. One proviso is left - if inclusion is incompatible with the needs of other children. To prefer
the needs of the other children to those of the disabled child in question seemed so perverse, I
was initially inclined to think the Department had made a mistake - but not so. That has been left
in to placate the unions concerned about an influx of children with emotional and behavioural
difficulties. But the lobby for inclusion at any price has got its way, and the safeguard for the
needs of the child has gone. What is worse, the responsible middle-of-the-road Special Educational
Consortium comprising all the major interests in the field of special education, has connived at
this, with the exception of RNIB. There are weasel words about the safeguards already being there
in the fabric of the legislation, but this cannot disguise the fact that the safeguard has been
removed from the face of the Bill, and neither the Government nor the Consortium has had the guts
to face the extremists down.

Provision in mainstream schools is still very patchy. As American experience shows, things like the
teaching of braille can easily become a casualty. I am prepared to lay money that, if the drive for
inclusion continues to hurtle along at its present pace, in twenty years' time they will be saying
"where have all the special schools gone?" Just as in the case of mental health services, they will
have to start bringing specialist facilities back. Not in exactly the same form of course. But I
wouldn't mind betting more money that they will then look with more favour on the blueprint the
National Federation of the Blind came up with for the education of the visually impaired in the
1970s - not individual integration into neighbourhood schools, but a network of centres of
excellence in selected primary and secondary schools throughout the country specialising in the
education of the visually impaired.

The civil rights agenda has also had an unfortunate influence on the debate about remedies.
Students in further and higher education are to be offered an action in the county court, which we
know from goods and services cases is expensive, difficult and does not work. RNIB's suggestion of
an educational remedy in the revamped Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal, which
follows a much less adversarial approach, would have answered to the need much better. Similar
considerations underlie the clamour, so far unsuccessful, for the new tribunal to be able to make
awards of financial compensation. The punitive animus of some civil rights activists can be seen in
a comment by Rachel Hurst on the launch of the DRC's conciliation service: "It will mean that some
more cases will be settled out of court, but what we really need are high profile cases where the
providers of goods and services are fined a considerable amount of money." *30

About employment I can be even briefer. The "give us the jobs and we'll do the rest" mentality of
the social model leaves the elitist and one-club nature of the rights approach cruelly exposed. It
is fine for the able, articulate person capable of asserting their rights, but it leaves those less
well cut out to flourish in the open market and in need of something more supportive poorly served.
In his foreword to RNIB's forthcoming strategy report "Gaining and Retaining Employment", Fred
Reid, Chair of our Education and Employment Committee, puts the point bluntly when he says: "It
will call upon Government to develop more supported employment for disabled people who cannot cope
in the open labour market. The report is critical of Government for placing an exaggerated value on
`progression"' in supported employment. Such thinking is based on a false paradigm, leading to the
unrealistic conclusion that all disabled people are capable of working as productively as
non-disabled people. They are not, and the provision of supported employment - which need not take
the form of traditional `sheltered"' employment - is an urgent priority if we are to make
significant in-roads into the scourge of disabled unemployment."

If you have stuck with me through the long trek up the lower slopes, you will now be poised for an
assault on the summit. It's not that disability rights have gone too far, but their pursuit has too
often been simplistically mis-focused through too narrow a concentration on the civil rights
agenda, and the manner of pursuing them can easily be counter-productive. All I can do here is
point to some of the complexities that need to be taken account of in a few brief propositions:

First, we need a mixed economy of benefits and services as well as rights. We cannot fudge this by
saying that we need rights to benefits and services as well as the benefit of rights. The values of
care and support for the vulnerable should not be lost amid the clamour for rights. Those who see
welfare to work as the solution to all disabled people's problems and consider that a regime of
benefits undermines the drive for equality, forget that work is not an option for two-thirds of all
disabled people who are over retirement age and heavily reliant on benefits. *31 Similarly, there
need to be services in place to make a reality of rights. Anyone who knows the history of deafblind
people's campaign for communicator-guides will understand the force of this given the Government's
view that this demand goes well beyond the scope of reasonable adjustment.

Second, Rights are not absolute as often portrayed. Sometimes it seems as if it is enough to say I
have a right to something - information in my preferred medium, sub-titling on television or to
vote in person - to establish that I must have it now. But other considerations come into the
reckoning, such as how much it will cost in relation to the benefit, and whether there are
acceptable alternative means of achieving the same end. If we wanted to go to Dublin we might not
have started from here. But we are here, and we have to work out the best way of getting there by
the optimum route in the optimum time and at the optimum cost.

Third, It is not just that the disabled are disadvantaged and everyone else is all right, Jack. Too
stark a dichotomy is posited between the disabled and the rest of society. The steps up to the
front door are not the only reason it's not possible to get into the Ritz Hotel. Its focus on
mutuality and commonality of interest between groups of disabled and non-disabled people was one of
the strengths of the Demos report. Disabled people need to considered the impact of their having
their rights on other people, as well as what they can do to engineer an optimum way forward, as
opposed to just waiting for a pre-conceived package which may never be delivered.

Fourth, as for campaigning, I don't have a problem with people who say the glass is half full. My
quarrel is with those who continue to make out that it's completely empty. Sooner or later this
runs out of credibility. Campaigning which is limited to moaning, whingeing, complaining, shouting,
hand-wringing and breast-beating doesn't cut much ice. It provides some useful background noise and
gives serious campaigners something to threaten recalcitrant ministers and civil servants with, but
not much more. As for serious campaigning, I can't do better than commend RNIB's Stephen King's
paper on influencing strategies for achieving an accessible information society for visually
impaired people presented to an Information Society Advisory Group Summit on 5 April last year. I
can't do justice to this here, but suffice it to say that the key is presenting solutions not
problems, and being resourceful in finding levers to pull and buttons to press. All too often one
comes away with the impression that the only weapons the disability movement knows are the
blindunderbus and the battering-ram.

So finally, what of the disability movement which has provided so much of the matter for this
lecture. Well I feel about them a bit like the Duke of Wellington surveying his troops before the
battle of Waterloo - "I don't know what they do to the French but they frighten the life out of
me"! We have already referred to elitism, negativity, arrogance and obscurantism, but the
charge-sheet doesn't end there. The disability movement is also a monolith, in that it's not enough
to be disabled to be a member - you have to think a certain way on pain of ex-communication. They
wouldn't acknowledge me, for example, which I suppose invites a sort of inverted Groucho Marx
response. The movement has a strong vein of illiberality running through it. The stock response to
perceived oppression is suppression. The way Glenn Hoddle was hounded out of his job, for instance,
was a scandal. I can't now remember exactly what he said, but it struck me as more loopy than
offensive. In any case, even if it had been, it is a strong liberal principle that merely causing
offence is not sufficient grounds for subjecting someone to sanctions.

I have experienced this myself. A few years ago I ran some seminars with the aim of bringing the
ideas of the disability movement into dialogue with some of the more traditional disciplines, such
as Philosophy, Jurisprudence, History and so on. The disability movement staged a boycott and wrote
to the ESRC in an attempt to get the funding stopped - I think because my flyer referred to the
"so-called" social model of disability, and because it was feared someone might say something with
which they disagreed. They also pressurised one of the speakers into withdrawing with the threat
that they would withdraw cooperation from his research. I must say that Rachel Hurst deserves
credit for bringing the two sides together and bringing people back into the discussion. The
movement is also venal. Impatient with the rigours of the examination process at City University,
they take their theses down the road to a more compliant university with the encouragement that
they will be fast-tracked.

Some may find my words harsh. I once mentioned to a colleague that I regarded the social model as a
heresy. "Mmm!" she reflected, "people used to get burned at the stake for heresy." In my experience
it is orthodoxy that more readily attracts that fate today. But in any case, it is my experience
that if I do not speak as I find, nobody will. Another thing my analyst told me was that disability
has a very high blackmail factor. Faced with an articulate disabled person making
progressive-sounding demands, non-disabled people find it very difficult to say boo to a goose,
even if it's disguised as an emperor penguin without any clothes. In any case, they're all so
concerned about not being thought to be out of line with one another. There was obvious nervousness
at the top of the DRC and the RNIB at the prospect of this lecture. Perhaps I could just put out
some extra publicity to reassure people it wasn't going to be as bad as all that; or make sure I
ended up with a ringing declaration that disability rights hadn't gone too far. I regard such
reactions as craven. I think it would be an insult to the level of analysis attempted in this
lecture to say that the question admitted of a simple yes or no answer. I believe that questions
were even asked in Parliament, and it is greatly to the credit of Bert Massie, Chair of the DRC,
that he responded a that Commissioners have a life outside the DRC; b that the title had a
question-mark after it; and c that the disability movement ought to be strong enough to withstand
some freedom of debate.

Disabled people are too readily intimidated by the claims of a spurious solidarity. For myself,
just this once, I do not wish to play that game. If you don't like the message, for heaven's sake
shoot the messenger. Don't blame the RNIB, and certainly don't blame the DRC.

The reaction to the announcement of this lecture was entirely predictable. Dead on cue, or rather
about four weeks ahead of the queue, the following heart-warming greeting headed "Colin Low - The
Tiny Tim of the Disability World" was received at City University from one Bob Williams-Findlay,
who describes himself as a disability rights campaigner: "Good to see Colin Low has maintained his
long held priority of self-interest and feathering his own nest. Have Rights gone too far asked the
Rehab man? I suppose it depends on who you are and where your situated. Most disabled people are
not comfy middle class brown noses who snuggle up to New Labour while cotton wooled inside an ivory
tower. Maybe there's a cure for Colin - but it might be hellish painful."

Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case. I don't think it could be said that I have gone out of my way
to ingratiate myself with anyone in this lecture. It would obviously be unfair to tar all disabled
people with this distasteful brush - though Bob's organisation does claim to speak on behalf of
several million. All the same, I think disabled people need to take care that their activist
leaders do not represent them in such a way as to incur the scorn of the late Auberon Waugh: "My
grand philosophical conclusion at the end of the day is that humanity does not divide into the rich
and poor, the privileged and the unprivileged, the clever and the stupid, the lucky and the unlucky
or even the happy and the unhappy. It divides into the nasty and the nice. Nasty people are
humourless, bitter, self-pitying, resentful and mean. Saints may worry about them and even try to
turn their sour natures, But those who do not aspire to saintliness are best advised to avoid them
whenever possible and give their aggression a good run for its money whenever it becomes
unavoidable. "Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you may feel that I've given them a reasonable run for
their money this evening.



Notes

*1 I may use terminology which offends against what has become known as disability etiquette.
Opinions differ as to what are and what are not the right terms in which to refer to disabled
people, but on one point everyone is apparently agreed - the one term by which it is not
appropriate to refer to disabled people is "the disabled". I don't agree. If one is making a
statement such as "the disabled are an excluded group", one is referring to a category, like "the
French" or "the Christians", and not to disabled people as people at all, and so "the disabled" is
arguably the most appropriate expression.

*2 Disability Rights Commission: Disability Briefing, November 2000.

*3 Figures supplied by Disability Alliance.

*4 "Handicap" is nigh on universally rejected by disability groups today as a term for referring to
the situation of disabled people on the entirely spurious ground that it derives from the
expression "cap in hand". In fact as connoting a disadvantage as opposed to a complete "disability"
it is in many ways preferable to "disability".

*5 Bickenbach, J., "Conceptual Changes to the Original Model of Disability", Presentation to
Stakeholders' Conference, ICIDH-2, London, 21 April 1999.

*6 Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, "Fundamental Principles of Disability",
1976.

*7 Hurst, R., "The View of Disabled People", Presentation to Stakeholders' Conference, ICIDH-2,
London, 21 April 1999.

*8 Finkelstein, V., "To Deny or not to Deny Disability?", in Magic Carpet (New Year 1975) vol.
xxvii, no. 1, pp. 31-38.

*9 Anti-apartheid Movement flyer.

*10 City News, 13 February 1995.

*11 Abberley, P., "The Limits of Classical Social Theory in the Analysis and Transformation of
Disablement", in Barton, L. and Oliver, M. (eds.), Disability Studies - Past, Present and Future,
Leeds, The Disability Press, 1997, p 25 at p. 28.

*12 Becker, H., "Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance", Glencoe, the Free Press, 1963.

*13 Jackie Leach Scully, on Disability Research discussion list, October 1997.

*14 Gregor Wolbring, on Disability Research discussion list, October 1997.

*15 Groce, N., "Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language", Harvard UP, 1985.

*16 Hart, H. L. A., "Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law", OUP, 1968,
ch1

*17 See, for example, Oliver, M. in Barnes and Mercer (eds.), Exploring the Divide: Illness and
Disability, Leeds, The Disability Press, 1996, p. 41: "disability is wholly and exclusively social"
(my emphasis).

*20 cf. Oliver, M., "Understanding Disability: from Theory to Practice", Macmillan, 1996, p. 33:
"It is not individual limitations of whatever kind, which are the cause of the problem but
society's failure to provide appropriate services and adequately ensure the needs of disabled
people are fully taken into account in its social organisation" (my emphasis).

*21 Poole, W. B. L., Review of "On Blindness: Letters between Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan",
British Journal of Visual Impairment, 1996.

*22 Echoes of a number of these positions can be found in Oliver, M. in Barnes and Mercer (eds.),
op. cit., pp. 47-49.

*23 Mills, C. W., "The Sociological Imagination.

*24 See, for example, Rock P. in Disability and Society, March 1996: "Terminations of pregnancy are
easy to get and encouraged by the medical "experts". Many mothers are pressurised to consider
themselves irresponsible parents by contemplating going ahead with the birth. The knock-on effect
is to give a message to that family that the birth is not a time for rejoicing. People say little
and shake their heads when the disabled child is born. Doctors see it as "breaking bad news", and
only rarely are informed advice and positive attitudes to be found in assisting the mother to
celebrate the birth of her disabled child."

*25 Rock, op. cit.

*26 "Understanding Disability: from Theory to Practice", Macmillan, 1996, p. 35.

*27 Goldsmith, S., "Designing for the Disabled: the New Paradigm", Architectural Press, 1997, pp.
138-40.

*28 Carey, K., "Design for Life", Presentation to DFEE/NDC/Demos Seminar, 29 April 1999.

*29 Norwich, B., "Special Needs Education, Inclusive Education or just Education for All?", London,
Institute of Education, 1996.

*30 Quoted in Disability Now, January 2001.

*31 See Caroline Daniel, "Radical, Angry and Willing to Work", New Statesman, 6 March 1998.

*32 Quoted in Neil Clark, "Auberon Waugh, Hero of the Left", in New Statesman, 29 January 2001.

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