Brian Wilson: Championing equal, but different

I CAUGHT a clip of David Cameron on Sunday, pointing out that we are only half-way through the Olympic journey. Later this month in London, the equally wonderful Paralympic Games will begin.

The Prime Minister noted how appropriate it is for our country to be hosting the Paralympics since – as well as being home to the Stoke Mandeville movement – “Britain has led the world on disability rights legislation”. It is a proud claim which will never be gainsaid, for its truth is literal rather than mere assertion.

To an unusual extent, that status can be attributed to one man and yesterday he died. Alf Morris, the Labour MP from 1964 to 1997, and later Lord Morris of Manchester, was a rare parliamentarian. His act of single-minded commitment in promoting the trail-blazing Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act (1970) means Britain can always assert that noble “first”.

And where Britain led, others followed – and sometimes overtook us which creates a current and future challenge. For the present generation of both politicians and practitioners, the relevant question is: “Do we still lead the world?’ – and if not, why not? Both the death of Alf Morris and the spectacle of the Paralympics should encourage that debate.

Alf Morris was very much the product of his upbringing. He came from a poor background and his father died young having been gassed and blinded in the First World War. Elderly relatives were wheelchair-bound yet there was no financial support for either them or his mother who cared for them. It was a primitive system which imprisoned people in poverty, loneliness and under-achievement.

Leaving school at 14, Alf later went to Ruskin College, Oxford, on a trade union scholarship. He was a teacher before becoming an MP at the age of 30. The plight of the disabled and their carers became his life-long cause and in 1969 an astonishing opportunity presented itself. He came top of the ballot for Private Members’ Bills in the House of Commons.

Some of what then unfolded was recalled in 1995 when MPs debated the 25th anniversary of that monumental reform, the Chronically Sick and Disabled Act, passed in the dying days of Harold Wilson’s second Labour government. Even now, the sheer scale of what that legislation paved the way for seems quite awesome.

It introduced the whole concept of equal rights of access to education and recreational facilities for people with mental and physical disabilities. It established a duty on local authorities to make special educational provision for the blind-deaf as well as children with autism and dyslexia.

When an Education Minister protested that dyslexia “simply doesn’t exist”, Alf replied: “Then it won’t cost you anything”.

Public places were obliged to ensure physical access and toilet facilities for the disabled. The Act introduced the Orange Badge scheme for disabled parking. It obliged hospitals to separate young and elderly patients with mental health problems. And so on. Some of these provisions have subsequently been refined and improved upon, but they all had their origins in that great, reforming Act.

Small wonder that Alf Morris, who became the world’s first designated Minister for the Disabled when Labour returned to power in 1974, remained an heroic figure for so many who had been given a decent, dignified standard of life by the reforms he instigated – amidst scepticism from some of his own colleagues and support from others across the political spectrum.

The corollary, of course, is that so little had previously existed. Speaking in that 1995 debate, Alf Morris recalled: “One could say that the attitude was one of serene satisfaction with the status quo. No-one even knew how many disabled people there were in Britain. They were mostly seen or heard by their families or, if they were in institutions, by those who controlled their lives.”

He continued: “Even to talk then of as-of-right cash benefits for disabled people or for the carer of a disabled relative was to invite ridicule. Local authority services were wholly discretionary and often non-existent. I knew of disabled people with every kind of moral justice on their side but no statutory right whatever to vitally-needed help.”

That grim description of the reality a mere four decades ago should remind us of an essential fact which is often overlooked by glib commentators. It is that every progressive change now evidenced in our society is the product of hard work and commitment by people determined to make a difference. None of it has happened, or will be safeguarded, through political abstention.

Alf Morris recalled that at first, the Secretary of State for Social Services, Richard Crossman, wanted him to drop his Bill and take on something less fundamental. It was, he said, Tam Dalyell – then Crossman’s Parliamentary Private Secretary – who “pressed and persuaded” his Minister until he became “an undeviating supporter”. Such contributions to great causes deserve to be recalled.

I had the same feeling, incidentally, when I wrote an obituary some years ago of Hamish Gray, whom I had known well as the Tory MP for Ross and Cromarty. What I did not know until he died was that he collaborated with Alex Eadie, the Labour MP for Midlothian, to deliver Scottish legislation based on the principle that no child is uneducatable; the cornerstone of our own system of Special Needs Education. We should not forget the debts we owe.

Neither should we ever retreat into the “serene satisfaction” of believing that battles are won or issues settled – though there is little chance of those directly affected by disabilities making that mistake. For too many, every penny still has to be fought for. Every round of council cuts brings fresh anxieties. Every unthinking piece of dull bureaucracy creates unnecessary difficulties. And prejudices still have to be overcome.

By and large, subsequent legislation of the past 40 years has improved the lot of disabled people – but you can never legislate for attitudes.

While we may now express astonishment at the absence of rights for the disabled prior to 1970, I doubt if anyone directly affected by disability will not have come across examples of official action or personal behaviour that would have been entirely appropriate to that discredited era rather than to the civilised 21st century.

So, at a time when talk of “legacies” is rightly fashionable, there is plenty to discuss and learn from in the weeks ahead as well as those that are now behind us. The achievements of Paralympians will make the word “disability” appear questionable. The life’s work of Alf Morris will remind us that rights are the prerequisite of such achievement.