EVERY year as November ends, Disability History Month starts. It provides an opportunity for disabled people to recall and celebrate our shared history.
In Liverpool the disability arts organisation DaDa, as part of its festival, is commemorating the life of Edward Rushton who was born in Liverpool in 1756.
DaDa has brought his remarkable life back to public attention. In so doing we are reminded of the many disabled people of the past who did so much to create better lives for their fellow disabled people.
Rushton left school when he was nine and became an apprentice with Watt & Gregson who traded in the West Indies where much of the economy was based on slave labour. He had an eventful life at sea. At the age of 16 he guided a ship back to Liverpool after its captain was about to abandon ship.
The cargo on his ships were slaves from Africa. On a journey to Dominica many of the slaves were hit by an outbreak of opthalmia, which is an inflammation of the eye. It can result in loss of vision in the affected eye.
Rushton would sneak food and water to the slaves but his contact with them resulted in him becoming affected and he lost the sight in his left eye and lost much of his vision in the other eye.
As well as becoming blind he was also charged with mutiny. He returned to Liverpool and was supported financially by his father.
These were the days before Braille, so he employed local boys to read to him. His interest in politics increased and he campaigned for the abolition of slavery.
This was not a popular view to hold in Liverpool at the time but Rushton persevered writing books and poetry on the subject. He was able to earn a living and married in 1784.
By 1791 he had earned enough to enable him to open the Liverpool School for the Indigent Blind.
Louis Braille lived just outside Paris and became blind at the age of three. He later developed a system of six raised dots that could be arranged to represent words.
He died in 1852 but Braille never took off in his lifetime. It took another group of blind people to achieve that.
The Royal National Institute of Blind People was started in 1868 by blind men Donald Conally, W Fen, Dr James Gale and the partially sighted Dr Armitage. A year later it adopted Braille and published the first Braille alphabet.
More recent campaigners include Megan Du Boisson who in 1965 created the Disability Income Group, an organisation of disabled people, to make the case for specific disablity benefits. Megan died in a car accident and was succeeded by another remarkable disabled woman, Mary Greaves.
It was largely as a result of the success of DIG that disability benefits were introduced in the 1970s.
Mary Greaves is also the person who worked with the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to ensure that the then new Open University provided excellent facilities for disabled people.
One of the most influential people in the fight against discrimination was Peter Large who had chaired the Committee on Restriction Against Disabled People which recommended what became the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 – 15 years later.
Throughout most of my life disabled people have fought successfully for provision that enable us to contribute to our society.
Today’s campaigners are fighting to preserve those victories against relentless attacks.
With each battle they write a chapter in tomorrow’s history.
Disability arts and the Da Da Festival is one way disabled people are coming together to share our identify and invite the public to join us.
TIME TO RE-OPEN THE REMPLOY FACTORIES?
AS the October-November issue of All Together NOW! appeared on the streets an almighty political row broke out.
In the House of Commons, Ed Miliband accused Welfare Minister Lord Freud of suggesting that more disabled people might get work if it was possible to pay them less than the minimum wage.
Lord Freud had suggested this in reply to a question at a meeting held during the Conservative Party Conference.
It is true that some disabled people have lower productivity as a result of their impairments. Adjustments and support by employers will enable some to produce as much as anyone else but there will remain some people, even with support, unable to do so.
In the past such people might have been able to work in supported employment in which they received a full wage but this was subsidised by the Government. The Remploy factories employed thousands of disabled people under these conditions. These are the same factories that Lord Freud’s Department of Work and Pensions closed.
Recreating supported employment is a better and more humane option than suggesting disabled people be paid even less than the minimum wage.
STUDENT UNREST
DISABLED students in higher education might be entitled to a Disabled Students Allowance.
It is not means tested and although the basic allowance is less than £2,000 a year, much higher amounts can be paid to disabled people needing to employ personal assistants to enable them to study.
The Government proposed to cut the DSA next year and pass the responsibility on to universities – but without providing them with additional funds.
That is rather like the Government saying local authorities can provide more social care when they cannot afford to do so.
Disability organisations and the National Union of Students fought the change.
As a result, the Government has now decided that it will postpone the date when the DSA will be withdrawn.
The new date is the 2016/17 academic year.
While this delay is obviously welcome, it is yet another sign of the Government withdrawing support for disabled people while assuming other organisations will fill the gap.
But as we have seen, so often the gap remains unfilled and disabled people pay the price again.
