Anti-Discrimination Legislation as Organisational Problem: Rethinking the Disabled People’s Movement’s (DPM’s) Political Campaigns in Britain

Histories of disabled activists’ campaigns for anti-discrimination legislation (ADL) take it as natural that activists perceiving discrimination against them would look to new laws to right this situation, and focus instead on how campaigns were built and what contributed to their success or failure (Zames Fleischer & Zames: 2011: Hayer: 2016). This assumption is far from obvious – entailing, as it does, a level of activists’ trust in the same legislatures and courts complicit in discrimination not only to police it in future, but also to define and identify it sensitively, that would render social movements themselves superfluous (Boggs: 2009).

Based on archival research on the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People’s (BCODP’s) papers at the Disabled People’s Archive (DPA); my presentation argues that, in Britain, disabled activists launched an ADL campaign for internal organisational and political reasons, rather than any imagined benefits of new legislation. Unable to adapt to the DPM’s growth in the late ‘80s, or meaningfully influence local conditions affecting its members in the early ‘90s; movement leaders perceived a legislative campaign as an opportunity to show national leadership, develop their grassroots’ capacity and skills, and provide a political counterweight to hostile local policies. Demands for ADL were, consequently, threat and opportunity dependent rather than clearly formulated or strategized.