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: Heyer: 2015). This assumption is far from obvious – entailing, as it does, a level of trust in the same legislatures and courts complicit in discrimination to not only police it in future, but to define and identify it sensitively, which 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, disabled activists in Britain launched an ADL campaign for internal organisational and political reasons, rather than any imagined benefits of new legislation. ADL was initially seen by BCODP members as either practically unachievable or a very low priority compared to expanding local and international work. This situation only changed with the onset of organisational malaise in 1990, which raised questions BCODP’s purpose in the wider movement. Unable to adapt to membership growth in the late ‘80s, or meaningfully influence emerging local challenges affecting its members; movement leaders perceived a legislative campaign as an opportunity to show national leadership, develop grassroots skills through a street protest campaign, and provide a political counterweight to unrelated hostile policies. Demands for ADL were, consequently, threat and opportunity dependent rather than a natural outgrowth of social movement activity.

Luke Beesley teaches political science at the University of Manchester. He sits on the steering group of the Marxism and Disability Network, which is part of the Historical Materialism journal and research collective, and co-convenes the Interventions in Disability Politics research seminars at the University of Brighton. He has been involved in Disabled People’s Organisations, and disabled members caucuses in trade and community unions, for far longer than he cares to remember.


Works Cited

Boggs, J (2009) The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker’s Notebook New York, Monthly Review Press
Heyer, K (2015) Rights Enabled: The Disability Revolution from the US, to Germany and Japan, to the United Nations Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press
Zames Fleischer, D & Zames, F (2011) The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation Philadelphia, Temple University Press