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Meeting of the Parliament 21 December 2011

21 Dec 2011 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Disability History Month

Milne, Nanette Con North East Scotland Watch on SPTV

This is a very timely debate, the first of its kind in this Parliament, and the fact that disability history month Scotland launched only last month following the launch last year of its UK sister group means that an enormous amount of work has been undertaken in a relatively short time. Therefore, I have no hesitation in congratulating Siobhan McMahon on bringing this important debate to the chamber.

As members have mentioned and as the text of the motion makes clear, the theme of this year’s disability history month is

“Celebrating our struggle for equality”.

It is only right that as a nation we look to the past for lessons that we can learn for the future, and in the field of equality for disabled people we witness a very clear struggle for the same rights as everyone else.

Without doubt, the most significant contribution to disabled people’s rights was made by the Labour MP, Alf—now Lord—Morris. In the late 1960s, there was hardly a mention in Britain’s statute books of disability but Alf Morris, who was deeply affected by his father’s disabilities, set about drafting a private member’s bill that encapsulated ideas such as providing help at home, assessing a person’s needs and—most important—making local authorities responsible for ensuring that the environment around disabled people was accessible. Despite what was, at best, Government indifference, Lord Morris’s bill was passed as the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970 and, four years later, he became the first minister for the disabled anywhere in the world.

However, there was still much more to do, such as getting disabled people out of institutions in which they had been incarcerated as a result of wrong assessments and giving them the freedom to lead independent lives. Disability benefit was eventually introduced and, in 1995, John Major’s Conservative Government passed the Disability Discrimination Act, which made it unlawful to discriminate against those with a disability when providing services and, in most cases, when employing people.

Further legislation in the past decade has impacted on and benefited the lives of disabled people; indeed, one example that will be apparent to all of us in the chamber has been the requirement on us either to alter our constituency offices or to make alternative arrangements to ensure that we are accessible to our disabled constituents. Although that is progress, it should not have taken legislation to make that happen.

I applaud the mood of the debate but I am slightly disappointed that, when we are here to celebrate the struggle for equality for disabled people—and rightly so—the second part of the motion makes a partisan point that I know Siobhan McMahon and others feel strongly about but which I feel would be better left out of this debate and left to tomorrow’s discussions. However, I finish by quoting Alf Morris, who, last year, said about disabled rights:

“I don’t like talking about what I or my bill achieved. That way lies complacency. There’s still so much to be done.”