Hansard

I give special thanks to the disabled people’s organisations that provided briefings for the debate. Most of them included testimonies that give voice to the lived experience of those who are easy to ignore, for which I am very grateful. Kate Forbes and other members have eloquently and powerfully highlighted the importance of giving voice to the beautiful diversity of disabled people who live across Scotland.

Those and many other testimonies, such as those in the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s recent study on destitution, bring home to us starkly and vividly the terrible experience of so many disabled people in the UK through current and recent crises. The Covid pandemic, the cost—or, rather, the greed—crisis and the extreme weather events that have been triggered by climate change have hit disabled people the hardest and have forced them to make heartbreaking decisions that threaten their health, their wellbeing and, very often, their lives.

Those extraordinary events are becoming the new normal, but the old normal is not working for disabled people, either, through practical exclusion from decisions about their own healthcare, from grass-roots political expression, from public transport and pavements, and from meeting the basic needs of everyday life.

Why are we still here, after decades of growing consciousness and awareness of disabled people’s voices, and after the brilliant, brave and painstaking work of organisations and activists? Why is the UK not only neglecting disabled people’s interests but, through Westminster’s vicious social security policies, actively undermining and attacking them? Part of the answer is in the UK Government’s macho idea of being there to protect people like them—the rich, the powerful and the so-called able-bodied.

In civilian as well as in military spheres, the most vulnerable people, including disabled people, are acceptable collateral damage. It is time to turn that completely on its head: it is time to acknowledge that vulnerability and interdependence are the natural state of the human condition. Rational economic man, independent and self-reliant, is not the norm, but is a fictional aberration. Starting from an understanding that we all need help, support and one another leads us to an ethic of care in place of domination.

What does that mean for policy in practice and for the important initiatives that the motion highlights, such as the independent living fund, the immediate priorities that are planned for disabled people and the proposed human rights bill? What does it mean for the way in which we achieve the outcomes of Scotland’s national performance framework?

I believe that we must, led by that ethic of care, prioritise four principles: human rights, equality, participation and redistribution. Human rights are just that—the rights of all humans, regardless of identity or status. They are the soil in which our lives can flourish and grow.

There are two ways in which states commonly act to deny us realisation of our rights. One is by paying lip service to them and hiding them in plain sight, pretending that human rights have already been achieved and that we need not worry about them. I am proud and grateful that, here in Scotland, we have a civil society, not least in disabled people’s organisations themselves, that will not let us do that.

The second way to deny rights is to try to eradicate them altogether by attacking the very concept and legitimacy of human rights and by promoting the narrative that they are not for all of us but are merely a means for the unscrupulous to obtain, by legal manipulation, what they do not deserve. That is a dangerous lie, but one that is increasingly espoused by those on the right of the Tory party who want to drag the UK out of its honoured place in the European convention on human rights.

I am, I say again, proud and grateful to be in Scotland, where our political and social traditions stand for solidarity and care. Having human rights as a nice luxury and something to enjoy only when the going is good is not how we want to function here.

Equality is about overcoming the many obstacles to taking part in social, economic, cultural and political life that are faced by all marginalised groups, and especially by disabled people. We must consider equality not as something that is the subject of a one-off assessment, but as something that is assessed at all stages of development and in relation to all policy areas. We should do that with consciousness that—as Peter Beresford has pointed out—inequality itself can diminish our awareness of power differences, because those who are excluded do not realise how much they are excluded from, and those who have easy access take that for granted.

Genuine participation is also key. I again recognise and honour the disabled people’s organisations that have, in many ways, pioneered the work on participation. Disabled people have been and, shamefully, often still are shut out of the decisions about policy and practice that are central to their own lives. Undeterred, the movement boldly challenged the accepted ideology, revealed the threadbare nature of medical and individualistic models, and developed the social model of disability and the philosophy of independent living. Neither of those ideas has been fully accepted in mainstream political thinking, although they are often hastily put in there when doing so is politically convenient, but are shrugged off again when no one is looking. We can do better, here.

Finally, an ethic of care requires redistribution. Policies and plans, when they are sensitively and wisely developed, can take us a long way, but practical change also requires resources. We must be brave and honest in speaking about and acting on the scale that is required.

The Social Care Future movement talks of

“the place we call home”

and of

“communities where we look out for one another”.

My vision, and hope, is for a Scotland where both of those are true for disabled people and for all of us. When we achieve that, our ambitions to have human rights not only enshrined in our laws, but realised by all our people, will be met.