Hansard

There are moments in all our lives when we feel the need to pinch ourselves, and today is one of those moments for me. Not only do I feel honoured and proud, as I always do, to be a disabled person and to celebrate disabled people and our organisations the world over, but I am incredibly proud and grateful to celebrate our collective fight from this chamber, having secured a members’ business debate on international day of persons with disabilities, which is tomorrow.

It is an absolute privilege to open the debate. In my first speech to the Parliament, I paid tribute to the disability movement. Today, I will do so again and expand on that. The theme for this year’s day is leadership and participation in a post-Covid world. I will dedicate my time today to the fights that the incredible disability movement, of which I am proud to be part, has led and won, and the fights that we are yet to win. It is because of the endless struggle—and, yes, the fight for representation—throughout the history of the movement that such days exist and that we are able to celebrate them and harness them to promote and improve the human rights of disabled people across the country and the world. However, as I am sure we all agree, disabled people’s rights are human rights every day of the year. In this chamber, we owe it to those who have fought for their right to exist—not even to live—to fight for them, too, every day.

The past year has been tough for all of us, but for disabled people—who have had their rights and freedoms stifled and taken away by a system that fought against them, rather than one that enabled them to realise their rights—things were hard before Covid. They have lived in lockdown for years. Long before the pandemic, disabled people across Scotland had been living below the poverty line. They had their care packages—in effect, their lifeline—cut, and they were forced to drag themselves upstairs because there are not enough accessible homes. Covid has deepened that inequality and exacerbated those problems, as is clear to all of us across the chamber.

I have said this before from the Labour benches, but it is a point that must be reinforced. We cannot go back to that normal; we must go forward to a better Scotland for everyone who lives here. That must mean ensuring that disabled people are included on the journey to recovery. We cannot, and should not want to, get there without them, so we must have them at the heart of all that we do.

It has been said that, if you are not around the table, you are probably on the menu. When the going gets tough, we have only to look at what is first to go, and who loses out on the most, to see how true that is.

In the initial months of the pandemic, almost six in 10 Covid-related deaths were of disabled people. No statistic could highlight the deep inequality that disabled people face more than that one. However, sadly, there are more figures that highlight that inequality. In the midst of the toughest years of our lives, disabled people have had their care and support withdrawn overnight and their lifeline denied. Their families and loved ones have been left to pick up the pieces, and that has broken unpaid carers. Forty per cent of children who live in households where someone is disabled are living in poverty. In many cases, disability benefits do not scratch the surface of the additional costs that are associated with being a disabled person.

There remains a disability employment gap of 32.6 per cent, and progress to reduce that has been slow. Recent analysis by the Scottish Government has shown that the employment rate for disabled people fell by 5.7 per cent throughout 2020.

Further analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that disabled people had reported a loss of earnings by the middle of 2020. As we begin to recover from the pandemic, one in four disabled people are worried about their health and safety at work, especially as workers begin to return to offices and public-facing roles.

We have to change—we all deserve better than that. That change starts by making sure that disabled people are at the centre of our recovery. Disabled people are innovative by design; we have to be, just to get by. Let us make sure that disabled people are around the table, not just because it is the right thing to do but because—you never know—we might learn something.

Decisions about us must never be made without us, and I urge the Government to ensure that they never are. To do that, it has to actively involve disabled people. It has to go the extra mile to make sure that they are around the table, and that means resourcing disabled people’s organisations.

Such organisations are way more than service providers—in fact, that is usually not the main thing that they do. They advocate and speak truth to power for a better world. They develop policy, build capacity, support, lead, listen, deliver and fight. They have given me and thousands of other disabled people so much. It is not an overestimation to say that they changed my life.

It was because of disabled people and the collective action and solidarity of our organisations, the Labour Party and the labour movement that I realised that the inequality that I experienced was not my fault. I was not broken or wrong—society was. The inequality that I and other disabled people have experienced is the consequence of structural, systemic oppression. It was because of disabled people and our organisations that we have risen up and demanded our rights and our emancipation. Disabled people’s organisations are life changing for disabled people—they are a lifeline for our families and are pure gold for Governments that want to improve the lives of disabled people, because—I promise—they can tell us how to do so.

None of us knows what the future holds, but we know that inequality cannot be an option and that we can conquer it only by working together with disabled people and their organisations. They have told us for a long time what that future should look like for them: a Scotland where social care meets our human rights and our workers rights, where charges for such care are gone, and where social care workers get £15 an hour; a Scotland where equality and human rights are enshrined in law and delivered in practice, including through the full incorporation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and a Scotland with a social security system that is there for people in and out of work, that guarantees a minimum income and, crucially, that does so while properly taking account of the varying conditions that disabled people live with and the costs that they incur.

Colleagues, if we do those things, we will begin to scratch the surface of tackling the systemic, sustained and ingrained inequalities that disabled people face. That is the new normal that we, in this chamber, must seek and deliver.

This week, in the run-up to the international day of people with disabilities, I want to end with a message to disabled people across Scotland: I promise that, for as long as I am in this place, your fight will be my fight, and there will be nothing about us without us.