AT THE end of one of the hardest years in living memory, disabled campaigners are determined to make celebrations for this year’s International Day of Disabled People extra special. 

After a decade of austerity and welfare reform measures deliberately designed to hit disabled people hardest, along came Covid-19 and official responses to the pandemic that explicitly rated disabled people’s lives as worth less than those of non-disabled people. 

The year 2020 was also the anniversary of two important disability-related milestones: the first was the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995; the other was the founding of Disabled People Against Cuts. 

2020 has been a particularly difficult year for disabled people. Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that 60 per cent of Covid-related deaths from March to July of this year were of disabled people. 

The real figure is likely to be much higher and this also doesn’t account for the disproportionate representation of disabled people among excess deaths.  

Disabled women under the age of 65 were 11 times more likely to die of Covid-19 than a non-disabled woman in the same age group. 

Recent figures revealed that people with learning difficulties were six times more likely to die of Covid-19 than non-disabled people. 

This could be linked to a number of factors but the unprecedented number of unlawful do not resuscitate notices written into the notes of autistic people and people with learning difficulties this year surely cannot be unrelated. 

Being in the most at-risk groups has caused disabled people considerable fear and anxiety. 

To then be represented in the media and public discourse as expendable to society has been a further punch in the face. 

According the popular narrative around the pandemic, the deaths of people with underlying health conditions were somehow inevitable and not the same as deaths of healthy people; restrictive measures to protect the lives of old and disabled people have been continually questioned. 

The implication throughout is that our lives are not worth the same as other people’s. 

The Clinical Frailty Scale used to prioritise treatment is more explicit about the greater value in saving the life of a healthy person as opposed to a disabled person. 

This has led to the situation where disabled people are writing medical passport documents setting out reasons they have for living and the contributions they make to society.

Experiences this year have evidenced both the importance and the limitations of the Equality Act 2010 — the successor piece of legislation to the Disability Discrimination Act. 

Public lawyers have spent an especially busy year using the Equality Act to challenge discriminatory measures introduced through the government’s shambolic response to the pandemic. 

There is no question that disabled people have benefited from the DDA, enabling many more of us to access education and employment.  

At the same time, it is virtually unenforceable, being reliant on individual disabled people to initiate legal challenges.

The law courts are one tool that disabled campaigners have used to show oppose the conscious cruelty of the Tories since they came to power in the coalition government. 

When legal challenges are successful, they can succeed in imposing mitigations against the worst harms of specific policy measures. 

What they can’t do is to interfere in the overall economic and social policies of government. 

For that co-ordinated and united grassroots resistance is needed and it was for that purpose that Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) was set up.  

DPAC was formed out of disabled people’s involvement in the protest outside the Tory Party conference in September 2010. 

It was very much a successor to earlier periods of disabled people’s activism with longstanding campaigners involved in its inception. 

Principles that DPAC is based on are those that have been central to the Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) since the independent living movement of 1970s when disabled people fought their way out of institutions to live in the community alongside non-disabled people. 

One such core principle is the social model of disability which sees disability as the social and economic oppression that disabled people face on top of the impairments, illnesses and/or medical diagnoses we live with. 

DPAC also took up traditional slogans of the movement such as “rights not charity” and “piss on pity” reflecting demands for access to equal participation in mainstream society in place of marginalisation as recipients of charitable benevolence.

Where DPAC differed from the DPM of the 1980s and 1990s was in its explicit positioning on the left and aims to make links with the wider anti-austerity and labour movements. 

This direction reflected the anti-capitalist zeitgeist of the years following the financial crash but it also marked a return to the anti-capitalist analysis that informed the original independent living movement in Britain and the development of the social model. 

By locating the fight against disabled people’s oppression within the wider struggle of the working class, DPAC was making a clear break from the New Labour years when Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) grew accustomed to sitting round the table with government focusing specifically on disability issues in isolation from wider political-economics. 

In doing so they ended up undermining disabled people’s interests through, for example, advancing the privatisation of public services. 

While DPOs were distracted bidding for contracts for service delivery, New Labour was meanwhile working with the US insurance industry on sowing the seeds for the new approach to disability benefits that was rolled out by the Tories after 2010 at an enormous human cost.

The early signs under Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership suggest an attempt to turn back the clock. 

Shadow ministers on the front bench have begun to ask disabled people about our ideas for what a national disability strategy — a “New Deal for disabled people” — might look like. 

It wouldn’t be difficult to find out what our views are on this. 

Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership then shadow secretary of state for work and pensions Debbie Abrahams carried out an exhaustive consultation exercise that included travelling to all regions of Britain and holding accessible workshops that looked at all the key areas of disabled people’s lives. 

There are also a number of in-depth reports to the United Nations disability committee compiled by disabled people’s organisations working collaboratively across Britain. 

These identify not only the failure of the Tory government to uphold disabled people’s rights but also give comprehensive recommendations reflecting the shared priorities of Deaf and disabled people across all four administrations. 

It is reasonable to question whether the objective of this new initiative might be something more tactical. 

It is well known that there was strong support among disabled people for Corbyn as a politician who wasn’t afraid to oppose welfare reform and austerity. 

Disabled campaigners would be wise to assume this is an attempt to pull us away from Corbyn and more radical politics by distracting us with a grandiose-sounding disability-specific plan that inevitably won’t address the level of fundamental change that is needed. 

If so, Starmer may soon be learning that disabled people aren’t the easy targets that the Tories before him took us for. 

We may have short lives but we have long memories and we pass the learning from our mistakes down from one generation of campaigners to another.

Disabled campaigners take a pride in our tradition of resistance. It’s what keeps us going when when the disabling barriers and the pain/distress/fatigue feel too much but we know we have to somehow find the strength to campaign regardless because the stakes are so high. 

And this International Day of Disabled People that’s what we will be celebrating — Deaf and disabled people’s resistance. 

DPAC and our allies at the People’s Assembly Against Austerity will be co-hosting an extended evening of politics, reminiscence, music and laughter. 

Speakers will include John McDonnell, actor Cherylee Houston, comedian TourettesHero, Paula Peters of DPAC and TUC disabled workers’ co-chair Dave Allan among many others. 

Join us from 7pm on Facebook live/YouTube/Twitter. British Sign Language and live captions will be provided.