A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

however, their descriptions of having been involved as part of the disabled people‟s
movement are quite different from Sarah‟s, speaking as a young disabled woman in her early
twenties:
150
I know of it… and would consider myself to be part of it… but not in the same,
like… not… not as in disabled people… it‟s more about… like, including every one,
rather than saying we‟re a different group… and we want the same… but it‟s, like,
now… now it‟s just about accepting every one… regardless… but I don‟t think
that‟s necessarily working… (l.1:1025ff.)
Mike Oliver and Colin Barnes have suggested recently that:
we no longer have a strong and powerful disabled people‟s movement and the
struggle to improve disabled people‟s life chances has taken a step backwards
(Oliver and Barnes, 2006:unpaged).
It was a mistake, they argue, for the movement to have become too focussed on the single
issue of securing anti-discrimination legislation. With the passing of the Disability
Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), a piece of legislation the disabled people‟s movement had
major reservations about (Swain, French and Cameron, 2003), much of the momentum went
out of the movement. While the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People refused
to participate in the task force set up to oversee its implementation, the large disability
charities run by non-disabled people „fell over themselves to nominate members‟ (Oliver and
Barnes, 2006:unpaged). As Oliver and Barnes further observe:
Since the late 1990s the combination of Government and the big charities have
successfully adopted the big ideas of the disabled people‟s movement, usurped its
language, and undertaken further initiatives which promise much yet deliver little
(Oliver and Barnes, 2006:unpaged).
While talk of disabled people‟s rights is increasingly heard from the charities, Oliver and
Barnes argue this is empty rhetoric:
Our history has taught us that in the recent past these organisations played a leading
role in keeping us oppressed and out of society. Name changes, tidying up their
language and employing token disabled people cannot disguise the underlying
reality that these agencies are interested primarily in self-preservation and that they