Yesterday afternoon I started to muse over quite an interesting question: is it possible to be part of the Disabled community and be a Tory? At first glance, the answer is an obvious yes – you can hold any views you want and still be disabled. But can you hold conservative views and still see yourself as a member of the disability subculture, or still be welcome in it? For m at least, the answer to this is less clear cut.

I think it’s fair to say that most crips are galvanised against Tory cuts. Many in The direct action network have pointed out that their cuts will kill, and DAN members are protesting at the Tory party conference as I write. But the disability community is not Dan, and Dan is, after all, just a loose organisation of like-minded individuals. There does not appear to be a leadership per se, and thus no central ideology. It’s thus hard to define what the disabled community is and what it stands for, so from this perspective the answer to my question is an equally obvious yes.

Yet at the same time I do not think it’s that straightforward. Yes, disabled people are a diverse group of people, and have no universal ideas; as I wrote here, we are an ‘us’ without a ‘them’. But to a large extent that ‘us’ is a self-selecting group of indeviduals which seems to be united along certain lines: a good wealth fare state, inclusive education, and the social model of disability – all of which the Tories seem to be against. What if, say, some guy with CP was idiotic enough to start believing Tory lies and started spouting Tory rhetoric? Would he have a right to see himself as one of us? Or would he, in effect, have ostracised himself from the disabled community?

I’m not sure of the answer, but from certain perspectives I think I must answer ”Yes’. At the moment, the government is poised to make drastic cuts – cuts which any fool can see are ideologically inspired but which will kill. They will also undo the progress towards inclusion labour made, and Tories are more likely to view disability in medical terms rather than as a social construction. In other words, Tory ideology seems diametrically opposed to the beliefs held by most politically active disabled people, and it is these Political crips who that ‘us’ is more or less composed ofTo a certain extent, to many crip activists the Tories have become the opposing force – the ‘them’ – which I stated didn’t exist in my ‘Us and Them’ entry. In this light, although it makes me a bit uneasy, I do not see how any disabled Tory can have the right to invoke an ‘us’.

I do not like the idea of a community to which I feel I belong casting out anyone upon any grounds, and I certainly don’t like the idea of the disability community having anything as formal as a sanctioned ideology; but I do feel that we must, of necessity, close our metaphysical ranks and defend ourselves against an obviously oppressive force. This may smack of childish ‘clubbism’, and I may be raising divisions where I have no right to, but the fact is this is how the situation may be. Ultimately, though, this is a symptom of the divisions these tory cuts will cause, and I’m only describing a phenomenon which may only be happening from a certain point of view.