Following on from my entry yesterday, I would like to direct you here and here. The first is footage of a speech by sue marsh, made in Hyde park, (I think) detailing the sheer horror of what Atos is doing on behalf of the government and their cuts. The second is footage of disabled protesters outside Hyde Park blocking the road. I think it’s great stuff, and now wish I was there, although I daresay I would probably have tried to decapitate the moronic prick who came up an called the protesters ‘freaks’.

When I stumbled upon the first clip earlier, though, it planted an embryonic idea in my head. These days, the disability community is hugely diverse: the title ‘person with a disability can be used to mean anyone from a person with cerebral palsy to a person with bipolar disorder. I’ve always thought that this diversity was one of the communities strengths, but it begs the question, what do we all have in common? A person with bipolar can do things I cannot, just as I can probably do things they cannot. What is the common ground between us; why can we say we belong to the same group?

The answer, of course, is that under the social model of disability, we are both constrained by disabling factors imposed on us by society. Yet it occurs to me that this model might be broadened: we are now both impaired, too, by what the government is doing. Atos kills disabled people, irrespective of whether their disability is cerebral palsy, bipolar disorder or whatever. In a way this gives rise to a new political model of disability. Of course, the idea of a political model has been suggested before, and by greater brains than mine; but what I mean is that a ‘disabled person’ could, in a sense, be defined as a person with an impairment who fights against the cuts. They who see themselves as impaired by the government.

I realise that, strictly speaking, this is not a model of disability. It is more akin to a model of a culture, one to which anyone who feels impaired by government cuts can classify themselves as belonging. Thus this model is also time-dependant – given that it only applies to this current epoch, it is not a model of disability in the truest sense, and will expire when things return to the way they were. Yet in a way it holds true, and at a time when those with impairments and disabilities are the hardest hit, I think we need it as a mechanism to unite our community.

In a way, of course, this model implies that one cannot classify oneself as disabled unless one feels impaired by and fights against the cuts. From a reductionist, biological perspective, that is absurd: one can be disabled irrespective of one’s politics. While it is not my aim to create devisions in our movement, which as I wrote here, are counter-productive, I do not think one can at present legitimately hold oneself to be a member of the disabled people’s movement or an activist if one does not oppose the cuts, or try to argue, (utterly without foundation, I might add) that the disabled people’ movement is being overrun by ‘fake’ disabled people who complain about Atos for the sake of it. How can such arrogant, ignorant twerps call themselves disability rights activists when the only rights they care about are their own? Clearly, such people do not rank among ‘us’; they do not feel the constraints being imposed upon us by the current government, and deny others feel them, so how can they be said to belong to our community? Under my model, can such people really be Disabled?