Alf Morris and his Act

Ian Henderson

noraolegics went into a

hotel in Wakefield for a drink. All three were in wheelchairs. At the end of the evening, the iu-uaord, who was distinctly unfriendly the moment they came in, told them that he didn't want to see them there again, adding that he didn't allow dogs in because they got in the way and the same applied to people in wheelchairs.

This rather nasty little story is one of the many vignettes of disabled living which this book* provides. It also highlights one of the major ironies of the debate about disability. The disabled are, it seems, trapped in a vicious circle. Until public attitudes change, legislative amelioration of their difficulties can only be half an answer. Yet without legislative enact

ment of enlightened attitudes, public

prejudices are likely to continue as vigorously as ever. This is also the probe lies behind race relations in this country.

Reading the early part of this book it is

always a surprise to those not engaged in organised pressure activity on behalf of the disabled to realise how recently disability was a non-subject as far as political discussion was concerned. When Alfred Morris was first returned as Labour and Co-operative MP for the Wythenshawe Division of Manchester in 1964, the last time the House of Commons had debated disability was five years previously. There was no mention of disability in any of the party election manifestoes in 1964 and only one brief one — in the Conservative manifesto — in 1966.

Morris, whose name is usually linked with the Private Member's Bill which he introduced and which in 1970 became the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, describes his family background which movingly accounts for his later dedication to the disabled. Born in the Manchester slum of A" coats, his father suffered multiple handicaps as a result of injuries in the First World War. Towards the end of his father's life the family moved to a modern council house but even then Mr Morris senior was not able to obtain full benefit from his new and improved, surroundings. His experience and that of many other disabled people whom Morrif met after entering Parliament convinced him that the disabled were the forgotten poor of our society. As a student, Morris first came across Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. "I had not been a Member of Parliament long," he writes, "before feeling it was time someone wrote a parallel book on the conditions of the chronically sick and disabled in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century."

The major theme of this book is the "race against time," as the dust cover blurb calls it, to produce the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act. The purpose of the Bill was to make mandatory what had hitherto been permissive in terms of local authority provision of essential services for the disabled.

The campaign that followed revealed a startling number of anomalies, not least in the field of registration. According to the authors of No Feet to Drag, the Central Council for the Disabled and the Disablement Income Group state that 3.5 per cent of the population were disabled, which would produce a figure of something like two million disabled people. In fact, less than a quarter of a million were registered with local authorities as disabled. Today, of course, the picture has been clarified by the publication in 1971 of the government survey of impaired, handicapped and disabled persons over sixteen. This shows if anything that the voluntary organisations were underestimating ',umbers. No less than three million suffer some form of disablement. Of that number approximately one and a quarter million are severely or appreciably handicapped.

Morris concedes that the ground was well prepared before his opportunity came through success in the ballot for a Private Member's Bill. In fact, the disabled have rather a formidable array of champions, as this book demonstrates. Such is the author's desire to include as wide-ranging a selection as possible, that some facts are a little fudged. Why for example out of the large body of expert advisers from the voluntary organisations who contributed to the preparation stage of Rill were so few singled out? And why is the campaign on behalf of the disabled driver given so much prominence at the expense 'f an even larger group of disabled people, the disabled passengers?

Morris's election to Parliament coi7i cided within six months with the emnt,Yence of the Disablement Income Group under the colourful leadership of the late Megan Du Boisson, herself in a wheelchair. Perhaps the two most important features of DIG, a child of the nineteen-sixties and the growing importance of pressure groups, are that, in the first place, it was founded by disabled people and has been led ever since by an equal number of disabled and able-bodied people. Secondly, DIG is the only disabled organisation to be specifically concerned with the economics of disability. The authors of No Feet to Drag recognise that the many case histories they present show clearly that care, through the services which, thanks to the 1970 Act, are beginning to be provided by local authorities, is not enough. There is a desperate need for more cash in the pockets of disabled men and women, not to mention the parents of disabled children. This money is needed not only to offset the loss of earning power which all disabled people, however enlightened a rehabilitation policy industry may devise, experience but also to meet the sheer cost of disability. Ironically, the disabled, as the cases in the book show, find life far more expensive than the rest of the community and yet in turn they are considerably worse off than the rest of us.

Valuable as this book is in presenting some of the evidence for deprivation which exists among so many disabled members of our community, I am sure that Alfred Morris would admit that he and Mr Butler have not produced an ' Engels ' for the disabled. Parts of the book read like the jottings column of a Sunday newspaper and there is a hint of an MRA pamphlet in the authors' zeal to trot out famous names in support of their worthy and, unassailable case. Other parts of the book — the occasional mis-spelling of names for example — 1”dicate that it was produced to a tight deadline and could have probably done with some stringent editing before it left galley proof stage. One problem which the authors face and indeed all of us who campaign for a fair deal for the disabled is the deceptive popularity of our cause. Despite the comparison offered between those who obstruct the workings of the Act and those who in 1848 opposed Chadwick's Public Health Act (immortalised, by Palmerston as the "Dirty Party ") there is no real organised opposition to the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act nor to the more controversial proposals advanced by such or ganisations as DIG. Michael Lake, writing recently in the Guardian, possibly touched a raw nerve of truth when he observed:

Those concerned with the plight of the severely disabled feel that what they need is f,00d opposition. It is not fashionable to oppose measures to alleviate disablement. Cripples, like the blind and deaf, have to struggle through forests of nodding sympathetic heads to find real supnort.

No Feet To 1) crl Alfred Morris and Arthur Butler (Sidgwick and Jackson £2.50)