'Lazy fatalism' holds back disability rights

The Chairman of the Disability Rights Commission has said that the inequality experienced by disabled people stands between the Government and its targets to reduce child poverty and increase the number of people in work.

In a speech today, Bert Massie, said that a "lazy fatalism and a low expectations culture running rife through parts of Whitehall" meant that there was a serious likelihood that Government targets would be missed and that millions of people will be condemned to continued poverty and life on the margins of society.

Mr Massie’s comments came during a keynote speech to launch a nationwide advertising campaign on the impact of disability discrimination in Britain.

He said: “For some reason, and despite all the facts, public policy makers are not thinking about disability. It is considered something over there for the specialists to deal with. Something to do with wheelchairs and ramps.”

He said that successive governments, including the present administration, had failed to break the culture of low expectations that holds disabled people back. He said: "There is a lazy fatalism that too often shapes the perceptions that politicians have of disabled people. In important areas, the distance between the living standards, opportunities and life-chances between disabled people and the rest of the population has widened.”

Mr Massie pointed to the introduction of phonics to literacy teaching in primary schools, the steep rise in levels of institutionalisation of people with learning difficulties and mental health problems and the refusal to introduce lifetime homes standards into regulations governing new housing.

Mr Massie spelt out his vision of a society where disabled people played a full role as active and equal citizens: “We would not be surprised that a person can be a manic depressive and at the top of their professional game, that a person with a learning disability could make a brilliant parent or that blindness is no barrier to holding high office.

"It would be a society in which we finally accept that discrimination and disadvantage in relation to disability is as absurd as it is on sex or racial grounds.”

(SP)