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30 Years of Disability Rights: Part 3
Welcome to Part 3 of our reflection on thirty years of disability rights. In this blog, we look back on the eclectic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cultural conversations around racism that emerged in 2020, what the past two years have been like for Disabled people in the UK, and what history can teach us.
Trigger warnings: COVID-19 deaths, racism and police violence, suicide, and benefit deaths
COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, changing most people’s lives beyond recognition. Almost immediately, Disabled people experienced a series of profound and unequal impacts on their rights, safety and access to everyday life. After a decade of austerity had weakened public services, social care and the wider safety net, Britain was especially vulnerable to a catastrophic event of this scale.
Early in the pandemic, Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders were applied to many care home residents and people with learning disabilities and autism without their knowledge or consent. This liberal use of DNRs without prior consent was later understood to have originated from clumsily written guidance about rationing care according to frailty that was shared among overstretched healthcare providers. The consequences were devastating, contributing to the deaths of many people, including Sonia ‘Sone’ Deleon, Nigel Marriott and Susan Sullivan.
These examples sit within a wider and deeply alarming pattern. In 2024, 39% of deaths of people with a learning disability were deemed ‘avoidable’, meaning they were considered preventable or treatable. By comparison, the figure for the general population was 21.1%.
Although some of this disparity reflects higher rates of co-existing health conditions, many of these deaths were linked to substandard care, neglect, missed signs of deterioration, systemic delays and poor communication. Learning Disabled people’s lives are not disposable, and health and care institutions must act urgently to prevent more avoidable deaths.
During 2020 lockdowns, public discourse also became increasingly hostile. Conspiracy theories surged, bolstered by chaotic and dishonest decision-making from policymakers.
Language that dismissed people’s deaths as inevitable because of ‘underlying health conditions’ became common, while phrases rooted in eugenics such as ‘sacrifice the weak’, ‘survival of the fittest’, and ‘humans are the virus’ were used to justify disregarding basic measures to reduce transmission.
Mask-wearing soon became a culture-war issue; some opposed it as government overreach. The reality for Disabled people was far more complex: masks created barriers for people who lip-read, but mask-wearing was an important measure in curbing the spread of the virus, and was essential protection for people with weaker immune systems.
Lockdowns were essential for curbing the spread of the virus, but brought their own harms, including increased isolation and worsening mental health. Yet the rapid expansion of remote working, online events and digital social spaces also opened doors that had long been closed to many Disabled people.
For a time, people like me, who had previously been excluded from workplaces, social spaces and community life, could participate more fully from home. Those of us who had long struggled to get out regularly found ourselves teaching others how to cope with restricted access to nature, nightlife, shops and personal care.
For many people, ‘the COVID years’ now feel like a strange fever dream of banana bread, DIY haircuts and political scandal. For many Disabled people, however, COVID-19 still shapes daily life – the virus still kills and disables people. The pandemic exposed how disposable Disabled people’s lives could appear to those around them, and that knowledge cannot simply be forgotten.
The consequences are still with us. The pandemic’s well-documented mismanagement led to at least tens of thousands of preventable excess deaths, disproportionately affecting Disabled people, and may have increased the Disabled population by hundreds of thousands. Six years on, policymakers rarely acknowledge this mass disabling event when discussing rising disability rates.
Racism and intersectionality
The police killing of George Floyd in the US, during the early months of the pandemic, prompted a significant shift in public discussion about racism across the West. In the years that followed, many institutions moved quickly to show that they were no longer ignoring colonial history or its continuing impact on Black and Brown people.
Academic frameworks such as intersectionality and critical race theory became more widely used in training and public education. Intersectionality’s central insight — that people who experience more than one form of marginalisation face distinct and compounded harms — became more widely understood.
Developed in the US and led by the organisation Sins Invalid, the Disability Justice approach has increasingly influenced the UK disability rights movement, particularly among younger people. Its ten principles place a strong emphasis on intersectionality, cross-disability solidarity and the analysis of wider systems, including capitalism, which both creates and punishes disablement.
Yet these cultural shifts have not been reflected consistently in mainstream media practice. The unprecedented media pile-on described as a ‘digital lynching’, which ended the life of Professor Jason Arday — a brilliant Black, autistic, working-class man — in August 2026, shows how far these lessons still have to travel. This is a cruel irony, given that Professor Arday himself contributed to the area of sociology focused on such teachings.
2024 and 2025
Two different governments presided over the UK during 2024 and 2025, and both attempted to enact cuts to welfare benefits; the latter pushing for the biggest benefit cuts since 2010.
Of course, Disabled people did what we have become all too accustomed to doing: we quickly organised, mobilised, and campaigned; we told policymakers that the cuts would cost lives and that Disabled lives have meaning.
I led Equal Lives’ campaign against the cuts, and I am proud of the impact of our collective efforts. Although we couldn’t stop the cuts altogether, we reduced them and undoubtedly saved many lives – we did that!
Both governments, supported by sections of the media, framed Disabled people as workshy. They particularly targeted people with psychiatric disabilities, implying that mental illness was less legitimate than visual or mobility impairments.
At the same time, both governments continued to ignore the social care crisis, which should have been addressed more than a decade ago.
What history teaches us
Progress takes sustained collective action
The past thirty years show that progress is hard won. It requires years of collaboration and determination and many forms of action working together: legal challenges, public education, protest, boycott, direct action, community care, and solidarity.
The same harmful narratives are regurgitated
We can also see a recurring pattern: policymakers, whatever political party they belong to, use familiar framing to justify removing rights and essential support from Disabled people. The media always plays a crucial role in manufacturing public consent for these losses.
When politicians and commentators divide people into the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’, they imply that systems can fairly draw that line. In reality, punitive assessments sweep all Disabled people into the same cloud of suspicion, regardless of the type or extent of their disability.
I rarely speak to a Disabled person who has not been negatively affected by the cruelty intrinsic to the benefit system. The recent Timms Review interim report demonstrates this, as 90% of PIP claimants who responded, roughly 34,200 people, described the assessment process in negative terms, using words like ‘dehumanising’ and ‘stressful’.
Recently, we’ve seen newspaper opinion pieces that minimise the reality of young Disabled people – women specifically - and suggest they are not truly Disabled but have been swept up in a kind of mass contagion that has made them believe they are Disabled; made them aspire to be Disabled.
We’ve also seen a documentary that propagated dangerous misinformation about ADHD. It is no surprise to me that this is the media environment we find ourselves in; it echoes the comments of policymakers who are attempting to, and often succeed in, making cuts to the things Disabled people need to live full lives.
The real cost of withdrawing support
In our work at Equal Lives, we see the distress and humiliation people experience when they must navigate systems that keep shifting the goalposts. Discussions about the welfare bill too often ignore why people claim benefits, and say far too little about the far higher social and economic cost of failing to support people properly.
Government ministers are either confused about the so-called ‘spiralling welfare bill’ or are deliberately misrepresenting it. Publicly available data from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) shows that the welfare bill is not ‘spiralling’: it remains stable at around 11.2% of GDP, is expected to stay at that level in 2030–31, and is actually lower than it was in every year from 2010 to 2016.
Despite this evidence, policymakers continue to repeat the claim and imply that UK welfare spending is exceptionally high. Yet, compared with many similar European countries, Britain does not have an exceptionally large welfare state.
I want to see these cycles of political and social hostility change over the coming years. There will be many more battles ahead against those intent on revoking our rights; in the words of Angela Davis, ‘freedom is a constant struggle’. But one thing I know to be true is that Disabled people, when we collaborate to fight for our rights, are formidable!
Written by Ari, Campaigns & Consultancy Officer
Sources:
6. ‘The Department’, John Pring
7. ‘Cash not care’, Mo Stewart
