Disabled politician won’t fight general election after ‘intolerable’ hate crime

A disabled politician has announced he will not stand for his party at the next general election because of the rising and “intolerable” levels of hate crime directed towards him as someone with a stammer.

Chris Nelson (pictured) has stood for the Liberal Democrats four times in Kettering, but he announced yesterday (Wednesday) that he would not be standing at the next general election, which will take place in the next 12 months.

He said he had been one of the few people with a stammer to have stood for parliament but could no longer accept the targeted disability-related hostility he has been subjected to, both from other local politicians – although never from any of the local MPs – and some members of the public.

He has been verbally abused, chased down the street, and had recordings of radio interviews posted online to mock his impairment.

Other politicians have made jokes about his stammer, with one describing it as an “embarrassment”, and he was told that one politician had asked a colleague at an election count: “How’s C-C-C-C-C-Chris doing?”

He said the “final straw” was an incident involving another politician that took place in a street near his home, which was later recorded by police as a disability hate incident.

He said he believed that it remained “politically acceptable” to mock people who stammer.

Nelson, a secondary school teacher, told Disability News Service yesterday: “Every time there is some person with a disability who gets abused, the people from [their] party are up in arms, and people in the opposition are looking for excuses.

“Every side is guilty of hypocrisy and every party has a minority of people that are a problem.

“The vast majority of people in my party have been lovely, and from other parties, but there is a minority that are abusive.”

He said that all political parties were equally guilty of such behaviour, although his party locally had been “very supportive”.

Nelson said he was “really sad” to have made the decision not to stand again, because he enjoyed the process of fighting an election, such as speaking to voters, and taking part in debates and hustings.

But he said: “It comes with a price and the price is not being able to sleep at night because of all this abuse.

“It’s not constant, but it’s regular and it’s there and there’s a degree to which you just go, ‘do you know what, I can’t live with this at the minute,’ particularly when you don’t see it getting better, and particularly when it seems to be getting worse.

“I feel quite sad, because my principles are such that I should keep going, but I have to put my wellbeing first.”

He said that both the media and political parties needed to address the issue of disability-related hostility.

He said: “There needs to be a culture shift within the media and the political sector in general, within political parties.”

And he pointed to the lack of people with a stammer on television, other than when they are “trying to overcome something, so we don’t have representation”.

Jane Powell, chief executive of the disabled people’s organisation STAMMA, which campaigns for people who stammer, said: “The consequences of mocking people because they talk differently can be, as in Mr Nelson’s case, career-changing. It is unacceptable.

“For this to happen in a political environment, and one which seems to encourage bullying and prize fluency over content, should shame all our politicians.”

She said Nelson had been subjected to unlawful harassment, and she added: “As a society we shouldn’t devalue what people say, because of how they say it.

“MPs need to model the behaviour that we want to see generally.”

She said STAMMA had set up an advocacy service to take on such complaints, to help cement its case that such behaviour was illegal.

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