Disabled election candidates: The SNP’s Kim Marshall

Kim Marshall decided to stand in the general election because she has already spent most of her life speaking up for those who cannot speak up for themselves, and teaching others how to do that.

Although she knows her first duty, if elected, would be to the voters of Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, she also knows that disabled people need MPs who can put their case for them at Westminster.

She watched the 2010 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition’s “active attack on disabled people” and the “dismal” record of successive Conservative-led governments at Westminster who have made disabled people “scapegoats for austerity”.

But the incident that really politicised her took place, she says, on 26 October 2020, the day before her husband began chemotherapy.

It was, she says, “the day that the police knocked on the door to tell us that they’d found a body at our son’s flat.

“He’d taken his life. He’d had mental health issues, but no one knew they were that bad.

“I couldn’t stand by and let other parents go through what we went through.”

She says that so many of the circumstances around coping with death during the pandemic, with her husband being clinically extremely vulnerable to the virus – they were living in Hertfordshire at the time – had made that time difficult.

But there were two “really pernicious things” that made it worse: a law that allows a landlord to enforce the rent on a property after the tenant has died, and the coroner taking three years to reach a verdict.

She also points to the apparent failure to offer her son – who lived in Cheshire – the treatment he needed before his death.

Asked to choose three policies that she believes would improve the lives of disabled people, Marshall says she would scrap benefit sanctions for all disabled people; stop service-providers “paying lip service” to their legal duties to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people; and incorporate the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities into UK law.

She says the SNP is a better prospect for disabled people than other parties because her party has “walked the walk” in Scotland.

She highlights the Scottish government’s introduction of adult disability payment to replace personal independence payment, where claimants “are treated with dignity and respect rather than being set up to fail”.

She also points to Scotland’s introduction of free personal care; higher pay for care workers; and funding from the Scottish government to mitigate the impact of the “iniquitous” bedroom tax, which “disproportionately affects disabled people”.

And she points to its different approach to mental health than in England.

“The Tories don’t understand that mental health issues can be incredibly debilitating,” she says.

“Their manifesto suggests that forcing people into the workforce is the answer while ignoring that a toxic workplace could have been the problem.

“The Labour manifesto appears to be taking the same approach: work solves everything. It doesn’t.”

Marshall (pictured) had an unhappy childhood in England, with an abusive, alcoholic father and her parents divorcing when she was seven.

She remembers rarely wearing anything but second-hand clothes, being bullied at school because her mum could not afford to buy her both a blazer and a coat, and having to fight her mum “tooth and claw to be able to go to university, as it wasn’t for people like us”.

After gaining a masters in law, she spent most of her career teaching law in England and Scotland, eventually being made redundant because of her employer’s failure to make reasonable adjustments for her “multiplicity of hidden disabilities”, before working as a policy officer and a manager at the Ministry of Justice in London.

She originally joined the SNP as a member of its London branch “after despairing of the chaos of politics in England and the stupidity of Brexit” and is now studying for a PhD at the University of Glasgow, researching the effectiveness of disability discrimination law.

She says she has “always been a political animal” and for years has been “quietly, subversively teaching law to show that it could change lives”.

As an expert in disability discrimination law, she has seen how the Disability Discrimination Act and the Equality Act failed to really improve the lives of disabled people, and after 2010 “things actually got much worse”.

The last Labour government’s decision to set up the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which took over the functions of the old Disability Rights Commission in 2007, was also “a retrograde step”.

“Previously we’d had a very distinct voice and a positive strategy to get legal precedents. That just seemed to evaporate with the EHRC,” she says.

“The EHRC itself doesn’t seem to understand that disability is different.”

She had tried before to win selection to stand at a general election – for Labour – but was rejected after being told she failed to maintain enough eye contact, something she finds incredibly difficult because she is neurodivergent.

Marshall says that life for disabled people today, at least in England, is “much worse” than it was in 2010, as they are “demonised, humiliated, blamed for the failing of the economy”.

She says: “I went to the Paralympics in 2012 and it was wonderful. I thought, ‘We get it. Things will change for the better.’

“But they haven’t. And it’s why people like me are standing. To make a difference.”

*This is part of a pre-election series of articles that will give some of the disabled people standing as candidates at the general election a chance to describe why they wanted to stand, how they became politicised, and the kind of barriers they have faced as disabled people. The aim is to raise the profile of some of the disabled people seeking elected office. DNS has analysed party manifesto commitments separately

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