My new book shows exactly why we need the disability movement, says disabled author

A disabled journalist has said she hopes her new book detailing the history of disability activism will show other disabled people how they can fight back against the waves of attacks on their rights and support.

Rachel Charlton-Dailey’s book, Ramping Up Rights: An Unfinished History of British Disability Activism*, was published on Thursday (3 July), just a day after MPs voted on a watered-down bill that will cut billions of pounds a year from disability benefits.

As she says in its introduction, she hopes it will allow disabled people to see “where our movement came from, and why it’s still needed in the 2020s”.

Much of the book describes the non-violent direct action that parts of the movement have used since the late 1980s to draw attention to the struggle against oppression.

In an online interview on Friday with Steve Topple, a journalist with the radical working-class media organisation The Canary, Charlton-Dailey said she believed direct action by disabled people was still essential, at a time when their rights are so clearly under attack.

Partly, she said, that is because of the widespread misinformation about disabled benefit claimants being spread by the media and government.

She said: “More than ever, we do need the disruptive action, but we also need the explaining… we do just need to talk to people and say, ‘you know that’s not true, don’t you?’”

This, she said, is why the new anti-cuts campaigns like Taking the PIP, which she is heavily-involved with, are so important, because they show what is “actually happening”.

Both direct action and campaigns like Taking the PIP are necessary, she said.

“We shouldn’t be building one up more than the other… and we should be the ones who are doing the explaining side.”

Asked by Topple for her “standout” piece of direct action, she points to the successful campaign by the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN) to ensure that former Tory MP Robert Hayward – who had wrecked an attempt to introduce a disabled people’s civil rights bill, and then lost his seat in 1992 – lost a by-election in the safe Conservative seat of Christchurch, Dorset, in 1993.

DAN activists chased Hayward around Christchurch, ensuring that his would-be constituents knew exactly how he had sabotaged attempts to bring in anti-discrimination legislation.

Charlton-Dailey (pictured with her dog, Rusty) said: “They chased him around for three days on the campaign trail.

“I would love to do something like that.”

She said all her conversations locally – she lives in Sunderland – were about the cuts to disability benefits, and that it was clear MPs were not listening to their constituents.

She said: “We know just how fucking scared people are, and I think they don’t realise just how much this affects pretty much everybody.

“They want us scared and they want us confused because it means we are less likely to fight back, and we are more likely to accept the bullshit when we are scared and confused and we don’t know how to fight back.”

She said her book was “giving people the ways that they can fight back and the way that they can keep going”.

Asked by Disability News Service where she saw the movement in five years’ time, she said: “Hopefully, stronger and better. I want to hope that we will not need to be where we are now, that we won’t need to be constantly fighting.

“But I think that we’ll just be going from strength to strength and hopefully that we’ll be a lot more unified.

“I’m trying to hope that we don’t need to exist, but we will always have to exist.”

Asked by Topple what the movement could do better when it comes to disability activism, she said: “A lot of it is just inclusion… making sure people are included, making sure there is more provision for a lot of people who can’t go to protests every day.

“It’s making sure we keep up the fight, and keep the pressure on.

“Basically it is just getting involved, trying to get involved as much as you can, like joining your local groups… getting involved online as much as you can, sharing, just talking to people more than anything, and just making sure that we’re getting the truth out there.”

The book – described by Kamran Mallick, chief executive of Disability Rights UK, as “a call to arms”, and by the Guardian’s Frances Ryan as a “much needed take on disability history and our power in protest” – covers events up until March 2025.

She told Topple that so much had happened since March, when she had to stop updating the book ahead of its publication, that from that point until now “it feels like we’ve lived about 20 political cycles”.

Her one regret is over her criticism in the book that there had not been much online disability activism, because in the last few months that has changed.

She said: “Since then, we have had online protests, and we’ve had online communities spring up, out of necessity.

“They needed to spring up, and we needed new life in the movement.”

Since March, she said, all that has changed, with “some really incredible action from disabled people”, and she pointed particularly to the week of action from the new Crips Against Cuts.

Charlton-Dailey said there was “lots of soul-searching” before deciding to write the book, because she questioned whether she was the right person for the task, as she “didn’t really know” about the history of the movement until she started her research.

It was appearing at an event alongside Barbara Lisicki – DAN’s co-founder – that gave her the idea to write Ramping Up Rights.

She said: “I really wanted to take people on the journey and make it as accessible as possible, and make it about the people instead of just dates, dates, dates, dates, dates…”

The book is the first time someone has attempted this kind of history of the British disability rights movement and “bring all of it together”, she said.

As disabled doctor and author Grace Spence Green says, Charlton-Dailey’s book manages to trace “disability justice across generations, yet feels so current and pressing”, and is a “damning indictment of the state’s treatment of disabled people”, while also being “an ode to our creativity, perseverance and resilience”.

Ramping Up Rights: An Unfinished History of British Disability Activism, by Rachel Charlton-Dailey, published by Hurst

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