Beresford’s book shows how disability movement can be part of ‘antidote’ to neoliberalism

A new book by a leading disabled academic-activist explores how people-powered movements – including the disability movement – can end the dominance of the “man-made disaster” that is neoliberalism.

Professor Peter Beresford (pictured) has been at the heart of the movement and wider battles for rights for more than 30 years, and his new book – The Antidote – charts how people-powered movements could offer an “effective route” to ending the global dominance of an ideology that has championed deregulation and the slashing of state support.

His book, published last week, explains how these movements can provide an antidote to the “global catastrophe” that is neoliberalism, which has brought staggering profits for a tiny minority, and, for others, “insecurity, threat and disaster”, including isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental crisis.

The Antidote makes a case for a new politics based on principles such as inclusion, support for user-led organisations, sustainability, empowerment and valuing lived experience.

And it includes an examination of how the national disabled people’s organisation he co-chairs, Shaping Our Lives, found ways to address the barriers to communication that can prevent disempowered groups from challenging neoliberalism.

It also hears from Dr Sally Witcher, former chief executive of Inclusion Scotland and founder of the social enterprise Inclusive New Normal, about how she witnessed a new grassroots community-led movement spring up among those who are clinically at very high risk from COVID-19, or who have long Covid.

Beresford told Disability News Service: “As the book highlights, disabled people long facing many routine exclusions themselves have organised to lead the struggle for physical, cultural, communication and digital access and equality which has benefited many other groups.

“They saw large-scale reforms they’d been told weren’t possible, for example, for home and distanced working, implemented wholesale post-Covid.

“Yet they’ve also increasingly been cast in the role of benefit cheats by neoliberal politics and ideology in its efforts to cut public services and divide and rule.

“There’s a powerful message here to highlight minorities within minorities and build equal alliances, seeing disabled women lacking access to anti-domestic violence provision and disabled gypsies, Roma and travellers (GRT) facing additional barriers because of their community’s longstanding fears of officialdom.”

The book builds a case for the disabled people’s movement to work with other oppressed groups by gaining an understanding of the links between their “different experience and identities rather than just emphasising the differences”.

Beresford says the “breakthrough issue” is to “recognise our common oppression and develop lines of action that build on this”.

He says in the book: “The lone teenage mother and refugee, the homeless person oppressed by the welfare benefits system and the trans person struggling to get through the bureaucratised gender reassignment process may not only be one and the same person, but they’re also people with a crucial thing in common – and that’s the discrimination they face under neoliberalism.”

He says that movements that unite with each other in a “genuine and transparent” way “are likely to exert much more strength and solidarity than those that continue to plough a lone furrow”.

Among those praising his book, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell says it “explains how personal politics and new social movements forge human connections that can be harnessed to transform society and shape a future beyond neoliberalism”.

The Antidote: How People-Powered Movements Can Renew Politics, Policy and Practice, by Peter Beresford, is published by Policy Press

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