Sometimes being a disabled person trying to get around the country feels like a modern re-enactment of the Odyssey: just as you’ve slayed one foe (getting a taxi to stop for you), you come across another (an out-of-service lift at a train station). So really it came as no surprise that during the week that wheelchair users finally won the right to priority use of the wheelchair space on buses (duh), Southern Rail announced that we can no longer expect help onto their trains without booking assistance 24 hours in advance – and even then, it may or may not materialise.
This is an outrageous position. That Southern felt that this was an acceptable thing to announce speaks volumes about a company which routinely fails its customers. To deny your service in general, and then to a specific minority, surely goes beyond just bad PR. But more worryingly, the advance-notice requirement reflects a deep-seated prejudice held throughout society: an assumption that disabled people don’t lead real lives. This is the same assumption that ultimately led to Paralympian Anne Wafula Strike being forced to wet herself on a CrossCountry train earlier this month; and the same assumption that meant Doug Paulley had to go to court just to get bus drivers to put some effort into securing a disabled person’s right to ride.
According to this thinking, only someone who has a job, or children, or friends, or a plane to catch would need reliable and flexible transport – and obviously disabled people don’t have any of those things. So it doesn’t matter if a parent refuses to fold a buggy and so delays a wheelchair user – flying in the face both of common sense (a baby will be just fine out of its buggy; the same can’t be said of me and my chair) and common courtesy. Because we disabled people don’t really have anywhere we have to be. Not urgently. Except that, increasingly, we do have all the commitments and plans that go with living life – and more; if someone will be at your house for 15 minutes at 6pm to help you to the loo, you’d better not be late. The least the transport system, and public services in general, can do is give us the opportunity to get us home on time.
I am a 22-year-old freelance journalist. The idea that I always know what I’m doing, work-wise or socially, more than 24 hours in advance is laughable. Are my friends expected to just not invite me to last-minute plans? Am I supposed to turn down work I want and need because I can’t get to the meeting? Is this really how we think people should be asked to live their lives in 2017, because they happen to use a wheelchair? Surely not.
If you wanted to put a positive spin on a miserable situation, you could think of the Southern strike as a huge and covert social experiment designed to show commuters what it’s like to be disabled. While many now feel that disruption is routine, for disabled people it really is a matter of course. No access to trains (or, God forbid, the tube), replacement services that don’t live up to their name and journeys that take hours longer than they should are simply to be expected, and no Aslef-brokered deal is ever going to change that.
Eventually, able-bodied commuters will get their normal service back; disabled people never had one in the first place. It would be nice if, for once, this made the headline news too.
For such blatant discrimination through denial of services, Southern rail should feel ashamed. But the truth is that in all likelihood the sheer ludicrousness and unacceptability of their proposals has never even occurred to them. And that’s why we can’t let this kind of announcement go unchallenged. Nor can the wider lesson be ignored: disabled people have lives, let us live them.
