This piece was first commissioned from me by a guy called Kurt April and printed in a South African journal he publishes early in 2007. I believe it remains as relevant today as it did then.
In the formal and popular history of the 19th century, Abe Lincoln is often credited with ending the fundamental inequality that was slavery in the US. Yet in the latter half of the 20th century, Martin Luther King struggled and died in pursuit of freedom for his brothers and sisters from that century’s mutation of plantation slavery into racial apartheid.
WLADYSLAW MEJKA argues that Lincoln’s legal remedy did not deliver equality, and King’s dream remains unrealised.
Our hesitant and uncertain opening of the gift of opportunity that is the 21st century finds us reaching for ever more legal remedies as we scrub away at the shame of inequality in all its forms. With these we believe we can create passports to the heart of society for those people and communities who have been systematically excluded and, sometimes brutally, marginalised from the choices and options many of us take for granted – a home, paid and satisfying work, healthcare based on need, and the opportunity to have our minds educated and our horizons of personal possibility widened.
Part of the inherent flaw in the use of legal remedy is to be found in the dynamic which occurs when those with power to legislate bestow carefully and complexly constructed rights on those people who are huddled at the margins of the society we create and recreate daily. The enactment of any law providing for equality and human rights is merely a formal announcement that a legislature wants to adjust the more overt and embarrassing imbalances in how society provides equality of opportunity for all. It represents a careful and calculated ceding of some of the power and privilege which our society elites accumulate as by-products of their class, profession, financial and material wealth, or inherited privilege. Offering to allow, however enthusiastically, a share of the opportunity cake cannot and will not create equality. Ending inequality, from whatever limiting restraints society imposes on people, is not realised when the barriers themselves are declared unlawful. It can only be realised when excluded people themselves refuse to accept there is a legal or moral basis for their continued exclusion and assert their equal right to live, work, and play in, as well as shape the heart of, our society.
We can no more assert that a person has equal rights and expect that to be the reality for them, than we can assert, no matter how loudly and with whatever passion, to those who ponder suicide that they have a right to life. These are not the only flaws in the legal remedy approach. Adding to an already crammed statute book actually triggers the creation of additional barriers to equality, as the various cadres of the elite use the opportunity of more regulation to create commissions which will publish guidance, codes with their own unique jargon, secondary level regulations, more guidance, performance frameworks, good practice notes, research and monitoring reports on how inequality must be removed – eventually, at some indeterminate point in the future, possibly, just maybe, but not today. Real ownership of the commissions remains firmly in the hands of government using patronage of appointment to ensure a malleable board of friends. Carefully controlled
Thus the transfer of power is weakened, the devolution of decision making delayed, and the distance which many must travel from the margins to the heart of our society is, in many cases, actually increased.
ILLUSION OF CASCADING EQUALITY
This grand and elaborate illusion of cascading equality continues to mesmerise as the ripples spread from the law makers, interpreters and enforcers, and laps up against the labyrinth of flood barriers – a.k.a. the voluntary sector, which prevent the equalisation of the water levels on which our societies float.
The western model of work on delivering equalities and human rights has mutated through various evolutionary cycles and social influences – religious missions, work houses and poor houses, charitable “good” works, the co-operative movement, nationalisation and, in the latter half of the 20th century, the arrival of the voluntary sector or, for that brief moment in time, the “third way”. Tellingly, one of the common ways this sector uses to describe itself and its role in our society is to talk of the number of people it employs and the value of resources it handles, often estimated at billions of pounds.
Encompassing everything from unpaid individuals working out of their spare room to multi-million pound businesses, often with a chain of fund-raising charity shops and a chief executive on a six-figure salary, the “third way” has forged a near-monopoly in working with people who are excluded, marginalised or simply forgotten by society. As with any other monopoly, this has come with a price tag of its own. The voluntary sector has created, and sustains to this day, a dependency culture between it and the very communities of people on whose behalf it exists. Some organisations have been around for over a century and plan, without any trace of irony, on being around for some time yet. Many have seen the original energy and righteous indignation which founded their organisation, morph into a mission which borrows heavily from 21st century business-speak – market share, cost-benefit analysis, balance sheets and bottom lines.
It can be no surprise that the priority for much of the sector is to stay “in business”. A common denominator for many organisations in the voluntary sector is in rescuing people once they have become trapped in the Kafkaesque nightmare that society becomes when any crisis can trigger an implosion of our fragile existences. Over time, voluntary sector organisations become expert in negotiating what can often seem a perverse maze of rights and entitlements, often understanding the application of the law better than those who originally created it. Some end up advising government, with secondments into the permanent civil service being so common as to be unremarkable.
Substantial amounts of government funding now goes direct into the voluntary sector, and the relationship between the two sectors is inescapably tainted and compromised. And what about the knowledge and expertise accumulated over decades of working at dismantling the exclusion experience by particular groups of people? Has it been cascaded down and out into society itself so that more and more people likely to be at risk can self-identify the beginning of a crisis and take avoiding action themselves, without the intervention and hand-holding of experts? Has there been robust and rigorous analysis of models, systems and methods of working at, say, eradicating the need for people to experience homelessness or end up sleeping rough on our streets?
No. For almost half a century in the UK, charities have created a growth industry in working with people who are homeless. Not one has debated, analysed and invited questioning about the real effectiveness of their approach, concluded that it was not good enough, that it was locked into a depressing cycle of repeat short-term fixes, and that the best solution was to wind up the business.
Not one has a measurable target or timeframe within which the exclusion or marginalisation must end or a new, more radical approach be encouraged to replace the bankrupt approach currently used. Homelessness in the UK, 50 years on, remains for many people a very real, personal, and deeply disturbing human indignity. The all too depressingly large number of women, men and children who are stripped of that dignity each day through being deprived of a home remains stubbornly indifferent to the last 50 years of effort and shows no sign of responding to another 50 years of similar effort. This wilful inability to recognise that the causes of inequality are continuing to defy the energy and efforts to deal with its outcomes, applies across the vast spectrum of the equality industry.
The industry is failing, on a daily basis, the very people it believes it exists to serve.
RADICAL REFORM NEEDED
If we are to break the dependency culture between people and the voluntary sector which “rescues” them from crisis, exclusion or marginalisation, radical reform of the sector’s ethos is required. If we are to build a society in which all have equal opportunity to realise their potential, access what they need, and contribute according to their ability, then the transfer of equality rights from the statute book and into a practical reality relevant to the everyday lives of citizens requires similar radical reform.
Instead of seeing people as being in crisis, excluded or marginalised, we need to reframe our perceptions of what these situations represent and so re-engineer the terms of engagement between agencies and people. The social model of disability offers a near perfect example of reframing, placing the emphasis on the cause of exclusion as being clearly located in the physical and attitudinal structures of society and not in the person with
disabilities.
Thus when we have a real awareness of daily living for a disabled person who uses a wheelchair to attain independent mobility, our perceptions of stepped access to a building change, and we see it not as an architectural design feature but as the barrier it is. Instead, with reframing we look to provide a physical alteration which enables all people to use the same physical point of access. When we come to design new buildings, we provide architects and engineers with client design briefs which ensure that showcase staircases exist only as faint, flickering, black-and-white movie memories in which Fred and Ginger go up the stair, just so that they can sing and then dance down again.
Extending reframing in this way beyond the social model of disability and into other areas of inequality will be directly challenging to the orthodoxy in the equality industry.
For example, reframing how we see a person as homeless or at risk of being homeless could help us devise radical new responses. Where organisations that lend capital to a person so that they can buy their home find the person can no longer meet the repayments, the traditional response is to repossess the home with the typical consequence that the person becomes homeless or roofless. It is not in society’s best interests that this happens and yet it does, with many voluntary sector agencies existing solely to pick up and patch up the pieces of those whose lives are fractured in this way. Reframing would find organisations that lend the money to home-buyers acknowledging that they too are stakeholders in our society and thus it is not in their interests to have people homeless, or to be a significant part of the causes of homelessness.
Having reframed the situation, what practical alternatives emerge? That the lender instead of automatically moving to repossess, has on its payroll its own expert staff with relevant experience and resources and who will work in partnership with the person, other housing providers and relevant agencies, to identify and secure alternative housing options and other support which will better meet the person’s changed circumstances. Along with other changes in attitude and practice, reframing the terms of engagement could bring about a dramatic and permanent reduction in the levels of homelessness. If that is what we want to achieve.
Another reframe has to be placed on how we transfer equality rights from the statute book into what becomes a relevant practical reality for people. Simply put, our current model is one where working with people who are excluded or marginalised is seen as best left to the voluntary sector experts and specialists. In social model of disability terms this is the equivalent of leaving the entrance steps in place and hiring a commissionaire to physically lift the disabled person and wheelchair in and out of the building. Fine for the employment prospects of weight-lifters and governors of California, but continued social exclusion of disabled people.
If we are to equalise the water levels on which our societies float, there are two other areas where we need to reframe what we do and why in making equality happen.
If we accept the voluntary sector is a vast reservoir of knowledge, expertise and understanding of the current systems and practices [including the law itself] in society which are barriers to equality, an immediate and priority objective has to be a large-scale and permanent programme of knowledge transfer from that sector directly to those individual people who will benefit from it. By distilling all that knowledge and experience down into a series of the kind of “how to ...” guides now ubiquitous in the use of IT software programmes, we can empower people to self-identify the barriers which they encounter and plot their own personal journey beyond those barriers and back into the heart of our society.
By providing people with these and other similar tools of self-determination, we avoid the fatal flaw of asserting a person’s equality on their behalf and instead allow them the oxygen with which to make their own declaration of independence.
In similar terms, we must reframe our expectations of how and why governments legislate on equality and human rights and so remove the inherent barriers which are a by-product of the processes used to reform and implement the law on equalities. There exists a presumption that the genesis of new law, its drafting and re-drafting in the various legislature contexts, underpinning it with explanatory regulations, and translating it into quasi-judicial guidance, has to be written for and can only be understood by a limited and exclusive audience. If we reframe to presume instead that any new law, particularly on equalities and human rights, should be accessible to and useable by the people it is intended to benefit, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that all future legislation should only take effect when plain language “how to” guides, providing contexts and illustrations relevant to non-experts and non-professionals, are universally accessible to all.
Finally, none of these or other potential reforms will assist or hasten our collective arrival at the desired destination unless all of us accept we have a personal, direct and constant responsibility for creating our society in which all have equality of opportunity. When you buy or rent your next home, will you check that it offers level access suitable for a disabled person who uses a wheelchair and use that information to decide whether it will indeed be your next home?
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