Braille
Monitor February
2007
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Lord Low of Dalston's Maiden Speech
by
Lord Colin Low
From the Editor: During the 1977-78 academic year the Pierce family
lived in London, England. I joined the London Branch of the National Federation
of the Blind of the United Kingdom and faithfully attended its meetings, even
venturing off to Eastborn for the NFB�s annual conference. I met a number of
impressive people during that year, but one of the most formidable was a young
professor at Leeds University, whose career I have watched with interest through
the years since. His name was Colin Low, and in 2000 he was elected to chair
the Royal National Institute of the Blind. Last July he was made a Life Peer,
which was a signal honor for Lord Low personally and for the RNIB as a whole.
On November 21, 2006, Lord Low rose in the House of Lords to make his maiden
speech. At President Maurer�s request, Lord Low�s staff sent us a copy of that
speech, which we are pleased to publish. Here it is:
My Lords,
when the other day I climbed up to the back of the Chamber, the Noble Baroness
Lady Howe commented that I was very brave to climb up all those steps. "Not
half as brave as I'll need to be to open my mouth," I replied. But my apprehension
is tempered by my recollection of the warm and friendly welcome I have received
from all your Lordships from the moment I entered the House--indeed from before
I entered the House--and I hope I may be able to count on your continued understanding
for at least a few minutes longer. And before I go any further, I should like
to place on record my appreciation for all the help and support I have received,
both from your Lordships and from the staff of the House, which persuades me
that there are few problems of access which will not be overcome. In particular,
I thank the Noble Lord, Lord Morris of Manchester, and the Noble Baroness, Lady
Warnock, who supported me at my introduction into the House on 11 July and are
both here today; the Noble Lord, Lord Williamson of Horton, convenor of the
cross-bench peers; and all those Noble Lords who have been kind enough to take
the time and trouble to guide me through your Lordships' proceedings. In parentheses
I might say that, if I had just one message I could give sighted people about
the blind, it would be that blind people can manage stairs.
My Lords,
though hailing originally from Scotland, where I spent the early part of my
life, I have been exiled in England for the last forty years, the last sixteen
of them in Dalston, whence I have taken my title. Dalston is in Hackney, which
was recently voted the worst place to live in England, but never so bad that
the London Borough of Hackney is incapable of making it worse, with the enthusiastic
encouragement of the Mayor of London, the Greater London Authority, the London
Development Agency, and the Department for Communities and Local Government.
I think I might be thought to be verging on the controversial were I to proceed
much further down this track, but I have detected some interest amongst your
Lordships in issues of planning and housing in London, and so I hope we may
have an opportunity of discussing them further before too long.
My appointment
has rightly been described as a "singular honor," and of this I am
deeply conscious. But what has given me greatest pleasure is the way so many
people have seen it as recognition not just for me, but of blind and disabled
people generally. One person went so far as to say that it was "a great
honor for every blind person in the world." However that may be, I hope
I may add a little to the diversity of your Lordships' House.
In actual
fact, so far as concerns me, the honor is not quite singular. There has been
some speculation to the effect that I am the first blind person to sit in your
Lordships' House, but this is not the case. The late Lord Kenswood, an early
president of the National Federation of the Blind, and the late Lord Fraser
of Lonsdale, the distinguished chairman of St. Dunstan's for many years and
founder of Talking Books, who both had wide-ranging public careers, both sat
in this place within living memory--and with the aid of the History of Parliament
Trust I have been able to trace four more blind peers going back to medieval
times, and no one is able to say whether there might not be more. There have
of course been other notable blind people who have occupied prominent positions
in public life. We know this in our own day from the remarkable example of David
Blunkett, whom I salute, but I like also to think of Henry Fawcett, perhaps
because he was MP for Hackney for the last ten years of his life, who, as postmaster-general,
introduced the parcel post in the 1880s.
The blind
have a long tradition of independence and activism in pursuit of better conditions.
The National League of the Blind, a trade union representing blind people in
sheltered employment, were ahead of their time in organizing a march from the
north of England to London in 1920, which was instrumental in securing the Blind
Persons Act of that year. Things have obviously improved for blind people since
then in a number of ways, but the fact that some people are apparently undaunted
by blindness should not be allowed to disguise the fact that many are severely
set back by it and remain in a condition of considerable deprivation, isolation,
and social exclusion. Indeed it sometimes seems as though the conspicuous success
of some highly visible blind people in overcoming their disability can lead
to the deleterious impact of blindness on a person's life being down-played
in public consciousness and official thinking. But this takes no account of
the costs entailed or the toll taken in overcoming the difficulties, or the
insuperable obstacles they present for the much larger number of less visible
people who are not so successful in overcoming them.
There is a
paradox here: 86 percent of people questioned in a recent survey said that sight
was the sense they most feared losing. Yet much research confirms that, in public
consciousness, disability is largely conceived of in terms of physical disability,
especially that which affects mobility. This probably has to do with the fact
that, though feared in the abstract, sight loss is so grossly underestimated
as a likely contingency as not properly to count as a disability at all. In
the same survey more than half of those questioned estimated their chances of
becoming blind as less than one in a thousand, whereas for the population as
a whole they are more like one in sixty--one in twelve for those over sixty,
and one in six for those over seventy-five. It would be surprising then if something
of this did not translate into official policy and practice.
There are
two general points to be made here. First, though I have been a campaigner for
inclusion and the mainstream provision of services all my life, we have to recognize
that one size does not necessarily fit all. The loudest advocates of mainstream
provision are usually the vocal and articulate elite who can cope best with
it. We need a continuum of provision, including some specialist provision, especially
in education and employment opportunities, attuned to the diverse needs of those
who find disability more debilitating.
Second, your
Lordships may wonder why I have spoken so much about blindness and not about
disability. The blind do have some important interests in common with other
disabled people--to be included in society, not to be discriminated against,
and to be involved in shaping their own destiny--but they also have important
needs which are peculiar to the condition of blindness--notably the need for
information in a nonvisual form and for an environment largely designed for
those who can see to be mediated for those who cannot. This is no small requirement
considering how critical the sense of sight is to man's interaction with the
natural world and the world he has constructed. Couching everything in terms
of disability has led to the central importance of sight being obscured in recent
decades so that there is now a pressing need for blindness to be raised higher
up the political and social agenda.
My Lords,
blindness is one of the severest disabilities. Yet under the Fair Access to
Care Services framework of eligibility for social services, the needs to which
it gives rise are rated only moderate to low. This effectively means that you
get no service. Though research has shown that visually impaired people have
greater difficulty with independent mobility than disabled people generally,
they still only qualify for the lower rate of the mobility component of Disability
Living Allowance. Failure to bear the needs of the blind in mind reaches farcical
proportions when we learn that they are now planning to lower the pavements
and remove the barriers at traffic hot spots so that motorists and pedestrians
will be more aware of one another and be able to demonstrate this awareness
by means of eye contact.
Technology
is a great force for inclusion, and we can now access much information which
was formerly a closed book. But if the needs of the blind are not kept in mind
when designing new devices, it can be just as great a force for exclusion. Try
operating an iPod, a touchscreen, or a digital radio with your eyes closed.
Most worrying of all, unless someone comes up with an electronic program guide
which is accessible PDQ, digital switch-over is going to mean digital switch-off
so far as visually impaired people are concerned.
My Lords,
90 percent of employers say that it would be difficult or impossible to employ
someone with a visual impairment. As a result, scarcely more than a third of
working age are in work. The proposals to move people off welfare and into work
referred to in the Gracious Speech are thus very welcome. Blind people do not
want to be written off on welfare if there is a realistic prospect of their
being found work. But the Pathways to Work pilots have not delivered for the
visually impaired. The fact, which emerged in committee in another place, that
the £360 million allocated for roll-out represents a real-terms cut of
40 percent does not inspire confidence. But we want roll-out to work and will
be looking to the Government to deliver on its promises.
When I began
my law studies over forty years ago, someone said that, where judges had to
find a solution for every difficulty, academics would find a difficulty for
every solution. My Lords, it will be my aim in this House to attempt to find
solutions rather than difficulties.
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