Disabled People

Lord Wasserman Excerpts

Thursday 5th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fellowes of West Stafford]

My Lords, I have stood before many different audiences in my life, but few as impressive or as daunting as your Lordships. Indeed, I am every day made more aware of the wealth of knowledge and experience by which I am surrounded on every side, making me both humble to have been included in your Lordships’ company and amazed by the support that I have received since my arrival.

I must first thank my sponsors, my noble friends, Lord Northbrook and Lord Marland, my patient mentor, my noble friend Lady Seccombe, and my Whip, my noble friend Lady Rawlings, both of whom have taken so much time and care to lead me through the steps of the dance. Of course, like all of us, I am indebted to the staff who are an outstanding example in their dedication to their tasks. I must especially remember Mrs Banks, who made it her business to ensure that my introduction ran smoothly. It will always remain one of the great days of my life.

Like many Members of your Lordships’ House, I have come to you by a circuitous route, although I was, I suspect, originally destined for a less bumpy and varied journey than the one I have travelled. My upbringing was a traditional one, largely dictated by my dear father who was as straight as a ruled line and who expected, after Ampleforth and Cambridge, that I would seek my goals in the predictable arenas of diplomacy or the City. Instead, for reasons now lost to me, I opted for the hurly burly of show business, passing through drama school and the now extinct system of repertory theatre before coming to London in a comedy, “A Touch of Spring”—a chance that I was given because I was the only actor they could find who was stupid enough to fall down a staircase eight times a week.

However, my arrival in the industry was not well timed. This was the early 1970s, a period of intense political activity, and both my perceived circumstance and my unfashionable allegiance to the Tories rendered me quite wrong for the prevailing zeitgeist. Before very long, I had been told I need not even try to audition for the RSC; I was deselected from a television show, in which I had been cast, because the star would not work with a Conservative; and when I was requested by the director of a restoration revival at the National Theatre, the casting director told me herself this would not happen because my sort of actor was, “better off on the other side of the river”—in other words, in the less intellectually challenging West End. There is a kind of hopelessness when faced with this sort of thing which I would like to think none of your Lordships has encountered, but I know full well that many of you have. It is distressing because it is invariably denied and consequently almost impossible to fight.

Eventually, despairing of my chances here, in the 1980s I left for Los Angeles. Since my intention was to become a film star, I cannot pretend the move was a succès fou, my highest point being the day when I came second to replace the dwarf on “Fantasy Island”, but it was a useful adventure all the same and I came home reinvigorated to find that both the mood in the business and I, myself, had changed. I married and had in fact achieved a respectable acting career and had begun to write when Robert Altman approached me to work on a version of the country house murder mystery. This was in every sense my lucky break, and I was fortunate in being old enough, at 50, to recognise it. When “Gosford Park” was released, I won the Oscar for Best Screenplay, an experience I can heartily recommend, and it led to many opportunities for which I am most grateful.

However, my early years in the business have never left me. This is not a complaint. Indeed, I am sure that the bursting of my bubble of self-confidence was a powerful spur. Like the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass, I had to run twice as fast to stay in the same place, and it served me well. Nevertheless, I have experienced the strangeness of being disliked not for who but for what I am. It is strange, as too many of you will recognise, to be dismissed—or even just assessed—by people who do not take the trouble to know you at all. It has left me with a lasting distaste for generalisations when it comes to people. I do not just mean racist views or religious intolerance, but any opinion about a nationality or an age group, a class, or the members of a club or political party. Even in the pseudo-tribute of praising this group for its rhythm, or that one for its handling of money, there is a patronising distance, a we-they attitude that is never helpful.

Possibly no group suffers more from a sometimes benevolent but still ignorant tendency to lump them all together than disabled people. Disablement, whether severe or, as in the case of the majority, something that with proper understanding and training is perfectly compatible with a full and fulfilled life, is no guide whatever to the personality or potential of the sufferer.

I should here declare an interest. For some years, one of my hats has been as chairman of the RNIB Talking Books appeal, a cause that embraces both my enthusiasm for literacy in all its forms, as well as for the empowerment of the disabled—in this case the blind. The organisation is pleasingly non-political—or cross-political. I succeeded the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, and we both consecutively served under the benign chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Low, who has initiated this discussion, today. Above all, I am an admirer of the RNIB’s conviction that blind people should strive for autonomy. In our recording studios in Camden Town, several of the technicians are themselves blind—a living demonstration that disability need not be an embargo to an interesting career, requiring specialist knowledge and highly developed skills.

Surely this must be the guiding principle of any government support for the disabled: a permanent and funded emphasis on helping them take their place in the workforce and in the world. For this reason, and in the mildest possible maiden speech sort of way—and while I am fully aware of the need for cuts at a time when our debts have spiralled not just beyond control but almost beyond comprehension—I would yet argue, like the noble Lord, Lord Low, that, in the coming changes, the employment and support allowance in particular should be as strongly defended as is compatible with the coalition's plans.

There is a suggestion that one year's assistance to find work is to be considered enough, the period to include the 13 weeks required by the initial assessment. However, there is such a thing as a false economy and, as my late mother used to say, “sometimes it's cheaper to pay”. Just as with health spending on blind people, there is no question that money spent on sight loss, where many conditions are now curable, will always cost the country less than supporting the sufferer who could have been cured and is not. Similarly, I remind the powers that if there could be some leeway in the area of training, the resulting gainful employment of disabled candidates would save the state a fortune.

My years at the RNIB and working with other charities, not least Changing Faces, an organisation that deals with shockingly severe facial disfigurement, have convinced me that the core philosophy when dealing with all forms of disablement must be inclusion. These are the days of the big society, and that must mean concentrating on the common ground that binds us all. Above all, it means talking to disabled people in the first person, and not about them in the third.

We hear a lot on the subject of human rights, and I know that I must avoid contention, but I am confident that there is one human right at least that we would all of us, on every side, defend. That is the right to dream. Disabled people must be allowed their dreams of how they would spend their lives, as well as a reasonable chance to achieve them. If their ambitions are unlikely, so what? So were mine, and they all came to pass. However, the dreams of most of our disabled community are not unlikely; they are quite realistic, if they can only persuade our society to treat them as fully paid-up members of it.