Many people with disabilities are disenfranchised completely from voting in Europe, but physical barriers are not the only ones preventing them from taking a more active role in politics. There is still a lot to do to encourage political participation and proper representation of this minority group.

Ricardo Silvestre (Movimento Liberal Social) is joined by Alva Finn, the Executive Director of ELF Secretariat, and Baroness Sal Brinton, British MP for the Liberal Democrats and Vice-President of the ALDE Party. Alva leads the conversation with MP Sal on how to drive cultural change regarding the acceptance of politicians with disabilities and how political parties can support minority groups in political participation. 

This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with Movimento Liberal Social and Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.

Play the episode on Spotify or SoundCloud, or read the full transcript below.

You can find Sal on X/Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Follow Lib-Dems here. And to know more about Steve Darling guide dog, Jennie, you can read about it here, and follow Jennie on X/Twitter,and MP Steve here.

Transcript

Ricardo Silvestre: Hello. Hope you’re doing very well and thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Continuing our first episodes of the year with some of our most influential guests. It is my immense pleasure to not be the host of today’s episode, but to leave that position for Alva Finn, the Executive Director of the European Liberal Forum. She will be talking with Baroness Sal Brinton. She’s an MP for the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords and also Vice President of the ALDE Party. Alva is the right person to lead this conversation, as she has and as you will listen to an extensive work done in the area of activism for political inclusion and Sal Brinton has a unique perspective on what is needed to change the culture and the infrastructure and also the resilience of the people with disabilities to have a larger participation in the political process.

Sal will also tell us some of the good examples by our friends from the Liberal Democrats, but also we’ll talk about organisations like the ALDE Party and the European Liberal Forum. I will also like to add that this conversation was recorded at the ALDE Party Congress in Portugal. And also a big thanks to the ALDE Party Secretariat for helping him make it happen. And after our main conversation, please state her a little more about what was the path that Sal took to the point that we had her on the podcast. But now, with no further ado, it is my immense privilege to bring you Alva Finn and Baroness Sal Brinton.

I’m here with Sal Brinton and Alva Finn. Ladies, thank you so much for coming to the podcast.

Alva Finn: Thank you so much, Ricardo.

Sal Brinton: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Ricardo Silvestre: We are at the closing day of the Alde Party Congress in Portugal in lovely Estoril. And by the way, Sal, congratulations for being re-elected as Vice President of the ALDE Party. We’re very happy.

Sal Brinton: Thank you.

Ricardo Silvestre: So this is going to be a three people podcast today, but I’m very happy to say that the Executive Director of ELF Secretariat is going to take over my place today. So I handsomely pay her to do this. So comfortable. So, Alva, take it away.

Alva Finn: Thank you so much, Ricardo. And the reason why I am taking over as host today is because I have a background in the disability movement. So yeah, I used to be a policy manager at Mental Health Europe. I was also the Secretary General of Social Platform, which is the largest equality network in Europe. And we had members from, for example, European Disability Forum. I’ve also worked a lot on legal capacity, which affects many people’s right to vote. I would say that it’s a lot of people with disabilities are disenfranchised completely from voting in Europe. So that’s one thing that we need to change. And yeah, I was really happy when Sal agreed during her busy schedule of the Congress, particularly because it was an electoral campaign, to do this podcast and to shed light on the difficulties of political engagement of people with disabilities from a liberal perspective.

She also co-hosted one of the sessions that we had yesterday with the Rainbow Platform. So shout out to the Rainbow Platform, because that’s Alde, Elf and some of the other political parties were working together to create more diversity in general in politics. I think there’s a lot of focus on gender equality in politics at the moment, but we also need people with disabilities to be represented in political parties, to be members of political parties, to vote for liberals.

With that introduction, I’d love to hand it over to Sal. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about how we define people with disabilities and what types of disabilities there are for people who might not know that much about it. There’s a big diversity of disabilities and what it means to you as well to be a person with a disability in politics.

Sal Brinton: Yes, thank you very much. And actually, it’s pretty simple. First of all, there are people with visible disabilities. I’m one of those. I’m a wheelchair user, and before I used a wheelchair, most of the time I use the stick for four or five years. I have colleagues who are visually impaired, hearing impaired, and it becomes pretty apparent pretty quickly what their disability is. There is a large group of people with invisible disabilities that still mean that they have barriers to being able to get involved in politics and get elected. I was working with a person with a very serious stammer the other day who has to speak for a living, not into politics. But because of that stammer and because he speaks slowly, it was becoming a barrier to him getting the jobs that he wanted to do. So that’s an invisible disability.

The barriers that people face are, first of all, society’s attitude to disabled people, and that is just assumptions, because they see you in a wheelchair. I remember at Heathrow some years ago, two members of staff and one just brought me to the desk and the other one said over my head to her, does this lady need taking to the departure gate? And fantastic response from the other lady. Why don’t you ask her? But the assumption was that because I was in a wheelchair, I had no brain. And I’m afraid that is commonplace for many people with disabilities. There are always assumptions.

So the political barriers are that actually, in some places it’s still almost impossible, if not impossible, to vote, or the barriers to getting your vote cast. So my mother’s blind and when she goes to the polling station, she has to get the polling clerk to read out the ballot paper to her because they don’t have a facility for her to be able to read it. It’s just…that’s wrong, because it also means that she has to tell him in the hearing of others how she’s going to vote. Now, that’s a barrier to free voting.

The other key thing is how we get people with disabilities elected. But first of all, I’m just going to say, why is that important? It’s important because if we don’t have disability disabled people in our councils, in our regional councils, in our parliaments, their voice will not be heard. And actually, we need to make sure we can overcome those barriers. And a lot of them are not electoral. It’s about making sure that people in wheelchairs can get out to do a canvassing session and there are ways of making it happen. It’s making sure that they can get into meetings. If a meeting room has a step to get in, I’m immediately excluded. It’s a very practical approach to making sure that we overcome those. I have to say, most of the disabled politicians I know are amazing men and women who have overcome these barriers through absolute determination and grit, but far too many people, it is just too much for them to be able to overcome them. And that’s a problem for our democracy

Alva Finn: Thanks for also sharing your personal experience. It shouldn’t always be up to people with disabilities to model certain behaviours. And, yeah, I think it’s still important. And I’m glad that you agreed to talk to us about it. I don’t see many people with, you know, more psychosocial or mental disabilities, unfortunately, in politics or open about it. I recently was very happy to see the first person with down syndrome elected to parliament in the world. I think that is breaking down barriers. I wanted to ask you a little bit about the disability gap in politics. How do you feel about it? Do you think we’re making progress? I mean, as I said, I think we’re making progress on things like the gender gap, but the disability gap. I think, to me, it’s still a real taboo.

You’re right. That people make weird assumptions about people with disabilities, that they’re just not capable. But actually, some people with disabilities are more capable because they have to navigate the world that is not really made for them and how they live. So, I think sometimes I’m so inspired by people with disabilities who get into politics because it’s not. You’re a woman and a person with a disability, so you’re working, I mean, many, many, many more times harder than a lot of politicians that I know. So, please.

Sal Brinton: The disability gap is really quite frightening. The global figures for disability is that one in five people are likely to have some sort of disability. Doesn’t matter whether it’s physical, whether it’s mental, whether it’s intellectual. However, not all of those people will need much help. They may face some barriers, but not much. In my parliament, we have a ridiculously small number of people with disabilities. I mean, I think out of 650, the new parliament has the highest number ever, but it’s way less than 10%. Way less than 10%. And visual ones, people who are visibly disabled, even fewer. And that is a problem. So the disability gap and how do you model what you need to provide for disabled people if you don’t understand it? It’s a very famous saying in the disabled activity world. We say nothing about us without us. The problem is our parliaments across the world, we are not present. We’re certainly not present in enough numbers. So the gap needs to be reduced.

And that puts a burden on us as liberal parties to think how we overcome it. Real problem here. We think we should select people on merit, and too often merit is judged by how we view other politicians who are able bodied. So the stammerer I referred to earlier, actually, it’s very rare for someone with a stammer to become an elected politician. Famously, Andrew Duff was an MEP for many years and he has a stammer and he battled to be able to do it because the people who were voting for him thought he couldn’t do the job properly. That is the sort of disability gap that we need to overcome.

Alva Finn: Tell us a little bit more about what you think can be done. I mean, we talked about this a little bit yesterday, but even for political parties, some of them are not in buildings that are accessible and therefore they cannot have staff that have disabilities working for them. I am proud to say that ALDE and Elf are in a building that is accessible fully. So, that’s just one example and it’s so simple. Some European countries, cities don’t have enforceable building accessibility requirements, so maybe they’re only on new builds, not on old builds. Brussels is notoriously one of the least accessible, the least accessible cities in Europe, and yet is the host to the European institutions.

When I was working with the disability movement, worked with many colleagues who were wheelchair users, and actually they still have a big protest called the Freedom Drive, where. And I applaud them because. Because they come from all over Europe in wheelchairs, but it’s difficult for them. And that is an example of how their political participation, but also their right to assembly is limited. So they’ve made it work, and I think that’s very important. The European Parliament had a briefing on political participation of people with disabilities in the EU. So there are things that can be done from the EU side. But, yeah, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what the Liberal Democrats have done and anything else that you’ve learned from our other sister parties within the ALDE configuration.

Sal Brinton: Just before I start on that, I just want to say the right to protest is a real problem. You won’t be surprised to learn, as a LibDem, I am passionately pro EU and was very, very anti Brexit. But I couldn’t go on the full length of our marches because the battery on my wheelchair would run out. That’s the sort of thing that people never think about. So I used to have to join it halfway through to be able to get to the end where the speeches were happening. That’s the sort of barrier that people who aren’t disabled just have no concept of at all until they know somebody with a disability, which is why we need more people there.

In 2010, I did a study for the LibDems on the four underrepresented groups in Parliament, which are women, ethnic minorities, LGBT and disabled people. And of those groups, under our UK legislation, it’s possible to have all women shortlists and all disabled shortlist, but you can also reserve places on a shortlist for any of those four groupings. And the LibDems took the view that for every winnable seat, we would ensure that there was a place for people from those four underrepresented groups on a short list for any winnable seat in the country. And that’s one of the reasons that we now have nearly 50% women MPs in parliament. It’s taken a while to come through, but the culture has changed because, as people have understood, women make really good MPs make really good shadow cabinet ministers. In the case of the Lib Dems, actually, the mindset is, oh, gosh, competent woman there. She’s just like our deputy leader, Daisy Cooper. And the job is done.

We have had disabled only shortlists and we have had places reserved for people with disabilities. And I have to tell you that this time in our Parliament, we have seven people with disabilities in our group, some visible, some invisible. And that’s an enormous improvement. It’s not much by the standards that we need, but it really is an enormous improvement because you can do two things. You can make arrangements to make sure that they are present, as in the candidates from these underrepresented groups. So for disabled people, they’ll get onto a shortlist and they can then campaign.

But the big issue is cultural, because it is still, for us, the members who vote from that shortlist. And overcoming that barrier is still a problem. I have a very dear friend who has been the chief executive of five national disability charities who uses an interpreter because he’s profoundly deaf. He has never been selected for a winnable seat because our internal electorate thinks that the public won’t think he can communicate. That is a major barrier and we need to sort it out. So the work continues, but the cultural change has already begun, certainly with women. And on the others, the party is still working.

Alva Finn: And that’s seven MPs with a disability, out of how many? 72. Yes. Because you recently had a very good election in the UK, where you’re now the third biggest party, and a historic win, actually, for the LibDems. Right.

Sal Brinton: Biggest number of MPs over 100 years.

Alva Finn: And that’s with…you had many, obviously, MPs or potential MPs with disabilities running, and they were all, or many of them were elected, which shows that they can win.

Sal Brinton: Absolutely, yeah.

Alva Finn: And that’s the thing to underline. Right. Because I think when you start to do it first, people think, and I still hear it, when a woman, for example, in the Alliance of Her or whatever, is, oh, we ran a woman candidate and it didn’t work. Well, you don’t say that about the men who aren’t elected. No, they’re just the normal candidate, you know, so there is a. There’s always a risk that you would say that about, oh, we ran a person with a disability, whatever the disability, and they weren’t elected, so we’re not going to do that again, you know. But you’ve proven that they. They are electable, of course, and that if you just give Them the chance people might be further ahead than the party thinks.

Sal Brinton: We have a new blind MP called Steve Darling, who was council leader in Torbay in the west country of England. When he came up to Parliament, he brought his wonderful guide dog, Jenny. Jenny has her own social media page and she gets more follows on Twitter than the MP. Twitter/X, I should say. And she is actually also helping to promote how disabled people are able to do their jobs. We all love Jenny, but it’s Steve who stands up and speaks and he is a brilliant MP.

Alva Finn: Yeah. And also one thing before I ask you the last question: we all need support, actually. Everyone needs support at some times in their life and actually we should normalise care and support in politics, because politics can be very cutthroat. You have to make tough decisions sometimes you got to put yourself out there in order to get where you want to go, and other people will have to come off lists for you to get there. But if we also look at it in a care and support way, we can support people in this difficult environment. And I just don’t think that we talk about that enough, including the resilience that you need to be a politician and not even if you are a woman politician with a disability, trying to navigate what is quite a difficult environment. So just wanted to say that everybody needs more care and support, I think, in politics.

Sal Brinton: Can I just add one thing? The resilience issue. If you have a disability and you are an elected politician, you need to be able to champion the barriers as well as overcoming the barriers. I spend my life on social media talking about my journeys being a disaster, whether they’re by bus, by rail or by air. And that is actually one of the ways we can make things better for the wider public. Every minister who reads about me being left off a train says, that’s a dreadful story. And then that’s the only way we can make things change. So it’s actually also about campaigning for the barriers that still remain.

Alva Finn: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I agree. And so, yeah, that brings me to the last point about how people can get involved now that they’ve heard about this. What can they do to support people with disabilities in politics or engaging in any type of political activity or political life? You know, protesting, becoming a member, voting, that kind of thing.

Sal Brinton: Well, I think most of our member parties have a disability organisation who will be made up both of members with disabilities, but also allies and supporters. It’s certainly worth getting in touch with them and it’s worth asking your local party what they do to help people with disabilities, because actually if they know there is someone with a wheelchair who wants to come to meetings, they might be able to arrange meetings in a place that doesn’t have a step. The most important thing is to get going and start to get involved. ALDE is taking a particular interest now, as is ELF, in disability issues. So I hope we will be able to model that and certainly provide support for local member parties across Europe who want to do more. But the most important thing is disabled politicians have to be determined to get there.

But by golly, once they’re there, they’re extremely effective. If you are disabled and you are listening to this, this is my call to you to get involved. You don’t need to go straight for something that worries you. Get involved, become an activist, start to look for things to get involved with, see if you like it. And in doing that, you’ll start to overcome the mental barriers that we all face about. No one will vote for somebody like me. Because they will. Because you’ll be really good indeed.

Alva Finn: And yeah, just maybe a quick word about what we would like to do at ELF. Accessibility of websites, particularly in the digital age of campaigning and information sharing with your members, that’s really important. So we’re going to look into doing a bit of a training on that. Accessible websites. Also, closed captioning is actually quite easy now, particularly for people with hearing impairments. Sign language interpretation, that’s a big one. I know that we have campaigned for many years in the European Disability Forum basically to have accessible State of the Union speech and it surprises me we have to ask for it every single time, but it should just be normal.

Sal Brinton: Sign language is a problem across Europe because every nation has its own. It’s just like our own languages. It’s different. Closed captioning and English, BSL being the lingua franca of Europe is quite useful, but that is more complex and we need to find a way around that.

Alva Finn: Yeah, I mean they translate all the languages in different languages because the European Union is obviously made up of many, many different languages. So I think they need to get better because if linguistic culture is important than these type of linguistic cultures for people with disabilities, it should be equally important.

Sal Brinton: We should also survey our member parties and find out what they about their manifestos. Do they do a BSL manifesto? Do they do an easy read manifesto for people who may have intellectual problems? Because those are really important and a braille one as well. Now the Lib Dems do, but that’s partly because we’ve been very active in this area now for 20 plus years and it’s not hard to do. But it sends your message to a group of the electorate who otherwise would not have heard from you.

Alva Finn: Yes, absolutely. And I think the LibDems are kind of an inspiration, I think, to a lot of the parties in ALDE because you’ve really been leading on these aspects. And whenever I go to your events, there’s more people with disabilities there. So there’s a lot of visibility and representation of people with disabilities. So thank you also for sharing your story, for telling us how we can get involved and also for pushing people like me and Elf to do more, because we absolutely can. But if you just don’t think about it and there’s no one around you in these spaces that has a disability, then yeah, you’re liable to forget. So I hope this has inspired people listening to really make sure that we are representing the breadth of society in our politics because otherwise you’re just, we’re just going to be representing middle class, able bodied white people, which I don’t think is the role of liberalism.

Ricardo Silvestre: All right, back to me now on a lighter note, Sal, I think this was a terrible idea because she did a tremendous job and she’s going to take my gig here. Thank you so much, Alva. This was amazing and thank you for sharing also your experience and all your knowledge on this.

Sal, I’m going to stay with you for a couple more minutes because we have this tradition in our podcast which is to ask our guests what was the path that you took until the point that we’re now talking and of course looking forward to tell us your story? What was the way for you to get to the point that we’re now here in Estoril and you as a vice president of the ALDE Party? So tell us.

Sal Brinton: Everything goes back to my childhood. My father, many years ago, ran Radio Hong Kong and we lived in Hong Kong for some time. We then came back to the United Kingdom and in the late 60s, one of his best friends, a journalist called Anthony Grey, was imprisoned by Mao Zedong. And my father said we must write to Anthony every week in prison. So aged nine, I was writing cards and letters to him on my birthday. I wrote to him and I told him about the birthday cake my mother had made and everything else. He told us afterwards, once he had been freed, that he never got any of these letters, but we know there were thousands of letters arriving every day. We have a joke in my family that we think the Chinese guards must have been trying to work out what the code was in this childish writing.

My father is also a politician, but not of my party. So I grew up in a household where we were always aware of what was going on. In my teens, I became involved with the Young Liberal movement, the anti-apartheid movement in the UK, and marched on the streets, much to my parents’ confusion because their politics were different. And I joined the Young Liberals and I joined The Liberal Party 50 years ago this year in the run-up to the first European Communities referendum in the UK.

At that point, I was working for the BBC so I couldn’t be public. But in 1993, I was elected to my local council and became a cabinet member for children’s services. Then after that, I stood for Parliament. Missed by a whisker twice, less than a thousand votes. And I was then asked to go into the House of Lords by Nick Clegg. So that’s what brought me to that. But I have always had an international interest, a human rights interest, and now a disabilities interest. I became vice president of ALDE in 2019, and I have just been elected for my last two-year term.

Ricardo Silvestre: Well, it’s a genuine privilege to have you here on the podcast with us. I’ve actually been trying to get Sal on for some time, and I would also like to have you back because there’s so much to talk about—the relationship between the UK and the European Union, women in politics, like Alva was saying.

But for now, we’re going to close it. I’ve been speaking with Baroness Sal Brinton, Member of the UK House of Lords, and with Alva Finn, the Executive Director of the ELF Secretariat. Ladies, this was an immense pleasure. Thank you so much.

whois: Andy White Freelance WordPress Developer London