Roy Webb is a member of the UNISON National Disabled Members Committee. He spoke to LabourNet on 6 June after a meeting on the history of the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation.

Disability is a universal issue. How can people make it part of their trade union activity?

The key thing for local union branch activists is to persuade members that fighting for disabled people’s rights is part of their union brothers and sisters’ battle for fair treatment at work. It’s a big big struggle.

My local branch is very good at supporting me, mainly because I was a Branch Officer for many years, but I think they’re not that great about picking up disabled people’s issues generally. That’s partly to do with ignorance or lack of education and understanding about just what the issues are.

They’ve done some quite good work on representing individual disabled people, but they still haven’t seen how how global the struggle for change needs to be to allow disabled people to be included.

I’ve been on the UNISON National Disabled Members Committee for around 10 years. Some of us started pushing for the union to use its massive resources to support the disabled people’s civil rights movement in general and their rights in the workplace too. We saw those as linked together, you couldn’t have one without the other. We had some minor successes, but it’s very difficult because of the politics of the union itself in relation to the Labour Party and the Government.

The place where change can really happen is in local workplaces, trying to get union branches to work together with local groups of disabled people to fight for change.

Activists have focused a lot of our attention, quite rightly, on campaigning with the Government at a national level. I’ve been trying to argue recently that we also need to try and set programmes of work which individual activists can carry out in their local areas, because that’s where we might be able to make a difference. If we could get local groups of activists from trade union branches and local groups of disabled people, to campaign together - primarily on a Disabled People’s agenda at the moment, but that should go along with an agenda for social justice and change generally, then we might be able to make some differences.

If we work together, we can change the local culture. It can make a big difference for people living in those communities.

Do you plan to go to UNISON conference?

Yes, I’ll be a member of the National Disabled Members Committee News-sheet team, so we’ll be writing loads of stuff. I’ve spoken at UNISON conference on many occasions. Usually I’ll get up on the platform and say this motion opposing the public-private partnership or private finance initiative is absolutely key - but we’ve actually got to fight for publicly controlled services which don’t oppress disabled people, which do provide proper accessible services, which include disabled people in their planning and organisation. We need to look at local campaign strategies and say how we are going to include those kind of demands in the fight against PFI. And usually I’ll get massive applause. But I’m never quite sure whether anything happens when delegates get back to their branches. You just hope that some people think it’s a good idea and start doing something about it.

What do you think will happen about the Labour Party at this conference?

I’d love to see UNISON at the very least saying let’s not just play along with the Government, which is what we’ve been doing all the way along, but let’s criticise them openly, let’s campaign openly now they’ve got a second term. I’d hope that they’d want to be more radical, start challenging the Government. A bit of a hope maybe but I’d love to see that happening.

Some people told me “we’re not going to vote, because we never vote anyway, but if we did we’d probably vote Labour. The Tories were in for 18 years, so why not give Labour a bit of a chance?” Labour might be in for the long term. If that’s the case, it becomes even more important to ask “what is organised labour going to do?” since none of the political parties now represent our interests, and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.

Has the Socialist Alliance made any serious move on Disability?

Well there’s quite a few disabled members, the only thing I know for sure is that they took some of the election leaflets which the British Council of Disabled People had produced, to try to highlight issues that disabled people wanted to focus on in the election campaign. They distributed them along with their own election leaflets in some parts of the country. They do say they support the social model of disability, which is what the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation created all those many years ago. It’s an open question really. I’ll be interested to see.

One thing I found difficult about my local group of the LSA was their reluctance to engage with other locally based groups and organisations. They want to prioritse asylum seekers and combatting racism, which is a cause I would support. But they won’t talk to the group that’s been fighting over Damilola Taylor’s death, for example, a very big group with many sections of the black community, many of whom are asylum seekers, because his family came here as asylum seekers. So I think, if you want to fight racism why not just ask black people what they want and see what happens? This is something which hasn’t occurred to them yet, but maybe they’ll get to it. We’ll see what happens.