AMERSHAM, ENGLAND – MAY 27: UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak speaks at a Conservative Party rally in Amersham. [+] Amersham & Chiltern Rugby Club, Amersham, England, May 27, 2024. (Photo by Alastair Grant – WPA Pool/Getty Images)
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The trade union representing journalists in the UK has slammed political parties during the election campaign for making media events inaccessible to journalists with disabilities.
With voters across the country due to head to the polls in less than three weeks, and in the final stretch of the election campaign where political news and announcements will become all the more important, the National Union of Journalists has chosen to speak out.
The accessibility barriers mentioned here include party conferences, campaign launches and media events, but can also include how information is presented on digital platforms and in print – for example, no British Sign Language interpreters at a keynote speech, or policy documents that cannot be read by a screen reader. Without such important accessibility measures, disabled journalists are denied the ability to speak truth to power through covering issues that directly concern the disability community and by providing diverse perspectives on mainstream topics.
In a call to action published on the NUJ website earlier this week, Johnny Cassidy, vice-chair of the NUJ’s Disabled Members Council, said:
“Since the Prime Minister announced the election date, there have been statements, press conferences and press events all over the country from Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Reform Party. And wouldn’t you know it? No BSL is being used by any of the parties. If we want to hold any government to account, we need disabled journalists in their midst.”
This is a point further emphasised by NUJ President Natasha Hirst.
“Political parties should make their events and materials available to disabled people, including party members. This is an election year and issues affecting disabled people, such as social security and the NHS, will be high on the agenda.
“Journalists with lived experience of disability have a vital role to play in analysing and communicating the Manifesto’s commitments, and countering the dehumanising rhetoric towards disabled people that has become all too common recently.”
Disabled journalists play a vital role in this moment of national reflection, but it doesn’t take any great investigative skill to conclude that there is no large-scale wrongdoing beyond political parties that excludes disabled journalists and silences the voices of disabled people.
Rather, this trend reflects a much broader, generalized discomfort that the disability community as a whole is being excluded from important political events and debates, and is more likely to be due to inaction rather than action.
More recently, this can be traced back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when BSL interpreters were not provided at key government briefings on safety information. Four years on, their absence was again noticeable at Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s election announcement on 22 May. Since then, various disability charities and local residents have criticised political parties for accessibility failures, including an inaccessible website for campaign social media images, a lack of alternative text to PDFs, and a failure to provide documents in a format that is easy for people with learning disabilities to read.
Of course, the marginalisation of the disabled community in the fight for No. 10 Downing Street won’t exactly be reflected at the ballot box. But with there being thought to be around 16 million disabled people in the UK – just under a quarter of the population and by far the largest minority – one cannot help but question the level of common sense and expediency in not providing basic accessibility in a contest where every vote counts.