1. Institutions and activist historiography

1There is an inconsistency between segregated residential institutions’ treatment in different histories of disability in Britain. In social (and social policy) history, the institution has ‘dominated’ analyses1 of the mid-19^th to mid-20^th century. The ‘mixed economy of welfare’2 (part private, part public, part charitable) arising in response to government diktat and local welfare settlements produced hospitals, asylums, workhouses and segregated schools that varied in their aims and conditions across time and place. These spaces present not only a discrete object of enquiry, but (in the course of their admissions, discharges, and complex relationships with other social actors) shed light on the moral, political, and economic contradictions of their time. There is, clearly, plenty here for the social historian to be getting on with.

2In historical accounts of disabled people’s mobilisations – their participation in collective action, social movements, or liberation struggles –, however, institutions are heavily underplayed in both activists’ historicisation of their traditions and political scientists’ theorisations of self-organisation as a policy variable. For activist-historians3, the development of grassroots disability politics has generally been seen as a story of the expanding influence, decomposition, and recomposition of pre-existing activist groupings – with disabled trade unionists, education and welfare reform projects, or ‘rights tourism’4 playing decisive roles at different moments. The assumptions of bourgeois social science, by distinction, insist that an activist grouping constitutes a meaningful political actor once it is shown to influence others in that class – most clearly demonstrated by access to parliamentarians and influence on the content of their programs and legislation5. For the former school, segregated institutions represent a simple antagonist to disabled people’s self-organisation – a type of social structure, represented by certain social actors, which the movement has fought more or less intensively at different times. For the latter, segregated institutions are scenery behind the real story of an activist group’s struggle for recognition by central government.

3Despite substantive differences in their emphases and grounding assumptions, activist-historians and political scientists have converged around a rich and enlightening account of the development of independent and militant disability activism in Britain in the early 1970s; one which foregrounds an activist organisation called the Disablement Income Group (DIG). DIG was the first mass organisation focussed on disability issues which allowed disabled people to join as equal members, and in which they occupied leadership positions. Its demand for a universal disability income could be framed in terms acceptable to all major political parties and much of the British public, and recognition by government as an ‘expert’ lobby (as well as real influence over backbench MPs) characterised its early years. A strategic impasse, following the election of a Conservative government in 1971, marked, however, the beginning of a long and fractious decline. Disabled members, skilled up for the first time en masse in political and social organising, began to break away throughout the 1970s, resulting in a self-organised Disabled People’s Movement (DPM) with a broader concern with social marginalisation, liberty, and equality than DIG’s narrow welfare focus had allowed. This account is plausible and has significant explanatory power. Many DPM activists were former DIG members, and debates over DIG’s successes and failures clearly informed self-organised groups’ strategic and theoretical innovations.

4My contention in this essay is not that this (by now standard) account is inaccurate, but that it is not the whole truth; and taking it to be so skews activists’ conception of their own history in unhelpful ways. Simply put, DIG (and the smaller groupings in its orbit) was not the only formation mobilising disabled people in social-movement like ways, nor the only activist tradition from which the DPM critically drew.

5Perhaps surprisingly, providers of reforming segregated institutions — most notably the Leonard Cheshire Foundation for the Sick and the Spastics Society — also relied on extensive and quasi-autonomous mobilisations of disabled people to secure their social status and continued existence. Under specific conditions, a certain class of residential institution and disabled people fighting collectively for social influence and autonomy were mutually dependent. While this symbiotic relationship was unstable, and only lasted from the mid-‘50s to around 1970, it meaningfully influenced the later DPM’s organising tactics and discussions of institutionalisation.

6In what follows, I hope to show three things through an engagement with these two reforming institutional charities – or what I’ll call “pseudo-movements” (organisations or networks which act in social movement-like ways, but restrict the self-mobilisation of oppressed people which characterises social movements proper) – and the disabled people agitating within them:

1. That disabled people mobilised simultaneously within those organisations and against their leadership; taking advantage of institutional opportunities to assert different constructions of the helper/helped relationship;

2. That these struggles profoundly influenced both the organising networks and de-institutional critique of the early DPM;

3. That the antagonisms between disabled activists in the pseudo-movements and their leadership were expressed through a series of contradictory incentives and opportunities within the charities themselves and their segregated institutions – rather than imported from outside of these.

7This re-engagement with institutional activism, I believe, problematises the conceptions of social movements and theories of change implicit in DIG-centric accounts; which over-emphasise questions of values and political will in the formation of social movements, and circumscribe the state (particularly the welfare state where disabled people are concerned) as the primary object of social movement practice. Whether understood through Oliver & Campbell’s imperative for the DPM to understand itself as a post-materialist “new social movement”6, or the political scientists’ assumptions of what movements are and do, the standard account describes social movements as oriented on resources and rights which are always provided and guaranteed by the state. Their practice, consequently, depends on changing social and elite values about who is entitled to what within pre-existing political structures. The encounter with reforming institutional charities complicates that by showing that progressive values can lead to reactionary results, and that the state has its own logics and makes its own demands of reform projects. Finally, through an exegesis of the institutional precursors to the DPM’s emergence, I want to emphasise the agency of institutionalised people and the role that they have played in liberation movements. In doing so, I hope to give some insight into the messy, dialectical convergence of social domination and opportunities to advance progressive aims or develop skills for struggle that are often better described in anti-racist and feminist radical histories than those of disability activism.

2. Special conditions for pseudo-movements

8The decades following the Second World War constituted a sea-change in the relationship between the British state and its, previously (quasi-)autonomous, welfare institutions; with a heady cocktail of labour shortages, a need to lower investment costs for reconstruction, and the political rigours of the post-war social contract incentivising central government to be more hands-on in its management of social policy. The National Health Service Act (1946) effectively nationalised the hodgepodge of private, religious, and philanthropic hospitals into a centrally run behemoth; and subsequent National Assistance (1948) and Mental Health (1959) Acts subsumed, transformed, or abolished much of the remnants of the mixed economy of care and provision that had flourished under the Poor Laws.

9The state was, to all intents and purposes, now the welfare provider for the nation, with any remaining third parties reduced to localised bit-part players which a much curtailed role.

10This unprecedented situation was intensely challenging for both the central state and anyone interested in running an independent welfare institution. Apart from the considerable fiscal and administrative costs taken on, central government now found itself the subject of moral controversy. Under the Poor Law system, governments had been able to outsource problems relating to moral economies; with local Guardians and institutional managers negotiating sensitivities around administrative rules and the treatment of inmates and beneficiaries. After the war, there was simply no-one to hide behind. The state paid for, administered, and managed all significant elements of welfare – from cash benefits to the incarceration of mentally distressed people –, it did so with taxpayers’ money, and it was led by men those taxpayers could vote out if they didn’t like the results. Central government was, therefore, vulnerable to the effects of scrutiny on conditions in welfare institutions or outcomes of welfare policy. In the immediate post-war climate, such scrutiny was often intensely unflattering, as (direct or unstated) parallels between the treatment of institutional inmates in Britain and dissidents, PoWs and racial minorities in Nazi camps were presented by reformers’ discourses7.

11Non-state actors remaining in the welfare field, or trying to break into it, had to deal with the reality that the state had hoarded most opportunities for intervention for itself, and may encroach further if it so chose. Welfare providers have always required direct and indirect government support in the form or finances or facilitative legislation and regulation, but post-war providers were unable to rely on the “elastic rhetoric”8 of their forbears. Welfare entrepreneurs from the 18^th century onwards had to prove a social problem which the state should take notice of (in practice, they often framed divergent and contradictory problems for different audiences), and offer a satisfactory remedy for approval. In the post-bellum 20^th century, one had to walk a thinning line: finding an area of welfare provision that had not already been taken over, and arguing simultaneously for its value as a remedy to social ills and the inappropriateness of the state managing it tout court.

12For the Cheshire Foundation and the Spastics Society, non-hospital segregated residential and adult training arrangements for unemployed disabled people, which were left largely untouched by post-war legal reforms, proved a sustainable candidate for intervention. Playing successfully (at least in their early days) on the state’s weakness to moral objections, both charities distinguished their provision from the dehumanising conditions for younger disabled people in “chronic units” of nationalised hospitals – whose inmates had little hope of autonomy or discharge – as well as the de facto segregation of disabled people in family homes in an inaccessible world. Where the state could only offer the “Young Chronic Sick” incarceration, boredom, and inactivity; the two charities argued that their kind of specialist provision offered residents a “home of their own” on a par with any non-disabled adult’s, the opportunity to pursue desired work and leisure interests, and opportunities to play a full and valuable part in post-war civil society.

13Both organisations set up national (and, for the Cheshire Foundation, international) infrastructure early on in the hope of expanding their provision, and developed public relations strategies to convince local communities and decision makers of their position. As their raison d’etre relied on improved outcomes for their residents that could often only be defined by residents themselves – domestic autonomy, meaningful work – or by their public visibility; these strategies were dependent on mobilisations of residents as exemplars of the charities’ effectiveness and desirability. In practice, such a strategy relied on devolving at least some organisational initiative to disabled people themselves – although the extent of power-sharing would be hotly contested by staff, residents, and managers in line with their distinct intra-institutional incentives.

14Both charities, then, were fundamentally concerned with value change, institutional reform, and modifying the state’s relationship to disabled people; and both relied on mobilising civil society and their disabled residents to meet these aims. As Judy Hunt has noted, they approached establishing and running new institutions as a moral crusade which enlisted disabled and non-disabled alike to transform the social and inter-personal positions of disabled citizens relative to their peers9. Such an approach sits awkwardly between the top-down paternalism (mediated by local moral-economic pressures) of the traditional philanthropic venture, and the self-organisation and strategic autonomy of the social movement. Conceptualising this process as purely charitable, with “an act on the part of a giver, a benefactor” the sole “focus of analysis”10, misses the specificity of the situation – and in particular the active role of the residents/recipients in organisational practice. Recent definitions of social movements – as “sustained collective challenges by excluded social groups attempting to protect themselves from social, political, and economic harms”11 - prove equally inapplicable. The Cheshire Foundation and the Spastics Society certainly posed a sustained and practical challenge to the status quo, constituted by the moral and social harms of the long-stay hospital system and lack of domiciliary support; but the nature of their mobilisations were for the excluded group, rather than decided by them. The term “pseudo-movements”, used throughout this piece, is designed to capture the conceptual ambiguity and practical fractiousness contained within this position – whereby disabled people were expected to go to bat for projects which were nominally (often actually) in their self-defined interests, but over which their actual control was minimal.

3. The Cheshire Foundation and the Spastics Society: a brief (early) history

15The Cheshire Foundation, founded in 1948 by the eponymous war hero, was explicitly referred to as a “movement” not only by its leadership12, but by even those residents who remained critical of its management13. Its “mission” was to provide disabled people with residential alternatives to the horrors of long-stay hospitals through, to quote one Trustee, establishments “run as homes rather than hospitals (...) [which] offer the affection and freedom of family life, the patients being encouraged to take whatever part they can in the day-to-day running of the home”14. The rapid expansion of these Homes15 in Britain – there were 47 housing over 1400 residents by 197016 - relied on changing popular and state attitudes to disability, and on the Foundation’s ability to accumulate cash and voluntary labour. An enlightened paternalism, based around “the idea that the disabled must be helped to live to capacity however small that capacity might be”17, was to replace assumptions that disabled people were incapable of any social contribution. Voluntary societies and local notables would be responsible for interpreting these capacities and how they should be encouraged through localised Home Management Committees. Here, if not in the hospitals, the medical profession would have to share the responsibility for disabled people’s care with the “mobilized” layman18.

16The Foundation’s process of consolidation was long and largely chaotic. Leonard Cheshire himself had ended up in the care home game largely by accident; when a former member of his failed Christian Socialist commune, Arthur Dykes, was discharged from hospital with incurable cancer and Cheshire offered to become his untrained palliative nurse at the commune’s former site. Upon realising that there were plenty of hospitals desirous to clear out long-stay patients (and patients even more desirous of escaping hospitals), Cheshire embarked on an ambitious project of opening homes across England and Wales, before launching an international mission which extended his influence to Poland, India, and Palestine.

17In the absence of meaningful instruction from their jet-setting figurehead, residents and staff were left to negotiate in-house rules, routines, and house activities amongst themselves. The settlement in the flagship Le Court Home, in particular, encompassed laissez faire social relations between both groups, co-management of finances, and collective bargaining over house rules.19 It was only in the late 1950s that centrally appointed managers made any serious attempt to control what went on in the Homes; mandating Matrons and Wardens to dictate routines, and attending annual managers’ conferences where organisation-wide policy could be decided. This new, top down project parachuted a socially conservative management layer – often drawn from the military officer class, church, and rural polite society – into remarkably liberal social arrangements in the Homes, characterised by resident control of key organisational infrastructure (most notably elected Welfare Committees and the Foundation’s public magazine, The Cheshire Smile).

18The Spastics Society, by contrast, had no well-connected frontman. Formed in 1952, it emerged from groups of parents of children with Cerebral Palsy and sympathetic medical professionals. In a theme that would re-emerge in the DPM proper, they believed that recent advances in medicine and rehabilitation made existing segregated schools and hospitals unjustifiable accommodation for the children and young adults in their care, and set about constructing alternative schools, colleges, and hostels20. Like the Cheshire Foundation, the Spastics Society too saw its project as challenging social attitudes as well as directly providing services, although it had much greater ambitions in both regards

‘We look in the future to the creation of an adequate number of groups to serve all spastic people throughout the length and breadth of England and Wales, to raise funds when required for the purpose, and to “fly the flag” for the Society so that the public sees the spastic person in a true perspective. We look also (...) to the provision of suitable activities which will encourage spastics to come out of their shells and bring them to realise that not only have they a rightful place in society, but that society is anxious they should fill it’21

19Resources to meet these ambitions, however, remained harder to come by and less evenly spread for the solidly middle-class Spastics Society than for the Cheshire Foundation. Hopes of expanding rested, on one hand, on successfully lobbying local health boards and the Department of Employment22 and, on the other, by making the users of these projects themselves more visible to ‘improv[e] the image of the spastic in the minds of the public’23.

20Despite comparably meagre resources, the Spastics Society’s expansion was hardly less impressive than the Cheshire Foundation’s. Providing solely for people with Cerebral Palsy, the Society’s 11 facilities (with 500 service users) housed or trained a significant portion of this demographic – with the expectation at the time that referrals to Society services would skyrocket in the following years24. Residents and students were encouraged to build capacity to allow this organisational expansion to take place; and were organised into ’62 Clubs (named after the year of their foundation) which held responsibility for local fundraising and the running of social events and self-help activities which would, it was hoped, corral broad support for the Society’s activities. The Society, too, promoted resident and student voices in its press; paying a small fee for service users’ articles in its monthly Spastics News to foreground the liberal spirit and person-centred nature of its provision. Like the Cheshire Foundation, the Spastics Society incorporated a self-organised layer and a user-friendly media into an otherwise top-down organisation – with the added generational complication that most Society managers were considerably older than their service users.

4. Domination and Social Mobilisation: disabled people in the pseudo movements

21Later DPM activists maintained an hostile attitude to these organisations ‘where able-bodied people make decisions on disabled people’s behalf’25. Despite decentralised power and decision-making structures in both charities (Foundation Management Committees and the Society’s managing groups were largely autonomous), disabled people had no vote on policy, no representation at the level of national leadership, and no input into the management of the Home, school, or hostel where they lived. These organisations had more than superficial similarities to social movements (focussing on value change and resource redistribution through a mobilisation of their base), but none of these activities were decided, controlled, or developed by the people they were supposedly for.

22As I have indicated, however, there were strong incentives to encourage disabled people to mobilise within both organisations – albeit with no question of them replacing non-disabled leadership. Through the 1960s, it became clear that charity providers required the financial and logistical support of local governments to grow and survive. Local governments were (through conviction or habit) by now committed to providing welfare services in-house and sceptical of outside agencies. There were even private plans, by 1959, for the Ministry of Health to nationalise residential homes in the same way it had Poor Law hospitals; effectively an hostile take-over of Foundation and Society assets by the state26. While it is unclear whether leaders in either organisation were aware that such an existential threat was considered, managers the Cheshire Foundation were painfully familiar with local officials who believed that care and welfare should be the sole responsibility of government. Conditions for resolving these tensions were clear to both sides: a demonstration by the charities that they could ensure outcomes that the state simply could not. As a representative for the Ministry of Health put it to the Cheshire Foundation’s 1963 Conference: ‘You will have to find out whether you can prove that these people are better off in your Homes than any other. If you could prove this, there wouldn’t be any point in trying to do it otherwise’.27

23Their initial strategy was to double down on the assertion that disabled people had unrecognised capacities and needs unmet in hospitals or family support networks. Disabled people were consequently encouraged to define their own aspirations, and show they were capable of social contribution. Disabled residents or service users, aware that the lack of community services or adaptable housing meant the reform charities stood between them and a long-stay hospital, also had some interest in promoting institutions which offered them comparably better life opportunities. While this arrangement did not amount to a democratic say in how institutions were run, it provided a platform to influence policy discussions. Consequently, it helped foster a sense of participation in ‘our movement’28 through which demands for greater autonomy could be articulated as keeping the Cheshire Foundation or the Spastics Society ahead of the curve set by their hospital counterparts.

24Opportunities for residents’ self-activity were limited in the Spastics Society to the ’62 Clubs and writing for the magazine, due to a combination of its size and its early reliance on government for funding and employment opportunities. In the larger, and operationally more independent, Cheshire Foundation, however, there was a broad sphere of residents’ influence – albeit one marked by frequent cultural conflicts between residents, managers, and national leadership. The Foundation promoted residents’ initiatives like film units, mobility aid co-ops, and the Cheshire Smile (which became the primary Foundation publication due to management inaction). At the same time, it exploited their results without resident consultation. Money raised by residents was co-opted to subsidise new institutions, films showing liberal conditions in one home were used to promote others with more authoritarian regimes, and the appearance of self-management enticed voluntary labour and professional endorsements for an increasingly autocratic organisation. Home managers and senior staff often found themselves in the unenviable position of being mandated to enforce order and discipline, while their immediate superiors were promoting the virtues of disabled people’s self-activity and liberal living arrangements in pursuit of resources for expansion.

25Unsurprisingly, this alliance between disabled people seeking greater autonomy and the crusading charities was beset by conflicts. Early disputes over house-rules, admissions, and expulsions became more intense as state hostility incentivised charity leaders to integrate into emerging welfare ecologies, changing elements of their practice to relieve stress on state services. Struggles by residents were both offensive and defensive. Residents in Le Court Cheshire Home in Hampshire used communication strikes, campaigns of non-compliance, and the threat of walkouts in solidarity with their victimised leaders to protect a limited form of collective bargaining over new rules and staffing decisions in two early disputes. In the first, 1956-8, a new Matron was convinced by these actions to respect the pre-existing role of the residents’ Welfare Committee in deciding home policy29; while her successor was forced to resign in 1962, three months into a disastrous attempt to impose hospital discipline in the home30. In the mid ‘60s, residents successfully delayed the rollout of Cheshire’s Nursing Corps – an attempt to attract Health Service funding by training an auxiliary force of lower skilled and lower paid medical workers– through co-ordinated literary attacks in the Cheshire Smile which sorely undermined Cheshire’s authority. At the same time, they used these struggles to demand resident representation at all levels of the Foundation’s leadership and to prevent increases in bed numbers – albeit with limited success31.

26In the Spastics Society, the Oakwood College for disabled teenagers epitomised a conflict around entangled generational dominations and disablism; as students rebelled against staff timetabling which forced them to go to bed by 10 p.m. and prevented them enjoying the same night-time freedoms as their non-disabled peers. Students co-opted the ’62 Clubs Conference, designed to co-ordinate self-help activities and fundraising drives, to propose an alternative staff rota system which would increase their ability to go out at night to fellow service users around the country32. With very precise political instincts, residents exploited the backlash that followed this ‘ingratitude’ to raise a series of grievances in the Society’s magazine – including against physical abuse and arbitrary rules in its facilities, restricted syllabi in its colleges, and their exclusion from its policy making fora. A remarkable debate between residents, staff, and managers played out in Spastics News, with each group blaming the arrogance and indolence of the others for the unhappy atmosphere in Society facilities33. Several residents and students further demanded the organisation of a consultative ‘Spastics Conference’ which, while more modest than Foundation residents’ demands for inclusion on leadership bodies, would have equalised service users’ status with that of social workers and medical professionals in the Society’s policy framework34. The situation became so fractious that, by the late ‘60s, a senior employee urged trustees not to open new facilities until a resolution could be found35.

5. The dirty break: pseudo-movements and the birth of the Disabled People’s Movement

27The response of national leadership to these agitations was a mixture of defensiveness and attempts to redefine their own projects to undermine the legitimacy of residents’ claims. In both The Cheshire Smile and Spastics News, national leaders publicly attacked ungrateful residents – accusing them of being power hungry, unrepresentative, and irresponsible – while leaning on editors to have certain authors or articles censored. Accounts were offered in progressive-sounding language as to why residents’ demands for greater autonomy were impossible or incompatible with organisational missions. Cheshire played up a desire to protect the vulnerable and the left behind; arguing that the most militant Foundation residents were somehow oppressing their more impaired neighbours by pushing for democratic processes which the latter were ‘too bowed by disability’ to ever use36. This, largely undefined, population of less capable residents became increasingly important to Foundation rhetoric as time went on, with their ‘spiritual rehabilitation’ (helping them come to terms with their supposed incapacity) replacing emphases on participation, integration, and autonomy in Trustees’ conference speeches towards the end of the 1960s37. While unwilling or unable to completely jettison a commitment to expanding residents’ ‘place in society’, Spastics Society Chairman James Loring argued to similar effect that their facilities represented a third way between the overbearing, patriarchal restrictions of family life and the hospital system. While consultation with residents was desirable, the Society’s services were already walking a tight-rope to banish both parochial domesticity and medical domination, and must resist any reforms which might push it off balance38.

28Materially, residents and service users were further weakened by institutional reforms pushed through despite their resistance, and by the knowledge that exiting the institution might sacrifice irreplaceable life opportunities. While nurses’ training in the Cheshire Foundation was delayed, and initially only rolled out in Cheshire’s Irish Homes (an experimental tradition beloved of Britain’s officer class), expansions of bed numbers per home and the opening of ‘wings’ with a higher proportion of medics to lay staff weakened residents’ leverage. As Le Court resident and later DPM activist Paul Hunt noted at the time, the trust and solidarity between residents necessary for organised resistance was hard to produce with Homes so populous that it was impossible to know everyone, and where medical routines were ready-baked into their operations39. t’s also likely that residents arriving at this later point experienced the Foundation’s homes as simply an improvement on the dire domestic and hospital arrangements they had just left, rather than as a once transformational social project taking a sharp conservative turn40. Certainly, for the Oakwood students, the fact that further education and employment opportunities would be difficult to procure outside of the Spastics Society (eventually) outweighed the benefits of continued struggle, and resistance died out after winning modest gains at the college41.

29It became clear to many disabled activists in both settings that opportunities for progress within the pseudo-movements were drying up: with managers digging in to revisionist conceptions of their missions, and residents fast losing leverage within the organisations. It was former Le Court resident Paul Hunt who first sent up the balloon, calling in the national and disability presses for disabled people to join him in a fighting organisation controlled solely by themselves. While the group that eventually emerged, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), recruited members from DIG’s failing incomes campaign, the veterans of the pseudo-movements were recognised as its vanguard in its earliest days. Former or current residents of Cheshire Homes and Spastics Society facilities made up three-quarters of its first executive committee, as well as sizeable chunks of its regional organisers and conference committee42. Crucially, the organisation’s analysis of the institution’s place in society was also largely formulated by current or ex-residents of Cheshire Homes on its Executive. Institutions were, they argued, ‘the ultimate human scrap-heaps’43 and the clearest expression of disabled people’s oppression. While conditions could occasionally be dragged upwards by progressive social and technological change, or by reform efforts from within, their essential function was to manage a social problem of exclusion rather than transform the helper/helped relationship. In the final analysis, their managers and providers were committed to defending the institution’s existence, and necessarily hostile to social innovations which threatened its relevance44.

30UPIAS’s antagonism to the pseudo-movements was real and intense, but it was not a blanket rejection of everything they’d ever stood for, or everything that had happened within them. Rather, UPIAS’s analysis and strategy effected a dialectical break with the Cheshire Foundation and Spastics Society’s progressive legacy; transforming and expanding their early de-institutional critique, and recognising them as sites for liberatory struggle. The initial critiques of state institutions made by the pseudo-movements were preserved by UPIAS in radical reformulations. The Cheshire Foundation’s critique of medical imperialism – the fuzzing of boundaries between therapeutic and residential environments to effect social control – was turned back on it as a critique of opportunity hoarding through undemocratic and totalising institutions; as germane to the residential Home as the long-stay hospital. Likewise, the Spastics Society’s contrast of rehabilitative opportunities and the backwards hospital and asylum system is re-interpreted as a contradiction between integrating social technologies (including, but not limited to, rehabilitation) and the stultifying social relations of exclusion45 – with the Spastics Society, as a provider of segregated services, firmly in the latter camp.

31Strategically, UPIAS recognised that the institutions of the pseudo-movements as containing an advanced section of the disabled population – arising from their comparative autonomy and experience of organised struggle – and spent significant energy trying to influence activists within them46. This process, combined with UPIAS members’ engagement in local deinstitutional campaigns in London and the East Midlands, appears to have constituted a more significant element of the organisation’s early work than any intervention into the (by then competing) disability incomes campaigns. The fact that UPIAS’s engagements with DIG and its rival income campaign, the Disability Alliance, is better remembered than its deinstitutional activities appears to be the arbitrary result of the popularisation of its arguments by non-members, rather than a reflection of the organisation’s early priorities47.

6. Conclusion: rethinking deinstitutional struggle

32I hope the historical case is clear from what’s gone so far: not only did institutional charities mobilise disabled residents in social movement-like ways, but later antagonisms between the Disabled People’s Movement and institutions in general were informed by the ins-and-outs of these mobilisations; most particularly the pseudo-movements’ failure to fulfil their progressive promises, and their tendency to abandon commitments to residents’ autonomy when their leaders came under pressure. As I’ve indicated, the influence of struggles within the pseudo-movements stretched to the leadership of the early DPM, and its analysis of institutionalisation. While the activist group which makes this case for this influence most clearly, UPIAS, was relatively small, and did not scale up with the growth of the movement; its members played leading roles in the national organisation of the DPM in Britain (the British Council of Organisations of Disabled People), important local activist organisations (including the Derbyshire, Lambeth, and Greater Manchester Coalitions of Disabled People), and the Disabled People’s International. The experience of the early anti-institutional struggles, alongside the critique emerging from battles with the pseudo-movements, thus had a wider impact on activist practice than its immediate participants.

33Despite this, the influence of deinstitutional struggles, and the pseudo-movements more generally, is but one explanatory variable in what must be a multi-causal and anti-reductionist theory of social movement emergence. The disabled people who got involved in something like UPIAS were the minority even amongst the rebels in the Cheshire Foundation and the Spastics Society. Most residents, even those uncomfortable with the leadership’s response to reasonable demands, were unwilling to set themselves up in opposition to institutionalisation in general, and their own provider in particular. The influence of residents and ex-residents also diminished in organisations like UPIAS through a combination of premature deaths, victimisation by institution staff, and the difficulties of recruitment once activists had left institutions.

34There was a political naivete too, as Hunt and other former residents pointed out at the end of the ‘70s in UPIAS’s private newsletter48. The break from the pseudo-movements had been largely spontaneous: rebellious residents knew they needed an organisation that could outwardly pressure institutions, but weren’t clear on what kind of relationship they would have to them. When they’d gained clarity on the institution’s functions, open and aggressive criticism made it difficult to directly influence institutional practice. While the Foundation and the Spastics Society (renamed Scope in 1992) remained objects of attack, real leverage over them probably declined through the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Other organisations of disabled people that arose in the early-to-mid 1970s (the Spinal Injuries Association, the Brittle Bones Society, the Union of Mental Patients), or shortly after (the Liberation Network of People with Disabilities) had neither the institutional focus or resident-activist networks of UPIAS – while having, at best, tenuous ties to DIG and its splinter campaigns.

35This essay has aimed to show at least some of the complexity involved in accounting for deinstitutional struggle and social movement emergence; and I want to end by pointing to some of the risks the dominant historiography of disability politics holds for a materialist history of disablement and the struggle against it. Towards the end of his life, Friedrich Engels49 noted a tendency for young German socialists and history professors alike to treat historical facts as the verification of historiographical assumptions; with modes of enquiry reduced to tools to arrange facts harmoniously, rather than illuminate dynamic, multicausal relationships and laws of motion. A hundred years later, UPIAS member Dick Leaman noticed a similar trend amongst disabled activist scholars, forcefully reminding younger comrades that narratives of the movement were ‘invented to describe significant combinations and interactions of ideas and activities, and of people and places – all with their own different histories – rather than any simple, linear unfolding of events’50.

36An exemplary candidate for Leaman and Engels’ critique is Mike Oliver’s contribution to activist historiography. The construction of disablement, there, is conceived as a consequence of hegemonic discourses – firstly of ‘tragic’ individualism, then medicine and its cultural impacts51. It stands to reason, in that account, that meaningful resistance will target those with power to set discursive limits – media and the institutions of the state – and will contest the presumptions and effects of dominant ideologies with greater priority than material conditions for autonomy and (individual or collective) self-fulfilment. Institutional struggles, under that reading, appear incidental and symbolic compared to the more visible activities of street or art movements, public intellectuals, and parliamentary lobbying. While such a position derives from Oliver’s ‘Social Model’ – which he asserts is a ‘hammer’ to smash hegemony52 rather than a subtle analytic tool – it’s hardly applicable to the unity of a research program and guide to strategy envisioned in the initial social definition of disability – developed, amongst others, by the ex-residents discussed in this piece. The latter saw the social creation of disablement as irreducible to ideological causes or discreet social processes, and to be constantly contested by disabled people – consciously and unconsciously, collectively and individually, openly and covertly. It’s this conception of disablement as a site of struggle, buffeted by and responding to the real contradictions of the social world, that I hope I have done something to illustrate.