Writing in 31st August's Liberal Democrat News, Caroline says:
The 15th Paralympics is now underway.
4,280 athletes, from 166 countries, participating in 20 different sports. Just as with the London Olympics these athletes will dazzle and often inspire us as they demonstrate excellence in so many different sports.
However, it is worth remembering how the Paralympics is in so many respects a new development. The first Paralympics to be held in the same city as the Olympics were held in Seoul in 1988. The very first Paralympics were held as recently as 1960, (although their genesis was of course the International Stoke Mandeville Games held eight years earlier).
In so many respects the development of the Paralympics marks the rapid change in attitudes towards disabled people. Within the lifetime of anyone barely over the state retirement age so much has changed. Just sixty and seventy years ago our society routinely excluded most disabled people.
Some positive changes started to take place during the Second World War. It was in large part due to Dr Ludwig Guttman that improvements started to be made to the care and treatment offered to military servicemen. Until his pioneering work ex-servicemen and other paralysed and disabled people were often simply written off for the remainder of their expectedly short lives.
As the recent excellent BBC drama, The Best of Men brilliantly demonstrated, Dr Ludwig Guttman’s significance was the way he challenged head on not only what were then firmly established medical practices, but also social attitudes. In stark contrast to the norms of the time he realised that what you can do, not what you can’t do, was all that mattered. Most significantly in a moment of inspiration he also realised that sport could play an important role in the rehabilitation of many paralysed servicemen. The rest, as they say, is now history and the Paralympics (the parallel Olympics) can rightly claim to have been born in Stoke Mandeville.
Yet while it’s important to remember how far things have changed, there are no grounds for complacency. In terms of pushing forward the agenda of equality for disabled people we still have a long way to go.
For a start, despite these Paralympics being the biggest and best to have ever taken place they are not without fault. Indeed, incredibly, it seems wheelchair spectators will be charged extra for merely booking seats.
The Paralympics should also put a spotlight on how much further we have to go in improving access to our public transport network.
Consider these harsh statistics. Every day as many people use the London Underground as the whole of Britain’s railway network. It has 270 stations, yet at present a mere 66 stations provide step free access from the street to the platform. Full step free access, including actual access to the trains themselves, is even more limited.
Of course making a Victorian transport network even remotely accessible is not an easy task, but quite frankly we could have a far more accessible network now in place.
One of the most foolish decisions made by Boris Johnson was to cancel a number of tube access improvements, even when they were already underway and millions had been spent. A prime example is the new tube station at Shepherd’s Bush where £39 million was spent on lift shafts, but to this day no lifts have been provided. Due to his actions a long standing pledge by Transport for London to ensure that at least one third of tube stations would be accessible by the 2012 Games has been broken.
One small change that must flow from the Paralympics is to ensure that the temporary use of mobile ramps at some tube stations becomes permanent.
However the biggest change would be a realisation that the progress that has occurred over the last 60 years is actually just a warm up to the further changes we must make in the years ahead.