Ramping Up Rights

From the ‘crippled suffragette’, to ’80s punks chaining themselves to buses, to campaigners taking a stand online, this book celebrates the amazing activists and protest actions behind the UK’s long battle for disabled people’s rights to live.

Rachel Charlton-Dailey highlights a shockingly overlooked tradition of disabled struggle. She unpacks how British attitudes and policy went so wrong in the twenty-first century, and interviews campaigners and disabled people about how they have reclaimed power, from resisting government reforms to changing the media narrative. She explores live frontiers in the push for civil rights—from the scandalous inaccessibility of our education and transport systems, to the existential debates about genetic screening and ‘the right to die’.

In this powerful book, honouring past disability activism becomes a call to action. Charlton-Dailey shows readers how hard, and how often, disabled people and their allies have fought, and won. She gives them the energy to keep fighting back.