Disability activist was granted Freedom of the City – then couldn’t get on the stage

It’s amazing how ableism can so quickly turn honor and celebration into insult and injury.

That might sound like the start of a really niche horror movie, but it was actually a disability activist describing what should have been a career highlight.

Anna Landre: Freedom of the City – except not

Anna Landre is an award-winning campaigner and researcher who fights hard to have disabled people’s issues heard.

Last week, she received one of the highest and most historic honours that can be bestowed on someone in London, the Freedom of the City, but it was marred by the fact that she couldn’t actually get up on the stage to collect the award – because she uses a wheelchair. Anna told me during a phone call that:

I spent the whole ceremony holding back tears… I couldn’t pay attention to any of the speeches – I was just trying to hold it together.

What Anna was most shocked by was that a ramp was available, but an organiser had just decided that she wouldn’t want to get on the stage:

An events person came up and she was like “Oh, I heard that you were upset about not getting on the stage, I’m really sorry. We do have a ramp, I just thought you wouldn’t want it. I didn’t put it out today.”

I mentioned to Anna that these sorts of things remind me as a disabled person of what it’s like growing up disabled and always getting left out. She said:

Even when you do get invited to the party or get into the room or get the award, the experience is often a segregated one.

Accessibility segregation

Anna Landre says it’s important to use the word segregated, for its connotations to civil rights laws, citing this New York Times article by black wheelchair user Luticha Doucette. Anna said:

It’s a continuous kind of ‘accessibility segregation’ that happens to us. And exemplifies how people purport to make decisions for us and assume we won’t mind.

A spokesperson from the City of London Corporation told the Canary:

The City of London Corporation would like to offer our sincerest apologies to Anna Landre for the inaccessible stage upon receiving her Freedom award. The City of London Corporation is fully committed to equity, diversity and inclusion and we are undertaking an urgent review to ensure accessibility at our buildings, facilities and events.

Although this was an awful thing to happen to her, Anna doesn’t want this to be painted as an isolated incident as is often the case when these things go viral:

It’s amazing that 29 years after the DDA and 14 of the Equality Act that accessibility is still a minefield in the UK.

She was keen to impress that “things like this happen to most disabled people practically every single day if not multiple times a day”.

A particular problem disabled people face is with public transport. Anna said:

I call it ‘Access Roulette’. Let me spin this wheel and see if today is going to go well — you truly never know.

Another problem is hotels:

You have to do so much research to figure out where you can stay and then half the time it ends up being a waste of time anyway because it’s not actually an accessible room or there’s a platform lift that doesn’t work.

It’s not about the incident – it’s systemic

As Anna Landre says:

It’s not about this incident; it’s not at all about the city of London or the Freedom of the City. It’s about this as a pattern — it’s awful this happened to me, but I want to use it to talk about this more broadly as a systemic issue. It’s illustrative of all the other violations of the Equality Act.

Whilst we do have legislation such as the Equality Act, many disabled campaigners think the fact it can’t be enforced in everyday life (except through civil action) means its easy to ignore:

You can’t call the police, for instance, to come and enforce it or report a violation. There’s nowhere you can call in the UK, unless the government sets up an ombudsman for enforcement.

Anna says she’d “like to see this government show some leadership on what is one of the biggest issues facing disabled people”. She wants this government to focus on real issues facing disabled people:

Instead of constantly hearing about disability benefits scroungers maybe the government can actually start enforcing disability access laws.

Featured image via Anna Landre