8th November 1995
(read time: 2 mins.)
Sue Elsegood had been invited to join The Campaign for Accessible Transport (CAT) on one of its protests. Sue and the other seven parked themselves in front of buses along a stretch of Oxford Street. What happened next was hilarious… but within five years, on 8 November 1995, the Disability Discrimination Act became an official Act of Parliament.
“We’re going to hijack a bus on Oxford Street. Do you want to join us?”
That was the proposition to Sue Elsegood, a wheelchair user from Greenwich, South London, in July 1989. But this wasn’t an anti-apartheid protest or a march against the Poll Tax.
The battle had been raging up the road in Westminster for years.
Between 1983 and 1989, six civil rights bills for people with disabilities were introduced to Parliament. Six times Parliament debated whether six million British subjects deserved protection from discrimination. It seemed a reasonable request. But apparently not. Six times Parliament voted ‘no’.
Sue had been invited to join The Campaign for Accessible Transport (CAT) on one of its protests. The demand seemed reasonable enough: people with disabilities should be able to use public transport like everyone else.
Apparently, making this happen required a nudge. Eight CAT members were planning to bring Oxford Street, London’s main shopping artery, to a complete standstill.
The plan was to park their wheelchairs in front of the very buses they were protesting against. Westminster would have to take notice.
Sure enough, amid the mid-morning rush, Sue and the other seven parked themselves in front of buses along a stretch of Oxford Street. Traffic was completely halted, shoppers stopped and stared, taxi drivers fumed.
Sue was now committed. She wouldn’t move until either Parliament voted through an appropriate civil rights bill or she was cured, whichever came first.
As it turns out, neither occurred that day. The police swooped soon after the television cameras arrived, and arrests for obstruction of the highway began.
The situation soon descended into farce.
It proved impossible to bundle the perpetrators into the police vans as they were not wheelchair accessible. The police had to ask Sue if they could borrow her adapted van to ferry the culprits to jail.
At Belgravia Police Station, the on-duty sergeant realised that the cells were not wheelchair-friendly, at which point the CAT 8 were released on bail. To be fair to the police, they’d never had to arrest people in wheelchairs for the crime of trying to catch a bus.
A week later, the CAT 8 received notification that all charges had been dropped, ‘in the public interest’. Or to put it another way, the Horseferry Magistrates Court wasn’t wheelchair accessible.
On 8 November 1995, the Disability Discrimination Act received Royal Assent - it was now an official Act of Parliament.
