The London Para Games aren't good for people like me – they're setting back disability rights

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Could the Para Athletics Championships that get under way in London tomorrow actually be damaging to the cause of disability rights?

There are many people who would argue that such a suggestion is nonsense. They might very well ask what on earth I, as someone who has forcefully advocated for the rights of disabled people, think I’m doing by raising it.

I can assure them that I haven’t taken leave of my senses, and that I have good reason for feeling an increasing ambivalence towards the para sports movement, despite my being a part of it (I’ve played wheelchair basketball; I play wheelchair tennis).

Here’s why: in the run-up to the general election, I appeared on an Al Jazeera programme which looked at the subject of disability in Britain in the context of the campaign.

There were two other disabled people on the panel along with a Government advisor, who probably ought to have donned a tin hat.

I have to give him a certain amount of credit for gamely trying to defend the indefensible, but one of the arguments he deployed during the course of the debate I found to be deeply troubling.

He took the three of us to task for always “complaining” about cuts and money instead of talking about our Paralympic medal winners, and hailing their achievements.

Yes, he actually said that.

Of course, he got jumped on. Conflating the two like he did, well, it would be like telling an able-bodied person they shouldn’t be critical about cuts to working families’ tax credits because Mo Farah has won another couple of races. Or arguing that you shouldn’t oppose an income tax rise because the Olympic showjumping team did really well.

Yet he’s hardly alone in deploying that sort of tactic, particularly in Government circles.

Here, you lot, that devastating United Nations report on the treatment of disabled people who aren’t elite athletes? It’s rubbish. We do disability well in this country! Look, the superhumans are on telly and the whole nation is cheering as they win a hatful of medals!

That sort of cynicism stinks. It also, by the way, serves to diminish the real achievements of Britain’s Paralympians.

Our Government isn’t alone in using the games badly. Take the tabloid media. It will make a big fuss about them. Then it will pat itself on the back for being inclusive before going on to forget about the fact that disabled people exist.

Think I’ve got that wrong? How often do you see us represented outside of athletic events?

On the vanishingly rare occasions when disabled people do appear in, say, TV dramas or films, they’re never in there just as characters. They’re there to be the disabled person. A prop to show the hero’s a great bloke. Look, he’s nice to the woman in the wheelchair. Isn’t he lovely?

Elsewhere in the media, in the arts, just in the everyday workplace, the exclusion of disabled people is commonplace.

Government policy has played a big role in that.

Kamran Mallick, chief executive of Disability Rights UK, has the right of it when he points out that while our Paralympians do make us proud, “they are a tiny proportion of the population who have decided to dedicate themselves to elite sport”.

“For most of us,” he continues, “our priority is to live independently and be part of our communities – ideals that are getting harder and harder to realise as cuts are biting in benefits, social care provision and access to decent housing.”

Look, it’s not that I don’t see benefits arising from the London Para Games. My kids are going. Cheering along people who have impairments like their father is a great experience for them to have.

The event also facilitated my going into their school to talk about disability sports, and disability more generally, and to answer pupils’ questions. It was an invaluable experience, as much for me as it was for them.

The visibility that the para sports movement has secured for disabled sportspeople is welcome.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t yet prompted the same to happen in other fields. The championships are thus in danger of becoming tokenistic.

That would be bad enough. However, the cynical use of them to provide cover for the appalling treatment meted out to disabled people by the Government casts a still darker shade on them.

Hence my ambivalence.

By all means champion the champions. We should do that. But the fact that they’re doing well shouldn’t provide an excuse for people to forget that millions of disabled people are struggling to get what they need to play an active role in our society.

Nor should it get the Government off the hook for the role it has played in that.