G21 - DAY ONE: "The Glen Hoddle Affair"

The Glen Hoddle Affair

by Kevin Carey

Special to the G21 Courtesy of ABILITY Magazine

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Glen Hoddle was fired as manager of the English soccer team four days after it was reported in the Times of London that he had said disability was caused by deeds in former lives. Hoddle, who believes in reincarnation, was attacked for insulting disabled people and most of the mass media, politicians and representatives of disability organisations mounted a massive and successful attack.

Who were these disabled people who wanted Glen Hoddle sacked for expressing a religious belief that might be thought outlandish here (though John Lennon was never ridiculed for adhering to it) but which commands great respect and strong and widespread adherence in Asia?

Every journalist knows that if you ask enough people a question you will get the answer you want from one of them and it wasn't difficult to find somebody with half a brain saying that Hoddle had to go and who just happened to be a wheelchair user; disabled people are as likely to be stupid as the rest of mankind.

There was also a scattering of protest from spokespersons from various organisations representing disabled people who said that Hoddle should be sacked. They should be. Anybody who supported Hoddle's sacking as a soccer coach for expressing his views on Karma is ethically disabled. Let us first clear away the hypocrisy.

Had Michael Owen been played from the first game in France, resulting in England wining the World Cup, Hoddle's book on Karma would be up amongst all those little books of crap in the best-seller list but he lost so he had to be forced out and disabled people were the stick used to beat him, wielded by an unscrupulous press and abetted by a Prime Minister too frightened to dissent. Nobody seemed to ask how this squared with the defence of Salman Rushdie which, I can only think, results from Indians being slightly less unacceptable than Islamic fundamentalists; but it was a close thing.

The ostensible crime was something vaguely to do with the rights of disabled people but Hoddle simply expressed a view about why people are disabled and drew no conclusions from this about how they should be treated; on that we only have his record of sympathy and support.

My grandmother believed until her dying day that my blindness was the result of my being conceived out of wedlock but she treated me more like a little god than a mere mortal.

Allied with the unscrupulous use of disabled people to prosecute an unjust cause there was the usual glib sentimentality; we can't stand up for ourselves; give as good as we get; make the distinction between an etiology of disability we don't happen to believe in and gratuitous insul tbecause of our physical condition. We were shoved right back in our cotton wool and some of our official spokespeople collaborated, grounds enough in my view for being sacked; but it's worse than that. Sentiment is a sure sign of dispensability.

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When push comes to shove very few people put sentiment over narrow self-interest. If, in the long run, it's euthanasia or higher taxes then it's euthanasia as long as the number of people paying taxes is larger than the number not paying them.

The only defence against this narrow self interest is not sentiment but tolerance and the failure to see this as the central issue is the other reason why the spokespeople should be sacked. Every day of our lives we have to put up with a ragbag of daft views about our disabilities, often from people who are 'on our side' but what is much more difficult to combat is intolerance of difference, from landlords (house owners andpublicans), employers and service providers.

If disabled people are to be sentimentalised and if public figures are going to collude in witch-hunts there can only be two outcomes.

The first, for our generation, is that we will not be taken seriously as individuals if we allow ourselves as a category of people to be used as society's cuddly toys. The Hoddle affair has undercut our dignity and our aspirations to be treated as people who simply happen to have a disability which cannot be hidden. Most people have disabilities but are more or less capable of hiding them and some disabilities, such as not being able to hold a simple conversation, are so widespread that society has written them off.
Worst of all, though, will be the long-term effects of sentimentalisation and intolerance. As foetal screening becomes more sophisticated and as people live longer there will be pressure at both ends of the chronological spectrum to eliminate disabled people. If we do not get outof the tax/dependence bind we will be the last generation of seriously physically and mentally disabled people.

Greed, intolerance and eugenics will coalesce, justified by sentiment which cannot tolerate the thought of bringing a disabled baby into the world or keeping a disabled geriatric alive.

This is, ultimately, why those spokespeople who joined in the Hoddle witch-hunt deserve to be sacked.

They have not understood that what is at stake is the composition of the human race with its variagation and differing competences.

We are headed for a planet of Baywatch bodies and what goes with them; Baywatch minds. There is no point in glorifying disability (you know the sort of thing; Beethoven was deaf) for that, after all, is another kind of sentimentality, so we have to justify our existence on the firm ground of social self-interest, on the ground that society is better off with us than without us.

That is a very positive statement to make but it won't ring true if we allow ourselves to be manipulated by Murdoch for his purely commercial ends and are so busy trumpeting our entitlements that we forget to contribute. Gordon Brown has acted with his own kind of high-minded self-interest in putting the emphasis on disabled people contributing to their own survival and to society through work; it might have been the wrong reason but it was the right course of action. We will only have one chance and that chance is now. If we do not take it there will be kill pills for mummy and kill pills for old Uncle Marmaduke and we will be left with Pamela Anderson as Secretary-General of the United nations.

Kevin Carey is a writer, broadcaster and social entrepreneur. His interests range from the relationship between information technology and social exclusion and the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. He is the director of a UK charity, HumanITy, which combines rigorous social analysis with experimental field projects on learning IT skills through content creation. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard before a spell at the BBC, followed by 15 years in Third World Development, Carey offers a unique perspective on world affairs. He is a politcal theorist, moral philosopher, classical music critic and published poet. This article will appear in Ability magazine, the magazine of the British Computer Society Disability Group. Ability is quarterly with a circulation of 16,000 edited by Sue Holman. Kevin Carey can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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