11 years ago, in my first ever speech (as a newly Disabled Person) I chose the image of three doors to create an analogy about the denial of access to the arts; and I reasoned that while two exclusive doors that used to proclaim 'MEN ONLY' and 'WHITES ONLY' had been almost demolished by the end of the 20th century, the third door had no need of any sign. For it was merely protected by huge steps, adorned with high handles, hung on over-weighted hinges, bereft of raised lettering and opening only onto suddenly drooping flights of stairs into cluttered corridors, clogged up with last years Xmas trees and this years boxes of charity collection tins! Because that was the door so tellingly constructed by Society that it denied Disabled People access to almost everything they wanted to reach in the arts.
So! - in this my last ever speech, due to my current battle with a terminal illness, I ask myself if that third door has now been demolished?
Has it Hell! Well I was the only Disability voice on the original Arts Lottery Board, and we had a budget of one billion pounds! So yes I was party to the building of automatically-opening doors, ramps and tactile maps, toilets that were not disabled and lifts that spoke, and flashed lights. But getting up in the lifts meant nothing! Because even when Disabled People got out at the top floor, they found it totally empty, devoid of other people, devoid of trainers, of funding cheques, of employment possibilities, with no boardroom table, and therefore no voice able to insist on: Inclusive Education, Access and 'Equality', Peer Assessment and Disability Representation; because - the same old non-Disabled People had merely added on another floor reserved for themselves, ensuring that behind them, they left their usual self-protective glass ceiling. And it is the impenetrability of that glass ceiling that has actually resulted, over the last decade, in Disabled People losing more than they've gained: (Like what you ask?)
Like DAM - a quality Disability Arts Magazine - LOST
Like LINK the weekly disability dedicated Television programme - LOST
Like THE ARTS COUNCIL OF England's previous DISABILITY UNIT - LOST - And therefore LOST - the guaranteed place for a Disabled Person not only on every single committee that advised the Arts Council, but on the very Council itself - Gone, all gone, with the result that there is no longer any protected funding specially set aside for growing annual expenditure on Arts involving Disabled People in every art form! So staggeringly there is less guaranteed financial support for arts and disability than there was before the Lottery windfall blew over us.
Indeed vanishing acts are rampant. At this moment in time when the government's own research figures on the Disability Discrimination Act proclaim that now One in Five of our population is a Disabled Person, that is the very same time that we find that in the whole vast arts industry in the UK of over half a million people only One in Five Hundred arts employees is a Disabled Person!! - twenty per cent of the population of this country made virtually invisible at a mere 0.002 per cent of employees in the Arts! It's a magical Conjurer's vanishing act.
But it gets worse, much, much, much more worse, because by the most bitter of ironies, those very same arts from which Disabled People have been most excluded are the very platform that Disabled People have targeted for telling their stories, painting their truths, advancing their dreams and so finally bringing to an end, the old prejudices that history has hung round the necks of Disabled People since Biblical times, calling them ogres, witches and one eyed Cyclops, gorgons, Captains Hook and Long John Silver and hunchbacks in Notre Dame - all evil enough, history said, to suggest such dangerous Disabled People would be better locked in a closet (After all Greece, as a country in the European Union is still doing that in the 21st century!) yet, despite all this the Disabled People in this room have deliberately selected the Arts as their field of campaign and means of changing Society: they have not chosen politics, or law, or education, but the Arts.
And I have not accidentally chosen to target the Arts Council England negatively, but positively, because that very same Council proved itself in last year's 'Year of Cultural Diversity' able to re-act imaginatively, able enterprisingly to find new money, able to give black arts a louder voice at 'Decibel' level.
And although I despise any notion of competition, I cannot help but notice that in the UK there are twice as many Disabled Citizens as Ethnic Minority Citizens; So in a spirit of 'admiration' for the Arts Council, I seriously expect them to double that response for support of Disability Arts!!
Because, because, because...
It's only the arts that can provide me with answers to the most difficult questions life throws up.
For example - How can I ensure that my children and their grandchildren grow up in a world unlike Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq or Sierra Leone? - A world where they will never be confronted by murder, rape, torture or starvation?
My answer is that only the Arts lead humans to an experience of being other people, of understanding other perspectives - only the arts hold us back from pulling the trigger on the gun - Because at the very moment of execution, thanks to role playing and the arts experience, we can actually feel the full horror of what it is to be 'The Victim'.
And the arts have one more global lesson for us all. The days of the old 20th Century, of its old men, of the 'old world' and the old arrogance and old class systems are over - consigned to Room 101. They had their chance, but made the last century the most murderous, land-grabbing, exploitative, enslaving, capitalist failure: with more wars, more mutilation, more death than even the days of the Plague. So the 21st century, through its arts, simply has to belong to women, to young people and to Developing Countries - all wise enough, to recognise the importance and the benefits, of including Disabled People, and all other marginalised groups of citizens. But before we applaud with relief, we find that those despicable old males have left us a global legacy in the shape of their land mines and cluster bombs! With the certain result that not only will the number of Disabled People, world-wide, rise incredibly quickly, but the double-whammy is that it is those same women and young people to whom we look for our future who in tending their own land, and in finding clean water are the most likely to have their arms and legs blown over their neighbours houses!
Wow!! I was asked simply to welcome you to this Festival! Well I do. From every one of me to every part of you - welcome. But it's not been quite the welcome you were expecting? Well, it's been deliberate - Not to ruin your Festival, But to make it stronger! Because I passionately believe that only by facing the truth, and doing so through a Festival such as this, can we begin to change our world.
So Moya I still have that audacity but now to Insist - Not to ask on 'special' grounds, not to plead, and never to beg - 'cap-in-hand' - but to insist that this Festival is held every year - Just like the Edinburgh Festival!
So that every year Disabled People have a central, National and International platform; a vibrant, ghetto-blasting platform for display and for demands, for demonstration and for debate, for sharing, for joy, for celebration, for love - I was almost going to say sex. So - in this, my last paragraph, of my last speech 'I insist' that by Sunday afternoon you create so great a momentum that it is simply too powerful to stop - what you Moya have started, and in which you Nick Capaldi, true to form, have played such a practical role in funding.
A momentum so great that it goes further in performance, and flies higher in ambition, even than Moya or Nick had envisaged, so that it goes beyond and above, this first Festival you have called 'ABOVE AND BEYOND'. Thank you very, very much indeed.
Paddy Masefield OBE, in a long career stretching back to the mid 1960's, has been an arts administrator, artistic director of several theatre companies, and prolific prize-winning playwright, with a special emphasis on young people.
Later he became one of the first arts consultants in the UK, and after becoming a Disabled Person in 1986, ensured that he sat on as many committees as possible that had the power to assist the development of Disability Arts, including: vice chair of the arts and disability monitoring committee, the first arts lottery board, and the touring panel all at the Arts Council of England. Membership of Boards included Central Television, the British Film Institute, c/PLEX (the largest community arts project in the UK), several theatres, and the National Disability Arts Forum. He chaired Year of the Artist's Think Tank, and was the only Disabled representative on the newly re-formed UK UNESCO Commission. His speeches took him to a human rights conference in Helsinki, an address to European Theatre Directors in Athens, to fronting a programme on Disability and Comedy at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, and most recently to the Board of the Foundation for Community Dance. In this speech he announced his retirement, in order to focus on his opposition to a diagnosis of terminal Cancer.