Women in Westminster: In Conversation With Baroness Grey-Thompson
Former athlete Tanni, The Baroness Grey-Thompson, was famed for her grit and determination on the racetrack. Now she uses that same drive to fight for fairness for people with disabilities. As part of our Women in Westminster series, we sat down with the 11-time Paralympic gold medallist to learn why she believes equality for disabled people remains some distance away
Baroness Grey-Thompson is one of Great Britain’s most decorated athletes. During her Paralympic career, Grey-Thompson earned an impressive haul of 16 Paralympic medals along with 13 World Championship medals.
That sporting success made Grey-Thompson one of the nation’s most recognisable champions of para athletics. She was heavily involved in London 2012, featuring in the much-celebrated opening ceremony where she was suspended above the track by wires – something she has since described as “truly terrifying”.
London 2012 is often cited as heralding a sea-change in how people with disabilities are viewed, but that is an assessment that Grey-Thompson rejects.
“I get annoyed when people say, ‘2012 changed the world’,” she tells Women in Westminster during our sit-down conversation. “It’s usually a non-disabled person telling me that. There’s still not even close to equal representation.”
Grey-Thompson was renowned for her fighting spirit and tenacity as an athlete, and those qualities continue to drive her work on the red benches where she campaigns on a range of issues that impact those living with disabilities.
Her own life experiences have furnished her with a fearlessness when it comes to challenging authority. From childhood, Grey-Thompson learned that the people and institutions that we all rely on should not always be unquestioningly accepted. She tells a story of being eight or nine years old and a surgeon wanting to carry out unnecessary surgery to equalise the length of her legs.
“It was just experimentation with disabled children. If they messed up my legs, it didn’t matter,” she tells us. “I said no and then my mum said no. And then the doctor said, ‘Well, I’ll ring your husband and I’ll see what he thinks’.”
The story illustrates both deep-seated attitudes towards disabled people in the medical establishment and levels of misogyny that both her parents had to navigate in dealing with professionals.
“I remember Mum’s face, but also getting home and my dad’s attitude,” she recalls. “My dad was a very strong feminist as well, and he was absolutely fuming that a man would treat my mum that way.”
It is experiences like this, or the time a doctor suggested she terminate her pregnancy because “people like me shouldn’t be allowed to have children,” that have led to Grey-Thompson having profound concerns about the impact of proposed assisted dying legislation on people living with disabilities.
“We’re seen as a cost,” she says. “A lot of the narrative is that we suck money out of the state, and a way to save money would be to end people’s lives.”
That, she believes, could lead to people feeling pressure from society and medical professionals to agree to end their lives.
“I’ve had some brilliant doctors, and people trust doctors. If they go, ‘Well, it’s time, you know’...” she says. “It’s come out in the debate that ‘being a burden’ is an acceptable reason to request assisted dying. And it’s like, - really? Where does ‘burden’ start and stop?”
As a woman who has always lived with a disability, and dealt with the discrimination that results, Grey-Thompson brings a specific lens to policy debates. For her, these are not abstract questions. They are reflective of the experiences that she and many others have had and continue to have.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in her tireless campaigning for a transport system that reflects the needs of people with disabilities. She has regularly shared the challenges she faces on public transport including taking to social media to describe having to “crawl off” a train when no assistance was available as she made her way to the Paralympics in Paris.
“Pretty much every chief executive of a train company has offered me their personal mobile number,” she tells us. “One was really funny. He said, ‘I’ll give you my number. If you want to get on a train, just send me a text message 10 minutes before.’ And I said, ‘You do realise if I take this, I’ll tweet it’.”
Grey-Thompson is clear that what she wants for herself and other disabled people is not special treatment. It is simply equality.
“I just want the same miserable experience of commuting as everyone else,” she says. “I’m not asking for a gold-plated train. I just want to get on and off.”
Listening to the former athlete, it is clear that when it comes to opening up opportunities to people with disabilities, the UK still has a long way to go. She continues to challenge ingrained biases and prejudices within government that impact on people across the country.
“It’s not left or right, it’s the whole system,” she says. “During Covid, I spent a lot of time in the Lords trying to get BSL (British Sign Language) on the 5 o’clock briefings on BBC One. And somebody said, ‘Oh, well, the public is really uncomfortable watching BSL’.”
Grey-Thompson simply will never accept that it is legitimate to deny one group the right to access potentially life-saving information because it may make someone else feel “uncomfortable”. Regularly encountering such attitudes at the heart of government gives her a determination to continue campaigning for change.
“People say, ‘Oh, you’re very passionate’ which, as a woman, usually means, ‘you’re angry’,” she says. “Sport has given me tonnes of resilience, which you need in public life. Parliament is a platform. That means you have to keep fighting.”
