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disabled. Compiled in 10 days, his 33-clause
Bill required councils to register all disabled
people; send them regular bulletins on
available assistance; provide sheltered housing,
home adaptations and recreational facilities;
introduce the orange badge scheme; extend
concessions on public transport; improve
wheelchair access to public buildings and
provide special lavatory facilities; and keep the
young disabled out of geriatric wards.
The Bill passed the Commons unopposed,
though the Department of Health was
unenthusiastic and the Treasury forced the
deletion of crucial clauses on mobility. The
Lords acclaimed it after speeches from four
wheelchair-bound peers, but their zeal to
extend the Bill put it at risk as an election
loomed and only the provision of government
time got it through.
Its enactment earned Morris seats on the
committees of many disability groups, and
the Field Marshal Lord Harding award from
disablement charities. Had Labour won in 1970,
Morris would have joined the government.
As it was, Wilson made him a social services
spokesman with responsibility for the disabled;
he would keep this job in opposition and in
government for 22 years.
He harried Sir Keith Joseph to implement
sections of his own Bill which had yet to take
effect — notably the provision for registering
the disabled — and blacklist recalcitrant
councils; well into the 1980s, Morris recorded
cases of foot-dragging.
When Labour regained power in March
1974, Wilson made Morris a Parliamentary
Under-Secretary at the DHSS and Minister
for the Disabled, with a brief covering twelve
departments. In 1977 he unveiled Motability,
a privately-financed car rental scheme for the
disabled worked up by Lord Goodman and
Jeffrey (later Lord) Sterling.
He heartened the disablement lobby by
persuading Barbara Castle to bring in an
invalidity pension, an invalid care allowance
and the mobility allowance. He exempted the
blind from NHS optical charges, and formed a
watchdog Committee on Restrictions Against
Disabled People. In the 1979 New Year’s
Honours, Callaghan made him a Privy Councillor
— a rare honour for a junior minister.
In opposition Morris kept his portfolio. He
stood apart from the warfare which afflicted
Labour in the early 1980s, abstaining in the
pivotal deputy leadership contest between
Denis Healey and Tony Benn. After the
Falklands conflict he accused ministers of
‘covering up’ the number of servicemen
disabled on active service. He took up the
cases of war widows on minimum pensions,
and cancer patients exposed to radiation at
nuclear tests in the 1950s.
As a trusted senior backbencher, Morris chaired
the Parliamentary Pensions Fund, the Commons
Members’ Fund and the Parliamentary and
Scientific Committee. He retired from the
Commons in 1997; up to the final weeks he
could be seen at the head of mass lobbies,
one for haemophiliacs who had contracted HIV
through blood transfusions.
In the Lords with a life peerage, Morris led
a series of revolts over the treatment of the
disabled, teaming up with Lord (Jack) Ashley
to oppose elements of Alistair Darling’s 1999
Welfare Reform and Pensions Bill with a
declaration that it ‘piled handicap on handicap
for many thousands of disabled people’.
Alf Morris married, in 1950, Irene Jones, with
whom he had two sons and two daughters.
Reproduced by kind permission of The
Telegraph
Peter Jones (1953, English), drawing on
events described in Alf Morris: People’s
Parliamentarian by Derek Kinrade (2007), adds:
Alf did not immediate endear himself to
College authorities. Long since politically
active, less than two weeks into his first
term he received an invitation to put
himself forward for selection as the party
ST CATHERINE’S COLLEGE 2012/61