History
During 1939 a programme of child `euthanasia' began, whereby the parents of newborns and young children who were reported to have disabilities were encouraged to send their children to paediatric clinics throughout Germany and Austria.  The clinics were actually killing wards and it is estimated that around 5000 disabled children died in this way.
Hitler authorised Aktion-T4 in the autumn of 1939 which extended the programme of `euthanasia' to include disabled adults who were removed from institutions or their homes and transported to one of 6 killing stations.  The victims were gassed to death within hours of arriving, cremated and then false death certificates were given to their families.
There was eventually a level of resistance to this leading to the cancellation of T4 but then a phase of `wild euthanasia' continued until 3 weeks after the end of the war.  It is thought that more than a quarter of a million disabled people were killed.

More information can be found here and here. It's fairly awful reading.

Although T4 was a very extreme event, it is worth looking at the values that underpinned it and how it came to be acceptable for such a programme to be rolled out.  Nazi propaganda focussed on fostering an acceptance that some lives weren't worth living using slogans such as `life without hope', `life as a burden'.  It promoted attitudes that the sick and ailing should not reproduce and that the health of the nation required healthy, strong people who had no `deficits'.  In particular, the ability to work and be productive was used to judge the validity of an individual's life.

Essentially, the humanity of an entire group of people was totally disregarded.

Contemporary
So where are we today as far as attitudes towards disabled people are concerned?
I'll read you a snippet taken from the TUCs response to the EHRC consultation for the Inquiry into disability related harassment (not online):

The widespread view that disabled people are second class citizens leads too easily to the commonest forms of harassment carried out by other members of the public, developing all too readily into disability hate crimes of which there have been several well-publicised recent examples, motivated by the contempt felt for a disabled person, sometimes regardless of the identity of the individual victim;

[There is the] view taken by public bodies that actually mirrors this attitude, that underplays the significance of the problem created by such social attitudes, and treats them with less seriousness than they would other forms of harassment.

Social attitudes towards disabled people are at the very core of this whole issue.

Disability Hate Crime

The Disability Now website lists a long dossier of over 50 examples of disabled people who have been targeted, threatened over long periods of time, attacked, robbed, humiliated, tortured and murdered - where their disability was the reason for them being targeted and where disability hatred was thought to be the motive but was not prosecuted as a disability hate crime in any of the examples given.
Where racially motivated attacks occur, it is challenged, it is publically unacceptable to be racist.  Where disablist attitudes exist, they are rarely challenged and this form of discrimination is still acceptable to many people in contemporary society and is rarely recognised for what it is.  

And it may seem like a controversial thing to say but the values that allow the abuse of disabled parking bays sit on the same spectrum as the values that lead to disability hate crime.

What kind of picture of our society are we seeing where a group of people are overtly targeted for abuse by others in society?

Politics and disability

Disability Now wrote an article discussing the dangers to disabled people of the BNP winning seats in the Euro elections. They quoted Jeffrey Marshall, senior organiser for the BNP's London European election campaign who commented online on the death of David Cameron's disabled son Ivan.

He said:

"We live in a country today which is unhealthily dominated by an excess of sentimentality towards the weak and unproductive. No good will come of it."

Of course, the BNP responded to point out that this is the view of just one member and it was distorted and went on to say that a BNP Government would:

herald a new golden age for disabled people.   Freed from the heavy economic burden of EU membership, the fortune wasted on foreign aid and billions spent on supporting transparently bogus asylum seekers, a democratic nationalist government could afford to be extraordinarily generous to those of our fellow Britons who are genuinely disabled and unable to work.

I'd be interested to know how would they go about drawing the line between disabled people who are genuine and deserving of state support and those who are not or indeed those who apparently have no hope of any kind of life and shouldn't be here at all?

But more importantly, for those disabled people who are living in poverty, being targeted for abuse, unable to access education and employment opportunities - the sophisticated image of the BNP appears to be a voice for them, in the same way that young white working class males see the BNP as representing their needs.

There is a serious democratic deficit and a need for mainstream political parties to provide access and representation for disabled people.  The incredible exclusion and disadvantage of disabled people in the UK needs to be addressed, including providing access to the political process, and in developing disabled activists and representatives at all levels within mainstream parties.

Hand in hand with this it is crucial to challenge the public attitudes that present the BNP with a platform for building acceptance of their fascist rhetoric and this involves promoting equality and human rights across all equality strands, developing social policies that support rather than demonizing disabled people, and to identify disability hate crime for the abhorrence that it is.

Disabled people are one social group who are both targeted by and are targets of the BNP. Additionally, the exclusion and invisibility of disabled people in society isn't going to be addressed unless our allies across other rights movements and mainstream political parties come forward and join us in our fight for equality.