In this chapter we bring together the themes of the previous eight chapters in order to offer an interpretation of the life situations of the people with learning difficulties whom we have studied. We will do this by, first, further discussing our position within the social model of disability. We will then review the development of categories and procedures in the Scottish legal system by which people have been declared incompetent in the tasks of daily life and therefore subject to special regulation. We will then analyse the position of three of our case study people, giving an extended case study of the consequences of such a classification for one woman. We will then suggest that people with learning difficulties are, due to their particular forms of, and relationships to, social capital, subject to invasive regulation by the power/knowledge of different professional groups. These discussions lead into our final chapter in which we explore the policy implications of our work.

In the first chapter we stated that we used an ‘operational’ rather than a ‘medical’ definition of learning difficulties in that we were interested in people so labelled by service providers. This is consistent with the ‘social model of disability’ discussed in Chapter 5 which locates disability in the barriers to full social participation experienced by people with impairments rather than in the impairment itself. For people with learning difficulties, one of the barriers is the label. The case studies provided consistent examples of how the label is flexible, contested and consequential: its flexibility is illustrated in our discussions of how it was becoming applied to increasing numbers of people, even communities, by LEC officials concerned about ‘employability’ (see Chapter 3) or by our account of how Ronald became (precisely) 50% disabled overnight as the public utility was groomed for privatisation (Chapter 5); its contestation is illustrated by Iona's employer firmly rejecting the imposition of the label on her chosen successor as chief cook (Chapter 4) or by Greg's father objection to his being “parried with the Mongols” (Chapter 5); its consequentiality is illustrated by Ewan's having to give up full-time work in order to maintain the label as the warrant to his major source of income (Chapter 7) or, most starkly, by the case of Clare which we discuss later in this chapter.