Disability politics is strewn with pratfalls, as I know to my cost. One writer's heartwarming story is another's patronising pat on the head. Someone's tale of triumph over adversity is for others just more inappropriate schmaltz. So, if you thought that the Paralympics, that four-yearly festival of disability sport was fireproof, well, think again.

Yes, I know, it's always greeted by whoops of amazement: this groundbreaking discovery that disabled people do play sport, and that some do it very well and even excitingly. It's a sporting equivalent of groundhog day, in which everyone discovers, yet again, wheelchair basketball and Tanni Grey-Thompson – or her latest equivalent – only to forget them all again until the next time.

Nonetheless, by the end of the games, we're all congratulating ourselves on living in a country that gives sport like this such excellent coverage, and declaring that we'll be looking anxiously for the results of games such as "goalball" and Boccia, invented for, respectively, blind and severely disabled people, which two weeks earlier we'd never heard of. So: the Paralympics is fireproof, is it? Not a bit of it: And especially not from disabled people themselves.

The games regularly face two criticisms in particular: first, that they are irrelevant to the everyday concerns of disabled people and that, worse, it often gives the impression everything in the garden is lovely; and second, that staging them as a separate event, far from being a celebration of disability, merely serves to emphasise its separation from the mainstream. The latest salvo to this effect has just come from the disability organisation Scope, which has produced a survey suggesting that two-thirds of the 500 mainly disabled people whose opinions were sought believe that the Paralympics and the Olympics should be combined. (At the moment, and for the past 30 years or so, the Paralympics have taken place a couple of weeks after the Olympics; before that, they often didn't even happen in the same country.)

On the face of it the complaints sound justified and press all the correct liberal buttons. It's integrated, it's inclusive; it's, well, just right!

Wrong! It would be an unmitigated disaster. I shall have coals of fire heaped on my head for saying it, so here are my reasons. First, the Paralympics wouldn't be combined with the Olympics, it would be swamped by it. Smothered. The Olympics is already the largest sporting event in the world (the Paralympics the second largest). It already sprawls all over our television screens and newspapers, threatening to take over the world (and I'm a sports-lover).

Ask the aficionados of judo, curling and hammer-throwing just how much coverage they get, compared with the likes of Usain Bolt and Rebecca Adlington. So can you imagine what, with the best will in the world, would happen to the Paralympics? It would be plucked from its lone and privileged status as a separate event after the Olympics is safely done and dusted, supported by the bastions of broadcasting diversity and equality, and forced to go slumming it with all the other Olympic events. Faced with the choice of the finish of the Olympic marathon or the final of the goalball event for blind athletes, where are sports editors most likely to send their reporters, and where are TV directors going to train their cameras?

But something far more insidious would happen, which would do even more harm to disability sport than lack of coverage. The reason the Paralympics is the second largest sporting occasion in the world is that, to achieve fairness, like has to compete with like. Therefore, many competitions have multiple versions of each event, to take account of physical differences; the amount of movement in the arms, degree of eyesight loss, etc. I think there are some 14 swimming categories, for example.

If the games were combined, there would be an inevitable compromise. The Paralympics would be asked to cut the number of categories for each event. The range of disability in each event would be wider, thus excluding more severely disabled people, if not from the competition itself, then at least from any realistic chance of success. This is what happened when disability events were included in the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002. The games were highly successful, and indeed those disabled athletes who participated thought it a good experience; but what about those who didn't get the chance, because their category had been broadened to a point which put them out of contention? The ultimate irony, surely; too disabled to be part of the Paralympic games.

Well, you might argue, that's sport. It's about being the best, and there can be only so many winners. The parallel, though, is those mainstream sports that make a distinction between certain body types. After all, a flyweight boxer might as well give up if he has to go into the ring with heavyweights such as the Klitschko brothers.

The truth of the matter is, huge strides have been made over the past 20 years in getting the Paralympics taken seriously. When I went to cover my first games only 15 years ago in Atlanta, there were four of us expected to do the whole of the BBC radio coverage (I managed to fit in a bit of television news as well, although we had to fly a director out from London to get the pieces onscreen). The day-to-day TV coverage was all done by an independent company, with less than an hour of highlights each day. (Not long before that, all the coverage the Paralympics got was a Christmas special, the basic theme of which was "isn't it marvellous that they even bother to get out of bed in the morning?")

So the fact that last time, in Beijing, I was one of a full journalistic team from BBC sport, complete with both disabled and non-disabled pundits providing at least six hours of coverage a day, was little short of a miracle. This is now topped by the fact that for the 2012 games, Channel 4 has thought it worth its while to outbid the Beeb to get the gig.

I'm convinced that if it had to fight for coverage with the rest of the Olympics, not only would the Paralympics lose its coverage and its privileged slot, but what visibility it did attract would revert to exactly the kind of patronising attitudes that a fifth of those the Scope survey said they hated.

So, what about that other argument that the games are irrelevant to the daily concerns of disabled people? Well, there are certainly enough concerns at the moment: potential loss of benefits; pressure to find jobs that don't exist; an insidious press campaign, fuelled from goodness knows where, suggesting most disabled people are on the scrounge: these are all very legitimate worries.

What's puzzling to me, though, is the idea that in some way the Paralympics deflect attention from those issues, and that paralympic athletes should be concentrating on solving them, rather than hurtling down the track in a wheelchair.

As far as I know, no one is suggesting Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis should give up the 10,000 metres and the heptathlon to solve the banking crisis, or tackle youth unemployment. No. Leave the Paralympics alone, where most of you will discover it for the first time in 2012, and then discover it for the first time all over again in 2016.