You would probably be sitting in a residential home.
If you were lucky. Putting your hand up to ask if you could be helped to the toilet. Staring at a communal television rather than your own phone. That was the reality for Disabled People in Britain before a small number of furious, determined people decided it didn't have to be.
They fought for the rights you use without thinking about them today: the right to live in your own home, to choose your own personal assistants, to leave an institution, to be heard as a political voice rather than managed as a medical problem. Most of them are no longer alive. Likes and shares are no good to them now. But you could at least learn their names. You could learn what life was like for Disabled People in the UK before they changed it.
A lot of Disabled People today have never heard of the pioneers of this movement, and so have no idea what was actually achieved, or how recently, or how fragile it remains. Learning about our past matters, especially right now, because a movement that forgets its own history is a movement that can be quietly persuaded it never needed to exist.
"We cannot rely on others, whoever they are and whatever their motives, for that is the route to the gas chamber, the residential home, the hospital and extermination before birth. Creating our own organisations is not something to take our minds off our 'tragedies' but a matter of life and death."
Mike Oliver, 1996
That warning was written thirty years ago. It is no less urgent now. With the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill currently passing through Parliament, the questions the movement's founders fought over are not historical curiosities. They are live.
Some of the people who changed everything
Paul Hunt
Co-founder, UPIAS
Wrote to The Guardian from a residential institution in 1972, calling for Disabled People to organise themselves. That letter led directly to the founding of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, the organisation that first articulated what became the social model.
Vic Finkelstein
Co-founder, UPIAS
A South African exile and psychologist whose theoretical work, alongside Hunt's, separated impairment from disability for the first time, locating the problem in society rather than the body.
Mike Oliver
Academic and activist
Coined the term "social model of disability" in 1983. His writing gave the movement a shared political language and remained its most consistent intellectual voice for decades.
Ken Davis
Co-founder, UPIAS
Spent years in a residential institution before becoming a key architect of early independent living provision in the UK, helping prove that life outside institutional walls was possible.
Jane Campbell
Activist and peer, House of Lords
A leading figure in direct action and policy change, later becoming Baroness Campbell of Surbiton, where she continues to warn that assisted dying legislation represents a form of disability discrimination.
Colin Barnes
Academic, Centre for Disability Studies, Leeds
Built one of the most significant bodies of disability studies research in the world, repeatedly warning of incorporation and the dilution of movement politics by the state.
A short timeline
1972
Paul Hunt's letter to The Guardian leads to the founding of UPIAS.
1981
The British Council of Organisations of Disabled People (BCODP) is formed, the first national body controlled by Disabled People themselves.
1983
Mike Oliver names the social model of disability.
1996
Direct action campaigning intensifies, including protests that helped force the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act.
1996
The Community Care (Direct Payments) Act gives Disabled People the legal right to control their own support, a policy born directly from the movement's campaigning.
2005
Improving the Life Chances of Disabled People promises a User-Led Organisation modelled on genuine Centres for Independent Living in every locality by 2010. Much of that promise was never delivered as intended.
2016 onward
Austerity-era cuts strip funding from general advocacy and peer support, leaving many Disabled People without any route into the movement's history or politics at all.
Today
The VDPM is built so that history, financial independence and democratic control cannot be quietly stripped away again.
Why this keeps happening
Vic Finkelstein warned in 1996 that "a lot of the new generation of disabled people are gaining the benefits but not recognising where it's come from, and as a result they're not participating in the movement." Disabled People today may use Direct Payments, live independently, or belong to an organisation calling itself User-Led, without ever being told that none of this was given freely. It was won, by people who are mostly no longer here to tell you themselves.
That is not an accident. Without political education and peer support, knowledge of the movement's history stays in academic archives rather than everyday organisational life. The danger is not that the history has been erased. It is that each new generation has to be actively introduced to it, or it might as well not exist for them at all.
Further reading
Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People, Disabled People's Archive
Grove Road archive material on early independent living history (Baldwinson)
Centre for Disability Studies, University of Leeds
Oliver, M. (1996) Understanding Disability, Palgrave
Campbell, J. and Oliver, M. (1996) Disability Politics: Understanding Our Past, Changing Our Future
Barnes, C. and Mercer, G. (2006) Independent Futures
The VDPM exists so this history is never optional reading again. Every member is introduced to it as a condition of joining, not an afterthought.