Britain is crippled. More of us than ever before are disabled. One in four, at the last count. But it is a statistic so obviously at odds with reality that anyone with working eyesight should question it. Instead, it has been adopted as fact by government, doctors, charities and benefits assessors.

This mass collapse in health – nearly four million more people describing themselves as disabled in the past decade – is driven, we are told, by genuinely worsening mental health and a surge in diagnoses of conditions such as ADHD and autism. So vast is the problem that a government review last week found the sickness-welfare system ‘not fit for purpose’. No wonder, when the number of working-age Britons claiming disability benefits is rising faster than the estimated disabled population itself.

I just don’t believe all these people really are disabled. The word itself has lost all meaning, and I should know.

My instinct to reject the disability label spurred me on, and it must have saved the taxpayer a few bob

My instinct to reject the disability label spurred me on, and it must have saved the taxpayer a few bob

A declaration of interest: I am a spastic. I have cerebral palsy – left hemiparesis, to be exact – and, unlike many ‘disabled’ people today, I’d much rather I didn’t. I am lucky. As an adult, it causes me relatively little trouble, beyond a strong aversion to standing up for too long. But my childhood was spent wearing a splint and undergoing medical procedures, some of which are now considered so barbaric that they are no longer carried out by the NHS.

My condition also brought with it what I fondly misremember as playground high jinks: shouts of ‘pegleg’ and ‘Spazzy McGee’, and classmates hiding my splint in the roof void when I took it off for swimming lessons.

But leave the character-building aside and what really upset me was not the pain. It was the determination of every adult around me to make me accept the label ‘disabled’ when I – desperately, above all – wanted to be normal and judged on the same terms as anyone else.

‘Michael,’ my NHS physiotherapist would say, ‘you qualify for a free travel pass and leisure centre membership. Why won’t you sign up?’ I was so stubborn in my refusal to accept help from ‘Support for Learning’ that it repeatedly tipped into belligerence and landed me in detention. I rejected ‘balance class’, extra time in exams and, later, disability-access schemes when applying to university or for my first job. The idea of any sort of leg up (forgive me) was offensive to my pride.

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My instinct to reject the disability label, I think, paid dividends. It spurred me on to moderate success, and it must have saved the taxpayer a few bob too. But I’m not deluded; I’m aware I was only a product of the environment at the time, in which labels were to be shunned.

Since then, things........

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