When Sir Bert Massie – who was a member of the Civil Society Futures Panel – died in October 2017 I described him as a giant of the voluntary sector. Someone who had made an enormous contribution, always reminding us that we were about rights and resistance, just as much as we were about service and association.

Reading his recently published memoir – A Life Without Limits – reminded me yet again what an enormous lifelong contribution he made, and how very many of the rights we now enjoy had been gained in his enormously productive lifetime.

But his memoir reminded me of something else. It is how his extraordinary combination of passion, focus and attention to detail really can change the world.

Bert’s passion, that disabled people should live full active and equal lives, is evident in every page of this book. His personal determination to lead a full and active life sings out on every page. And so too does his passion to ensure that all disabled people – and indeed all people facing discrimination – should lead full lives.

But it was not just passion – there is a clarity of vision, a focus, and a certainty that changes in both policy and practice really can make a difference. A vision for a better, more equal world, based on personal experience and the experience of the people he grew up with and the very many people he worked with in his life. But a vison too that was collaborative and willing to make alliances. I’ll treasure forever his entertaining presentation to an early meeting of the Inquiry about the alliance forged between people using wheelchairs and mothers pushing prams that successfully pressurised successive ministers to demand better access on the railways.

Passion and vision are essential. What Bert also brought was a willingness to engage in the hard graft of good governance, of detailed policy making, of tireless briefing and engagement. Time and again he describes the processes of change, the need to work with others, and the common cause he created. Bert could fight battles, and could pick fights, but he could also make change happen, not posturing but arguing incisively, and creatively for the sort of change that really does remove the limits to lives.

I learned a lot from Bert and his work and will be forever grateful. But this memoir tells us all so much more about the way in which a Liverpudlian from a working class family, contracting policy as a baby, came to be such a giant in our sector, making changes that will be felt for generations to come. And reminding us all, all over again, that we should never take rights for granted. They need to be fought for time and time again.