The country has a “sicknote culture” that needs to be tackled, the prime minister said. Britain “can’t afford” its record levels of welfare spending and it’s “not fair” on the taxpayer.Who could argue with this? Frances Ryan, of course!
Attacking sick and disabled people is a method that has been deployed time and time again over the past 14 years of Conservative rule. It is the equivalent of the party’s in-case-of-emergency button: if in trouble, ministers can sound the alarm and the rightwing press will churn out headlines about getting the “jobless” off the “dole”.
The notion that we have a 'rightwing press' is laughable. If we did have one, would we see males being treated as females in the pages and broadcasts?
The plan to shift responsibility for issuing fit notes away from GPs to other “work and health professionals” in order to encourage more people to get back into work is a classic piece of Conservative welfare thinking. If there are too many sick people in the country, don’t bother dealing with the causes – just get someone who is not a doctor to declare they’re not actually sick after all.
What has largely slipped under the radar, though, is a major reform: a review of personal independence payments (Pip), the flagship non-means-tested benefit designed to help cover the extra costs that come with disability. Proposals include asking for more medical evidence before awarding the benefit, looking at whether some payments should be one-off rather than ongoing, and withdrawing money from some people living with mental-health problems and replacing it with treatment.
How terrible, trying to treat someone's illness so they can live a normal, working life! Oh, the humanity!
And asking for actual medical evidence! OK, I'll give you that one, since we didn't seem to need it for the pandemic, did we?
The bleakest part of Sunak’s plan is that there is a genuine crisis obscured by his misleading rhetoric. Britain is a significantly sicker and poorer country than it used to be. In the coming years, addressing the growing number of long-term sick people will have to be the priority of any government. To do that though, ministers will need to forgo the fiction that hordes of workers are faking illnesses and admit the facts.
But it's a fact that some of them do. Even people who don't need to for monetary reasons. The question is, surely, how many.
The true sickness in this country cannot be found in a benefits office or a GP surgery but in Downing Street. It is a political culture whose default setting is demonising and impoverishing people who are already suffering, and a rightwing media that for decades has parroted the lies and bigotry it is fed.
And those who live alongside the sicknote brigade and wonder why they work when others don't, Frances? They can't all be 'hoodwinked' by our so-called right wing media.
3 comments:
I have friend with a cystic fibrosis who has worked all her adult life in a benefits office (despite occasional hospitalisations and the necessary regular clinic visits for monitoring).
Fortunately she has a good sense of humour; in her position, I doubt I’d have the self control to deal politely with the minority of clients who sit in front of her insisting that some far less serious condition means they can’t take any job at all. As in so many other benefit areas, if all such claimants could be shamed into removing themselves from the system, proper provision for those in genuine need would be far better and easier to access.
It is a great shame that the likes of Frances Ryan will always prefer to condemn the government for policies shaped by overwhelming demand rather than acknowledging the harm caused by those who clog up the system with spurious claims.
My dad had parkinson's disease. After they both retired my mum could claim some kind of carer's allowance due to the fact that he started to need full time care. We never realised what a tough time she had caring for him until after she died and we read her diaries which were pretty harrowing. But they were certainly not short of money. As you can imagine, there wasn't much that they could do by the time dad's illness became really bad so they weren't going out and spending it. Their bank balance grew to the point that mum had to start buying furniture to stop it getting to a level where their allowance would be cut off. Furniture being one of the things that were allowed by the system as opposed to, I don't know, a Yamaha R1 motorbike for example. Had they been younger would the system have been hassling mum to get a job? I don't know, but the support that they received wasn't as awful as the general government reputation for incompetence would have lead me to expect. Is the toleration of workshy grifters the price that we have to pay for genuine cases to be properly supported?
Stonyground.
"...in her position, I doubt I’d have the self control to deal politely with the minority of clients who sit in front of her insisting that some far less serious condition means they can’t take any job at all."
I can imagine how soul-destroying that must be...
"...the support that they received wasn't as awful as the general government reputation for incompetence would have lead me to expect. "
My mother gets Attendance Allowance as she's in a care home - it helps to pay some of the care home costs, and claiming it for her wasn't as onerous as I'd expected (despite letters from the DWP demanding the address of the care home which they'd already been given and to which they'd already sent one of their officers to interview her!)
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