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.
