The Tory war on the sick, disabled and chronically ill
By Claudia Webbe MP
Rishi Sunak’s ‘clampdown on sick-note culture’ reflects the sickness of the ‘elites’ and the capitalist system they run, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP
IT’S a shocking fact, not known nearly widely enough, that around half of disabled people claiming Employment and Support Allowance have attempted suicide at some point in their lives, and too many because of the government’s onerous work capability assessment (WCA) scheme.
The figure was 43 per cent seven years ago, according to NHS Digital’s Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, and, while no more up-to-date figures have since been published, the numbers will only have gone in the wrong direction as the government has pushed harder and harder to force claimants of out-of-work disability benefits into work.
What is known, however, according to information presented to the Commons work and pensions select committee in 2022, is that over just a three-year period before then, the WCA had been linked to 600 suicides.
We also know that the government has, for years, ignored warnings from experts about the dangers of the WCA programme. The WCA has long been criticised by disability groups as a programme run by corporate “healthcare professionals” through which the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has hounded disabled people with constant and constantly changing physical assessments, even for those with incurable and deteriorating health conditions.
Among leading experts responsible for the study, Professor Ben Barr of the University of Liverpool had recommended to the DWP that it start to monitor the adverse impacts of the WCA programme — but, as reported, the DWP did not even bother to contact him and other experts to find out how it could do so.
Even worse, the DWP actively covered up the data, withholding it from the professor the Cameron government had appointed to assess the “fairness and effectiveness” of the system.
This damning and terrifying reality appears to be mirrored among unemployment benefit claimants who the government sanctions for “failure” to perform some arbitrary work-related task or to scrabble hard enough for poverty-pay jobs. The emphasis here is on the word “appears,” because, in February of 2022, the government blocked access to data for Glasgow University academics who wanted to study whether benefit sanctions were driving up suicide rates.
This brought to an immediate halt the academics’ vital study that was already underway. Under then work and pensions secretary Therese Coffey, the DWP buried its own research and refused repeated requests — including Freedom of Information Act requests — for the data. Its excuse: a claim that the information was “sensitive” and, appallingly, that it was in the public interest to hide it!
Since then, the government has aimed only to increase the number of sanctions imposed. Last April, a government report was published that noted that sanctions are not only ineffective but actually counterproductive. Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt’s response was to announce that sanctions “will be applied more rigorously.”
Added to all of this is the DWP’s practice of making deductions from already inadequate universal credit payments. Nationally, according to DWP’s own data, almost half of all universal credit claimants suffer deductions from their payments, with around half of those being forced repayments of “advances” the government loans to claimants to cover the fact that the first five weeks or longer of their claim are unpaid.
In my constituency of Leicester East, where more than four out of 10 children are living in poverty, the amounts deducted are higher than the national average and the percentage affected will compound the suffering already faced.
A survey by the TUC found that 86 per cent of universal credit claimants had been put into financial difficulty because of this mandatory waiting period. The survey was conducted in 2020, before the current cost-of-living crisis, which can only have made matters worse. This DWP practice causes “immense misery,” and forces many into debt and to rely on foodbanks, or simply to go hungry, with obvious impacts on physical and mental health.
And now, Rishi Sunak has said that he plans to deprive doctors of the ability to sign those suffering poor mental or physical health off work, handing power instead to officials with no medical training, saying that instead he wants “work and health professionals” — the same kind of role that some have argued has ruined, and even ended, the lives of so many disabled people — to make sick notes harder to obtain.
This context demonstrates that there is no regard for whether people are actually fit to work. The pre-decided aim of this attack on so-called “sick-note culture” is to increase the number of people forced to work even if they are ill. The move comes at the same time as the government has axed a scheme to help disabled people find work — and is cutting benefits for sick and disabled people.
Arguably, Labour’s aims are not much different to those of the Tories. A month before Sunak made his speech, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves responded to a question about what she would have done differently compared to Hunt’s Spring Budget. Her answer? To say that she wants to get people off sickness benefit and into work.
Blaming the poor for their own poverty and maintaining the capitalist stranglehold with the goal of ensuring that companies always have a large pool of people who will work for low pay will sadly justify the political reasoning.
By pushing a narrative that there are millions who should be working and aren’t — especially if they are supposedly hiding behind a sick note — the political elites foster an “us and them” mentality that impedes social and class cohesion and collective resistance. Reeves, remember, once said under then Labour leader Ed Miliband that she wanted Labour to be “tougher on benefits” than the Tories and not to be seen as the party for people who are out of work.
The British economy is also built, by design, on maintaining unemployment. The Bank of England’s monetary policy committee (MPC) aims to maintain a certain level of unemployment to limit inflation, by ensuring that workers are inhibited from being “too” ambitious in their wage demands, because they know that there is always someone willing to take their job and potentially for less than they are demanding.
But the level of unemployment (and of economic inactivity, which is a frequent media and political discussion topic) cannot be allowed to be a still pool, because if those not working can’t be forced into work and those in work can be confident of their jobs, then the unemployment rate — called by the MPC economists the “underlying” rate — doesn’t do its job of inhibiting wage demands.
The “right” kind of unemployment for capitalism has to “flow” — workers being made unemployed while those unemployed are forced back to work — or it doesn’t do its job. Recent MPC publications have expressed concern that the labour market is “tight,” without the required flow.
More directly, too, those forced into work they are not really fit to do — especially under penalty of sanctions — cannot be too demanding. They are intrinsically more likely to work for less — and we’ve all heard Tory MPs openly discussing the desirability of waiving even the minimum wage for disabled people to get them off disability benefits.
Sunak’s plan to deprive doctors of the right to sign sick people off work is the latest branch of a whole system specifically designed to make unemployment and disability a misery of poverty and stress — because for far too many people, even working is a misery of poverty and stress, and poverty and stress make people sick.
Fixing the system so it doesn’t make people sick and poor would rip out the foundation of exploitation and oppression that underpins the capitalist system, something the current political leadership could never countenance. So instead, they plan to make it far harder and more punitive for the victims of the fundamentally capitalism-diseased system.
The sick-note plan is not a response to the imagined “sick-note culture,” but yet another sign of the diseased nature of capitalism and the “elites” that run a society built on it — and, as ever, the victims of the disease are made to pay for the sickness inflicted on them. We have to build a genuine left, in politics and with our unions to combat and tackle this political sickness head-on.
Claudia Webbe MP is the member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe
