There is an innocuous-looking paragraph tucked away in John Pring’s marvellous exposé The Department which says so much about how the British political class has carefully nurtured this appalling, though largely unrecognized, scandal over several decades. And how – when faced with incontrovertible and accumulating evidence of the human damage inflicted – it has just doubled down.
On page 51, Pring recalls how in the US in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan imposed a series of cuts to disabled people’s benefits, resulting in a spate of suicides. One woman with arthritis, spinal disease and severe depression, left a note saying, “the message I’m getting is either work or die.” “The Reagan administration”, Pring writes, “reviewed about 1.2 million cases and stopped payment to nearly 500,000 claimants, with 200,000 of those terminations reversed on appeal, until Congress forced a halt to the programme in 1984.”*
This sounds so much like the “slow violence” of British All Work Test/Personal Capability Assessment/Work Capability Assessment programme, even down to the huge number of successful appeals, that it’s quite uncanny. With the exception of course that no-one in authority has had the courage to say stop*.
That failure, as Pring relates, has been responsible for hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths. These casualties comprise three kinds: people suffering from mental distress who were hounded and threatened with destitution by the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP), those whose real and impairing physical conditions were ignored, and those, such as ex-squaddie David Clapson, who died as a direct result of sanctions.
And it reveals the political/ideological lineage of what has happened over on Airstrip One which all began in 1989 when Thatcher’s social security minister, John Moore, sent a note to chief secretary of the Treasury, John Major, stressing “the need to tackle the rising expenditure on these benefits” with “no choice” but to make “long-term savings”.
But though the policy was shot through with its Reaganite/Thatcherite parentage, it did not loosen its grip when the Tories lost power in 1997. In fact, so keen was Tony Blair to demonstrate that Labour was no longer the party of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson (and heaven forbid Jeremy Corbyn) that he made it a point of pride to extend the policy. It was the Labour party that introduced the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) in 2008 (under Gordon Brown actually) and vied with the Tories in the 2010 election campaign over how quickly existing Incapacity Benefit Claimants could be re-assessed (the promise was 10,000 a week). Of course, it was the Conservatives – in the person of Iain Duncan Smith in particular – who actually perpetrated this, resulting, as Pring documents, in a spike of deaths and suicides at the height of austerity in 2013/14. But the sad and sobering point is the Labour party would have done exactly the same thing.
And is doing now. Rachel ‘tougher on benefits than the Tories’ Reeves has kept Tory plans to further tighten eligibility for sickness benefits, resulting in ‘savings’ of £1.3bn. This further turning of the screw follows the creation of the WCA itself (because previous testing regimes like Peter Lilley’s All Work Test and Tony Blair’s Personal Capability Assessment were still too tied to the pesky opinions of medical professionals), more stringent rules introduced by Labour in 2010, yet further fine-tuning by the Conservatives in 2012, and of course Rishi Sunak’s goodbye present to the sick and disabled.
But still there is the common perception that if you self-diagnose as feeling a bit peaky, you can just saunter in to your local Job Centre and claim benefits. For example, Paul Routledge, chief political correspondent of the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror recently informed his readers that millions who “should and could work” “sign on” for long-term sickness benefits.
Yeah right.
As Pring illuminates, the fact that people “know” this can be attributed to the determined, and astonishingly effective, propaganda campaign enacted from the start of the ’90s that inculcated a fashionable cynicism that most ‘disabled’ people on benefits were, at best, swinging the lead and, at worst, outright frauds.
That this belief is as fresh as ever is illustrated by Sir Kier’s instruction to the Department of Work and Pensions (the Department of the title) to rifle through benefit claimants’ bank accounts to find evidence of fraud. The fact that fraud is miniscule, and for Personal Independence Payments it actually stands at zero, doesn’t make any difference.
But now we are told by Liz Kendall, who lives, by the way, in a Notting Hill mansion and claims thousands in Parliamentary expenses to pay her heating bill, that there a millions of not really ill people on sickness benefit (god knows how they got there), who need a bit for firm encouragement (doubtless through the threat to cut off their only source of income) to join the virtuous ranks of the “economically active”.
This attitude has survived unscathed since it was first fleshed out at the start the century under the previous Labour government. Then, as Pring relates, DWP-linked academics convinced themselves and others that the country was in the dreaded grip of a “malingering epidemic”. A book on the subject, Malingering and Illness Deception, mentioned the word “malingering” more than one thousand times – despite the fact that there was no actual evidence that the thing existed (the excuse being that the research hadn’t been done yet or was too difficult).
In Pring’s words – in an interview about the book – “There is this belief that people are defrauding the system and it is based on nothing whatsoever.”
As five months of a new government committed to ‘change’ have demonstrated, this conviction is as firmly entrenched as ever. Its latest iteration is that after Covid, there are millions vegetating on “long-term sickness” benefit whose purported ailments (or “illness behaviours” as they were termed a few years ago) shouldn’t stop them working. And as compassionate [sic] guardians of the public interest, we are going to flush them out.
The fact that Britain is now, post-Covid, a lot sicker, both mentally and physically, than before is not allowed to seep into the brains of these ideologues. After more than a decade of fiscal austerity combined with stagnating wages – and then topped off with a lockdown that imprisoned people in their homes followed by inflation, high interest rates and a resultant ‘cost of living’ crisis – this shouldn't come as a surprise.
This country was, though no-one in power wants to face it, suffering from falling life expectancy before Covid hit.
In reality, though the absolute numbers of disabled people on out-of-work benefits has risen, the proportion of disabled people on those benefits has dropped slightly.
Possibly if you want to reduce the benefits ‘bill’, you should strive to make society and the economy healthier for the people who make it up. Just as if your aim is to curb the tax credits ‘bill’, you increase wages.
But that kind of thinking would just get in the way of the smooth transmission of the propaganda, wouldn’t it?
At the end of Pring’s book, he evinces the hope that those who suffered because of decades of “dehumanizing bureaucratic neglect, cruelty and violence” can retrospectively receive justice.
But the prerequisite for justice is acknowledgement, recognition, awareness. And I’m sorry to say I can see neither hide nor hair of that.
This is the first part of this review. In the final part, I would examine what this tale of wanton “neglect, cruelty and violence” reveals about the corporatisation of British politics and system’s reliance on an unholy fusion of politics and the media.
*As the linked article relates, Reagan’s eventually aborted plan of withdrawing benefits from hundreds of thousands of disabled people was revived by Donald Trump during his first administration. I honestly don’t know whether it was implemented at the time but, given that he’ll be back in office from January, it probably will be.
