I got an uncanny feeling of déjà vu when watching the recent Channel 4 drama about water company pollution, Dirty Business
A teacher, Reuben, gets an infection when surfing in sewage encrusted waters. Periodic attacks involving writhing on the floor and vomiting mean he has to give up his job. He applies for disability benefits but gets zero points because, as the assessor keeps repeating, when he is not having an attack, he functions normally (3rd episode, 20.43).
You can see the tired resignation creep across Reuben’s face, as he realises that the fact he does have regular attacks which make him unemployable is completely irrelevant to the assessment.
This is so evocative of the hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people deemed fit for work points in the roll-out of the Work Capability Assessment under the Con-Lib Dem coalition. They got zero points too because although they couldn’t do any job that existed in the real world, by reaching above their head or into their top pocket once, they revealed that they could do an entirely abstract form of work.
At the time, there were futile calls for a real-world test to take account of what jobs actually demanded people could do repeatedly (as jobs tend to). But these were slammed down by the government in the shape of employment minister Chris Grayling who declared himself “absolutely, unreservedly and implacably” opposed to such a real-world test.
Current Labour DWP enforcer Pat McFadden doesn’t need to signal his opposition to a real-world test – it’s taken as read that it’s a total non-starter. The unbending focus now is on reducing the numbers of people qualifying for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) (which is what the teacher in Dirty Business applies for) despite the fact that 300,000 claims a year are rejected.
Labour did want to make the PIP criteria much tougher, something even Iain Duncan Smith found too much to stomach, but plans were put on hold as a result of an unexpected rebellion of backbench drones. But they will undoubtedly be repackaged as a result of the Timms Review now out for consultation.
Nothing better illustrates the duopoly afflicting the allegedly adversarial British political system than the treatment of sick and disabled people. The default consensus that they are ‘taking the mickey’ and deserve to be punished for having the temerity to have something wrong with them, which is probably half in the mind anyway.
The attitude, as John Pring shows in The Department, can be traced back to the dog days of the Thatcher administration, when health minister and “Mr Privatisation” John Moore wrote to chief secretary to the Treasury John Major, saying rising spending on sickness benefits needed to be tackled, with ‘no choice’ but to make ‘long-term savings’.
In the old system, i.e. invalidity benefit which existed before the testing regime began in the early ’90s, the ‘overriding consideration’ had been one of reasonableness, with the claimants’ ability to work measured against jobs which existed in the real world. But that is a bygone era in British history. Hence the assessor’s monolithic insistence that when the ex-teacher in Dirty Business was not having a debilitating attack, he was perfectly able to do a job. The fact that vanishingly few employers would want to employ someone who involuntarily squirmed around on the floor every week, being sick everywhere, is not the state’s problem.
Have a nice day.
As of the beginning of this month, new claimants in the Limited Capacity for Work Related Activity Group of the Health element of Universal Credit (formerly Employment and Support Allowance) will have to survive on £50 a week, a nearly 50% cut from the £97 they previously received. This is so the ‘perverse incentive’ to apply for sickness benefit is removed. Actually, there is now a ‘perverse incentive’ to say there is nothing wrong with you even though there is, to ensure against the possibility that you will be judged unfit for work and placed in the LCRWA group.
This, in case you needed any reminder, is being carried through by a ‘Labour’ government. I remember being told in 2020 – by some young careerist working his way up the greasy pole at a meeting to choose the Labour leadership candidate which the CLP I was in would support – to “think of the most vulnerable person” I knew and then cast my vote for Sir Kier Starmer.
What he forgot to say was that if I harboured some sadistic desire to make them suffer even more, I should vote for Starmer.
As Dirty Business makes clear, there is a unity of purpose between the ‘Labour’ party and the Conservatives, which was briefly under threat in the four years before 2020 (which now resemble some strange hallucination). And the wretched consensus is not merely about how to treat the chronically ill.
As the programme recalls, David Cameron promised to tear up 3,000 pieces of needless regulation in order, he claimed, to release the growth potential of the British economy. Over a decade later, Starmer wrote to all 17 regulators in the UK telling them to relax rules for companies. This has resulted in a steep decline in enforcement actions, as they obediently scrabble to fall into line with the government’s so-called growth agenda.
And where has this deregulatory mania got us (aside from turds in rivers that is)? In the 18 years after the Financial Crisis of 2008, the economy has grown by 22% (an average rate of under 1%), while in the 18 years prior to 2008 it grew by 53% – more than twice as fast (and that record was terrible compared to the social democratic post-war years). But do carry on, won’t you.
We are in the grip of necrophile Thatcherism and it’s killing us. Some more than others, admittedly.
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