Trigger Warning – This book can cause serious damage to your propaganda

 

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.

The inability to make half an argument

The startling thing about the death spiral currently engulfing the UK economy is that the medicine prescribed to deal with it – austerity and tax rises on ordinary people – will only make the economic pain worse. And yet they are seen as the only conceivable option.

Jeremy Hunt soberly tells us we must “pay our way in the world” as he ordains £30 billion in spending cuts and £24 billion in tax rises. Meanwhile the ‘Labour’ opposition rules out taking “risks with public finances” and or “getting its big government cheque book out”. Given that Hunt’s public spending cuts will take place in 2025 – after the next general election – and that the Labour party will almost definitely, following Blair’s example in 1997, not dare deviate from Tory spending plans in a bid to appear economically ‘credible’, it is an odds on certainty that austerity mark 2 will happen regardless of which party is in power.

That that party is the Conservatives, is dependent, we are told, on the unlikely event of them recovering their reputation for “sound money and sound public finances” lost in the Liz Truss debacle. But the incredible thing is that following the Cameron/Osborne years they had it in the first place.

The twin disasters of Austerity Mark One

It is established, if not universally known, that the original version of austerity was a disaster in social terms. The 40 per cent cut in funding for public services, most apparent in huge reductions in local authority social care budgets (for home visits, help with dressing, washing etc.), translated to 335,000 excess deaths and falling life expectancy .

But austerity was also a disaster economically.  GDP per head only reached an average of 1.2% between 2010 and 2018, lower than the previous decade (which was already low). Despite a mania for selling off public assets, which raises revenue in the short-term, public debt rose from 65% of GDP in 2010 to 79.1% in February 2020, and then mushroomed further because of the Covid lockdown.

Under ‘Osbornomics’ all this pain for masses of people was accompanied by an unconditional bounty for the super-rich in the form of quantitative easing, a state subsidy which raised the value of financial assets like shares. In the Eurozone, a mirror-image – ‘Draghinomics’ (after Mario Draghi former head of the European Central Bank) – likewise dispensed the suffering and largesse to, respectively, the undeserving poor and the undeserving rich, resulting in similarly comatose economic growth.

That there is a connection between falling real wages, lacklustre GDP growth, rising government debt, and austerity (which cuts the public sector workforce and reduces spending power and thus has ripple effects in the economy, and therefore on government revenue) can only be denied by an ideologically-induced blindness, which handily our government and its handmaidens in the media have in abundance.

Nonetheless, the barely contested response to projections that government revenue will be reduced in future, in the context of even larger falls in personal income, is to reintroduce austerity, the effect of which will be to further reduce government revenue.

It must have been this kind of iron-clad logic that earned the Conservatives their reputation for economic competence.

Don’t cut your cloth according to your measure

It shouldn’t take a PhD in economics to see through it. Despite the tenacity of home-spun wisdom that the government is like a household and must budget for hard times accordingly, cutting its outlays to take account of lower income, it isn’t and shouldn’t*.  The government’s spending – on for example enhanced salaries for nurses and other public servants – will multiply through the economy by being spent by individuals, and eventually turn into income for the government paid through tax. As economist Anne Pettifor points out:

Once earned, individuals, households and firms spend and invest their new, higher income. They spend on goods, on rent, on food, and on services provided by for example, football clubs, lawyers, accountants, musicians, artists etc. That spending generates additional tax revenues for government, this time paid by football clubs, firms, shops, landlords, farmers, lawyers, musicians etc.

This anti-austerity insight that the government is not like a household and shouldn’t behave like one essentially comes from John Maynard Keynes, who famously said in 1931, “You cannot balance the nation’s books by cutting its income”. That this perception, which comes from a man who explicitly wasn’t a socialist, is now indelibly associated with the Left and non-mainstream economists is an indication of how far to the Right politics and economics have shifted in the West in the last four decades.

The economic limits of shopping

Because in the context of 2023, not 90 or so years before, there’s something wrong with it. It, and its contemporary proponents, are making half an argument.

Resuscitating what economists call “effective demand” – a virtuous circle that ensures people have more disposal income so they go out and buy consumer goods, thus stimulating production to keep up and, through increased tax, shrinking government debt – is not the panacea for the economy because it doesn’t get to the root of what’s fundamentally wrong with it.

For decades the economy has become more dependent on profits from finance and speculation for the prosaic reason that more money can be made that way than from expanding production. This is despite unrelenting efforts to sustain demand in the form of escalating personal debt. And as a profits are made, more capital is inevitably produced, conditioned to seek profitable outlets of one sort or another. Curiously, governments in the West in the last decade responded to this surplus of capital but creating even more of it through Quantitative Easing.

There is no realistic way of expanding demand quickly enough to absorb this ever growing mass of capital. Even if the UK government miraculously saw the light and stopped suppressing demand through austerity and holding down public sector pay.

In this financialised economy, government progressively becomes more indebted as it has to support a weak private sector through bail-outs, tax cuts and subsidies to low pay. Meanwhile private sector debt escalates because being “highly leveraged”, in technical parlance, is seen as the way to increase exposure to financial products and thus bring in future profits.

Theoretically, the route out of this conundrum is strong economic growth which enables the gradual amelioration of debt, private and public. In its own rather pathetic way this is what the short-lived Truss administration was trying to do through its “investment zones” and scattergun tax cuts, which would supposedly have ‘paid off’ after a few years. That the ‘markets’ quickly pulled the rug from under Truss’s feet is an indication that no-one really believes revived economic growth is possible. With Sunak and Hunt, we’re back to stabilised misery.

Socially it is imperative that the RMT and others win their pay disputes. It is vital that the NHS is properly funded and re-nationalised. It is essential that Sunak’s attempts to force workers to continue working even if they want to go on strike – reminiscent of the Fascist regimes of the 1930s and one continuity with Liz Truss – are defeated. But we shouldn’t pretend that these victories – should they happen – will bring about an economically sustainable system.

*The idea that the government should ‘trim its sails’ in hard times, much like a sensible household, has proved to have a tenacious hold on public opinion, since it was first outlined by the conservatives and their allies in the media in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But not only is the analogy wrong, it is belied by the fact that most people don’t take any notice of it in their own lives, in that personal debt goes on rising year by year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not So Great Expectations

Recently I was struck by a quote from geographer Danny Dorling on the fact that, in 2020, the UK recorded the highest number of excess deaths since the Second World War.

“All these excess death calculations that are being made, we’re comparing ourselves in 2020 with five truly awful years,” said Dorling last month, “whereas other countries are comparing themselves with the best years they’ve ever had.”

Excess deaths are defined as deaths above what could be expected based on an average of the previous five years. Because of Covid-19, there were nearly 85,000 excess deaths last year. In the first three months of 2021, there were over 32,000 excess deaths.

However, the problem in using excess deaths in the UK as an indicator of the unprecedented nature of the Covid pandemic is that, because of the political choice of austerity, between 2014 and 2019 – the previous five years – excess deaths were already rising. There were, for example, over 32,000 excess deaths in 2015, over 20,000 excess deaths in 2016 and 2017 and over 22,000 excess deaths in 2018.

In other words, because of the preceding “five truly awful years”, the huge rise in excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 was less pronounced than it would otherwise have been. In yet other words, the true extent of the present human catastrophe overseen Conservatives has been masked by the previous human catastrophe overseen by the Conservatives. You might call that ironic.

Lifting the veil

This can happen because a veil of denialism still surrounds austerity. With Covid, the bare facts are generally accepted even if the reasons for the enormous death toll – at the time of writing the sixth highest in the world – are blotted out. Austerity does not even have that chink of light. A cheer-leading consensus has blinded a rational acceptance of its effects. The entire political class was in cahoots – though austerity was carried out by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, the pre-Corbyn Labour opposition voiced its support from the sidelines.

Austerity was largely implemented through swingeing cuts to benefits and central government funding to local authorities. A combination of the popular and the invisible.

The ground for the former was prepared by a massive, and effective, propaganda campaign, portraying benefit claimants – especially allegedly sick claimants – as scroungers living off the naive generosity of the taxpayer. In addition to direct cuts in benefits – the benefits cap and freeze – there was a huge increase in the sanctioning (the withdrawal of all financial support) of claimants. Over a million sanctions were imposed in 2013, a 345% rise on their 2001-2008 average (they had been introduced by the previous Labour government).

Local authorities, however, bore the brunt. The central government grant to local councils was cut by 49%. Given that most local government spending (around 60%) goes on social care, this is where the axe fell, with palpable consequences for mortality rates. In 2014, there were a million fewer social care visits to the elderly than there had been five years before.

There is nothing painless about cuts; they don’t just eradicate ‘waste’. “ … the more cuts there have been to public health, social services and benefits – particularly for people in old age – the more earlier deaths there have been in the UK,” says Dorling. “Cuts that prevent visits by social workers to elderly people reduce their chances of being found after a fall. Cuts that make it harder to rehouse someone who is currently in a hospital bed back into the community result in hospital beds not being available for others.”

All this was compounded by what was happening to the NHS. Though formally “protected” from austerity, between 2010 and 2015 health spending rose by an average of 0.5% compared to an annual uprating of 4% since 1950.

In 2017, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that the post-2010 squeeze on public finances was linked to around 120,000 excess deaths in England alone, with the over 60s and care home residents most affected. The researchers estimated there were more than 45,000 excess deaths between 2010 and 2014 and over 152,000 people could die between 2015 and 2020 unless the “mortality gap” was closed by more funding.

Mind the gap

But such was the size of the mortality gap, it was starting to eat into life expectancy. In autumn 2017, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revised its predictions for life expectancy for both women and men, cutting the estimate for both by about a year – an estimate that had been made just two years previously. Life expectancy was flatlining. After rising consistently for decade after decade, it was now barely creeping upwards. During David Cameron’s time in office it rose by a month a year for men and by just two weeks for women. By contrast, in the 1940s and early 1950s life expectancy rose by a year every three years and accelerated again in the 1970s and ‘80s.

This means, explains Dorling, “that 110 years of improving life expectancy in the UK are now officially over. The implications for this are huge and the reasons the statistics were revised is a tragedy on an enormous scale.”

The evidence kept accruing. In February 2020, the Marmot Review, an investigation into health inequalities originally commissioned by the Brown government, found that overall life expectancy had failed to increase for a decade and had actually declined for the poorest 10% of women. The author, Michael Marmot, blamed austerity for taking a “significant toll” on the nation’s health and being responsible for “flatlining life expectancy”.

And the pension industry believes life expectancy is actually falling. In 2018, The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries cut adult life expectancy by six months in what it said was “a trend as opposed to a blip”. In March 2019, Continuous Mortality Investigation, a company owned by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that the life expectancy of men and women aged 65 had fallen by five months from 2017. According to one group of analysts, the main reason was that deaths in 2018 were “particularly high”.

However, there is a silver lining. In 2017 the Financial Times had reported that the “sharp slowdown” in life expectancy could wipe £310 billion from the deficits of large companies’ final salary pension schemes.

In an irony typical of this economic system, deteriorating public health is actually good for the financial health of big firms.

At present, official life expectancy is stalling, as opposed to actually declining as it is in the US, but further revisions are not unlikely.

For whom the bell tolls

Changes in life expectancy such as these are momentous. Besides the human cost, they signal that something very significant is happening to an economic and social system. The collapse of the Soviet Union was preceded by rising mortality and declining health spending. In 1976, a French demographer – widely ignored at the time – correctly predicted the demise of the Soviet system on the basis of rising infant mortality figures. Coincidentally, since 2014 infant mortality has started increasing in England.

But despite our free institutions and allegedly adversarial media, stagnating life expectancy here and now has created nothing more than a faint murmur. The ONS’s downward revisions referred to earlier were buried in an appendix to a press release. The BBC can claim that Covid “has undone the progress made in the last decade or so” and ignore the pre-Covid rise in excess deaths (that its own graphs show!). Matt Hancock can pontificate about adding five years to life expectancy through healthy eating.

Nothing is being suppressed. All the information contradicting official complacency can be readily collated (I just have). But in the absence of mass exposure and repetition – the secret of news becoming received wisdom – the truth about austerity and life expectancy reaches, at best, a minority who want to hear about it.

And far from the damage being repaired, austerity – as enshrined by Rishi Sunak’s last budget – will continue. With the evidence about the effect of austerity in 2010s now clear, the government is responding by upping the dose.

Meanwhile, the land of make believe strides on, brimming with absolutely unwarranted self-confidence.