Sometimes it’s quite difficult to remember that anything new announced by this government is something they think will be popular with voters, rather than something they can actually do.
Rishi Sunak’s time in Parliament is short, his coalition is broken and his mandate is non-existent. Thus, any grand plan announced for the future usually lays the groundwork for an election, or else tries to find dividing lines between the Conservatives and Labor that would put the latter on the wrong side of public opinion. Will keep.
The reason this is hard to remember is that the topics on which Sunak decides to announce grand plans often feel a combination of pointless and cruel. The threat to the Tories from reform moving small boat immigration to the top of the political agenda is greatly increased rather than diminished.
Last week, Sunak added a new action to his growing list – this time on people who are too sick to work. The speech announcing it was so much disordered wealth that kind hearts might ask about the health of the one who wrote it, for it seemed to be the product of persistent brain fog.
The core of Sunak’s complaint was the increasing number of people unable to work for health reasons, who are judged as such by the state and therefore receive out-of-work benefits.
But the issue was quickly clouded by Sunak announcing reforms to the “fit note” system – a “fit note” is what almost everyone still thinks of as a sick note, named after this 14-year-old Was replaced by the first iteration of the Tory government.
A sick note is essentially a note written from your GP to your employer stating that you are indeed ill and unable to work, and you would normally be required to make an absence of more than five days. Is. They are uncontroversial and their logic is fairly well understood: if your employer is going to pay you for not working (first your salary and then eventually statutory sick pay), then it is reasonable to have a medical professional confirm. That you are sick.
The fact that your GP is making this claim means that everyone agrees that they are qualified to make this decision, and also suggests that they are able to provide you with appropriate treatment for any discomfort you may have. Are. Sunak’s new system will hand that determination to someone with no medical qualifications, who will be appointed to try to reduce the number of sick notes.
In this system, your employer will receive a note from someone with no medical qualifications stating whether or not you are actually sick, and whether that private employer should still pay your wages. Logic is non-existent.
However, worse was to come: through a little pressure, Sunak’s comments managed to suggest that almost half of those considered unable to work suffer from depression or anxiety – a With huge implications, even among supposedly enlightened people, for mental health issues these days – many of these people must work.
Except that these comments were based on a misunderstanding of the data, which have been carefully and clearly explained by the Office for National Statistics. It is true that more than half of those medically unable to work suffer from depression or anxiety – about 1.35 million people in total.
However, the vast majority of those people – more than a million of them – had depression or anxiety as a secondary condition, not as the reason they were signed up. Chronic illness can be a driver of both conditions in itself, even without it being compounded by the financial insecurity that comes with a hostile welfare system.
It is certainly a fantasy that large numbers of people simply suffer from depression or anxiety, let alone that it is somehow easy to get rid of such conditions.
Either the number 10 is so incompetent that they failed to understand what the numbers they were looking at meant, or it is so senseless that it didn’t care. Which of those two messages is it trying to send to voters – and who in the world thinks that vote is the winner?