The price of gutter politics

When historians come to write about these years of political stagnation, a chapter or two must surely be devoted to the glaring disconnect between the politicians and the people; and how politics became so removed from the business of making people’s lives better. A week rarely passes when there aren’t more things to divide us than bring us together, amounting to an escalation of this calculated dehumanisation through crass and abused labels, symbols, narratives, histories, and mythologies.  

This week, it was the turn of the long-term sick to be reduced to the status of some social and economic malignancy. 

Does it really need to be said that a natural consequence of suffering anxiety and depression is that people who suffer from these often debilitating conditions tend to get anxious and depressed? 

Yet perhaps it does need to be said, given that our Secretary of State for Work and Pensions began his week by launching himself into a series of interviews that appeared purposefully designed to make life difficult for those suffering from long-term illness. I wonder if Mel Stride felt particularly chuffed with himself when it was all over. I know people who didn’t feel so good

“You know what they’re like,” I reassured one such person in my life as their anxiety escalated around 10 A.M on Monday. I tried to put on a brave face. “It’s all performative… They’re tilting at windmills knowing they probably won’t be in power to carry out these threats… It’s pre-election chaff… They’re setting up another culture war between the fit and the unwell… It’s part of the Tory party gift about being in it for hardworking families and bugger the rest…”

Every word worsened the acid burn in the pit of my stomach as I wondered what new hell might be coming down the line and how (or if) I might protect my loved one from the harm this government is so often happy to inflict on her and people like her. 

I’ve long since come to terms with the malevolent acts of governments. Just a few years ago, I was an innocent victim of the great Concentrix fiasco – I might well have been the first person to write about it before it made national headlines – when the government contracted the business of fraud checks to a third party. Because I shared the same surname as my sister (I know, quite the coincidence!), they accused me of being married to my sister. It took six months and the efforts of my MP to prove otherwise. So, I know a little about how these crackdowns usually go and how they often hurt the innocent.

HMRC eventually stripped Concentrix of the contract after it was revealed that of 36,000 appeals, 87 per cent had been upheld. Perhaps the government thought it was worth causing unknown stress in 31,320 families. It’s how they seem to roll. It’s the logic of the witch trial: only if you drown are you deemed innocent. Only those who scream and protest the hardest are without sin. But even here the numbers don’t tell the true story. Many people can’t scream loud enough. Many just lie down and accept their fate because they’re too sick to do otherwise. 

For people suffering long-term health conditions, life is not a matter of perky policy announcements with the dawn chorus of Madeleys and Ferraris, a quick zip around the London radio and TV studios before lunch back at the ministry. This might come as a shock to people in government but there are real people out here in the country who are simply unwell every day of the year and it isn’t a matter of having bad days. All days are bad, just some are worse than others. 

Yet, at times, it feels like some politicians live in a binary world with fitness and sickness being a simple polarity. If you’re sick, then the NHS is there to make you better and then you become “not sick”, or as they prefer to think of it: “employable”. The fact that the NHS struggles in this fundamental capacity is never acknowledged. They ignore how the NHS is a huge impersonal system in which the distance between the healthcare professionals and the patients grows ever wider. Some people simply cannot be made well. Some people will never be employable. Some will barely have lives worth calling a life. For those people, feeling better isn’t an act of willpower. It isn’t about growing a backbone or having a stiff upper lip. 

And yet those in power still ask questions which make you wonder if they even understand what a serious long-term illness looks like.

“How do you do your shopping?”

“How do you go on holiday?”

“How do you find socialising?”

To which the reply might be:           

“I can’t do my shopping. I’m too ill.”

“I never go on holiday. I’m too ill.”

“I don’t have a social life. I never leave the house. Maybe you haven’t figured this out yet but I’m too ill.”

Do people like Mel Stride understand this as they bounce around making big announcements about the nature of the help they give the most vulnerable? The charity Scope has called the government’s proposals around Personal Independent Payments a “reckless assault on disabled people”. If you or somebody close to you experienced the consequence of Stride’s words this week, you’ll know that these matters shouldn’t be treated as though it’s all wonderful jape, saying the things that upset the “all right kind of people”. 

Did he start his week with tears? Did he have to console somebody with a promise that things won’t get worse? Did he stare into the dark places where you wonder what makes any of the struggle worth it?

Sensible reform and improvement in the system would be welcomed but not because the system is too generous. Ask anybody who has experienced the PIP system first-hand and they will tell you how shockingly cruel it is. It makes demands on the most vulnerable that would challenge people even when fully fit. It all makes a lie of Stride’s claims that under these new proposals, people with “milder mental health conditions” would no longer receive support. It sounds reasonable except it’s already unlikely that people with “milder mental health conditions” get any support. There are too many examples out there of people with serious (and sometimes terminal) conditions getting no support. A PIP payment is very different to getting a doctor’s note for a couple of weeks off for stress, although the Prime Minister has also been having a great deal of fun proposing scrapping the right of GPs to sign sick notes.  

And whilst we’re at it: might we not ask why so many people claim to be suffering stress? What has happened in the recent history of this country that so many people are mentally unwell? Might it be linked to the fact that so much in this country appears to be broken and whose fault is that? But let’s not even get into the whole debate about whether a GP is more qualified to assess a person’s health than some case worker in the DWP ticking off boxes on a decision tree.

But, no, this isn’t about the “grown up conversation”. Stride was on Radio 4 to score some cheap points, which is surely what this was all about. “As to Labour,” he said, “Labour have nothing to say about welfare. In fact, the only thing they’ve been saying about welfare is that they’re very squeamish about sanctions. They don’t think they should be applied in the way that we think, which we believe will cost billions of pounds.”

“Squeamish”? I wish I had another 10,000 words to unpack that single word.

So very brave of him to say the unsayable but should we expect anything better from another PPE wonk from Oxford who treats social care like there’s a fun wheeze to be had in annoying Labour? Now we learn that he would like to give vouchers to the sick rather than money. Well, not to get too personal about this but his expenses make for interesting reading: all the money to register his domain name (party political or government business… you decide); his monthly subscriptions to The Telegraph and The Spectator (all work-related, I’m sure, no sports pages or fun to be had there); the £2.40 trip from Paddington to Sloane Square for a constituency visit; his Council Tax and energy bills; and the £22.98 he paid for the book The Power of Habit.

And perhaps if MPs had to fill in a 50-page booklet like claimants for PIP followed by intense interviews they might claim less. 

All of which is to say: well done, Mel. You made my sister sick on Monday.

@DavidWaywell

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