This is what happens when you prioritise lurid headlines over actual solutions
10 years ago David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party on a ‘modernisation’ ticket with a plan to make the party electable again. The failure of that project is evidenced by the party’s repeated reversion to type.
Whether evidenced by immigrant-bashing, hostility to Europe or, today, threatening the obese with benefit sanctions, the nasty party of old never really went away.
Indeed, under the veneer of ostensibly compassionate conservatism exists a far more traditional attitude to life: rich people will only work if you give the money whilst the poor will only do so if you take it away.
The latest wheeze is to threaten people who cannot work because they are obese or suffering from addiction problems with sanctions if they fail to seek treatment. Under the proposals which David Cameron will announce today, the Tories will reduce payments worth around £100 a week for those who don’t attend medical programmes.
The Conservatives plan to make £12bn in welfare cuts in the next parliament and today’s policy proposal is designed to make at least some of those savings.
However I have two major gripes with the announcement.
The first is the messaging
I mentioned already that the thin veneer of compassion has long-since dropped from the Tory brand. This ought to be driven home by today’s announcement. There is of course nothing inherently wrong with providing treatment to the obese or those suffering from drug addiction. In fact, it’s quite a sensible option.
But demonising people with lurid headlines and threatening to deploy sanctions are not a particularly helpful way to tackle addictive behaviour; not least because food/alcohol/drug addiction tends to be a consequence of underlying emotional problems – the substance is the emotional crutch, if you like. What eactly will being threatened do to a person’s emotional state, do you think? As disability campaigner Ellen Clifford told Sky News today: “That {Cameron’s proposal] isn’t going to suddenly snap people out of an enduring condition. It’s punitive and it’s savage.”
There are bigger fish to fry (no pun intended)
The NHS is haemorrhaging money due to the cost of obesity and obesity-related illness. Were the government actually serious about saving money and improving the nation’s health it would spend a little more time focusing on measures which nip health problems in the bud – i.e. before they result in costly long-term conditions.
However such an approach would probably not result it populist and lurid headlines, which perhaps explains why the government is reluctant to do it. As Tam Fry the National Obesity Forum also told Sky News this morning: “We have the most appalling problem [with obesity] and so far the coalition government have done absolutely nothing serious about it.”
It’s worth emphasising that point: the government has done absolutely nothing about it. Doing something about it would after all be ‘nannying’, wouldn’t it? (although for some reason this policy doesn’t fall under that label).
The UK has higher levels of obesity than anywhere in western Europe except for Iceland and Malta. But believe it or not most overweight people do actually hold down jobs. Rather than address two significant challenges – public spending and public health – the Conservatives have proposed a policy which produces the sensationalist headlines while not actually tackling any of the problems it ostensibly sets out to solve.
James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
34 Responses to “Stopping benefits for the obese: why it won’t work”
Patrick O'neill
no my point is the state would be required to give every unemployed person 6 months of paid labour after a years unemployment this is in no way to penalise the unemployed. I am of the opinion that most disabled people can work in some way or other with the right support. I disagree with the idea that it would force down wages
Patrick O'neill
one other thing i am dead against workfare or state employed labour being channelled into profit making businesses. using the unemployed labour to channel dividends into private pension funds while we gut the only pension those people will have access too sits very uneasily.
Leon Wolfeson
You disagree with basic economics, right, as you restate your plan for forced labour. You make withholding labour strongly conditional…
This is a major attack on rights, and of course you’ll force most disabled people into this sort of cycle of very low paid work, or they can be “supported” with benefit withdrawals.
Leon Wolfeson
So basically, you’re going to have people on minimum wage replacing council workers, until the non-supervision jobs are gone there (and people are left with terrible service, with untrained “bin men” and the like…then we’re down to scraping gum off the streets and such.
Useless “work” like that is strongly inflationary, because it has no real productive effect, and yet people are being paid anyway. So the minimum wage will erode even faster!
The state pension will of course be all the people you’re trapping will ever have!
Patrick O'neill
im not sure how you equate employing the unemployed with benefit withdrawal