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
wouldn’t it be more likely we would use the labour to add value locally such as environ,mental work or helping people to acquire skills When the private sector fails to
Leon Wolfeson
Because that’s what it is. It means you take the job or get no benefits, and that’s exactly what “job guarantee” schemes are.
Minimum-wage, short-term employment is bad enough as it is without trapping people into it and creating strong incentives for it – for example, councils dependent on it won’t support measures to reduce employment locally nearly as strongly, as it will increase their wage bill. It’s a major, instant, structural issue.
Meanwhile, the evidence from studies of Basic Incomes show that the only people who work significantly less are heavily pregnant women and people in full-time education.
Leon Wolfeson
“Add value”. That’s 100% corpspeak for “replacing workers”, I’m not really thay silly.
Encviron…replacing groundskeepers and park staff.
Mental work…replacing office jobs (and of course JSA workers and such)
Acquiring skills? Don’t make me laugh, this sort of scheme has always been at the expense of actual training schemes, since there’s no skill requirements for pushing people into them. Unless you mean the skill of travelling for hours by bus per day to a temporary low-skill minimum wage job (since the train would cost more than the job pays)…
Patrick O'neill
im really not sure why you think im in favour of cutting wages? unless we offer an alternative to long term unemployment we will continue to have people pushed into faux self employment or into workfare or simply sanctioned off the benefits system in order to manufacture low unemployment figures. My thinking would be create new work not replace the jobs already available but obviously that would need considerable oversight.
Leon Wolfeson
Because you’re demanding forced minimum-wage labour. You refuse to consider alternatives, I’ve offered one clearly – a Basic Income.
Forced Labour, especially the sort of replacement of Unionised public workface labour as you suggest, is completely the wrong way to approach the issue, especially when as we current do we face a major shortfall in jobs and the market should be empowered by government investment to create well-paid jobs, not to attack those who have seen their jobs slashed by cuts forced into low-income positions!
“Oversight”, every time forced labour is tried, always turns out to be a bad joke and the high economic cost of the sort of schemes is well documented.