Work will set you free

On the 19th April, 2024, Rishi Sunak gave a speech. For reasons which escape me, what he said might still matter.

Rishi Sunak is an extremely rich man, the great majority of his family wealth having been inherited through his wife. He is the prime minister of the UK despite not having been voted for even by the tiny, elderly, membership of the tory party. The only reason he is still prime minister in 2024 is because he hasn’t yet chosen to call the election which will, almost inevitably, remove him from power. The only reason anybody needs to care about anything he says or does is because he’s still, unfortunately, there.

Mel Stride is, to my deep shame, my MP. On the 24th of March, 2024 he said some really unpleasant things about mental health. I should have realised at the time that he was saying them not only because he thinks them but because his master, Rishi Sunak, thinks them too.

Here is the government press release about Sunak’s speech on the 19th April. Here is the text of the speech itself¹.

From that speech (reformatted to make it slightly less painful to read):

But since the pandemic, 850,000 more people have joined this group due to long-term sickness. This has wiped out a decade’s worth of progress in which the rate had fallen every single year. Of those who are economically inactive, fully half say they have depression or anxiety. And most worrying of all the biggest proportional increase in economic inactivity due to long-term sickness came from young people.

So, let’s repeat this again: we have had more than a decade of the most incompetent, corrupt and malign British government in more than a century.

• A government which has taken the UK out of the EU, something young people voted heavily against, doing enormous and predictable damage to the economy and harming, particularly the prospects of young people.
• A government which, under Liz Truss, managed another enormous self-inflicted wound on the economy.
• A government which has prevented measures to reduce pollution from cars, which affects people more the younger they are.
• A government which has decided that doing anything significant about climate change is too hard, thus blighting the futures of young people.
• A government whose actions to suppress voters affect young people more than older people.
• A government which has completely failed to make housing affordable for young people in the way it was for their grandparents and even parents.

I could go on: there is so much more. This is a government which hates the young: a government which has obliterated hope for the future. A government of a party made up largely of the old, and the poorly-educated, which is itself made up of poorly-educated, incompetent and selfish people. Rishi Sunak and Mel Stride don’t care about the damage they are doing because they think they are either rich enough to avoid it or that they will be dead by the time the situation becomes serious enough to worry them. And they care about nobody but themselves: not even their own children.

On the 19th of April, 2024 the government also rejected a proposal by the EU to allow limited free movement of young people: another direct attack on the hopes and aspirations of the young. The opposition also rejected it. And this is another obvious cause for depression among young people: while Kier Starmer’s labour party is clearly preferable to the tories, they are locked in a battle whose goals they have long lost sight of and have half turned into their enemy in the process: they also have no intention of doing anything substantial about climate change, or of doing, really, anything to give young people hope for the future.

What is surprising is not that young people are getting depressed in huge numbers: faced with a future in which it is hard to find any hope how otherwise should they react? No, what is surprising is that depression is not more widespread or that there has not yet been some kind of revolution against the old. It is time for that, and past time.

And then there’s covid. Quite apart from the government’s incompetent handling of the epidemic and use of it as a mechanism to send money to their friends and sponsors, there is the small problem that it is not over: people are still getting covid although we are meant to pretend they are not. In particular long covid is in fact a thing, and a thing which affects very large numbers of people. On the 5th of March, 2023, an estimated 1.9 million people living in private households in the UK had self-reported long covid symptoms. If you assume that half of these reports are spurious, you get 950,000 cases: a number which, on its own, is greater than the 850,000 people mentioned by Sunak.

And then there’s the NHS. Systematic underfunding, loss of staff because of brexit, and getting beaten about the head by covid: what do you think this has done to it? What has it done to waiting lists and access to care? What does that mean happens if you get ill? Right, yes, it means just exactly what you think it means.

What a surprise this must all be to Rishi Sunak: more than a decade of a government which hates young people and the NHS, combined with a pandemic which is not over and whose lingering effects are hurting very large numbers has left a large number of young people unable to work mentally, physically, or both. Who would have thought it, eh?

So what does Sunak propose? Well, of course he needs someone to blame, and he’s picking both on the young people themselves and on doctors. Yes, doctors: people with extensive medical training who are guided by a code of ethics in how they behave, and who can be struck off if they break it. Apparently Sunak thinks that he, a man with a degree in the easy bits of three bullshit-ridden subjects and a postgraduate qualification in business administration (in other words: in bullshit), knows better.

So what is he proposing? Well, here’s another quote, again reformatted to make it less painful to read:

Building on the pilots we’ve already started, we’re going to design a new system where people have easy and rapid access to specialised work and health support to help them back to work from the very first Fit Note conversation.

And part of the problem is that it’s not reasonable to ask GPs to assess whether their own patients are fit for work. It too often puts them in an impossible situation where they know that refusal to sign someone off will harm their relationship with that patient.

So we’re also going to test shifting the responsibility for assessment from GPs and giving it to specialist work and health professionals, who have the dedicated time to provide an objective assessment of someone’s ability to work and the tailored support they need to do so.

In other words he is saying that GPs are somehow not qualified to make judgements about their patients because they are frightened of them, perhaps. So he’s proposing removing the responsibilty from GPs to give it to ‘specialist work and health professionals’.

Who are these people going to be? What qualifications will they have? How will they acquire these qualifications (it takes at least six years to train a doctor, and at least three to train a nurse)? What code of ethics will they abide by? What will the penalties if they do not abide by it? What professional body will oversee all this?

Oh don’t be silly. These will be people who have done a couple of weeks’ training, who will be supplied by some contracting organisation with strong links to the government, which will certainly be remunerated based on how many people they force back to work. There will be no standards of ethics, and nobody will enforce them. More than likely the individuals themselves will be paid based on the number of people they force into work. These people will be gangmasters.

Because all that matters to Sunak is how many of his serfs he can get to work so that more money pours into his already-overflowing pockets, along with those of his friends and his sponsors.

Because Sunak is a man with only a small mind and small ideas, he has to borrow ideas from other people. The idea that he has borrowed here is that only work makes people free: Arbeit macht frei.