Running down the uk’s services was a political choice. but our leaders don’t seem to grasp basic cause and effect

OPINION

One of the central failings of the post-2010 Conservative governments is their inability to grasp the interconnectedness of public services, public health and the welfare state. If people fall below the poverty line, their health worsens. Stress and malnutrition induced by poverty have lasting effects. Austerity stripped back preventative, early intervention services. The pandemic hit front-line health and care services that haven’t been able to recover, generating acute crisis, one of the results of which is people being unable to work.

Add the impact of the cost of living crisis and you are left with multiple systems that aren’t working properly – in fact, it is hard to think of an area of government that is working at all.

This is the context in which the political right is attacking benefit claimants. Disabled people aren’t really disabled. Unemployed people are workshy. If we could get these people into work we wouldn’t need all that immigration that’s complained about.

It’s worth taking each of these claims in turn. Disability benefit claims have risen since the pandemic, but the current success rate for personal independence payment (PIP) disability benefit applicants is only around 50%.

Readers of Big Issue’s disability benefits coverage know that applying for PIP is a minefield, with an assessment designed to “catch people out”. The work capability assessment, which determines eligibility for the disability element of universal credit – a separate benefit to PIP only paid to those out of work – used to inspire countless horror stories, but has become less pernicious of late. Inevitably, the government has decided to tighten it, claiming this will reduce disability-related unemployment – a claim since blown apart by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

Of course, not all unemployed people are disabled. Britain has low unemployment by international standards, but at no point has that interrupted the moral panic over “workshy scroungers”, supposedly stealing a living at the taxpayers’ expense. The way Britain thinks about unemployment is garbage. Unemployment is a product of the economy far more than it is of individual choice or moral worth. It rises when the economy struggles. It falls when the economy improves. Again, it’s not hard.

Short-term unempl