1 in 10 working-age people now on welfare in the UK
Startling new figures from the United Kingdom have revealed that one in every ten working-age adults are receiving sickness benefits. The data come from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), a respected independent economic research institute, and have led many to conclude that the UK will soon be known as the “Sick Man of Europe.”
Government officials and politicians from opposition parties alike have expressed their dismay as well as their determination to do something to turn the situation around. Ingenious plans to cut down on benefit fraud, tax junk food, ban smoking entirely, and now even to require obese people to take weight-loss drugs, are all being floated.
And meanwhile, not a word about the fact that the sharp increase in sickness (both mental and physical) began in 2021 and shows no signs of slowing.
What goes up just keeps going up
Before the “pandemic,” the number of people in the UK between the ages of 16 and 64 claiming incapacity, disability benefits, or both, was 2.8 million. That has now surged to 3.9 million, with a large proportion of new recipients — almost 70 percent — basing their claims on poor mental health.
In the last few years alone, the number of adults under the age of 40 applying for sickness benefit has almost tripled, going from 4,500 new claims per month to over 11,500.
The cost to the economy has risen correspondingly, from £36 billion to £48 billion in the past four years, and the IFS predicts the cost rising still more over the next five years until the amount being paid out in sickness benefits will be almost double post-COVID compared to the pre-COVID era.
The UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has blamed the rise in the number of people relying on disability benefits on “long waits for treatment of health conditions.” In his party’s manifesto, Labour promised to address the problem and over the past few weeks, government ministers have proposed several means of doing so.
Who says you're really sick?
The first is a “youth guarantee.” Young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 will henceforth lose their benefits if they refuse to take up jobs or enter vocational training.
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall told the BBC that young people had to shoulder their responsibilities and suggested that many of them are “self-diagnosing” mental illness to excuse their unemployed, unproductive status. Her BBC interviewer did not press her on why it might be that this phenomenon only exploded after COVID measures were introduced, and Kendall did not volunteer any suggestions of her own.
What Kendall did stress was how wonderful it is for people to gain skills and earn a salary:
Let me tell you why, because if you lack basic skills in today’s world, that is brutal. If you are out of work when you’re young, that can have lifelong consequences in terms of your future job prospects and earnings potential.
So, we, the Government, will face up to our responsibility, unlike the last government, of having that guarantee in place.
Kendall added that the young people she had spoken with agreed that it was “better for their mental health” to be in work but still failed to show any curiosity as to why they were nonetheless sitting at home, claiming they were too mentally ill to get a job.
Weight loss, net gain
Wielding another type of stick (or carrot, depending on one’s perspective) is the UK Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, who has initiated a partnership with the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to investigate whether the weight-loss drug Mounjaro can simultaneously cure obesity and get people back into the workforce.
Nearly 30 percent of UK adults are categorized as obese. Mounjaro is perhaps less well-known than Wegovy but the two drugs work in broadly similar ways with similar results. Naturally, both drugs have side effects which must be weighed against the undoubted risks to health of being obese. Demand for these drugs is extremely high, at times greatly surpassing supply.
Streeting is now overseeing a five-year trial of Mounjaro in Manchester, one of the UK’s largest cities, with the hope that weight loss will translate into both physical and mental health benefits and propel people into employment. 3,000 people are being given the drug to help them lose weight.
In media interviews, Streeting hit back at those suggesting that his plans are “dystopian” and insisted that the program holds promise for many.
I’m not interested in some dystopian future where I involuntarily jab unemployed people who are overweight. There's a lot of evidence already that these jabs combined with changes to diet and exercise can help people to reduce their weight but also prevent cardiovascular disease and also diabetes, which is game-changing.
Nanny State on steroids
Streeting also noted that illnesses related to obesity put an immense strain on the UK economy, costing taxpayers over £11 billion per year. PM Starmer echoed his enthusiasm for the Mounjaro program, telling the BBC that the drug was “very important for our NHS, because, yes we need more money for the NHS, but we've also got to think differently.”
However, many have spoken out against what they feel are inherent ethics violations and have expressed their fears that while voluntary now, in the future governments might condition welfare support on taking certain drugs or modifying their behavior.
Professor Simon Capewell, a public health expert at Liverpool University, called the plans “unethical” as they treat people as economic units rather than human beings with needs and desires beyond the purely financial.
Nonetheless, the government remains committed to the Mounjaro scheme and is also considering new taxes on junk food, following on from even more stringent laws governing cigarettes and alcohol.
Next time around, we'll lock down faster and more furiously
And all this without anyone wondering why it might be that suddenly, in 2021, people started gaining weight, making new welfare claims, “self-diagnosing” mental illness, and becoming otherwise incapacitated.
Kendall, in her BBC interview, made no mention of lockdowns, which are widely acknowledged to have made a huge contribution to a decline in mental health. This was perhaps understandable, as her party while in opposition pressed continually for harsher and longer lockdowns than the government enforced.
Also this week, Matt Hancock, who was Health Secretary at the time the first lockdowns were imposed (he later resigned after a scandal involving his own breach of the lockdowns) gave testimony at the UK’s Covid Inquiry, during which he doubled down on the importance of lockdowns regardless of the social, economic, and health costs.
Hancock told the inquiry that “early lockdowns” were "essential" in the event that a dangerous disease was circulating and that arguments against lockdowns were “false, wrong, and dangerous.”
Spiked
Meanwhile, studies from other countries such as the Netherlands and South Korea have suggested reasons for a spike in mental (aka emotional) disorders as well as neurological complaints. Not only lockdowns but also the mRNA shots are implicated in a wide range of conditions, with researchers likening the effects of mRNA spike proteins to those of chemotherapy, the latter producing “chemo brain” and the shots causing the “brain fog” that doctors around the world have come to associate with what they label Long COVID and also Long Vax.
One study published in Nature linked the shots to a long list of negative outcomes which could be expected to lead to disability and unemployment. The researchers observed a 68 percent increase in levels of depression, a 44 percent increase in anxiety levels, an almost 94 percent increase in sleep disorders, and a 33 percent increase in bipolar disorder, following receipt of the mRNA shots.
A prematurely aging population
The figures released by the Institute of Fiscal Studies are alarming for many reasons. They reveal the cost of disability to a country already in serious debt and they show a startling rise in chronic illness that shows no signs of abating. Perhaps most alarmingly, they show a population that is aging beyond its years — young people getting sick at rates previously only seen in older age groups, with diseases that were once rarely seen in the young.
A 20-year-old today is about as likely to claim a health-related benefit as a 39-year-old was in 2019; a 35-year-old today is about as likely to claim as a 46-year-old in 2019; and a 55-year-old today is about as likely to claim as a 60-year-old in 2019.
The IFS concludes:
Before the pandemic, around one in thirteen were claiming a health-related benefit. That is now set to rise to one in eight by the end of the decade.
If PM Starmer and his government think that they can tax and drug people out of this mess, they may be in for a grave disappointment.
