COLIN CAMPBELL: Should work take second place behind the ultimate priority of ‘lifestyle and wellbeing’?
When George Osborne and Danny Alexander teamed up to crack down on people claiming benefits and slash the numbers on welfare they did so with a level of zeal which shocked even those who were broadly supportive of the policy.
Osborne was Chancellor in the 2010-2015 Tory/Lib-Dem coalition government. Alexander was the MP for the Inverness constituency and Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Osborne launched a reign of fear and misery on people on benefits and Alexander went along with it.
One notorious case revealed by the Inverness paper I worked on at the time and which attracted national attention involved an Inverness man who had only one leg. He went through an assessment and the verdict when revealed resounded around the country: “Fully fit for work.”
Danny Alexander – who was later to be knighted for his efforts – appeared regularly on the BBC’s Newsnight, Question Time and other programmes to defend a harsh new regime. Many people here were dismayed by his apparent eagerness to be the frontman for it. A highly popular new MP when he was elected in 2005, he acquired the unflattering tabloid nickname of “the ginger rodent”, and paid the price when he was booted out by Drew Hendry and the SNP in 2015.
Now, a decade on with the Tories still in power without their former Liberal Democrat acolytes, how drastically things have changed. A record number of people, 5.3 million, are on benefits, with a soaring number claiming they are medically unfit for work. In Glasgow, one in five working age adults are claiming out-of-work benefits.
In a substantial number of cases “mental health issues” are cited as the reason. These days this is an issue you have to tiptoe around. “Climate change anxiety” has now joined the expanding list of mental health issues.
Meanwhile, the Scottish Government is pressing ahead with plans to create a four-day working week in parts of the public sector. Same pay, an extra day off every week. What’s not to like for those covered by what will initially be an “experiment”, one which will, quite inevitably, be hailed as a huge success by everyone involved.
It is however utterly dismal news for those people who are already dismayed by the failure and inadequacy and widening gaps in a range of public services as things stand.
It also blares out the increasingly strident message that work should take second place behind the ultimate priority of “lifestyle and wellbeing”, that the normal process of earning a living is in fact the unfair imposition of boredom and drudgery which is best avoided. The evidence is that an increasing number of young people in particular are taking that to heart and are intent on avoiding it completely, with a recent survey finding more than 10 per cent intend to steer clear of it – permanently.
The “broken Britain” catchphrase is being bandied about more and more but nothing today compares with the industrial chaos and the cinema, pub and dance hall power blackouts of the 1970s, and the eccentric and desperate official advice of the time that, where possible, people should share a bath to save fuel.
But in these post-Covid times, for too many the ethic of “an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay” does seems shattered almost beyond repair.
No one should be calling for a return to the harsh era of George Osborne and Danny Alexander. But the vast number of people somehow able to do quite well by living off the state when there is an unprecedented number of jobs available offering decent wages strongly suggests things have now swung too much the other way.
