How An
Epidemic Of Malingering Is Destroying Britain
Britain's New Labour Government claims that unemployment figures are
low. This is, almost inevitably, yet another piece of spin. There may well be
less than a million now on the official `unemployed' list but the Government's
figures don't include the 7.8 million Britons of working age who are
`economically inactive'.
Unemployment benefits cost Britain £4 billion a
year but sickness benefits cost four times as much - a staggering £16
billion.
More than 80% of the people on incapacity benefit have been
receiving cash for over a year. Once someone goes off `on the sick' the chances
are that they will stay `on the sick' for eight years.
Faked sickness has
become one of Britain's most `successful' industries.
Millions of people
now take time off work by pretending to be sick. This habit has become endemic
and is particularly prevalent in national and local government offices where
co-workers are unlikely to complain. The highest incidence of people taking days
off sick occurs among: civil servants, teachers, health workers, social workers
and police officers. Stress is the favoured illness of choice (having overtaken
the once ubiquitous `bad back') and is preferred because the symptoms are so
vague that it is almost impossible to prove that someone is not suffering from
it.
(The people who suffer most from stress at work are the self-employed
or the businessman running his own small business and struggling to cope with
the red tape produced by the Government and the EU. They, however, are unlikely
to be able to take time off work so easily. If they don't work they don't earn.)
Many government employees enjoy their days off so much they retire
permanently `sick' in their 40s or 50s. (Again, the contrast with the
hard-working self-employed and entrepreneurs is dramatic. Thanks to the way the
New Labour Government has destroyed their pensions they are likely to have to
work on until their 70s or 80s if, indeed, they can ever save enough to be able
to stop work.) Naturally, all government employees who are unable to work
through stress are given special stress counselling in addition to the pensions
and cash sums they receive in order to ease their pain.
At any one time a
quarter of Britain's policemen (and policewomen) are off work `sick'. An
astonishing 70% retire on long term sick leave. The result is that one third of
the budget in some large police forces is now used to pay those on pensions and
on long term sick pay. Many of the state employees who have retired on
substantial, index linked pensions then earn extra by doing odd jobs or by
turning a hobby into a money making venture. Since they have their sick pay or
pension to live on they are happy to work for small amounts of money. The
self-employed professionals in those categories simply cannot compete.
These retired state employees are the new parasitic `rich'; completely
free of money worries for life, guaranteed inflation proofed payments sufficient
to pay for a smart car and house of a standard far exceeding anything they could
have ever dreamed of buying if they had carried on working, and an unending
series of holidays. These people are destroying our community and will make life
difficult for the genuinely ill. For thousands the disability pension offers a
pool winners lifestyle. They may well have had some emotional or physical
discomfort when they were awarded their pay-out and pension but often the pain
disappears but the pension does not. The stress and the backache become a
memory. But the taxpayer goes on paying out the monthly pension payments. In a
just world there would be a twice yearly appraisal. But in our world the pension
payments, the holidays and the new cars just keep on coming.
Today, an
astonishing 2.4 million Britons of working age are currently claiming incapacity
benefit. That's up by more than 250,000 since New Labour took office and,
together with the dramatic increase in the number of civil servants, and the
growth in the public sector paid for construction industry, explains Britain's
relatively low unemployment figures (at the beginning of 2004, there were just
under 1 million Britons officially unemployed though that figure doesn't allow
for all the unofficially unemployed who were on special schemes designed more to
lower the unemployment figures than to provide any realistic training programme
and it is nevertheless worth remembering that a survey of British companies in
February 2004 revealed that a fifth of job vacancies remained
unfilled.)
This problem is a much bigger problem than our ageing
population. Pensioners usually claim money from the state for an average of ten
years or so. Individuals receiving sickness payments may take money out of the
system for 30 or 40 years.
A survey of 300 doctors found that 77%
admitted signing `workers' off very quickly just to get rid of them. A survey of
67 doctors, conducted by researchers at Aberdeen University and published in the
British Medical Journal, found that most doctors tend to hand out sick notes
when they are asked to do so. Many doctors hand out sick notes because they are
frightened that if they don't so their patients will leave their practice.
Stress has replaced backache as the disease of choice for individuals
who want to be paid for doing nothing. The problem for doctors is that stress is
a vague disorder and the symptoms are conveniently hard to diagnose. All a
patient has to do is say is that they are worried, can't sleep, aren't eating
properly and don't want to go out much. Tossing in a line about having a nasty
boss is the cherry on the cake.
Part of the problem is the fact that
doctors (hired to look after the sick) are also given the job of acting as a
ticket office for the benefits system. Britain's employment rate in January 2004
was at high of 74.7% but record numbers of people 5.9 million were off sick -
with around 3 million of them claiming sickness or disability benefit. Excluding
pensioners and people off sick for less than six months, the number claiming
long term incapacity benefit has risen to just under 2.5 million. In parts of
South Wales (a country, incidentally, in which most of the people who are in
work are working for the Government) over 25% of working age men are claiming
sickness benefit. This is obviously nothing less than a long term fraud. The
vast majority of these people are off work for alleged stress related problems
or `depression'. There is, incidentally, a common conclusion from this that
unemployment leads to depression. This is false. Many of those who are claiming
to be `depressed' do so in order to increase the size of their weekly benefit
payment. (In London's commuter belt, where stress is a significant factor, the
number of working age men claiming sickness benefit is below 5% so it isn't
difficult to reach the conclusion that four out of five Welshmen claiming
sickness benefit are fraudsters.)
Doctors don't have time to work through
people's problems with them, to help find a cause or work out what to do, so
they just hand over a sick note and some tablets. Around 10% of the patients who
get a sick note are probably genuinely ill (and need more help than a bottle of
tablets and a sick note). The other 90% are just crooks.
Ironically, it
is those on benefits who complain most about the failure of the public services
(such as the NHS). They fail to understand that public services (such as the
NHS) have failed, at least in part, because far too much public money is being
wasted on paying benefits to people who could and should be working. Too much of
those who have become parasites fail to understand that a country's wealth comes
from its workers.
As the number of fakers and parasites increases so the
resentment increases. We all have the same amount of time (today's prime
resource) and it is hardly surprising that the people who earn and pay tax are
sometimes aggrieved and full of resentment when they rush past the park and see
perfectly healthy people on benefits sitting in the sunshine reading a
book.
This endemic of malingering is helping to destroy our society. The
malingerers hurt those who work, they hurt the genuinely sick, they hurt the
society in which they live (there is so much less money to pay for a decent
health service for example) and, although they probably don't realise it, they
hurt themselves most of all.
Taken from Why Everything Is Going
To Get Worse Before It Gets Better (And What You Can Do About It) by Vernon
Coleman, published by Blue Books at £15.99. The book is available from the shop
on this website or from all terrestial bookshops or Web-based bookshops.
Copyright Vernon Coleman 2004
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