Idle Britain
Where is the nasty party?
On September 6th, Daniel Khalife, a former soldier awaiting trial for espionage and terrorism offences, absconded from HMP Wandsworth in broad daylight and, for a moment, it looked like modern Britain had its own Ronnie Biggs. The Met commissioner announced to the public that the escape was ‘clearly pre-planned’ while the suspect was still at large. It seemed safe to assume that Khalife had been amply assisted by his foreign sponsors, and that all the might and expertise of the Iranian state had been put behind getting their man out of the can – a highly unfortunate incident, but a somewhat understandable one nonetheless.
Seventy-five hours after his escape, Khalife was discovered out in the open in Chiswick. In the more than three days that had elapsed, Khalife had moved a mere five miles from HMP Wandsworth. He had apparently made no attempt to make his way to a port from which he could attempt to exit the country and avoid a lengthy prison sentence.
Having ruled out the possibility of high-level foreign interference, how was it possible for a dullard like Khalife to escape prison? Part of the explanation may lie in the fact that two-fifths of the workforce of this already understaffed arm of the British state could not be bothered to show up to work on the day of the escape. No grand conspiracy – just banal, low-level incompetence.
No-shows have become a staple of the post-COVID British public sector. The NHS now posts a sickness rate of 5.6%, up from 4.3% in 2019. In the Civil Service, the average number of days lost to sickness per employee has risen from 7.0 in 2019 to 7.9 in 2022. Of the increase of 0.9 days, 0.3 were attributed to long-term illness, and 0.6 to short-term illness. For TFL, sickness rates reached 6.8% in 2021/2 – an increase from 4.7% in 2018/9 – and staff shortages forced 2115 unplanned station closures. Unsurprisingly, the TFL Twitter account is now little more than an endless stream of apologies to angry commuters for their ‘inconvenience’.
It seems that public sector employees have learned that they can now play truant without any real consequences. They’re not wrong. TFL allows you to self-certify your illness for up to seven days. You can self-certify three times per annum, so long as you keep your sick days under seven days every six months. That’s one week and two long weekends off every year if you play your cards right. In any case, to get sacked for excessive sick days would require you to receive an informal warning and two additional written warnings within a single year. With regulations like that, why would you not just treat your sick days like extra holidays? We would say that those who are too honest not to are the suckers, and TFL staff clearly agree.
While it would be preferable for public sector staff to show up to all their shifts, they are hardly the worst of Britain’s malingerers. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claimants rose from just under half a million to 858,000, a 72% increase. The number of people who were economically inactive due to long-term sickness has risen by 492,000 – more than the entire population of Edinburgh – since February 2020. Curiously, the number of people economically inactive because they are providing care for this vast group has fallen by 285,000, family caregiving apparently being the sole area of the British economy where productivity growth seems to have been healthy.
In total, six percent of the working age population are now on disability benefits. Nearly half of these claimants are eligible for support because of mental – rather than physical – illnesses. By contrast, in 1992/3, only one-quarter of claimants were declared unfit because of mental illness. This increase in claims because of mental ill-health has not been matched by any increase in suicides. In 1992, the suicide rate was 12.5 per 100,000; in 2019, it was 11, and in 2022, it fell slightly to 10.6. To summarise: the number of people killing themselves has barely moved for three decades, and was largely unaffected by the pandemic, yet the number of people we are paying not to work because they are too sad to do so has exploded.
It seems clear, then, that malingering has become more acceptable in Britain than it was before the pandemic. The events of 2020/21 have left us with hundreds of thousands of people who now declare themselves to be unable to work because they are too tired, or who claim that they are too sad to show up on time every day. Some suggest that this is the consequence of an epidemic of a mysterious disease known as ‘long COVID’ – a disease with vague symptoms that usually include ‘brain fog’, as well as the need for assistance at train stations. We propose an alternative explanation.
During the pandemic, the government funded millions of people to live on reduced – but nonetheless still comfortable – incomes, whiling away the hours watching Netflix and not going outside. People placed on furlough were taught that they could reduce their hours, but still make ends meet by just not doing anything with their lives. No going out, no holidays, no socialising. Just the loving embrace of the sofa under the warm glow of the television. Many had not previously thought that this life was even possible, but having given it a try, decided that they preferred a life of idleness and made it their goal to continue living it.
For those in work, the mild discomfort of going into the office was removed. Ad hoc requests for assistance and slightly dull workplace chatter were eliminated by the Teams call sans camera. As society was consumed by repeated news cycles discussing nothing more than disease, the importance of disease was heightened in the public consciousness, thus making claims of sickness at work something to be taken very seriously, rather than as likely evidence that someone had an errand to run. In the aftermath, many now feel content to fail to show up for their agreed hours and have learned that disabilities law provides them with ample cover for their malingering.
What is to be done?
The government should take action to reverse the cultural changes that it set in motion from March 2020. The public must be informed that there is nothing wrong with them and that they should get back to work. How could we do this? Between 2010 and 2015, David Cameron supposedly murdered 300,000 disabled people with his disability assessments. As a result, the rate of disability fell from 19.3% in 2011 to 17.7% in 2021. At the time of the 2021 census, you did not have to be disabled to avoid work, thanks to the Rishi Sunak’s furlough scheme. As such, the malingerers did not feel the need to register their disabilities. As the era of non-disabled handouts ended shortly after, many have been forced to discover new ailments for which they must be generously compensated. It is time to haul them into the job centres and see if they can work.
Secondly, we should reward the Protestant-minded citizens who have not given themselves over to the culture of sloth. The average Briton now takes 5.7 sick days per annum. After we remove bank holidays and statutory holiday requirements, this leaves us with 232 working days out of 365. With the UK average full-time salary at £33,402 we can estimate that the average amount workers are being paid for being sick when they were expected to be working is £820. Under current legislation, sick days are essentially a benefit. If you take them, you get more days off with no negative consequences. As such, taking a sick day is an opt-in hourly pay rise for salaried workers. If you want to get more of something, you should subsidise it, and what we are currently subsidising is not showing up for work with two hours’ notice. To remove these perverse incentives, we should give an £820 cheque to everyone capable of going a year without a sick day. Ideally, these cheques would all be sent on January 6th, when people have run out of money after Christmas and are at their most tempted to pretend that their sniffle leaves them unable to work.
Finally, we must upend the notion that ‘mental health’ is a serious obstacle to doing productive labour. Stress and anxiety exist but are experienced by every person on earth and should not preclude you from doing something productive. If this was a genuine issue, we would at least expect people to be killing themselves at higher rates, but they are not. Interest in ‘mental health’ as a search term doubled over the previous decade, probably because of relentless NGO campaigns that declared ‘mental health’ to be coequal to physical health. But the hard indicator, the suicide rate, has not budged. The only other hard indicator is more people being too lazy to work. It is therefore difficult for us not to conclude that all we have done is advertise a life of sloth to the masses and encourage them to take it up. To remedy this, the government should launch an advertising campaign, with carrots – ‘you can do it!’ – and sticks – ‘get off your arse you lazy cunt.’
It is time to say no to ‘long COVID’, to end our national moment of idleness, to confront the public, and to get Britain moving again.