The Daily Mail has had a busy couple of days spewing out scapegoating propaganda for its billionaire owners and the political class. The Canary’s HG reported on its vile Islamophobic spin over a Muslim man’s courageous, selfless actions. But before that, it was shilling for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Because, feast your eyes on the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) employment rate figures.
For the right-wing propaganda machine, it can mean only one thing. It’s time to crack out its favourite old chestnut: welcome back to “workshy Britain”.
DWP: Daily Mail digging up ‘workshy’ rhetoric
On Tuesday 13 August, the ONS published a collection of data on the UK labour market. It explored the number of available vacancies, the employment rate, and people’s earnings across the UK, among other things.
Naturally, the Daily Mail honed in on the data showing the rates of unemployed and ‘economically inactive’ people in the country. Its baiting headline blared:
Sir Keir Starmer urged to ‘get a grip’ of workshy Britain – as nearly 10 million Brits are out of work but not looking for a job despite companies struggling to hire staff
Ironically, the Daily Mail followed this with an article unpacking the multitude of reasons people were not in work. Some were studying for instance, while others were looking after family, off work temporarily sick, or living with long-term health conditions.
Together, these comprised over 7.3 million of the total 9.4 million economically inactive people. In other words, the bulk of the Daily Mail’s “workshy” Brits are anything but.
They are students, or vastly undervalued and often unpaid carers, plugging the gaps of the broken healthcare and welfare systems. They’re chronically ill people that both are also letting down.
Predictably, the Daily Mail also slipped in that the long-term sickness figures had hit:
a near-record 2.803million
Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail didn’t draw the connection with the Tories’ abysmal “let it rip” pandemic policy:
All down to the way Covid was handled : Sir Keir Starmer urged to ‘get a grip’ of workshy Britain
https://t.co/3xHLUX8x28— Jason (@jason_lb) August 14, 2024
If it had made the link, it might have dug up the fairly recent ONS data. This plainly showed the results of the toxic Johnson government’s eugenicist mass disabling approach. Specifically, in April, the ONS said that 3.3% – two million people – in England and Scotland were living with long Covid.
Of course, while that doesn’t mean that all two million of those living with it are not working, it’s a fairly obvious cause for the overall rise in economic inactivity. Given Covid is still rife, this is only likely to continue to rise too.
Long Covid and the ‘psych lobby’
Instead then, the Mail doubled down on its crusade against chronically ill and disabled people. Following these statistics, it wrote that:
Earlier this year the Tories announced plans to overhaul disability benefits which included telling individuals with ‘mild’ mental health problems to get therapy and return to work.
Sir Keir Starmer said at the time that he supported reform and ‘the principle that those that can work should work’ but mental health campaigners said the Tory stance threatened incomes of the disabled.
First up, let’s make this abundantly clear: mental health conditions are real, valid, and extremely serious. In no way should the Daily Mail – or the Tories – trivialise people living with them. Next, living in this neoliberal capitalist hellscape of the right-wing’s design is a huge part of why so many people are going through mental health crises in the first place. The Tories’ class war austerity, racism, ableism, and other bigotry emboldened and running rampant makes for a perfect storm.
Then, the lack of mental health support services compounds this in a vicious circle of violence. Needless to say, if people are economically inactive for mental health reasons, it’s a reflection on appalling government, after appalling government, NOT the individuals. The government should not be forcing people living with mental health conditions into work, period.
However, the fact is, the ONS figures didn’t actually detail what long-term health conditions people were living with. In other words, the Daily Mail plucked people living with mental health conditions out of its arse, simply to punch down on them.
Of course, the irony is also not lost on us that it seized on so-called people living “with ‘mild’ mental health problems” in the context of the surging rates of long Covid either.
Specifically, a vocal lobby has been psychologising patients living with the similar and sometimes overlapping chronic illness myalgic encephalomyelitis for decades. Notoriously, a DWP-funded, but deeply flawed piece of junk science set the stage for medical professionals to stigmatise, psychologise, and gaslight myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS) patients. Already, they’re doing the same to people living with long Covid.
Daily Mail setting the demonising agenda for the DWP
And don’t look now, it’s 2024, but the hateful tabloid is STILL using the discriminatory, homogenising language “the disabled”. Obviously, it’s not surprising the outlet is lumping each individual disabled person into one, uniform, amorphous group – because it hardly recognises us as people trying to live our own independent, fulfilling lives.
A few people on X wondered who exactly “urged” Starmer to “get a grip”:
Which idiotic Tory Twat said this?
I am willing go bet it is some brain donor who let covid run ride through Britain. https://t.co/hVIx5feNv7
— John West 🕯💙🇺🇦 🗿 (@JohnWest_JAWS) August 13, 2024
A poster who took one for the team and actually read through the pathetic excuse for journalism (as I’ve had to), pinpointed the culprit. Conveniently shrouded by the Mail’s strategically positioned passive voice, it was of course, a fucking Tory:
This is a front page headline!!??
Let’s dissect it shall we?
Told by who?
Right near the end it says “The Tories said”
So The Tories are saying that there’s too many unemployed people?
OK.
Labour have been in charge for 1 month
The Tories were in for 14 YEARS!!
So……….. https://t.co/pG3qGX6zp8
— Joël Grimal (@FFP83) August 13, 2024
Why this matters? Because here’s a shining example of why Starmer’s red rosette Tories have shifted increasingly to the right. The right-wing corporate media have set the agenda and shrunk the ‘Overton Window’ of politically permissible. All that’s left is for power-hungry grifters to sell their souls to the capitalist billionaire whims of the day. Invariably, that always involves lining their pockets, while demonising marginalised communities.
And so far, so good for the establishment elite with rightwing Liz Kendall at the DWP’s helm. Notably, if the Daily Mail’s rhetoric and statistics sounds familiar, that’s because it is. One week into the new Labour government and she was having a little field-trip to a Jobcentre in Leeds. As the Canary previously reported, there she highlighted the 2.8 million people unable to work owing to long-term sickness. Then, in another breath, she declared:
It’s not good enough that the UK is the only G7 country with employment not back to pre-pandemic levels.
It’s not exactly hard to read between the lines. As one person on X highlighted that this “workshy” rhetoric is actively gaslighting chronically ill and disabled people too:
Sir Keir Starmer urged to ‘get a grip’ of workshy Britain https://t.co/LKWMA6NEuK
Those with long term health conditions are not work shy we are flipping disabled and many want to work and can’t 🤬
— Toni Bennett (@ToniBenno94) August 14, 2024
At the end of the day, it’s the Daily Mail doing what it does best. That is, paving the way for the now Labour-run ruthless DWP to ramp up its war on chronically ill and disabled people.
Featured image via the Canary
