The DWP and NHS will be working together if Labour’s Blairites get their way

A new report has offered a revealing insight into the Labour-led Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) likely “back to work” plans over the next five years. Crucially, it advocates for greater so-called integration of the DWP and the NHS. Of course, it’s but another move to coerce chronically ill and disabled people into work and stop their benefits.

In other words, Labour is picking up where the Tories left off sinking the DWP’s claws into the NHS. However, it’s little wonder when the study was spearheaded by Alan Milburn. That would be, the 90s and early 2000s former Blair health secretary responsible for opening the floodgates to rampant privatisation in the healthcare system.

Dangerous DWP NHS integration plans

On Tuesday 23 July, former health secretary under Tony Blair’s New Labour Alan Milburn government will release a report into so-called “longterm worklessness”.

Notably, this will articulate the findings of a study into “economic inactivity” and the benefits system. Crucially, as the Guardian reported ahead of its publication, this will call for the new Labour government to:

integrate health services into job centres to unlock a hidden workforce of about 3 million “economically inactive” people who are without jobs

Unsurprisingly, Milburn is set to push this plan to new DWP secretary Liz Kendall. And it’s likely the right-wing boss of Labour’s “Back to Work” blitz will eat this up. Throw in a weasely Wes “privatise the NHS” Streeting and you have the perfect necrocapitalist storm brewing. Low and behold, the Guardian stated that:

Milburn is also understood to have been in touch with Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, and Wes Streeting, the health secretary, with Keir Starmer’s government keen to address economic inactivity as it pushes for higher growth.

However, his ideas aren’t exactly anything new. Already, Kendall has flirted with the idea of DWP and NHS integration. In March, she told Murdoch-mouthpiece the Times her plans for doing precisely what Milburn is proposing in the new report.

What the new study findings now offer is a convenient pretext for the Kendall-Milburn-Streeting unholy trinity of corporate capitalist cronyism.

Milburn’s corporate capitalist DWP NHS agenda

Significantly also, Milburn’s new role as Streeting’s health adviser could lend weight to this. As the Canary’s HG previously reported, Milburn has:

his fingers in many different private healthcare pies

In particular, she reported how Milburn’s has paid himself and his family over £8m since 2016 from his private health consultancy. So why not dabble in the business of coercing chronically ill and disabled people into the exploitative capitalist workforce while he’s at it?

According to the Telegraph Milburn said:

Equally if you are getting benefits and could work you should have to engage with those services. Government can help but people need to help themselves.

Here we go again. Milburn’s engagement guff is laced with the prevalent demonising trope that the corporate media and political establishment has manufactured against benefit claimants. That is, his rhetoric is a by-product of precisely the “scrounger” rhetoric that has pervaded justification for the Tories’ repeated dangerous social security reforms over the last 14 years.

In a nutshell, this is the propaganda that sick and disabled people are “work-shy” or “shirkers”.

Consequently, the Labour sycophant is jumping on this bandwagon. His report can loan cover to the new government as it drives through its capitalist back to work agenda.

The DWP’s ‘deserving’ disabled and chronically ill claimants

In the Blair era, it was Milburn who ushered in the age rife with NHS privatisation. Effectively, he started the private sector takeover of the health service, and the Tories continued it. In the same vein, Blair’s then Department of Health, though not under Milburn at the time, initiated so-called DWP and NHS co-working. Again, the Tories have gone on to embed this, increasingly blurring the lines between the machinery of health and welfare.

But significantly, the Canary’s Steve Topple has detailed before how Blair’s government instigated ‘Individual Placement and Support (IPS)’ services. The DoH described these as vocational services for people with severe mental health problems.

Sound familiar? Kendall has banged on about her plans for ‘helping’ chronically ill and disabled people into employment. At a Jobcentre in Leeds fresh after the election, she expressed that:

More disabled people and those with health conditions will be supported to enter and stay in work

Now, Milburn’s report is sounding alarmingly IPS mark two. The right-wing Telegraph pinpointed people living with “mental health and spinal issues” as examples of those on long-term sick.

Of course, the implication here is that those living with these types of conditions should be in work. Ergo, they should not be claiming benefits.

In effect, it’s the Victorian notion of deserving and undeserving poor playing out across welfare policy on chronically ill and disabled people.

The ‘hostile environment’ of welfare

Ultimately, the government is deciding who is disabled or sick ‘enough’ to get social security. To many chronically ill and disabled people, this will send alarm bells blaring.

South Asian migrant justice activist and writer Harsha Walia has described how the nation-state weaponises borderisation of societal spaces to exclude migrants. In particular, she has drawn attention to the infiltration of the border regime into workplaces, expressing how:

The production and policing of the border becomes a quotidian workplace ritual as law enforcement, doctors, teachers, landlords, and social workers regularly report migrants to border agencies.

The UK’s Prevent scheme is one such example of the Home Office’s violent border regime worming its way into places of employment and learning.

In much the same way, the DWP surveillance of benefit claimants has involved an almost ‘barrierisation’ – the outsourcing of the department’s policing functions into public services. So, Topple has previously branded this the “hostile environment for sick and disabled people” for good reason.

Now, staunch Blairite Kendall, weasely Wes, and his new Blair-era health advisor look set to crank this up a notch. Invariably, the New New Labour, and continuity Tory government will push chronically ill and disabled people back to work at any cost.

In Labour’s topsy-turvy neoliberal “changed” UK, Jobcentre staff will decide if you’re too sick to work. Then, healthcare professionals will push people into it regardless. Or in other words, it’s more of the same ableist “sick note culture” war, just wrapped up like caring, when they couldn’t give a crap.

Feature image via the Canary