Wes Streeting launched his proposal to set up a trial, giving weight loss jabs to the unemployed in the Manchester area, in the right wing Daily Telegraph.
Who benefits from Labour’s partnership with Big Pharma?
The trial is essentially a ‘partnership’ between the NHS and the US manufacturer, Eli Lilly. Our NHS will provide the US pharma corporation with access to several thousand people, enabling them to further develop their highly profitable drug. In the USA, the treatment can currently cost $1000 a month. Data provided by the NHS, which covers nearly the entire population, is highly sought after by Big Pharma.
Partnering with big business is the strategic line running through all of Labour’s programme for government—whether it’s property developers in the housing programme, fossil fuel companies in the carbon capture scheme, or US health corporations looting the NHS as part of its ‘big reform’. This repeats the same mistake as Gordon Brown’s private finance initiative during the Blair years, which mortgaged schools and hospitals to private businesses. Capitalist companies have the resources and lawyers to outmanoeuvre those working for public services. They answer to one thing: profits for shareholders.
“Labour is terrified of raising money through taxing capital or the rich, so it can only raise investment for public services by lining the palms of private partners.”
Is the true cost of providing the trial going to be covered by this US company? How can the public or journalists access the full workings of these deals? As we saw with the Horizon scandal in the Post Office, there’s usually a complete lack of transparency.
Labour has abandoned any notion that state-financed bodies, which can raise money at cheaper rates, could carry out some of these functions being gratefully scooped up by private companies. Even less does Labour’s leadership imagine that state ownership of key sectors, like drug production, could benefit everyone. There was a time when motions calling for the nationalisation of drug companies were regularly adopted at Labour Party conferences. Drug companies make outrageous profits selling their products to public health services, which often have no other choice if they want to provide patients with the latest medicines.
Streeting’s Medicalisation of the Unemployed
We’ve been here before. Governments do little to alleviate unemployment, or they actively create more unemployment through austerity. They then blame the unemployed themselves for not getting a job. Remember George Osborne’s demagogy about ‘strivers versus shirkers’, or Labour Minister Liz Kendall’s proposal last week to send job coaches into mental health clinics.
George Orwell, in his classic study The Road to Wigan Pier, written before the Second World War, had a clearer analysis of the relationship between obesity and joblessness than Wes Streeting. He castigated do-gooders who criticised the diet of poor working-class people, arguing it was lack of money that produced poor diets. It was no surprise they wanted ‘comfort food’ to fill themselves up.
Streeting’s simplistic link between joblessness and obesity is unworthy of a minister who should be aware of the relevant data and research. You cannot understand this correlation as a one-way process. People don’t simply become obese and then can’t get a job. Intermittent employment or being jobless creates the conditions in which people gain weight. Creating more properly paid, secure jobs is a much shorter route to solving this problem.
“Streeting prefers to cater to the prejudices of Telegraph and Mail readers, who believe obesity and joblessness are mostly an individual choice, unaffected by social or economic forces.”
What about the other causes of obesity?
Streeting says little about how a capitalist food industry and distribution system produces obesity. These companies profit from selling ultra-processed food stuffed with sugar and salt. Why doesn’t the Health Minister set out a plan for much tougher regulation? Evidence from the sugar tax shows that even that limited measure has been positive.
Labour has no plans to restore or increase resources for local public services like swimming pools, sports facilities, or publicly funded exercise classes. Benefits look unlikely to increase substantially in the coming budget and may indeed be cut in relation to inflation or wage rises. Scandalously, Labour has not said it will drop the Tory plans to change the work capability assessment (WCA), which could see around 420,000 people unable to work due to disability or ill health lose up to £4,900 a year. These people will be poorer and more vulnerable to obesity or mental health issues.
Jabs Are Discriminatory, and Open the Door to More State Compulsion
The government hasn’t said what will happen to any jobless person who refuses the weight loss jab. Will they, like mentally ill people who don’t want to see a Liz Kendall job coach, lose some or all of their benefits? And why should the weight loss jab be free for the jobless but not accessible to all people suffering from this condition, whether employed or not? Ash Sarkar from Novara Media nailed the issue on BBC Question Time last week:
What worries me about the weight loss drug is being seen as an arm of the Department of Work and Pensions, it is a healthcare decision, it shouldn’t be a DWP decision. Job coaches are being sent into hospitals where mental health patients are being treated. Instead of saying let’s fix the leaking roof, Labour are saying let’s paint the kitchen because that’s a bit cheaper.
Newsnight 17 Oct 2024
By mixing up the roles of the NHS and the Department for Work and Pensions, Streeting is crossing a line. Will the next step be compulsory anti-depressants for mentally ill people to ‘help’ them back into work? Or will jobless people who can’t control their anger be given anger-suppressant drugs?
“The government hasn’t said what will happen to any jobless person who refuses the weight loss jab. Will they, like mentally ill people who don’t want to see a Liz Kendall job coach, lose some or all of their benefits?”
Many specialists this week have also highlighted the side effects these drugs can have. Not everyone maintains their weight loss once the jabs stop. Are we condemning the obese jobless to permanent use of these jabs? Medical history is littered with the tragic consequences of new drugs on some patients.
Fundamentally, this Labour minister is treating people according to their “potential economic value, rather than their health needs,” as Dr Dolly van Tulleken, an obesity researcher at Cambridge University, remarked last week.
“Fundamentally, this Labour minister is treating people according to their “potential economic value, rather than their health needs,”
Weight loss jabs could be helpful and appropriate for some obese patients. But we should oppose any hijacking of this as the primary means to get the jobless back to work. As noted above, we need a radical programme to tackle the root causes of deprivation and ill health, not a Wes Streeting wheeze that echoes right-wing ideology about why people are unemployed.
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