It seems that the former Health Secretary felt the need to escape his responsibilities as an elected MP so he could take part in a popular TV reality show, while disregarding the often fatal human consequences of the social policies he helped to create.
In my Justice, Power and Resistance article, Public health crisis created by UK social policy reforms, I identify the human suffering created by successive administrations who disregarded reams of research demonstrating the preventable harm created by social policy reforms. With a fatally flawed assessment model to limit access to disability benefit, these reforms were always destined to kill many.
Until recently, when former UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock MP gained nationwide attention as a contestant in the popular ITV series I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, few people realised that MPs were allowed to have a second job, or to generate additional earnings outside Parliament. Indeed, we thought that being an MP and representing a constituency was a full-time job. It seems not.
MPs’ ‘outside interests’, which invariably pay a lot of money, must be declared and are a matter of public record. MPs are paid for delivering speeches, writing articles and, most recently, entertaining the public. Time will tell how much Mr Hancock was paid to make a fool of himself every night on TV, for three weeks, with estimates quoted of £400,000. His constituents were left without access to their MP, who was too busy trying to guarantee himself future employment beyond the next general election – unlikely to be in politics, given his hasty exit from government last year amid scandal.
Hancock was elected in May 2010 and was part of the notorious coalition administration (2010–15) that adopted additional austerity measures for political reasons rather than out of financial necessity. These were in addition to extreme social policy reforms guaranteeing that those in greatest need would suffer more than any other group, as identified in my book Cash Not Care. Successive UK administrations have accepted no responsibility for the public health crisis created by such policies –adopted using a fiscal priority while disregarding health and wellbeing, within the neoliberal context where limiting state costs dominates all policy decisions. The thousands of deaths directly linked to disability benefit assessments are ignored, while an NHS report identifying that almost 50 per cent of claimants of the Employment and Support Allowance disability benefit had attempted suicide was never published in the public domain.
Given that the human crisis created by the politics of greed was exposed long ago, it would not be unreasonable to expect Conservative MPs to work as hard as possible for constituents, given the public health crisis and preventable harm created by the combination of social policy reforms and the brutality of austerity measures. The chronically ill and disabled community now lives in fear of being assessed for disability benefit. However, Hancock clearly feels no regret for the suffering caused by his party, and his relentless activities to attract public attention outside his duties to his constituents seems to be never ending.
Regrettably, MPs have no interest in the impact of policies once they’ve made it to statute, and disregard all evidence of the public health crisis created by UK social policy reforms or the suffering linked to the assessment of disability benefit claimants. What was once a welfare ‘contract’ with the British people has been completely broken. The promises made by successive administrations, and government ministers, are invariably a million miles away from the experiences of the public in need of state support when too ill to work.
One has to wonder what support Matt Hancock provides for his chronically ill and disabled constituents who suffer at the hands of the Department for Work and Pensions, or will they struggle to simply make an appointment with their elected representative when he’s otherwise occupied in the jungle?
Mo Stewart is an Independent Disability Studies Researcher and is the research lead for the Preventable Harm Project that exposed the influence of corporate America with the design of UK social policy reforms. She is also the author of Cash Not Care: the planned demolition of the UK welfare state (New Generation Publishing, 2016). More at https://www.mostewartresearch.co.uk/
The public health crisis created by UK social policy reforms by Mo Stewart from Justice, Power and Resistance is available Open Access on Bristol University Press Digital.
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