A Rant About Social Policy and Some WCA Horror Stories

One of the depressing aspects of researching into the WCA and all its associated material, such as the connections between Big Insurance and our welfare system, and how academics have willingly lent their credentials to a pseudoscientific base for it, has been to discover just how long it has been going on. A fairly recent example at DWP Examination ‘Another Horror Story’ has comments spanning over two years from July 2009 to September 2011. Each time the story is virtually the same. And those are not by a long chalk the earliest accounts on the net.

The WCA is just the latest instrument that the government has dreamed up to cut the welfare budget, but what an instrument! The process has been refined, adjusted over time to make it increasingly hard for the sick and disabled to be considered so. It has been necessary for an accompanying ideology to justify those changes, the overarching notion of which has become: ‘There is some form of work that impaired people can do, even if it is just pressing a button’. This concept is underpinned by an unquestioned assertion that ‘Work is always good for you’. Both these ideas are so weak that they do not even stand up to common sense understandings, let alone sociological interrogation.

Due to my academic background it is not difficult for me to visualise the form that a really robust criticism of the WCA, the ESA regulations and the political ideologies that have ‘informed’ them would take. There is some personal irony for me in the fact that I bloody hated Social Policy as a module. Why? Because it is an abuse of reasoning, the misuse of so-called statistics towards a pre-set agenda that has been informed by a political ideology. Social Policy arises from biased motivations and is scientifically unsound yet declares itself valid on the grounds of certain ‘evidence’ provided by academics who already partake of the ideas that the government wish to propagate. It is untruth and I am sociologically allergic to it. The Orwellian aspect is that these policies are always enforced under the guise of being the best solution to a problem, or will lead to a positive outcome for the greatest number of people, when in fact, as we are seeing with the WCA, they often lead to increased suffering.

So… while I can conceive of a vigorous intellectual savaging of this Welfare policy there are one or two hurdles, not least of which is my anger, and the fact that it is a demanding thing to take on and do justice to. I made a start early on in my exposure to all this,  in the form of a critique of the WCA from a social science perspective. That was before I knew as much as I do now and is just a sketch of the main flaws. To be an acceptable academic piece it would of course need strengthened by inclusion of statistics, references etc. Anyway, it is here.