Britain’s public finances are being crippled by a steep and sustained rise in the numbers of people of working age who have left the jobs market because of ill health following the pandemic and lockdowns, the Office for Budget Responsibility has warned. The Telegraph has more.
Lockdown wreaked havoc across the economy, devastating children’s education, hammering the public finances and piling pressure on a health service already struggling with the ageing population.
But among its more pernicious and long-term consequences appears to be a steep and sustained rise in the numbers of people of working age who have left the jobs market because of ill health.
At a time of an acute skills shortage, when the economy is struggling to get back above its pre-pandemic size, this represents a loss the nation can scarcely afford – as well as being a desperate personal tragedy for those unable to fulfil their potential.
More than two million people are economically inactive – neither in work nor looking for work – because of ill health. This is an increase of 350,000 compared with pre-pandemic levels, and has dire consequences for the economy and the Government’s already-precarious finances.
Some of those not working are among the 1.4 million claimed sufferers of Long Covid. Other conditions have also become more prevalent.
Among those who are not working because of sickness, almost 620,000 cite mental health problems as the cause, a jump of more than one-third from just under 460,000 a decade ago.
Progressive illnesses such as cancer are up 17%, affecting more than 200,000 people, while heart problems and musculoskeletal conditions have ebbed to take 111,000 and 543,000 out of the workforce respectively.
The reasons this translates into more inactivity are varied.
As well as infecting millions, the pandemic also overwhelmed parts of the health service, delayed treatment for other conditions and contributed to vast waiting lists – meaning those who are out of work for ill health have to wait longer before they can return to the jobs market, and family members are more likely to have to take time out to care for them.
The number awaiting treatment hit 7.4 million in April, up from below five million on the eve of the pandemic and under three million a decade ago.
Poor mental health in particular is increasingly prevalent among the young, and is the most common reason cited by unwell under-50s for their absence from the jobs market.
The benefits system itself may even bear some of the blame.
Those who are out of work, in poor health and claiming benefits are incentivised to claim sickness support instead of jobseekers’ allowance.
Interestingly, on this occasion the rise in economic inactivity appears to be a U.K.-only phenomenon.
The costs of all this additional inactivity are huge. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the benefits bill has risen by £6.8bn for this financial year for the extra 930,000 people who are in poor health, almost half of whom are inactive.
The lost tax revenue owing to those off-work or working at lower capacity is estimated to be £8.9bn. On top of that there are the additional healthcare costs for those who are unwell.
The already humungous bill for the disastrous Covid response just keeps getting bigger. Why this rise in economic inactivity is specifically affecting the U.K. needs to be looked into further.
The Telegraph report is worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
“… the 1.4 million claimed sufferers of long Covid.”
Funnily, all of them are ‘vaccinated’.
Yeah.. funny that. It couldn’t be that toxic shite injected into people, of that we can be sure.
All those embalmers unable to embalm because of peoples arteries blocked by long rubbery clots were just making it up.. obviously ‘conspiracy theorists’..
Talking of long rubbery clots.. if you’ve a strong stomach.. see below..
https://anamihalceamdphd.substack.com/p/hydrogel-coagulates-blood-and-causes?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Huge rubbery blood clots..
https://anamihalceamdphd.substack.com/p/huge-rubbery-blood-clots-in-an-unvaccinated?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web
How are the 1.2 million that arrived last year getting on ?
Ok I expect.. I doubt they’ve been jabbed!
Time to reshare Ed Dowd’s UK data. Lockdowns don’t cause disabilities. Enough of this ridiculous ignoring the obvious. ”The great resignation” indeed!
https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/1679185829372268544
Ignoring the obvious is the only game in town I’m afraid..
Here’s John Campbell’s latest ( 15mins ) and he takes us through the Australian data, which is shocking and even more so when comparing the adverse effects of the Covid jabs to those from traditional vaccines. At the 2min mark he even states he would never have taken the shots himself had he known what he knows now. Fair play to him for coming out and saying what many are probably feeling. So don’t tell me, you intelligence-insulting and patronizing MSM rag, that any of the above in your article is to do with flaming lockdowns! It’s all lies and you know it! We all know what’s killing and disabling people, both quickly and over the long term.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1l6Q2r5VWLo&ab_channel=Dr.JohnCampbell
Damn right we do.. the wretched injections, and many of them pushing the things knew they were harmful too..
But if I knew the virus posed a trivial threat to almost everybody and the gunk couldn’t possibly have been properly tested, why didn’t he?
(I stopped watching him when it became clear that he believed the CCP)
I think at that stage he simply trusted the establishment. He had no idea of what we know now.
Nothing to do with anything safe and effective?
How dare you!!!!!!!
While it could be that some of us have quit work a little earlier than normal, could it be that the attitude to minor illnesses has changed? A few decades ago, it was unusual to take time off sick due to minor “common colds”, for example. In those days most of them did not want to have too many days off in case it affected their chances of promotion.
Sort of on topic. I worry about being injured and requiring a blood transfusion from an infected person. (Vaccinated)
Don’t worry. It’s unlikely you’d get a transfusion (person to person). More likely you’d get an infusion of red cells from a donor. These are pressed by separating the plasma and white cells, rinsing, then adding saline. Effectively “red cells in brine” if you like. So nothing like small proteins that were floating about in the plasma, and red cells don’t have a nucleus, so no issues there.
Thank you. Not a scientist and when I read that this crap is found in every cell for me this means EVERY cell.
let’s just pay people to stay home and do nothing for months. what could possibly go wrong, they said.
Workers will get right back in as soon as they’re allowed, of course.
WTF did they expect?
When they censor the truth bad things happen. Any comment, Marianna Spring??
”The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is in charge of the Ministry of Truth, which the government of the United Kingdom established in 2019 in reaction to what they claimed was the overwhelming volume of false information and fake news flowing online.
They called this Ministry of Truth, The Trusted News Initiative (TNI).
The AP, AFP, First Draft, Google/YouTube, Twitter, Reuters, Financial Times, Meta (Facebook), European Broadcasting Union, CBC/Radio-Canada, The Hindu, Microsoft, and The Washington Post are just a few of the influential partners in the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative.
It is the only “forum” of its sort in the entire world created to accept information that has not been authorized by The Ministry of Truth in real-time.
The Ministry of Truth’s (TheTrusted News Initiative) strategy was quite effective in preventing the dissemination of accurate information that jeopardized their attempts to completely dominate the information landscape.
Experts and scientists were effectively kept in the dark, with any research or conclusions that didn’t support the government’s version of events about COVID-19 being labeled as “fake news.”
It also resulted in a culture where people were reluctant to express their opinions, where governments exercised excessive control over what people knew and believed, and where freedom of expression and independent thought were suppressed.
The Ministry only provided the public with material it deemed to be “true,” although frequently this meant withholding crucial information that may have saved lives.
Millions of lives were tragically and needlessly lost as a result of the Covid-19 injections.”
https://theleadingreport.com/2023/07/13/bbc-could-be-responsible-for-majority-of-2m-excess-deaths-in-europe-due-to-misinformation-campaign-used-to-censor-the-dangers-of-covid-vaccines/
That just reminds me, I first complained to the BBC in early April 2021 –
YOUR COMPLAINT:
Your continual covid 19 fear propaganda
You are supposed to be independent. Your covid 19 coverage is nothing but government and big pharma’s propaganda. You refuse or are incapable of asking their “experts” any critical questions. You refuse to give any truly independent experts opportunity to give alternative views regarding vaccine safety, quarantines, actual covid death figures, masks etc. In no small measure you have propagated the totally unwarranted climate of fear which exists.
Do your job. Rediscover the art of investigative journalism and actually THINK. Do some research – look at what proper experts have to say – John Loannidis, Bryam Bridle, Geert Vanden Bossche, Mike Yeadon, Carl Heneghan, and if you want your eyes opening re the safety of vaccines – which you promote without question- read vaccinepapers.org .
You are promoting an ideology. Your censorship would make Goebbels proud.
I used to value the BBC. Not any more.
Finally what about your virtually non existent reporting of the “lockdown protests”.
Needless to say I got the usual fob off.
At the time I didn’t realise the extent to which they’d already been captured.
I don’t suppose any of this will feature in the “inquiry.”
Cost / benefit analysis. What’s that when it’s at home?
As soon as a ‘benefit’ is ‘one human life’ the discussion stops.
My mother died at age 93. She was desperate to avoid going into hospital where she thought they could keep her alive almost indefinitely. She didn’t like people ‘fussing’ over her but tried to be polite (not always successfully). I hope I’m a bit like her.
Correlation only proves causation when it supports the narrative, ergo ‘global warming’ did it, in the dining room with the lead piping. This story is very insulting to a thinking person’s intelligence. A higher than average number of people died in nursing homes, where they aren’t sat in the greenhouse but in a lounge with aircon and/or fans, out of direct sunlight, therefore the common denominator must be the excess heat. But we know that in the winter they’d blame the cold. Give me strength!
”In the second quarter of 2023, over 39,000 people died in the Netherlands, 1,900 or 5 percent more than expected for this period. In three weeks of June, there was excess mortality among people in long-term care and senior citizens. This coincided with a heatwave in the country, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) reported on Friday.
June 2023 was the warmest June since temperature measurements started in the Netherlands in 1901. Temperatures were over 3 degrees higher than typical. Elderly people and people with weakened systems are vulnerable to heat.
In the second quarter, about 150 more people died per week than expected, but there was only excess mortality during weeks 23, 24, and 25 – the three weeks in June when there was a heatwave in the country. Excess mortality is when the number of deaths is so much higher than expected that it exceeds the accounted-for fluctuations.
The higher-than-expected number of deaths in the second quarter can also partially be attributed to a flu epidemic in the Netherlands in April. Covid-19 is also still circulating in the country, though the number of virus particles in sewage water decreased in the second quarter. According to CBS, 319 people died of Covid-19 in February, the latest known figures.”
https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/14/heat-wave-causes-5-percent-deaths-expected-june
I am not alone in my scepticism. So all these elderly people ”dying from the heat”, what exactly do the doctors put as the cause of death on the certificate? ”Heat stroke”? From sitting in a lounge in the shade, far away from any actual direct sunlight? Crazy. A heat wave = causation of death but all of those serious adverse event reports = coincidence.
https://twitter.com/BareReality/status/1679772952139649025
I asked a friend of mine about these absentee rates – had he noticed this in his business? He said no, there is no difference whatsoever in absentee rates in his business with about forty people. He was aware of these figures (and most are vaccinated, he assures me although he never asked them, considering it wasn’t an appropriate question to ask employees) and he put it down to them having stayed open all the way through the lockdowns, if only with a skeleton staff initially and then staff coming back as soon as they felt able. I’m not a fan of vaccines (and that’s been the case for at least twenty years) but I think it is too easy to just jump on that as a reason for this increase in absenteeism. I think there are many factors at play here including psychologically it being OKay to be off work for a sniffle (fear of contaminating the office) as mentioned by another commenter.
I somewhat disagree – but have an up-tick for a sensible argument.
Except for the pesky fact of continuing excess deaths, I would suggest malingering, quiet quitting, and hypochondria are causes of the disability increases in the UK and in the US. Are people sicker–the excess deaths would indicate so. I personally don’t know anyone with a chronic illness, new disability, adverse jab effects, or death from covid. Maybe I need to get out more….
He’s not in the public sector!
Britain’s public finances crippled by 26 years of mass immigration.
I’d love to know what the supposed skills shortages are, whether they are in the private or public sector, and where they are geographically. Maybe they are just down to vacancies in zero hours jobs that people only do short term until they find something else. Does anyone know of any statistical analysis?
Trying to remove those stupid 2m lines from our church floor. Governments have left humanity a catastrophic legacy eminating from the big Covid-19 lie. History will judge them harshly. The golden rule is NEVER believe what the government tells you.
Hmmm.. Elephants and rooms spring to mind.
I’m largely economically inactive by choice. (I have an arrangement (you can’t really call it a contract) with a small local company which means I work when they need an extra pair of hands and IF I want to.)
Fortunately, I have a pension, savings and a BtL which means I can afford not to be a wage slave. I’m prioritising a very nice lifestyle over working and paying tax to the moronic Government which stripped me of my Civil Liberties and Human Rights over a virus they KNEW was only dangerous for a small and easily-identified section of the population.
I didn’t cause the devestation.
Lockdown served to erode the work ethic of much of the nation and embedded a dependency culture. The benefit system in the UK incentivises chronic sickness particularly. Decades of welfare statism were causing society and economy to decay gradually and Lockdown greatly accelerated the decay. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we’re doomed.