We are not a nation of malingerers. We are a country that is crippled by austerity

Every school had that kid who would come up to you in the playground, grab your hand and thwack it repeatedly against your forehead. “Stop hitting yourself!” they’d shriek maniacally from Vimto-stained lips, tugging your limp wrist as you stood there dumbfounded inside a growing circle of onlookers.

Rishi Sunak pulled the political version of that manoeuvre last week when he claimed Britain has a “sicknote culture” in which people are guilty of “over-medicalising the everyday challenges and worries of life”. Stop pretending to be sick, said the man whose party has spent the past 14 years implementing draconian policies that have made the nation progressively sicker. How dare he lay the blame at our door?

We are not a nation of malingerers – we are a country crippled by austerity. Public service spending cuts and drastic reductions in state benefits have been chipping away at our health for years.

Since 2011, improvements in life expectancy in the UK have stalled (and for some groups, reversed). Homelessness has climbed by a staggering 74% since 2010. The number of people living in absolute poverty has risen, food bank dependency has shot up, NHS waiting lists have grown exponentially. But sure, Sunak, let’s all sally on.

Back in 2018, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur Philip Alston visited the UK to report on extreme poverty and human rights. His findings, as a clear-eyed outsider, were damning. He concluded that “great misery” had been inflicted on the British public by “punitive, mean-spirited and often callous” austerity measures.

“Much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos,” he wrote. I bring this up because we mustn’t forget that this was the backdrop against which the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis unfolded.

Yes, recent data shows that the number of people in the UK not working due to long-term sickness has risen sharply since 2019 – spiking at 2.83 million in February this year – but that’s because these events exacerbated inequalities in wealth and health that had already become entrenched after years of Tory misrule.

I think it’s fair to assume that many of those struggling with long-term health issues may not have ended up so unwell had earlier intervention been available to them. In Tory Britain, however, GP surgeries are so overburdened that patients with non-urgent concerns are often left languishing until their issue becomes critical. I know an NHS consultant who was refused a GP appointment because his “only” complaint was debilitating fatigue. If even health professionals are being denied medical attention, what hope do the rest of us have?

This will be a familiar story to any of the estimated 1.9 million people in the UK (and one in 50 people in Scotland) who now have Long Covid, the symptoms of which are overlooked and under-treated. It doesn’t help that the government has campaigned for workers to return to offices despite remote and hybrid roles making it easier for people with chronic illnesses to participate in the workforce. Nor was it helpful when Boris Johnson described Long Covid as “b*llocks”.

Sunak, like his predecessor, wants you to believe the most vulnerable are the architects of their own despair, that their poor health is both self-inflicted and exaggerated. In truth, this country is sick because it has been starved of compassion by a party that uses poverty as a whip. Voting them out is the only route to recovery. Let’s not stand still while the rest of the world watches on.