Sunaks' fight against sick note won't sink Sir Keir

Sick Note Culture: The Best of Britain. A stubborn sniffle? A day on the couch. Too many people in the evening? A morning in the bathroom and an afternoon nap on the couch. A pesky investigation into your questionable conduct during a global pandemic? If you're Downing Street's long-serving cabinet secretary, Simon Case, an extended period of remarkably timely sick days – and say they say Downing Street is out of touch with reality.

In Case's defense – a phrase that rightly disgusts me – he almost certainly wasn't shooting a sick person. Among the examples given in the first paragraph, it is likely only his case would in fact have required the issuance of a sick note. GPs don't throw out work exemptions like confetti, as anyone who has battled a fever to call their local GP surgery will testify. In most cases, sick notes are given to – get ready – sick people.

I find it odd that the self-proclaimed party of patriotism considers the sick note to be a cornerstone of our culture.

Sunak's decision to target sick notes – or, as Boris Johnson has blusterously renamed them, vouchers – as pre-election policy is therefore strange. Personally, I find it odd that the self-proclaimed party of patriotism considers the sick note to be a cornerstone of our culture. I would like to think that the Prime Minister does not see this nation as just an island of lazy workers desperate to extract their daily wages from employers. In fact, perhaps this policy says less about British culture than it does about that of this government. Facing an electoral drubbing, Sunak appears to believe his path to victory must be as nasty as possible. No need to do calculations before eighteen years to see how this is not enough to save his results in the polls.

Putting the cart before the horse – the horse being much-needed reform of a crumbling national health care system – comes to mind. As a policy, Sunak's latest idea would place itself squarely in the fight against car theft by covering car seats in lead to make them heavier in the hope that this would slow the escape of would-be burglars. Such misdiagnosis of cause and effect is as infuriating as it is inconsistent with current government policy – one of the few consistent beliefs among the various prime ministers that the Conservative Party has sampled in recent years is that more people with disabilities Brits should work. Jeremy Hunt has, in recent months, reaffirmed this belief by revamping welfare benefits to allow some disability benefits to continue while working. Any hope that this would effectively facilitate the return to work of many people with disabilities has been dashed by a lackluster policy that will make it more difficult to maintain employment for people with chronic illnesses and add additional challenges for people whose system immune is vulnerable who come to the office. .

Ever the master tactician, Sunak has unnecessarily opened another front in the culture war in which he consistently manages to lose – Sunak's barbed rhetoric on mental health will be of particular interest to students who often find themselves pushing back against those who disdain existence of such a thing. Getting people with invisible disabilities back into the office is a key entry on Sunak's penciled to-do list, although he does not yet appear to have decided which angle of policy he will bother with. Publicly, he has considered scrapping personal independence benefits altogether for people suffering from depression and anxiety, a blow to those already facing an invasive and highly selective means test.

Does the Prime Minister have so little confidence in our ability, as students, to meet the needs of tomorrow's economy?

Another pet plan issues vouchers as a replacement for the standard social payment. It is all too easy to see a Conservative government proposing a system in which it chooses what can be bought, at what price and from which seller and laughs – to reverse the comments of Cable Vince to a then-beleaguered Gordon Brown – the Prime Minister's rapid transformation from Mr Bean to Joseph Stalin. The confusing ideology masks the dark implications of such a policy: the loss of agency and financial autonomy of the disabled community to drive out a handful of voters. No coherent plan to encourage disabled people to return to work is compatible with a plan to confiscate their wallets as punishment for daring to call on the support the state can provide them.

These desperate measures do not bode well. What does it say about the general health of our economy that the best way for Number 10 to revive it is to cajole the sick into their cubicles? Does the Prime Minister have so little confidence in our ability, as students, to secure tomorrow's economy that he would rather the nation use crutches and jackhammers? Recovering from years of gutless, short-sighted savagery in public spending requires focused, bold leadership, not policy straight from the mind of a barely HR-friendly supermarket manager. The austerity imposed by Lemsip will not reverse economic decline, nor revive a party that is languishing in the polls.

Andy Street, sensationally removed as West Midlands mayor on Saturday, would not have held out, if only for being a little meaner to the disabled; Keane Duncan would not have avoided defeat in Sunak's backyard in York and North Yorkshire if he had forced a hospital ward to shut up, sit up straight and stuff envelopes. Cruelty is no substitute for politics, and this shoddy prime minister should have learned a lesson long ago. Let's be realistic: the Prime Minister is not doing his job well enough to challenge the way the rest of us do ours.