Sicknote Britain’s fabulous beasts

So here we go again. The incapacity benefit myth is getting another airing only this time the emphasis is a little different, the rhetoric a little softer, the message ostensibly more empowering.

No longer is David Cameron and his party presenting us – or at least those disabled people on Incapacity Benefit – as unscrupulous scroungers entirely capable of work but happy to sit on our fat backsides and watch the money roll in from the state benefit system. Now he says that there are around half a million people on IB who’re just yearning for the right and opportunity to get back to work if only someone (Cameron) would give them the little shove they need.

Hang on, who are these mythical people? How does anyone actually know they exist? And politicians on all sides have to make their minds up. Are they work-shy sluggards living off the fat of the benefit system? Or are they craving the motivation they otherwise apparently lack to get themselves back into the earning classes?

My belief is that they are neither of these things because, like other mythical beasts. The gryphon, the dragon, the mermaid, the fairies at the bottom of the garden, no-one has ever satisfactorily proved that they exist.