Not that we’re for or against - we’d prefer to stay studiedly neutral in fact - what is going on here. We’d just like to point out that it’s inescapable:

Online “sickfluencers” are helping their followers maximise their benefits as more than 15,000 people a week are approved for long-term sickness and disability payments.

The accounts on YouTube and TikTok have received millions of views and thankful followers have shared their stories of successfully receiving disability benefits by using the advice.

The advice included lists of keywords to use in assessments that match up to the scoring criteria such as “psychological distress” as well as template claims “to increase your chances” and warnings not to answer certain “trick” questions at the interview.

It’s righteous that there is a system to support those who are sick. Whether it should be quite the one we’ve got - or even necessarily one run by government - is a different matter. But if there is going to be such a system then there will be those who claim to be sick who might not, quite, be as sick as is being claimed. Humans can be lazy and greedy after all.

There will also be, inevitably, those who advise on how to be sick enough to gain the support without, actually, being quite that sick. Both chancers and grifters do exist, after all. How many will be a function of how generous, compared to non-sick incomes, the support for the sick is. All well known and obvious we would have thought.

This is not to say, not here and now, that the system should be different from what it is. Rather, we just want to point out the difficulties of planning. For there are always second order effects. First order is that we wish to take care, financially and economically, of the sick. We’re a rich nation, we can do that, we don’t have to put Grannies on ice floes for them to sail off into that v short future. But we do get second order - chancers looking for an easy life. We get third order effects, grifters glomming onto charging for advice on how to do so. No doubt there are fourth order effects we’ve not thought of either.

Planning’s difficult, see? Which is why it so often doesn’t, in fact, work out.

Still, as Alistair Campbell has just noted we now have, for the first time ever, an entirely state educated Cabinet. Undoubtedly things will now get better as we no longer have the chinless wonders there purely by merit of their birth. Undoubtedly.

Tim Worstall