We’re now a quarter of the way through the 21st century. But from one look at the corporate media benefit claimant-bashing bile over the last year, you wouldn’t know it.
The date marches on, some of the hacks trade places with electoral washouts – and vice versa – but the vile bigotry never ceases. If anything has changed in the past 25 years of hate-rag vitriol, it’s only that they’ve increased the ever-flowing pool of marginalised community scapegoats.
Not that any oppressed group ever graduates from the right-wing press’s punch down portfolio. The Canary reviewed the past five years of Telegraph, Times, and Daily Mail coverage on disability benefits – and the data can attest to this.
However, perhaps most notably of all, what became abundantly clear was quite how much the corporate media had refused to let some abhorrently ableist and grossly bigoted narratives lie. And amidst a torrent of this, the corporate press’s particularly nasty and appalling anti-fatness stigma stood out tall.
Disability benefits and discriminatory narratives
The benefits are a “life-style choice” purveyors, arbiters of the ‘grift’ and ‘graft’ “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” sanctimony, “workshy”, “idlers”, “shirkers” – it was all there. Across the dataset – with its 1130% rise in 2024 – the words themselves weren’t particularly prolific.
We found the facetious idea that it’s a “lifestyle choice” in five articles. Grifter and grafter guff came up in four. That old (rotten) “workshy” chestnut cropped up across no fewer than ten pieces. Invocations of “idleness” and “shirkers”, just three and one pieces over our time period and search terms respectively.
That these outlets used these terms in any articles at all is appalling enough. Yet, most also didn’t have to say it in as many explicit words. The implication was often plain and terrible to see in many articles regardless.
Among the most infamous of infamous smears, there were two that really encapsulated an especially disgusting discourse that the corporate media refuses to put to bed.
Just when you think it can’t get any worse, the right-wing regurgitators raise you: its “lazy scrounger” rhetoric.
Again, they didn’t often voice it in quite so florid adjectives. Four counts of “scrounger” – all courtesy of the Daily Mail, naturally. Meanwhile, the Telegraph spewed out five out six of the pieces peddling “laziness” as synonymous with benefit claimants.
Anti-fatness and benefit claimant bigotry
Once more, there were plenty of articles where it didn’t need to say these outright for readers to know that’s what it was implying.
Crucially, the corporate media often wrapped this up in a vastly more reprehensible narrative (hard to believe, we know). It’s one that has long been rife in the right-wing press. In tandem with these disgusting terms, the mainstream media’s output was also bristling in anti-fatness bigotry.
That is, amidst the vicious crusade against benefit claimants, the fascistic foghorns whipped up a furore over fat people. And often, they did this in the most paternalistic, and putridly body-shaming ways.
In October, Telegraph troll Allison Pearson penned one notable disgusting anti-fat diatribe. Hers specifically extolled the economic advantages of mass-prescribing weight-loss drugs.
In it, she unironically advised we “as a society” should stop fat-shaming people. So herself and her hate-mongering employer especially then? Rich too when she packed the very same Ozempic – likely quid-pro-quo – promo-piece with every single hate-riddled insult and stereotype under the sun (or in the Sun for that matter).
The oxymoronic lack of self-awareness was therefore truly off-the-charts scale staggering throughout. She literally labelled benefit claimants “useless lumps” and suggested they would “flog their free drugs on the black market”. To the likes of Pearson, people not cranking out capital are burdens to society, or criminal fraudsters – a rhetoric that has reared its head repeatedly in recent months. And why not divvy out a dose of anti-fat discrimination while she was at it – “lumps” – a deliberate double entendre that should not go unnoticed.
We won’t reel off a list of her numerous other incorrigible insults and give them any oxygen. Safe to say that she made every attempt to punch down on fat folks, poor people, really any marginalised demographic she could swing her arm at. And the grand crescendo of it all leads exactly where you might expect. Make people fit for work – then ramp up punitive benefit conditionality.
Every other sentence seems an ode to framing fatness as something to revile – about yourself, and in others.
Weight loss porn in print
Similarly, a supposedly ‘satirical’ soapbox from Telegraph columnist Michael Deacon in December had an equally vile message. Deacon pitched “high-altitude fat camps” to fix the UK’s so-called ‘obesity crisis’. Of course, his bigoted banter fits right in with the worst kinds of weight loss porn we see plastered across every nook and cranny of the media. From late-stage capitalist entertainment media’s fetishization of fat-shaming to the clickbait press’ capitalisation of it. The point is that it’s within this context that Deacon was emboldened to say this – and vice-versa legitimise it in a vicious mutually-sustaining circle.
And significantly, what these articles have in common is the way in which they pitch fatness as some form of personal failing. Ostensibly, they’re suggesting that people are undeserving of health-related benefits by reason of their fatness. So there’s the implication too that people claiming disability benefits for conditions linked to their weight, shouldn’t be.
If the corporate media can foist the blame for people’s poor health on individuals, then they can preserve the capitalist status quo. Simply put, it shifts the onus away from tackling the structural factors of our inequitable classist, ableist, racist, and misogynistic society. One particularly revolting headline from the Daily Mail said it all:
Listen love, I can’t be applying for jobs day in and day out. You’ve got to have some ‘me time’: The brazen words of Jimmy, 40, to SABRINA MILLER in this shocking dispatch from the ‘disability benefits capital of the UK’ where 75 per cent are overweight
Needless to say, it’s the ‘lazy scrounger’ narrative all over.
Bigotry masquerading as partisan facts
However, the blatantly bigoted tirades from corporate media’s resident click-hate merchants wasn’t the only way these outlets farmed outrage and stirred up contempt either.
They also churned out a steady stream of analysis articles pointing out the so-called “sickness benefits bill”. Crucially, these made the connection with ‘obesity’ as a driver of increasing rates of ill health and unemployment. Some directly honed in on this, while others merely mused on it in passing. But all were part of building a despicable discourse over fatness.
Let’s talk cause and effect here. What do you get when you have a band of right-wing media anti-fat bigots bashing the costs of “obesity-linked benefits”?
A government in bed with Big Pharma readying to pimp claimants out for profits. Specifically, this would be the DWP doing a deal with the pharmaceutical corporate devil Eli Lilly for a weight loss drug trial. Essentially, it’s the department testing whether so-called weight-loss jabs could get unemployed claimants back into work.
Slow-clap for Labour then. The dust barely settles before Starmer’s government seems to jump jovially aboard another astonishingly atrocious back-to-work bandwagon.
The Times: nothing to see here…
In fact, the Times piece was quite literally crooning over a report from healthcare analytics consultancy LCP reifying the welfare savings these drugs could foment. What the Times didn’t mention? That Novo Nordisk A/S has previously paid an author of the report – Jonathan Pearson-Stuttard – for studies into the healthcare costs of ‘obesity-related’ conditions.
That would of course be the same Novo Nordisk that manufactures two of the major weight loss drugs in question – Wegovy and Ozempic. Additionally, Pearson-Stuttard also took fees from Pfizer outside the study. The company produces weight loss drugs too. Go figure.
So perhaps it’s no surprise Pearson-Stuttard was plugging the “cashable savings for the welfare system” of Novo Nordisk’s drugs to the Times. Honourable mention too to former DWP coalition government Liberal Democrat minister-turned-lobbyist Steve Webb for jumping on the Wegovy-train as another author on the report.
The so-called “worklessness crisis” narrative and weight loss jabs have been banging around together at least since Sunak launched Wegovy NHS trials in June 2023.
Then health secretary Steve Barclay boasted the boon they could be for the economy by getting people back to work. Predictably, this – at least in part – revolved around building:
evidence that the drugs can reduce the benefits bill
And since then, the right-wing press and politicians have been increasingly trading on this anti-fat benefit claimant propaganda.
Conditionality and coercion
Yet, that has hardly been the end of it. Because, if that all weren’t insulting enough, in December, the Telegraph reported that:
Obese people are to be given gastric band surgery on the NHS in a drive to reduce worklessness.
So, we have both pharmaceutically suppressing appetites and surgically shrinking people’s stomachs. That’s the new Labour government’s grand plan for getting claimants back to work? There’s a stupefying scale of anti-fat bigotry on display in all this. And as the Canary’s Steve Topple has noted, it all comes down to the matter of coercion.
He tempered that it doesn’t mean that “Labour is that dystopian – yet” that it’s going to condition benefits on their take-up. After all, it’s early trial days for now on both counts.
At minimum though, the rancid rhetoric the press is spouting could pave the way for the DWP withdrawing disability benefits from people with conditions it links to obesity. And that’s a form of coercion too. Namely that by rendering people without support, it could leave them with little choice but to turn to these drastic – and sometimes dangerous – health interventions. Not that there’s actually any guarantee that either will actually improve people’s health, or help them find work with a livable wage.
There aren’t even enough jobs going for the number of job seekers, let alone sick and disabled people that the government seems hell-bent on shunting into work. Plus, vacancy numbers say nothing of whether the work is appropriate, accessible, and accommodating of people’s health conditions. Not to mention the companies too numerous to count who’s bosses are parasitic pricks profiting off the backs of low-waged workforces.
Not forgetting the eugenics part in all this
Every article we found bandied about the concept of ‘obesity’. This pertains to the medical measurement of body mass index (BMI). That might seem innocuous enough at first glance. However, it’s premised on a medical model that disparages fat bodies as automatic indicators of unhealthiness. Essentially, it promotes fatness as something that needs to be fixed.
Of course, this atrociously ableist thinking tracks, given its roots in eugenics.
It was 19th century Belgian astronomer, mathematician, and sociologist Adolphe Quetelet who invented the model that later formed the basis of BMI. Notably though, he did so on a study he conducted with only white French and Scottish men. In other words, by its very origins it centred whiteness and patriarchy. Moreover, he pursued this to identify the “ideal” weight and size for an “average man” – by which he quite clearly meant white Western European males.
A telling passage in his book laid bare the ableism at the heart of it:
Everything differing from his proportion or condition would constitute deformity or disease.
Fatness above his metrics constituted a deviation from his “ideal” and inherently signalled sickness. Invariably, it fed into the dominant ideology of the day to devalue chronically ill and disabled lives. Because from there, a who’s who of 19th and 20th century eugenicists took up the concept.
Predictably, vulture capitalists of the 20th century also sniffed out the profits potential of this junk science-turned medical model. Life and health insurance companies adopted it as a predictor of health conditions.
So let me be clear: the implicit assumption that there’s anything wrong with fatness in the first place is utter bullshit. The medical mainstreaming of BMI is about one thing, and one thing only. That is, the capitalist urge for policing poor, racialised, and disabled bodies.
In short, insurance companies hijacked BMI to deny claims. Now, the media-political corporate establishment is making mutterings over removing disability benefits linked to ‘obesity’. These things aren’t unrelated. In a nutshell, it’s the very same eugenicist medical science that threads through both repressive weaponisations of anti-fat stigma and bias.
Personal failings and anti-fatness
However, the history of the terminology the corporate media has been using is just the start of all that’s wrong with the coverage.
Another is that the term ‘obesity’ has a linguistic origin that’s hardly less problematic.
The Latin etymology ‘obesus’ translates as “having eaten oneself fat”. Additionally then, there’s in-built oppression and othering from a term that literally blames people for their body weight.
And this is also largely the underlying intimation of the articles too. Outlets largely made the suggestion – though not always explicitly – that fatness equates to laziness. In other words, fat bodies are that way because of people’s personal choices in relation to diet and exercise.
Obviously, there’s so much wrong with this too. Topple has also previously underscored how this hugely misses the point that, in multiple ways, it isn’t a choice. He highlighted a number of examples:
- The UK’s addiction crisis, caused by depression-inducing corporate capitalism, that means people are dependent on sugar to make them feel happy and give them energy.
- Food manufacturers’ use of cheap vegetable and seed oils that human’s cannot metabolise or digest properly – therefore, they sit as fat in our bodies.
- Our economy’s reliance on jobs that mean we sit in chairs all day.
- The drive for every member of a household to have to go our to work – meaning meals are rushed.
- Poverty – which means poor people cannot afford to cook healthy food, or even eat three meals a day without state support.
- Time poverty – which means poor people don’t have the time to cook healthy food even if they can afford it.
- The fact DWP claimants are not provided with enough to live on – therefore, all of the above happens.
Do away with the notion the establishment give a damn
Moreover, inequitable access to healthy food is also not only down to poverty, but also due food deserts too. Specifically, where you live can determine the cost and availability of food as well.
Then there’s dietary requirements that can limit the types of food people can eat safely, or that their body needs. These include things like allergies, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, conditions causing digestive dysfunction like gastroparesis, or eating difficulties like dysphagia. Many neurodivergent people also have personal ‘safe foods’. Moreover, plenty of these and other health conditions therefore affect people’s weight gain or loss. So ultimately, it’s massively ableist to make out a person’s body weight is down to their own personal dietary failings.
And talking of time poverty for overworked and exhausted households – we’ll say it again: disability benefits are also not out-of-work benefits. Many people claiming them actually work, so this extends to them as well.
Some people – like those with ME – also can’t and shouldn’t exercise, or risk a permanent worsening of their health.
The point is, framing exercise and diet as a choice vastly oversimplifies something with multiply-marginalising factors at play.
Of course, the right-wing press knows all this, but has put out this constant drip of discriminatory drivel regardless.
At the end of the day, hawking hate pays. Bedding down with Big Pharma pays. Celebrating body diversity, tackling structural health inequalities, and buttressing society with a functioning, fair welfare system? Not so much – and the political establishment media lapdogs know this too.
Featured image via the Canary
