PRESENT at Labour’s International Investment Summit on Monday were representatives from Lilly – the world’s largest pharmaceutical company.
This coincided with an announcement from the Labour government that Lilly was making a £279 million investment to launch a scheme in the UK that includes a real-world trial of weight-loss injections impact on worklessness.
The study, to be conducted in Manchester, will be used to determine whether the new weight-loss drugs developed by Lilly can be used against the unemployed to drive them back to work or off benefits.
Labour’s health secretary Wes Streeting, in an article in yesterday’s Telegraph, was overjoyed at the thought that Labour had found the way to drive workers off sickness benefit and back to low-paid jobs with a single injection.
Streeting wrote: ‘Our widening waistbands are also placing significant burden on our health service, costing the NHS £11 billion a year – even more than smoking. And it’s holding back the economy.’
Streeting and Labour prime minister Keir Starmer are enthusiastic about the plan to revive the collapsing economy by forcing workers designated by the state as not sick but simply overweight back to work by use of the new generation of drugs being developed by the pharmaceutical giants.
Starmer emphasised this in a BBC interview yesterday, backing Streeting’s plans, saying: ‘I think these drugs could be very important for our economy and for health.’ He added that weight-loss was ‘very important for the economy so people can get back into work’.
Starmer places the requirements of the bosses to either force the sick back to low-paid work or create the conditions where their benefits can be cut on grounds of being not ill but ‘workshy scroungers’, before any consideration of the health of the population.
The giant pharmaceutical companies are equally drooling at the prospect that, for a relatively small investment, they have opened the way for massive expansion of their weight-loss drugs throughout the NHS, making their shareholders a fortune.
In fact, this plot is not new.
In November 2023, the Observer reported that drug firm Nova Nordisk had lobbied the then-Tory government suggesting it could profile people claiming benefits and target them for weight loss injections.
Professor Simon Capewell, a public health policy expert at Liverpool University, told the Observer at the time that this proposal by executives of the drug company was ‘shocking and absolutely unethical’ and that ‘They suggest targeting people in the interest of the state, for economic reasons, rather than prioritising the person’s own interests and health.’
Professor Capewell went on to say that setting up a pilot scheme that aimed the injections at people ‘on the borderline for returning to work’ would be ‘scientifically dishonest’ and risked biasing any results in favour of the company. ‘If you’ve got folk who are just over the obesity measure and are considered by the DWP to be borderline for just returning to work, it would be a marvellous bit of marketing for the company,’ he said.
The disintegrating Tory government did not last long enough to implement this plan but it has now been enthusiastically embraced by Starmer and Streeting as the way to use advances in medical science, not for the benefit of people but for the profit of the health corporations, and to drive anyone designated as overweight off sickness benefit regardless of any underlying health issues.
The latest developments in weight-loss drugs, which medical science believes are a breakthrough in not only obesity issues but potentially have benefits for people with diabetes and heart conditions, is being used by the Labour government and the pharmaceutical giants not to alleviate suffering but to increase profits and reduce state spending on benefits.
The time is now to put an end to the Starmer government that is shamelessly adopting the Tory policy of driving the sick back to work in order to rescue bankrupt British capitalism.
Workers must act by demanding the TUC immediately recall Congress to organise a general strike to bring down the Starmer government and bring in a workers’ government and socialism.
A socialist economy will nationalise the pharmaceutical industries, where scientific advancements in medicine are for the benefit of all not for the profit of the parasitical capitalist class.