The Telegraph insists that 231,000 young men on Universal Credit have been “signed off work for life.” The phrase is calculated to inflame: a generation of idlers, condemned to sponge. But the category is bureaucratic, not eternal—GP fit notes, backlogged assessments, mental health crises. “For life” is a fabrication, a narrative device.
The Telegraph gives the game away in its own chart (from the DWP). Right there in the small print: “Active sick note from the doctor but has not yet had a Work Capability Assessment.” That is not “signed off for life.” It is the waiting room of a broken system, where GPs paper over the cracks of collapsing health services and the DWP drags its feet on assessments. To turn a temporary fit note into a lifetime sentence is not journalism, it’s propaganda, designed to paint illness as idleness and manufacture consent for another round of cuts.
Why the backlog? A decade of austerity hollowed out the NHS, leaving people waiting months for treatment. The DWP itself has been stripped of staff and resources, so assessments take longer, leaving more people classed as “inactive.” The state produces the very statistics the Telegraph now weaponises, and then blames the victims for the crisis it has engineered.
This is not about young men refusing to work. It is about capital refusing to provide work worth doing.
The political function is clear. Worklessness is not framed as the consequence of capital (from deindustrialisation, precarity, to a collapsing health provision) but as a pathology of youth. A social problem is reframed as a moral failing. By doing so, the press prepares readers for the “solution”: welfare cuts, conditionality, austerity reborn.
Jenrick warns of another 2008 crisis if benefits are not slashed. Labour ministers echo the right’s talking points, insisting too many young people are “inactive.” What vanishes is any acknowledgement that economic inactivity is a structural feature of capitalism itself. Marx called it the reserve army of labour1: a surplus population that disciplines those still in work, drives down wages, and ensures the threat of replacement hangs over every bargaining table.¹
The current panic is not just about expenditure. It is about discipline. Capital requires young men to accept precarity, zero-hours contracts, and underpaid service work. If they resist, if they fall ill, if they collapse under conditions created by the system, they are cast as shirkers. The narrative of “signed off for life” functions as ideological cover for another assault on the working class.
When the Telegraph warns of crisis, it is not describing reality but manufacturing consent for cuts that will deepen it. Labour has a choice: either break with this script, or repeat it. So far, Starmer’s party has chosen repetition—reframing capital’s abandonment as a problem of “skills” and “activation.” Meanwhile the reserve army swells, not out of laziness, but because capitalism has no use for surplus lives except as a threat to the rest.
The fantasy of “workshy young men” is not just a statistic. The Telegraph isn’t attacking 200,000 men—it’s softening the ground for another assault on everyone who works for a wage.
- Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (1867), “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” Marx describes the “industrial reserve army” as the surplus population generated by capitalist production itself, “always available for exploitation whenever capital requires it,” ensuring downward pressure on wages and disciplining the employed workforce. ↩︎
