george orwell | Pandaemonium

UNEMPLOYMENT IS NOT A MEDICAL CONDITION

October 23, 2024 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on unemployment and weightloss drugs, was published in the Observer on 20 October 2024 under the headline “Pumping the unemployed with weight-loss drugs echoes Victorian attitudes to the poor”. In early 2023, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, chief executive of the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, and its UK corporate vice-president Pinder Sahota, met in Whitehall with the then health secretary Steve Barclay, England’s chief medical officer, Prof Chris Whitty, and various health and Treasury officials. They discussed the possibilities of a […]

Categories: Britain, Class • Tags: beveridge report, british politics, george orwell, mounjaro, poor laws, poverty, unemployment, wegovy, weight loss drugs, working class

A PICTURE OF HOW POWER WORKS

November 24, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the normalisation of corruption and incompetence, was my Observer column this week. (The column included also a short piece on the funding of the Biden transition.) It was published on 22 November 2020, under the headline “From Grenfell to PPE, absolute power still corrupts in high places”. A cladding manufacturer allegedly fakes results to win a contract for material it knows is a deathtrap. The government sets up a system to reward companies with whom ministers have links. Almost 90% of […]

Categories: Britain, Politics • Tags: chumocracy, corruption, deregulation, george orwell, grenfell tower, national audit office, windrush scandal

BLAMING THE POOR

August 4, 2020 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on the history of blaming the poor, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 2 August 2020, under the headline ‘Illness, obesity, racism; who gets blamed for our crises? The poor of course’. The role of government, the US political scientist Lawrence Mead wrote in his 1986 book Beyond Entitlement, is to ‘persuade [people] to blame themselves’. Mead is the godfather of workfare (schemes that make welfare benefits conditional on the claimant working) and a key proponent […]

Categories: Class, Politics • Tags: african americans, coronavirus, culture, culture of poverty, george orwell, inequality, lawrence mead, obesity, poor, poverty, racism, underserving poor, working class