Why Labour’s wheeze to use weight-loss drugs to get jobless back to work is worrying sign of things to come

Yet there is no doubt among those who study public health that to invest massively in expensive weight-loss drugs, as a long-term answer to obesity, is to address the symptom of the problem, rather than the cause. The Manchester study, for example, will be run by a public-private partnership, Health Innovation Manchester, working alongside the US-based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly; and you don’t need much imagination to see what a disaster it would be for “big pharma” in the UK, if the people were suddenly to start tackling the causes of obesity through improved diet and greater physical mobility, instead of sitting at home popping expensive lifetime medication for obesity, cholesterol control, and high blood pressure.

Junk food dependency

Now, of course, Streeting would probably argue that attempts to combat obesity through lifestyle change have failed, and that drastic action is needed. Yet still, it is difficult not to feel that his initiative is a classic example of what the Edinburgh and Australia-based economist Katherine Trebeck calls the “failure demand” phase of late capitalism, when increasingly large areas of economic activity and growth involve attempts to remedy damage caused by the system itself.

Indeed the pharmaceutical approach to obesity is a prime example of “failure demand”, generated by a food industry which finds it more profitable to market highly-processed “fun foods” that are almost devoid of real nutritional value, than to provide consumers with food that might actually nourish their minds and bodies. Given the higher profit margins associated with junk food, it’s even arguable that the whole food producing and retail industry on which we rely for our very lives, is now dependent on a sector that is literally wrecking the health of millions of our fellow citizens.

This whole area, in other words, is ripe for serious government intervention to improve and protect the health of the people, and radically to change the rules of the food industry game, as our Victorian forebears did in the late 19th century. As Health Secretary, Streeting should be in the forefront of this movement, using government powers to confront the food industry where it refuses to move, and to ensure that the pharmaceutical industry invests in drugs that actually cure us, as well as those we need to take for life, to protect us from the consequences of the economy in which we live.

Disasters ‘good’ for GDP

Instead, though, all we have from Keir Starmer and his ministers is a slightly chilling culture of compliance with big capital, along with relentless promotion of the myth that economic growth – regardless of its purpose or type – is always good. It’s now obvious to most students of economics that crude economic growth, as currently measured via GDP, is at best a mixed blessing under 21st-century conditions. Short-term GDP growth, after all, is a measure which nods in approval at a collapse of public health, since it both reflects a boost in food industry profits, and predicts a boost in pharmaceuticals consumption.

Even more disastrously, it warmly welcomes the mounting symptoms of global climate collapse, since every massive flood or fire generates a huge surge of economic activity as human beings try to patch up and rebuild. And just as disasters that wreck human lives only add to the measure of gross domestic product, GDP, likewise, has currently no way of factoring in, on the deficit side, the traumatising human pain and loss entailed in such events, or even the prospect of complete environmental breakdown.

One might almost weep

Yet still, we see little sign of a new generation of politicians intelligent and compassionate enough to move on from this failing measure of success, and to implement the deep structural changes that would promote a positive work-life balance for all, along with strong communities, greater conviviality, thriving local fresh food economies, and new energy systems that offer communities more control over their own future – measures that might damage short-term GDP, but would help heal us as human beings, and provide a far stronger and more sustainable basis for any future economy capable of surviving the current crisis.

In this context, one might almost weep at the sight of a new Labour government, with access to so much new thinking on these issues, still so wedded to the present system that its response to these profound human crises is to jab the overweight unemployed with expensive chemicals in order to reconnect them with an economy that has so clearly failed them, both physically and emotionally. That Streeting can see no further than these tired and increasingly desperate corporate solutions is perhaps not surprising.

That the once-mighty Labour movement, though, can apparently do little or nothing to shift the government’s economic thinking into the 21st century, is both depressing and deeply concerning, and suggests that at a moment when a radical reform and reset of our economic priorities was so desperately needed, the bruised and battered UK can instead expect only a great deal more of the same.