Who is really sick, and who decides? The answer, in postwar Britain, has never been simple. Gareth Millward – a historian of the British welfare state – tries to work it out in this thorough yet entertaining social history of the sick note – a process with which every British worker will be familiar (even if only through texting a photo of a positive lateral flow test to one’s boss).
Since the modern welfare state was established in 1948, the phrase “sick note” has become loaded. In the Nineties it was a nickname for the perennially injured Tottenham Hotspur player Darren Anderton, while during the New Labour years the tabloids wrote of a “Sicknote Britain” teeming with malingerers. The Labour government even considered sending “mystery shoppers” into GP surgeries to check whether certificates were being handed out too freely. But this cynicism was nothing new: the government suspected miners of absenteeism in the Fifties. Millward goes on to trace how in 2010 the sick note – via work capability assessments and other tests for disability or sickness benefit claimants – eventually became the “fit note”, shifting the focus on to declaring people fit to work.
By Anoosh Chakelian
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