The quote above is typical among many politicians and the media that portrays incapacity benefit claimants as abandoned unemployed in areas where jobs are in short supply. The invalidity benefit count in the 1980s was 700,000, so there has been a huge shift of people from job-seeking to disability benefits. Due to the limits of my research, I have not been able to dig further into the statistics yet.
However, there is an issue here that is completely neglected. And that is, regardless of the motivations of the then Conservative Governments, people who transfered, may have genuinely had disabilities and sickness that prevented them from working.
The most important test then, surely, is to compare disability claimant rates against the unemployment rates for developed nations. What we find is a scattered graph with no correlation.
Source: OECD 2008
The UK is roughly in the center of the main cluster broadly similar to the USA and Ireland. Our disability claimant rate is higher than France, Germany and Italy but because we have far higher rates of mental health sufferers than all European states.
So we can say with certainty, regardless of why the disability claimant count rose, the UK disability claimant rates are not disproportionate.
One factor that isn't taken into consideration, is that in the last twenty years, there has been a growing understanding of mental health. People have broken through stigma and accepted that they have a problem. This often occurs due to work stress or depression from unemployment.
In the 1980s, many people who had worked all their lives and had lost their jobs in heavy industry became severely depressed and in some cases suicidal. Treating these people as having a sickness was the right thing to do. These people may have benefited from retraining and finding new work to improve their mental health. But these things are never clear cut and can only be taken on a case by case basis.
There is no evidence that UK disability claimants are abandoned unemployed without a disability or sickness.