The PIPs Are Squeaking Now

I have been repeatedly turned down for Personal Independence Payment, even on appeal, despite having osteoarthritis from head to toe, the remains of the most ulcerated colon of anyone who ever lived to tell the tale, depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, paranoid personality disorder, anankastic personality disorder, anxious personality disorder, and an Autism Spectrum Disorder, possibly Asperger's Syndrome. So I can assure you that PIP is hard to get. Anyone who is receiving it must really, really, really need it.

Those who suggest that it is possible to self-certify as mentally, or if some of them were to be believed even physically, ill enough to be awarded PIP, yet for some unknown reason most people, including themselves, did not therefore do so, are on the same level as those who suggest that anyone might use a foodbank, yet for some unknown reason most people, including themselves, did not therefore do so.

In the spirit of 40 years of Education Secretaries who have presumed to opine as to how much homework should be set, how often disruptive pupils should be put out of class, and so on, Wes Streeting, whose only degree is in History and who has never worked outside politics, now informs us that there is an "overdiagnosis" of mental illness. It is particularly galling to hear the approval of people who opposed the lockdowns, and who have rarely stopped banging on about them in the five years since. They predicted an explosion in mental illness, and that is undeniably a factor. But the alternative was mass deaths from Covid-19. The lockdowns were the less bad option. Yet those who most noisily foresaw its downside seem not to have noticed their vindication.

Streeting is personally opposed to assisted suicide, although it would be interesting to see whether he would resign rather than implement it. But his attitude is the context in which it is being railroaded through Parliament, with even the requirement of approval by a High Court judge having been abandoned, meaning that the Bill itself ought to be, in the terms in which it was given a Second Reading. Streeting's enthusiasm for contracting out the National Health Service to his own private donors is the context in which assisted suicide is openly expected to be treated in the same way, no doubt with prepayment plans, with advertising, and with sales staff paid by footfall. The withdrawal of benefits from the already suicidal ought to do those interests no end of good. And with them, their pet politicians.

Yet Streeting is right to take back control of the NHS in England by abolishing NHS England. The complaints about job losses are never made by or on behalf of more useful workers. Streeting has empowered his successors, and it is now our task to supply them.