Austerity and mental health in the U.K.
mosaicscience.com
mosaicscience.com
It's good that they have a policy. It's scary that they need it.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/70850/response/174789...
It's pretty annoying to hear Priti Patel (and people in this thread) deny the reality: benefits sanctions cause suicide.
http://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/one-in-five-benefit-rel...
(And people who are sanctioned aren't all knowingly doing something wrong. They've been open and honest and declared everything to DWP. But currently DWP will suspend your claim, then send you the letter asking for more information. You don't get that letter? The first you know is when your benefits are suspended.)
Edit:
> In the UK, suicide rates rose in 2011 and 2012 (the most recent data available).
Newer data is just coming out. Small rise in deaths by suicide in women, small drop in deaths by suicide for men.
EDIT2: link to data sort of here. http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/about-ons/business-transparency/fr...
"Expressions of suicidal thoughts are common amongst the general population. This does not mean that they are never serious statements of intent."
What the fuck? No they're not common.
You do not have an austerity problem if your budget is increasing. You have a spending problem. The UK's mental health woes are simply an issue that their government managed health care didn't deliver on promises and overspends in other areas.
So sorry, there is no problem cause by austerity here. Always scoff when you see such claims as your more than likely to find government expenditures have increased.
The UK is one of the few shining beacons in Europe at the moment.
Why do the left think we've so many "asylum" migrants illegally trying to cross using heavy goods vehicles and the Channel Tunnel?
Many "asylum" seekers reach Greece, Hungary, France, even Germany (!) and declare "this isn't good enough, we want asylum in the UK!".
Illegal immigrants drive down unskilled labour costs, which is beneficial to the economy... they don't get welfare, or have access to non-emergency healthcare, and they typically live in cramped shared accomodation so put much less strain per head on housing than all the Russian oligarchs who buy Chelsea investment properties to leave vacant.
So I'm not really sure what your objection is... unless it's the obvious one.
Oh wait, maybe it's ZOMGTHETERRRRRRRIZM! Not sure that's a huge bother to be honest, all our recent terrorism has been home-grown.
But yes, for the record, I do object and the current UK government objects to it. Which is why we haven't opened up the flood gates like Germany, stupidly, did.
I put it in quotes because these people aren't interested in following the standard asylum seeking procedures. They want to go around them. Which means they aren't actually an asylum seeker. It makes them an illegal immigrant.
Not many governments in the world will tolerate illegal immigration.
So it's illegal immigrants you're talking about, rather than asylum seekers?
> Not many governments in the world will tolerate illegal immigration.
On the surface that's a reasonable position. After all, surely if they tolerated it then they'd be legal immigrants.
But tolerate is a simple word for a complex situation. There's a difference between how much a government talks about immigration and how much they're willing to spend to stop it (and willing to spend to fix any negative knock-on effects either from reduced migration or blunt-instrument policies).
The same claim - that immigrants are a benefit to the economy - has been stated without refute for 20 years now in the US, for both low level Latin American workers (construction, agriculture, minimum wage service) and higher level services (H1Bs in technology and nursing).
The participant rate of employment in the US, which can't be gamed as easily as other unemployment measurements, is still lower than it was in 2008. Now the taxpayers get to subsidize both the unemployed American worker and the immigrant (via health care, schooling, lost taxes, etc.)
How this is a benefit for anyone other than capital owners is something I'd love to hear.
We'll have to agree to disagree there. It satires a position I don't hold. You both seem to assume that I believe immigration to be a 100% clear and unambiguous benefit, which isn't the case.
I'll go further; anyone who presents immigration arguments as simple is selling something.
In reality I'm making counter-points to someone I feel is trying to punch more than the evidence seems to allow.
Now to the points you've raised...
> The same claim - that immigrants are a benefit to the economy - has been stated without refute for 20 years now in the US
This thread is about the UK, and I learned all I know about the US from watching the movie Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps... but sure... if you like let's talk about the US. Why do you think nobody, apparently ever, refutes the benefits of US immigration?
> The participant rate of employment in the US...
Yep. Clearly a first-order effect of high immigration (legal or otherwise) is going to be competition for some types of jobs. I haven't heard any argument with that. There will be second-order and third-order effects on employment though.
It's also important to try to quantify the approximate size of each effect and the timescale over which it occurs. You're welcome to translate that "participant rate of employment" reference for an international audience. They didn't cover that in Nutty Professor 2.
> Now the taxpayers get to subsidize both the unemployed American worker and the immigrant (via health care, schooling, lost taxes, etc.)
I'm surprised that illegal immigrants have much access to healthcare & education access in the US. I'd be curious to know exactly what the cost of that is.
The third type of subsidy you raise there 'lost taxes' could really just be a short-hand for 'all government services', so isn't additive with the others. What's in the "etc."?
Don't misunderstand, having one group subsidising another is certainly a social justice issue, but it doesn't seem like it's in the top 5 biggest social justice issues in America. The Klumps were very informative on that point.
> How this is a benefit for anyone other than capital owners is something I'd love to hear.
From your references to H1B visas and to subsidising immigrants not paying taxes I assume you're objecting to both legal and illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants are much much easier to defend:
60% of the top US companies were founded by 1st or 2nd gen immigrants (Google, Apple, eBay, Tesla), and 15% of US presidents are 2nd gen.
Immigrants are also twice as likely as naturals to start a business, creating both jobs and market efficiency. Both of those things generate tax revenue and prolong the US position as the #1 economy in the world.
Even if you don't believe in trickle-down economics you'd sound like a crackpot to argue against that.
With illegal immigrants there's much less data and the arguments I've heard are are much less convncing... but I still don't believe anyone who presents it as a simple argument.
Hence austerity.
Only if you only look at the raw £ figures, and take into account neither inflation nor population growth.
Public expenditure between 2010 and 2016 (since the Tories came to power) has gone from £673bn to £759bn. In that time, the CPI's gone from 112 to 127.[0] Population growth is about 7.4% every 10 years.[1] Expenditure per capita is not increasing in real terms.
(Also, there are good reasons that economists measure public expenditure as a % of GDP).
[0] http://www.rateinflation.com/consumer-price-index/uk-histori...
[1] 2001 census: 58.78m; 2011 census: 63.18m
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_aust...
"The United Kingdom government austerity programme is a series of sustained reductions in public spending, intended to reduce the welfare state."
"The programme was initiated in 2010 by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. Its original stated goal was to, "achieve cyclically-adjusted current balance by the end of the rolling, five-year forecast period." At the June 2010 budget, the end of the forecast period was 2015-16. However, in 2014 the Treasury extended the proposed austerity period until at least 2018."
The UK goverment are the ones who kept pushing the term 'austerity', which is why the article is using that word in relation to welfare cuts.
If you want to argue terminology, fine, don't call it 'austerity', choose a narrower label like 'welfare cuts in a stagnant economy' or something.
> Always scoff...
Alternatively; never scoff.
I would suggest that, for avoiding (some) downvotes in the future, you add a link and some clarification. For instance:
https://petermartin2001.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/how-to-bala...
If you start calling people names I have to assume it's because you've run out of proper arguments but still feel agitated enough to keep posting.
> The PDF by the way uses words like "cost saving" and "efficiency" quite liberally.
What's your point?
Are you saying that because a political party use those words then they must not be misleading?
On a national level a "cost" could just as easily be renamed a "stimulus", so your choice of words is based on how you want to sell an ideology.
The Keynesian approach is that in a down economy you apply stimulus and in boom years you cut back. The Friedman approach is somewhat different, but the key point is that none of this is provable, so politicians choose their economics based on ideology rather than choosing their ideology based on economics.
"Efficiency" is also misleading in this context. To be more efficient you actually need to deliver the same outcome for less money. If you choose to deliver less (i.e. by making cuts to services) then that's not increasing efficiency, it's just cuts.
And you're wrong about me being a "leftie", as you would find out if you chose to actually talked to me rather than just sniping.
The budget effects are just evidence that austerity by spending cuts is not a very good way of saving the government money in the current situation. Cutting government spending in a recession can shrink the whole economy and cause tax revenue to drop even more, and then the resulting budget deficit proves you need to make yet more spending cuts, etc.
See http://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-academic-consens... for a more detailed marcoeconomic explanation of what's happening. (edit: changed to a newer and more fitting post from the same blog)
Yeah, sure. As we all know, numbers don't lie. However, oversimplification, obliviousness, intellectual dishonesty and ignorance do. I won't try to infer in which "bucket" you fell, but looking at the raw value of GBP spent is no way to analyse government spending.
It, mainly, fucks two lots of people;
1) Those caught up in the "war". 2) Those who would otherwise have the money spent on them (broadly, the disadvantaged).
Note, those two sets don't make up the majority, and have the least ability to enact change.
I think it's fair to characterise democracy as two foxes and a hen voting on what's for dinner!
Given the nature of the original quote ("Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." - Benjamin Franklin), does that imply that the poor need more guns?
> more guns
Democracy is about achieving better results without having to kill people.
It's a few weeks since I listened, but part of the argument would be that you would expect the death rate to be higher as by definition some of this population is in less than perfect health. The death rate for those that weren't declared fit for work was higher as well.
Also between 2010 and 2014 total spending on welfare increased by £28 billion so austerity seems to be as much a PR exercise as anything <-- just to make clear, this wasn't part of the show.
Austerity is a macroeconomic policy, and its presence or not is identified in macroeconomic indicators (e.g. government spending as a percentage of GDP). I would have thought that was obvious. The relevance of austerity to the article and other discussions of this type is that austerity is used as the justification for cuts to social services and the welfare state (even in cases when the amount of money being spent/cut is tiny so the difference it makes to the budget is negligible) and that these cuts cost lives (for no gain, since austerity doesn't work).
You can argue about whether there was ever any intention to actually reduce the deficit at all, since the results of austerity are well known to macroeconomists, but that just leads to the conclusion that the government is killing people (and tanking the economy) for purely ideological reasons (i.e. reducing the size of the state, at any cost). Which is hardly any better than the up front reason of "tough decisions" where some people supposedly need to die to save the economy.
Note that I'm not saying that anyone with a history of using MH services should just be allowed to claim benefits for ever. But if JC+\DWP are going to suspend benefits at the drop of a hat they should make the support to get a job better.
That's just an asserion. Citation?
>> But if JC+\DWP are going to suspend benefits at the drop of a hat...
Pretty sure this isn't what they do, but if you have a better method of sorting genuine claimants out from the rest I'm sure they'd love to hear it.
"benefits changes cause suicide" is not in any way controversial; pretty much everyone accepts that it happens. Financial instability is well known and accepted as one driver for suicide. What people normally say is that the rate of suicide in people who are sanctioned is the same as in those who are not sanctioned - but I'm not talking about sanctions, but about all the changes. (Reduction in support for ESA claimants in the work-related activity group; refusal to help complete forms; etc)
> Pretty sure this isn't what they do,
Pretty sure this is what they do, because I speak to people who have had their benefits suspended.
One person did some voluntary work, and declared it. DWP wanted more information, and sent a stencil, but it got delivered to the wrong address. The first the person knew about it was that their benefit hadn't been paid. (They were due to get paid on a Friday. Not getting paid left them with no food over a weekend - this is one of the reasons so many people are using foodbanks. The important bit about this anecdote is that because the person was claiming contributions based ESA with permitted work at the higher rate the voluntary work (which had already been fully declared) was irrelevant to their claim - it couldn't have had any effect.
You do know that a benefit suspension is different from a benefit sanction, right?
I disagree about austerity being a PR exercise. As far as I can tell the £28bn increase in the total "welfare" budget is almost all pensions, and what people typically think of as welfare (child care, housing, unemployment, etc) has dropped by 6% overall, although the social exclusion budget within that has actually risen.
>> As far as I can tell the £28bn increase in the total "welfare" budget is almost all pensions, and what people typically think of as welfare (child care, housing, unemployment, etc) has dropped by 6% overall, although the social exclusion budget within that has actually risen.
Pensions are welfare spending. If you're going to arbitrarily pick sections off then you could make any amount of spending look like a reduction. You could argue about the priorities, but not that welfare spending has gone down.
The current UK government hasn't done anything substantial to improve the efficiency of public services. Instead they've generally reduced the level of service. It's not more efficient, just worse.
Sadly all this is an anthropological problem linked to the unending appeal of bread and circuses as offered by politicians who enjoy being in power and know how to achieve that end. People get hurt as a result; tragic but much of it inevitable and saying it isn't doesn't make it so.
Those people experiencing the reduced level of service never deserved the red carpet and gold plating anyway. A 4 star hotel is still good; but yes I can see why one might be upset if they were forced to downgrade from a 5 star hotel. Running out of analogies now.
Which 'undeserving' people are you talking about exactly?
Give an example of a public service where service levels has declined, as clearly you have some in mind?
The only obvious one I can think of is welfare, which of course involves handing physical cash to the claimants. The only reasonable measure of welfare service level is of course the £ value of those hand outs. So yes, the welfare service level has declined. But it is within public expectations; it is after all what the UK public voted this government into power for. Indeed, the UK public opinion intensified as before that they were only happy with having a Con/LibDem coalition.
A&E departments missing max 4 hour limits
Entire towns not having any but locum GPs; people having to wait more than 48 hours to get GP appointment; people not being able to see GP of choice; junior doctors choosing to leave UK.
Social care being delayed, causing people who could be discharged from hospital having to stay there
Social care being delivered by people on zero hour contracts, and making flying 5 minute visits.
I could go on.
The NHS needs increased funding to stay where it is. And that's not including new things like 7 day working ("Do what you're doing now, but do it better, and do it over 7 days a week, and do it for the same money"). And the NHS is clearly seeing budget cuts - Hunt has gone back on his "everything they need" pre-election pledge. (The two year pay freeze and junior doctors leaving in their thousands are clearest evidence, but the gaps in provision for children with mental illness (some children are sent out of the country to get treatment (and not exotic treatment) which isn't something that happens anywhere else in health).
We now have NHS England suggesting that staffing levels should be "proportionately safe", while also seeing CQC give damning reports because of unsafe levels of staffing.
On 36.9% of votes cast through first past the post. In other words 63% of the country didn't vote for the Tories or their austerity policies (that said you can barely slip a fag paper between Tories, Labour and the LibDems policy-wise).
In Scotland the story was quite different. The SNP romped home with 56 out of 59 Westminster seats, many seats gained with greater than 50% majorities, so as a Scot I can tell you up here we unambiguously voted against Westminster's wishes to destroy public services.
No wonder the immigrants have a higher level of employment and literacy
23 year old graduate here from the UK - never touched welfare in my life, never had to. But happy to pay tax for those that need welfare. It's hardly a life choice.
"In the US labour market participation rates now lag five percentage points behind the UK."
"In Britain, however, the workless family – perennial preoccupation of politicians, policymakers and tabloid newspapers – is as rare as it was it was 30 years ago, unless a member of the household is disabled."
And to be fair http://www.migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/character...
If you are too ill to work in the USA, what happens? Are you left to die?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...
Also, I'm not against welfare