Police in England and Wales dealing with more mental health crises than ever
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The Conservative Party has been in power for 13 years and bears most of the responsibility. They’ve tried every trick in the right-wing playbook: cutting social services to the bone, blaming immigrants and Europeans, stoking internal divisions, and most recently Liz Truss’s record short-lived government tried to solve everything by cutting taxes for the rich. The country desperately needs new ideas and a complete purge of these clowns from government.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/524a7e1e-4ff0-48d6-b9b1-973a9dd4e...
Labor has some culpability in this in that Tony Blair stole Margaret Thatcher's playbook (just as Clinton did Reagan's) and then Labor was taken over by Jeremy Corbin who seemed to look to Cuba and Venezuela as role models. I like the current leader, Keir Starmer, who helped represent the defendants in the McLibel trial.
Globalism is really a remarkable belief system. How can the U.K. leaving a trade union generate such strong feelings across the Atlantic?
I know a lot of people in the finance biz in London which is particularly devastated. The UK pushed the EU into much more openness and transparency than they would have had on their own, "passporting" made it possible to sell financial services across the whole market. One reason why London leads the world in finance is the great talent it attracts and Brexit has sent many of those people packing.
Isn't that a good thing? At least in the long run?
why is that? The move away from london didn't improve productivity, it's a pure cost.
Brexit was an own-goal, and none of the troubles it caused needed to happen, and having achieved brexit brought zero good outcomes to Britain.
I mean good for the UK. If the cancer cells voluntarily leave your body for somewhere else isn’t that a good thing?
> Both exports and imports will be around 15 per cent lower in the long run than if the UK had remained in the EU. (OBR)
Trump never lowered trade by 15 per cent and most of what he did can be reversed. Brexit, which started on a cynical whim of David Cameron. can't be reversed.
You could turn that question on its head: Why did so many people inside the UK have strong feelings about an objectively beneficial trade union?
The answer is of course that this is not what the EU is.
There have always been the two poles about what the goal of the EU should be: The one extreme being a simple trade union between otherwise independent nations, the other being a full-fledged federal state like the US, with a single federal government and legislative body.
The reality is that it's neither of the two but some sort of hodgepodge compromise somewhere in the middle.
Ironically, the UK have been some of the strongest proponents of the "trade union" side in the past. But apparently for the brexiteers even that compromise was too much.
So all the economic justifications against Brexit are red herrings, right? Because when deciding about the fundamental nature of one’s country, people don’t really care if it’s good or bad for the economy. You have to be a pretty bloodless person to predicate the decision on that.
From "greatest" empire of the world to a small island no body cares besides for their funny politicians, in 100 years (speedun edition)
Also I am an admirer of many British Youtubers.
Anyhow there is nothing unique about it being hard to get help for mental health in the UK. It's bad in the US too.
This could describe many developed countries right now, especially the US.
> The country desperately needs new ideas and a complete purge of these clowns from government.
Problem is the slugs keep voting for salt.
UK's per-capita GDP displays the exact same pattern as France and Italy: growth until 2007, the bubble popping in 2008, and instead of a recovery, slow decline thereafter.
An alternative hypothesis to yours is that all of Western Europe drank the Kool Aid of globalization and financialiazation in the past few decades, and that messed up the fundamentals of their economies.
See: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... (UK) and https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... (France)
Also, inflation and energy prices are worse in the UK than many European countries, compounding the problem.
The UK no longer makes anything. We facilitate and service. But that type of work only works for certain people, with certain skills, in certain areas.
The same goes for many other western economies.
What about Bentley, Rolls Royce, submarines, jet engines and other aero parts, luxury goods, Dr. WHO, Top Gear, short term politicians and more?
Also buckfast ;)
>> The UK no longer makes anything
≈≈ The UK has a weak manufacturing sector OR
≈≈ The UK does not manufacture much.
The Tories are almost exclusively responsible for that. With education and long-term industrial policy, there could have been an enormous high-tech manufacturing sector underpinned by an educated workforce to replace the older primary industries like coal mining and "low secondary" like bulk steel.
These policies should have started in the early 80s, but instead at that time they started slashing and selling.
Germany has a lot of faults policy-wise, but they somehow managed to keep manufacturing despite spending trillions on reunification right in middle.
To be fair Germany's manufacturing sector has no secret sauce that Germany invented, but is a sector that managed to survive mostly due to cheap energy from Russian gas, which is now gone, and is highly dependent on a constant stream of mass migration keeping wages in manufacturing low and therefore the cost of German exports competitive.
One of the biggest German policy failures will probably turn out to be the lack of investment in nuclear power to underpin the next 50 years. Maybe their solar and wind efforts will be sufficient, or a battery revolution will fortuitously save the situation, but I have doubts.
Meanwhile, someone British who heard I studied engineering: "are you going to do TV repair?"
but this isn't a problem, unless people refuses to adapt and change to face this new economic reality.
There's something to be said about lack of up-skilling programs funded by the govt, but why does the responsibility of one's life and financial wellbeing fall onto the govt, rather than themselves?
On the other hand, brexit was a disaster, and is just pouring salt into the wound.
If 45% of a country's adult population are somehow unable to "adapt to the new economic reality" then this is definitely a policy problem and not just a matter of "personal responsibility".
> why does the responsibility of one's life and financial wellbeing fall onto the govt, rather than themselves?
What is a government for if not that?
to ensure that nobody but them has the force to interfere with another person's life, with the goal of maintaining order and peace.
Yet somehow we have little issue or qualm in framing modern life as "worst ever", by various metrics.
It's interesting and complicated.
> Derbyshire police said the number of mental health calls had risen by 1,784% over 11 years, North Yorkshire said theirs had risen by 485%, and Merseyside police’s figures had risen by 463%.
> A National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesperson said non-crime incidents such as significant mental health crises and vulnerabilities had a significant impact on available resources.
> “Policing is often seen as the service of last resort, but chiefs must make decisions balancing ever-growing demands. The demands on policing are significant and it is vital that we deliver our own priorities to protect the public and catch criminals first,” the spokesperson said.
There's just so little positive momentum in the country, and that's reflected at all levels, and in the British public.
Our politics speaks for itself. We've had a rut of populist leaders because of a populist platform, that every economist, organisation, foreign country said was a stupid idea, and which has and will continue to decrease the standard of living for people of the UK. Despite this, including a currently unelected prime minister, and one partially elected (by 20,000 or so people) who almost wiped out an entire generations pensions, the next election will rally against immigrants or something and easily be a +10 CON, because the voting bloc are dense and easily manipulated by the media.
We have a healthcare system which has already collapsed. Ambulance wait times, doctor appointment wait times etc. now pose a threat to health should something go wrong with you. Mental health, as the article describes, is in collapse. As is physical health. 64% of adults are overweight/obese, the same for 22% of 4 to 5 year olds, and 37% of 10-11. Almost a quarter of 10 year olds are obese! Smoking surged during the Covid pandemic (because people "were bored") and while there's nothing to suggest problems at this time, vaping is increasingly prevalent. Alcohol use is basically ingrained in social life, and binge drinking is common amongst students. The population is overwhelmingly sedentary. Olympic/international sporting success is massively misleading as these athletes represent the cream of the crop funded by the National Lottery. We have a population that doesn't give a toss about their health and a collapsing healthcare system. It's hardly a surprise Covid wiped out 150,000 people here, whereas in countries like Japan with similarly elderly populations but fitter populations, had far less deaths. The elderly population is growing and young people aren't reproducing so the healthcare system and economy are soon to take a bashing from the forthcoming demographic crash.
We have an education system which hangs onto the coat tails of international success and recognition from the 2 biggest (Oxbridge). The rest are either middling or sub-standard. I don't consider myself to be highly intelligent, but there's a distinct dumbness about the UK population. People are very susceptible to poor lifestyle choices, lack of hobbies, lack of skills, poorly read, poor grasp of (what should be) common knowledge, too focused towards celebritism, consumerism, status display, and gossip. It's very hard to find interesting people to talk to here.
Our younger generation are completely steamrolled by social media and whatever app/website America/China has kicked out. Whether you sit on the conservative/progress side of politics, both sides blindly follow anything they are told to, with little critical thought.
I'm scared for this country, and I know it reinforces one of the points above about demographic collapse, but I wouldn't raise a kid here until emigration is on the cards.
The Police dont even tell you where they are taking you, basically if you dont do as they say, they arrest you and you get banged up in the cells, if you do as they say, you get banged up in a mental health ward.
To make matters worse, if you are a smoker, you are not allowed to smoke on hospital premises and because you are often stripped of your possessions in the first few days and not allowed out, with the hyper addictive changes to the tobacco, you'll invariably get one of their drugs that can incapacitate in seconds for showing any signs of violence or aggression, all be cause you cant have a smoke.
I thought the Nazi's were bad, but employees of the state take things to a whole new level.
Because, contrary to an idealistic public view that mental health is taken care of when discovered, the reality is that it's a system that has little recourse or solution other than to medicate into dullness, and if acting-out requires it, into virtual sedation and lockdown. With all personal rights and dignity gone by default.
Most people who went through it would come out traumatised if they weren't already to start with. It's not treatment the average person would give their dog.
Ironically what Sarah Connor goes through in Terminator 2, isnt that far from the truth, plus we shouldnt forget Religion is a legal form of insanity!
Where there is secrecy, state criminality can exist.