Mel Stride

I am unfortunate enough to have Mel Stride as my MP. On the 21st of March, 2024, he said some really unpleasant things about mental health. I was going to write to him, but there’s just no point: someone who can say what he said is not someone with whom it is useful to communicate. Below is the draft of what I wrote.

I was really impressed by what you said on the 21st March:

There is a real risk now that we are labelling the normal ups and downs of human life as medical conditions which then actually serve to hold people back and, ultimately, drive up the benefit bill.

That is … just an extremely stupid, arrogant and nasty thing to say.

You then went on to make some more noise about how doctors tend, after seeing people with mental health problems, to sign them off as sick. That is, you know, doctors: people who have done six or more years of very hard work to qualify and who are bound by medical ethics. As opposed to you: a person with a degree in the easy bits of three mostly-bullshit subjects.

And of course you would rather that the helots just struggle on until they fall off some cliff and die. That, after all, would make some number on a spreadsheet bigger and put money into the pockets of your corporate sponsors: the people you actually work for. Not to mention conveniently eliminating the unproductive: Arbeit macht frei as someone once wrote.

Well I’ve walked along the edge of that cliff most of my life, quite literally on several occasions. I have never been diagnosed with anything, nor in fact sought medical help: I hate to think what people who have must have gone through. And however little I have contributed to society it is more than you ever will. I was never going to vote for your disgusting party of course, but until now I had some respect for you personally: not any more.

And of course it hasn’t occurred to you that the people of Britain have been living through the worst government for a century: a government which has destroyed the economy, twice; a government which has systematically downplayed climate change thus erasing young people’s hope for a better future; a government which is destroying communities, destroying the arts, destroying all the things its members are too stupid to understand; a government which used the pandemic as a way of handing billions to its friends. A government which has been actively trying to suppress votes to stay in power. The only comforting thing about the government you’ve been part of is that you aren’t forced to choose between malice and incompetence: it’s always both¹.

I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that the response to living through this might be to be just a little bit depressed? No, of course it hasn’t: I don’t suppose you spend much time thinking about other people, do you?

And now, at long last, your party is finally facing the electoral obliteration it deserves. Nothing you think, say or do will ever matter again. That, at least, is a reason to be cheerful.