If anything summed up Nick Clegg, it was his speech to the Liberal Democrat party conference this week.
And in it was a pledge to shake-up mental health services. He pledged that an extra £120m of funding would be provided for mental health services.
Hooray, we are supposed to say. But which government has provided over cuts to mental health trusts that have been 20% greater than for other hospitals?
I know as well as anyone that treatment for mental health in this country is a mess. It is an illness, or rather a group of illnesses, that costs the economy around £100bn a year. And an even worse statistic is that the single biggest killer of men between 20 to 49 is suicide.
Unless you are in total breakdown there is nothing for you in this country. It is hard enough to see a GP but when you get there, it’s a prescription for some drugs and off you go. ‘Next!’ There is little by way of what are known as ‘talking therapies’ and not all of these are suitable for everyone. I had to walk through hoops in order to see a therapist. I was one of the lucky ones. Many end up talking to themselves.
Nick Clegg obviously has too much time on his hands in his vainglorious non job as Deputy Prime Minister (which he isn’t really because Cameron delegates the slightly less important matters of state to his senior real Tory cabinet ministers rather than Clegg and his yellow Tories). He thinks we will forget or ignore the huge cuts his party of useful idiots have enabled the Conservatives to impose on mental health services, in this case cuts of 2% in real terms, whilst at the same time referrals to crisis and community health departments have risen by over 15%.
Perhaps Clegg’s belated concerns about mental health have more to do with arithmetic in that he has calculated there are a few votes in this area that may prevent his wretched little party being wiped out at next year’s General Election. And there are certainly considerable numbers of people for whom life is an interminable struggle because of their mental health.
But as with everything else with Clegg, I don’t believe him. Since his promise to abolish student tuition fees changed to their tripling once he got his non job, his ministerial car and his large office he has proved to be just another lying politician.
The only positive out of this may be that Clegg has started a debate that may eventually deliver some improvements. It won’t be him or his Liberal Democrats who will be able to deliver once they have been punished by the electorate for their dishonesty and opportunism but it would be nice if other politicians with better principles could.
“It’s time for promises to be kept,” said Clegg in 2010. No one will believe any of his promises now, sadly for him.
