Sick leave

Fair play to the Labour MP Nadia Whittome for coming out publicly and announcing that she is suffering from PTSD and, on the recommendation of her GP, is taking ‘several weeks off in order for my health to improve’. Regardless of her politics, this is quite a brave thing for her to do and I commend her for it. She has praised various people, including Labour leader Keir Starmer, for his support. Good. That’s how things should be but let us be very clear about this: this is far from the norm.

This situation would never arise at many, if not most, employers. While I was blessed with mostly excellent managers, certainly in my final decades in the civil service, the instructions from the top in how to deal with sick leave, any kind of sick leave, were draconian in the least. You would be summoned for potential disciplinary action if your sick leave ran for more than a few days, never mind ‘several weeks’. I remember a colleague, who suffered from cancer which would eventually kill them, being warned about their levels of sick leave. And in the British Red Cross, when I was forced to go sick after being bullied and abused by managers, I was paid the bare minimum level of sick pay. That, they probably thought, would teach the bastard right for being mentally ill.

MPs are in that rare situation of not having managers at all. They can turn up for ‘work’ pretty well whenever they like and those who do not hold ministerial or shadow ministerial posts – I am reluctant to call them jobs – can choose their own hours, perhaps returning to their constituencies from time to time for a photoshoot with some local folk, before doing whatever they like. So when they get ill with something like PTSD, no line manager is going to drag them into an office and warn them that if they don’t sort themselves out pretty damn quick they’ll receive a disciplinary warning, probably leading to dismissal if their sick leave mounts up. The automatic assumption is that anyone who goes sick is ‘swinging the lead’, as my grandmother would have put it, and mental illness is just someone being fed up and we all get fed up sometimes, don’t we, so just pull yourself together.

The only thing I would say to Whittome is that the election of Conservative governments since 2010 is a prime reason for the awful way in which many employees are treated and by constantly rebelling against her own side by supporting the hard left cranks and head-bangers of the hard left, a consequence is that ill ordinary folk will suffer more. See how I did that? Offering genuine empathy and sympathy to a fellow poor mental health sufferer while at the same time pointing out that the obsession with political purity which can damage the very people they purport to represent.

Get well soon, Nadia. History shows that only the Labour Party in government can do good for the ‘lower orders’ who have always been ignored and abandoned by the Tories. And it’s great that you are getting the treatment you need and deserve. Wouldn’t it be nice if adequate mental health treatment was available to everyone? It won’t happen under Boris Johnson and the Tories. So, what’s it to be? Purity or government?