The Tories and Labour are both HOPELESS on benefit reform
The Tories and Labour are both hopeless on benefit reform, with one party making ridiculous promises and the other focusing on the wrong cause for criticism.
The Tories reckon they’ll spend £730 million on ‘talking therapies’ like counselling, in order to put an extra half a million people back into work. They say this will save the economy £12 billion on benefits ever year.
There are two problems with this.
The first is financial; the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said delivering an extra £12bn of savings from the measures “looks difficult to the extreme”. IFS associate director Tom Walters said: “History suggests that reductions in spending are often much harder to realise than is claimed.”
So it’s unlikely that the predicted saving will be achieved.
Labour has chimed in on this point, saying Tory leader Rishi Sunak was trying to “disguise the fact that he has caused a spiralling benefits bill”.
But this is the wrong way of looking at it.
The fundamental issue is the fact that mental illness has multiplied by 33 per cent since the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
The solution is to identify the cause(s) of this proliferation and eliminate them from people’s lives.
But neither the Tories nor Keir Starmer’s Labour are interested in that: it would require too much effort.
Vox Political needs your help!
If you want to support this site
(but don’t want to give your money to advertisers)
you can make a one-off donation here:
Be among the first to know what’s going on! Here are the ways to manage it:
1) Register with us by clicking on ‘Subscribe’ (in the right margin). You can then receive notifications of every new article that is posted here.
2) Follow VP on Twitter @VoxPolitical
3) Like the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/VoxPolitical/
Join the Vox Political Facebook page.
4) You could even make Vox Political your homepage at http://voxpoliticalonline.com
5) Join the uPopulus group at https://upopulus.com/groups/vox-political/
6) Join the MeWe page at https://mewe.com/p-front/voxpolitical
7) Feel free to comment!
And do share with your family and friends – so they don’t miss out!
If you have appreciated this article, don’t forget to share it using the buttons at the bottom of this page. Politics is about everybody – so let’s try to get everybody involved!
Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
fighting for the facts.
Cruel Britannia is available
in either print or eBook format here:
The Livingstone Presumption is available
in either print or eBook format here:
Health Warning: Government! is now available
in either print or eBook format here:
The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:
CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) derives from Systematic Desensitisation Therapy used for Phobias and has made some Americans very wealthy in the UK.
Problem being that the assumption is that your problems are “all in your imagination” and as such can be “Talked Over” then simply vanish.
That’s not how Mental Ilnesses work but it IS how Right-Wing Zealots think they work (the person is just lazy and is just thinking of excuses not to work) and that’s good enough for them.
I personally have had to deal with “victims” of CBT performed by cheap amateurs who harmed their patients by the sheer attacking and judgemental nature of the treatment, the biggest part being a “box ticking” exercise.