NHS patients confront Wes Streeting

Young mental health patients protest at a Wes Streeting event. They are standing up to interrupt him holding a sign that says "Disability cuts will kill"

Three NHS patients angry at the government’s attacks on young people with mental illness and its failure to properly fund the NHS confronted the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting at a Guardian Live event in London tonight.

Two mental health patients interrupted him from the audience shouting “Your cuts will kill”, condemning his support for the £5bn cuts to Personal Independence Payments to disabled people, and his dangerous scapegoating of young people living with mental illness. The Health Secretary failed to engage with the patients before they were taken out of the meeting holding a banner that read “Disability cuts will kill”. 

One of the protesters, Eli Adie, a young community worker with a history of mental illness, spoke powerfully about the number of young people who have been lost to suicide, telling the Health Secretary that his cuts would add “more names to the list of all our dead friends.” Speaking afterwards they said:

“I am so angry with this government. I am deeply frightened about the impact these cuts will have on me. I don’t know how I would survive without this support. I am living in fear and I know dozens of others who are terrified too. As I said in the poem - I have a list of dead friends, victims of a youth mental health crisis most politicians have ignored. If these cuts go ahead I dread to think which names will be added to that list. That a Labour government is doing this to some of the most vulnerable people in the country is appalling.

“It is made even worse by Wes Streeting’s tabloid-baiting scapegoating of young people like me who cannot work because of severe mental distress and chronic illness. This is a shameful and cowardly political tactic that will worsen young people’s health. It is only being used because the government would rather attack easy targets like us, than take on the powerful corporations driving the youth mental health crisis or hit the rich with the wealth tax needed to fund our crumbling public services and essential welfare payments that allow people to live with dignity.”

Eli and Hannah are leaders of Mad Youth Organise, a campaign fighting to win corporate accountability and government action to tackle the root causes of the youth mental health crisis. The youth-led campaign, run by patient organisation Just Treatment, has condemned the proposed cuts and vowed to fight to stop them happening.

Another NHS patient, Maggie, directly confronted Wes Streeting after the event, recounting her near death experience in an NHS hospital when she was left sitting in A&E overnight as she developed sepsis. She also spoke about how she was forced to raid her savings to pay privately for surgery that should have been available on the NHS.

“This is a shameful and cowardly political tactic”
— Eli Adie

“Last year I wrote to Wes Streeting along with other NHS patients who have suffered huge personal loss as a result of the deterioration in the NHS over the last decade and a half asking for a meeting. We got no reply. But he obviously has time to speak with private healthcare corporations - as he has accepted tens of thousands of pounds from rich donors with links to that industry.

“It is therefore little surprise that he is leading a rapid acceleration in the privatisation of NHS services, when all the evidence shows profit driven healthcare leads to worse outcomes for patients, and is a danger to the future of the NHS as a public service. So I came here today to ask him - whose side are you on, patients like me suffering because of cuts and privatisation - or the corporate profiteers getting rich off the back of taxpayer money that should be going straight in to publicly run NHS care?”

While there was a small increase in funds for the NHS in the Autumn Budget, it came nowhere near the £57bn extra needed to match healthcare spending in somewhere like France, and get the NHS back on track. Meanwhile Streeting has chosen to increase the flow of taxpayer funds into profit making companies under the veil of cutting waiting lists instead of using extra resources to expand NHS capacity, something which has been shown to result in significant long term savings and improvements in outcomes.

Tonight’s event was also interrupted by young trans rights campaigners, and activists demanding wealth taxes on the super-rich - a reflection of the growing public anger at the government’s repeated betrayal of the interests of voters.

Diarmaid McDonald