Streeting's sick quip is clueless and dangerous

WE need to talk about Wes Streeting. Largely because his most recent remarks around mental health over the weekend were stupid, dangerous and a disgrace.

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The Health Secretary seems to be suffering from an obsession with wanting to play to the right-wing gallery in the same way his boss, Sir Keir Starmer, did ahead of last year's election with his appalling comments on immigration.

Streeting said this to the BBC at the weekend: "Here's the other thing, mental wellbeing, illness, it's a spectrum and I think definitely there's an overdiag- nosis but there's too many people being written off.

You could easily be thinking you were listening to a Tory Cabinet minister occupying govern- ment before the arrival of the supposed “grown ups’ last summer.

Instead this was a Labour politician waving away the country’s mental health crisis so he could justify govern- ment cuts to the benefits system.

And the inference from Streeting’s clueless remarks was that those people with mental health diagnoses are a burden on the taxpayer. His comments even reeked of a suggestion that some are trying to cheat the system.