While our tax overlords at HMRC desperately try to shut down their phone lines, they’re happy to funnel taxpayer cash into other priorities. A Freedom of Information Request has discovered that the department’s central Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Team has grown by a fifth in just six months since the start of the year. HMRC has always sought to be as inclusive as possible in its tax collection…
HMRC stresses it has “not included staff elsewhere in HR whose role may include an element of equality and diversity work within their overall duties.” Under a Labour government desperate to prove its “respect” for the blob expect those numbers to keep ticking up…
Speaking on Times Radio, former Home Secretary David Blunkett spoke about overdiagnosis of mental problems:
“Let’s distinguish those who are really severely mentally ill, diagnosed with things that require prolonged medical and diagnostic treatment. My wife and I talk about this a lot, because she’s a retired GP, about the fact that you can be sad without being ill. You can be momentarily depressed because your boyfriend or girlfriend’s just thrown you and you’re not mentally ill. You can even have mild issues, which can be dealt with with the right kind of support, but it doesn’t make you mentally ill. So we’ve got a real task, I think, to get the psychology, if you like, of this over. But there are things where you definitely need medical intervention, and there are other things where you need good friends, you need good connectivity, and you need a job.”
