After a recount and a knife-edge head to head, Labour’s Richard Parker has won the mayoralty in the West Midlands to defeat Andy Street.
Dick Parker: 225,590 votes – 37.8%
Andy Street: 224,082 votes – 37.5%
It clearly didn’t matter how much Street distanced himself from the national party during the campaign in the end. Losing a two-term mayor will make impossible for the Tories to spin their ‘everything is fine’ line. Truly disastrous expectation management from the Tories – who strongly claimed it would be a winner…
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.”