We can't afford NOT to spend money on Mental Health

There is much irony – very sad irony, but irony all the same – that a man desperately in need of psychiatric help has recently killed a member of parliament on the streets of Britain.

Governments of late, but particularly this current government, seem to have taken great joy from cutting the national mental health bill, when so many have warned them of the consequences (no doubt Jo Cox included).

What they don’t seem to realise is that if anything is going to bring this country to its knees, it won’t be the EU (in or out), it won’t be war, it won’t be immigration, it won’t be taxes, it won’t be widespread poverty...it won’t even be terrorism per se. It will be mental health. And you should be frightened. VERY frightened. Particularly as you could be on either of the wrong ends of it.

The Twin Towers

If 9/11 (and the years since) has taught us anything, it is that there are people walking amongst us that are capable of the most appalling atrocities, atrocities maybe even they can’t at this moment imagine (although worryingly some of the really scared ones can!). More particularly these atrocities involve suicide missions.

The word “suicide” here should be a big clue as to their mental state. This may be the basis of their problems, but then it is compounded by radicalisation, particularly when talking about young people. Radicalisation rationalises their mental problems – in other words it makes their confused lives clear by telling them who is to blame and how they should be punished.

But we should have addressed this years ago. When Blair talked about “education-education-education” he wasn’t just talking about Maths and Geography. It was also about mental health education. But somehow this has got lost in the system, much to the horror of those who can see the consequences.

And those consequences are a generation of young British people growing up with little or no mental safety net in a rapidly expanding world of technology, social-intricacies and media confusion.

The News Today…

We are now seeing regular stories of wonderfully gifted young people taking their own lives during what from the outside look like minor teenage mental hiccups, but which to them are like giant mental fire-storms. Why? Because with Government cuts, they could not get mental health treatment.

We are now also seeing regular stories of wonderfully gifted young people becoming easy prey for radicalisation, as groups exploit voids in their mental health, leading them to join violent gangs or religious extremists. Why? Because with Government cuts, they could not get mental health treatment.

But of course, it’s not just the younger generation that are becoming the victims. If you keep your eyes wide open you will observe mental health victims every day. It’s like Pokémon Go, only in real life! It’s not just the recent elderly right-wing extremist killer. There’s the other end of the spectrum too. The Secret Footballer book revealed that many top footballers are on anti-depressants; remember that when you’re screaming from the terraces. When interviewing an elderly famous ex-footballer (a household name), he also revealed that recent events (he’d been made redundant) had caused him to seek help and medication (Prozac), something I didn’t expect to hear from one of my heroes.

And with no safety net, long waiting lists, and untrained staff, the growth of mental health problems in this country and the potential for the violent repercussions is the ticking time-bomb for our whole society. Want to talk about an outburst of road-rage or civil unrest, to ricin or dirty-bombs? No?

The End Of The World?

Even if you don’t suffer from mental illness yourself, you may still think it worth spending money on mental health because your fellow man/woman deserves to get the dignified and proper treatment in their time of troubles. But even if you don’t care for them, or for the mental health of young people, what you should care about is that you are surrounded by a nation of increasingly neurotic people, who are only one meal away from the type of civil unrest not seen since TV programmes like The Walking Dead. One guy not taking his “meds” could be catastrophic, as we saw in France recently. What if everyone on anti-depressants suddenly stopped taking them?? What if The Daily Mail did a scare story on Prozac?? Yes, they would be stupid enough to do that.

Now, isn’t that worth spending a few bob on, if only as a national insurance policy to ensure we don’t get hacked to death in our beds…or that we don’t wake up and find ourselves hacking everyone else to death in their beds? (Not sure which is worse there…)

Scared? You should be. This is a Pandora’s Box that cannot be easily closed. This is a genie that won’t easily squeeze back into the bottle. This is a cat that won’t be enticed back into the bag. And as for the horse, he’s bolted…and we need to go and get him back. NOW!

This politician’s death is not about the EU, ISIS or racism, it is about the chronic state of mental health in the UK. Her colleagues need to act on this, and I don’t mean adding more bodyguards, because we are ALL at risk.

Makes you think.


[Previously printed in 2016...and in 2015...and...]

Is this the beginning of the end for Rupert Murdoch?

It's funny. 

Rupert Murdoch has been saving up his pocket money so that one of his companies, 21st Century Fox, can mop up all remaining shares in Sky. 

It's funny for many reasons, partly because most people thought he already owned Sky, but not Fox, when in fact it's the other way around! He actually only owns 39% of Sky, a fact that has bugged him for years. (He lost control of it in its formative years.)

Funnier still is that he's willing to blow £11.7bn on his new Sky toy in order to take full control of the company, which therefore values Sky at £18.5bn. But is it worth anywhere near that much?

The last time he tried this tack in 2010 his bid fell apart humiliatingly during the phone-hacking scandal, particularly when it emerged that his beloved News Of The World "journalists" had hacked the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. 

But the same bid is back again, and Murdoch's son James (now CEO of Fox & Chair of Sky) reckons there should be no real concessions required to push it through. Offcom, the public and politicians from all sides see this differently, so it should be interesting to see how this pans out. 

The question is: Is Rupert making the right decision? 

Bob Dylan always said The Times They Are A Changing, and Murdoch was always good at spotting change, taking big risks, getting ahead of the crowd and cashing in big. If he took an interest in a new technology then you could bet he could make it work. Eventually. 

Love him or hate him, Britain is a very different place because of him. 

But has he misjudged the future this time?

Two things have happened in the last year that should have set alarm bells ringing at Murdoch HQ.

Firstly, despite unrelenting pounding by Murdoch's press, Theresa May failed to win the last election, even when starting the campaign with a huge poll lead. 

Murdoch is supposed to have stormed out when he heard the BBC exit poll. If it was a shock to Britain, it was an earthquake to Murdoch, and a huge body-blow. His baby newspaper, The Sun (now bolstered by effectively merging with the dying News Of The World), had previously "won it" for Murdoch-approved political leaders in the UK for decades. In particular, John Major had miraculously won against all the odds in 1992, and Murdoch & The Sun had basked in "their" victory.

But in 2017's election Murdoch's media weren't perceived to have performed poorly, and yet they had been all but routed. Intriguingly no one, including Murdoch himself, it seemed, could work out what they'd done wrong. Swaying voters with hysterical headlines had always worked in the past, so why hadn't it worked this time, particularly with a clear cut winner in May & an opponent they depicted as a Trotskyite scarecrow. 

So, it wasn't just May who'd missed an open goal, Murdoch had as well. And Murdoch didn't ever miss, not like this. It sent shockwaves through the industry. Had he lost his touch, they asked.
Worse still, it now appears that Murdoch may have driven droves of voters TOWARDS Jeremy Corbyn! When The Sun (or the Mail) produced outrageous front pages (pro-Sweet-May, & anti-Trot-Corbyn), they were reproduced widely across the other media...the social media. 

But they weren't retweeted in awe, they were retweeted in mockery. At first caustic & cutting remarks captioned the front-pages, but then - sometimes even before the papers hit the street - parodies would be spread far & wide across the land, & retweeted mercilessly to viral status. In many key areas, The Sun & The Mail were becoming a laughing stock. The old media was being torn apart by the social media. 

On & on during the campaign the right-wing papers blindly blundered on just making it worse for themselves & May. The more obnoxious the papers were, the more people turned against them. In an undercurrent that was hard to pick up, Murdoch news became fake news. 

Curiously, it went undetected by the papers who smugly believed that even if there was a movement pitching invisibly against them it would never come out & actually vote against them. But they were wrong about that too.

There is a classic video of a man walking into a supermarket, picking up a huge pile of The Sun & dumping them all in a nearby bin. Another shows a guy casually hiding a huge pile in a supermarket freezer! Although this was only 2 people, and less than 100 papers, the videos went viral, and led to loads more papers being dumped and opinions formed. 

In the old days people would be more middle class about it and actually buy the newspaper before trashing it. Now people are sending a clear message to retailers, social media and the world at large. If the paper's offensive, don't sell it or YOU can pay to have it trashed. 

Liverpool had already banned The Sun, and other cities could join forces too. It could easily snowball into a crisis of confidence for Murdoch's papers. It would be like a house built of straw, so easily blown away. 

Secondly, with his News International branch of his empire having this big question mark over it, attention switches to Sky. 

The jewel in the Sky TV crown is Premier League football. Since the early 1990s they have opened the door to widespread live football on TV, effectively cornering the lucrative market that many (wrongly) felt would kill the sport. 

Unfortunately, they have opened Pandora's Box, and are struggling to control it. Live Premier football has thrived so much that fans want it more than Sky can supply it. There is now a whole industry of illegal live streams of every match that has a camera pointed at it! 

Sky and the Premier League are desperately trying to plug the holes, but like Corbyn's minions, there's millions more springing up just as fast as they block one source! It's a losing battle, particularly as it's a global problem, not just a few football fans in the UK. 

What Murdoch has failed to foresee is the potential for this market. For example, when Virgin Media recently advertised their TV package as having "All the football" they were inundated with enquiries as to whether that meant ALL the games live. Yes, ALL the football. 

Of course, it just meant that Virgin offered access to Sky & BT live games, but it just showed what fans' expectations were. In the past after crawling through the desert & finding the oasis dry they would have drunk the sand (i.e. bitten the bullet and bought the Sky Sports package). Instead, they are taking on the system to get "All the football" any way they can. 

What's more these aren't computer whizz-kids, these are just as much the middle-class fans who used to be the backbone of Sky Sports subscriptions. They have been more than happy to fight their way through the mysteries of Kodi and the like to get live streams, and they are the warriors that Murdoch has to beat. Well, good luck with THAT, Rupert! Your peasants are revolting!

Sky's response has not impressed many. The company has been panicked into restructuring its Sports channels. "Only pay for the Sport You Love", they boldly claim, where the Sky Sports Premier League channel is £18pm and offers only (only!) 126 live games. Now that might be a third of all Premier games, but fans are non-plussed. Up until a couple of years ago you could get the Sky Sports 1 channel (the one that showed 99% of the Prem games on Sky) on its own for about £10pm. [You sometimes had to search hard to find that subscription, but it was still available till recently!] Fans in the know don't like paying for stuff they don't have to, and even more they hate massive price hikes. 

Of course, if you add the other Sky Sports Football channel (the one with the lower leagues, the Caraboa Cup, etc) the price rises to £22pm. All the sport is £27pm, but if you take all that you should get a life!

Part of the restructuring of the sports channels is to make it more difficult for the illegal live streamers, but give them a couple of long evenings with their laptop & a can of Carabao and they'll have worked their way around anything Sky & the Premier League has to throw at them. 

Without a solution to this demand-for-streaming problem, the value of Sky is really debatable. Either they must get heavy and throw everything they've got to stamp out the illegal streaming (a tactic that shows little sign of working), or they should offer their own reasonably-priced streaming package.
I'd bet Murdoch would favour the latter, but the question is could he pull it off?

Fail, and he may find he's just spent £12bn on a company, the value of which could slip through his fingers like sand as people go elsewhere for their TV and sport. Let's face it, there's plenty of competition around, legal or otherwise. 

Unbelievably, his Sky could (theoretically) get squeezed out and just melt away, and he could end up like the baddie at the end of an Indiana Jones movie, grasping at his long-desired prize just as it crumbles into dust.

So, instead of wasting £12bn on mopping up the past, he should look again to the future. There's money in them-thar-hills, and if anyone can spot it then it's Murdoch.