Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Domestic abuse support needs more than tick-box politics

Picture by Andrew Parsons / No. 10 Downing Street

One of the problems with the political news cycle, whether in normal times or now, is that politicians believe that making an announcement about a policy problem is all they need to do to tick it off their to-do list. The more complex the problem, the more tempting it is to make an announcement that sounds as though you are taking it seriously, but which doesn’t do anything to address even one aspect of what’s really going on.

One of the classic long-term examples of this is social care, which no political party in the past two decades has done enough to address, beyond making announcements about what they might do. Another is ‘skills’, which few politicians really understand, but which they know is in some vague sense important to those who haven’t been to university. In recent years, we have heard plenty of announcements on how seriously the government takes mental illness, which then amounts to little more than someone as powerful as the Prime Minister saying ‘it’s okay not to be okay’, without doing the sorts of things that powerful people like prime ministers can do, like increasing the amount of support available for those who aren’t okay rather than leaving them on a year-long waiting list.

Domestic abuse was an epidemic even before the coronavirus lockdown

The latest policy area that keeps popping up on political to-do lists without any real resolution is domestic abuse. It was an epidemic before the coronavirus lockdown, with two women a week being killed by their current or ex-partner. Whatsmore, 90 women and the same number of children are turned away from refuges on any given night. In the latest Spectator, I explain how the lockdown has made things so much worse.

So far, ministers have conformed to type.

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Isabel Hardman
Written by
Isabel Hardman
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator and author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians. She also presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

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