Good day. It's a big day for the government, with Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves speaking at its international investment summit, an event aimed at showcasing Labour's commitment to restarting the economy and driving growth. As Stacey Kiran As reported in his overnight article, Starmer promises to reduce red tape and “eliminate red tape that blocks investment,” in language that sounds very similar to what his conservative predecessors used to say when launching similar initiatives.
I'll cover some of what happens at the summit here, but Graeme Wearden will lead coverage of the same on its live business weblog.
In other news, with ballot papers for the Conservative leadership contest due to be sent to members this week, that contest is heating up. Betting houses have Kemi Badenoch favorite, but his odds put Robert Jenrick not far behind and no one is predicting the winner with confidence. This morning Jenrick and Badenoch face criticism. Jenrick is under fire for calling for the head of NHS England to be sacked and for attacking the Labor Party over immigration center contracts that the Ministry of the Interior began tendering when he himself was minister there. But Badenoch's dispute may be more serious, because she has been criticized by a former Conservative cabinet colleague for her comments about people with autism and anxiety problems.
At the Conservative conference, Badenoch's team published a 36-page essay called Conservatism in Crisis that identifies many factors supposedly holding back growth. About anxiety and autism he says:
It is positive that our society is now more open about mental health. However, the socialization of mental health, whereby mental health went from something where people worked for their own benefit to something where everyone had to treat you differently, has generated costs and has not achieved improve people's mental health outcomes…
[A change in the perception of harm] helps explain why people who have suffered events that were once considered non-traumatic now feel entitled to support. This increases the demand for psychologists and therapists, needed to help people who were previously considered capable of coping. As will be explained in the next book [based on the essay] In the psychology and psychotherapy professions, numbers have increased from 102,000 in 200240 to 223,700 in 2023.
Being diagnosed as neurodiverse was once considered useful, as it meant you could understand your own brain and thus help you deal with the world. It was a change focused on the individual. But now it also offers economic advantages and protections. If you have a neurodiversity diagnosis (e.g. anxiety, autism), it is typically considered a disability, a category related to race or biological sex in terms of discrimination laws and general attitudes.
If you are a boy, you may receive better treatment or equipment at school, including transportation to and from home. If you are in the workforce, you are protected on employment terms from day 1, you can more easily claim for wrongful dismissal and, under disability rules, you can also require your employer to make “reasonable adjustments” to your work (and can disclose your disability once you have worked and not before).
In short, while psychological health was once considered something that people had to work on as individuals, mental health has become something that society, schools and employers have to adapt to.
As Eleanor Langford reports in a story for the iThese comments have been heavily criticized by Robert Buckland, a former Conservative justice secretary who has an autistic daughter and who carried out a review of employment opportunities for autistic people during the last government, after left the ministerial position. Buckland told i that it was wrong that the Badenoch report “stigmatized or grouped certain categories together.” He added:
Anxiety is not a neurodiverse condition… autism is not a mental health condition.
That part of the report did not seem to me to be based on any evidence, and mixing autism with mental health is not right. It is not the right approach to take in this.
a spokesperson for Badenoch He said he only wrote the foreword to the report published at the Conservative conference and that it was wrong to say it was stigmatizing people. The spokesperson said:
If we want to solve the problem of deteriorating mental health, we must be able to point out what is happening and how society has changed its approach to it and determine whether that approach is working.
It would be a mistake to infer bias and it is essential that we can talk about these issues without the media deliberately misleading their readers for the sake of easy headlines.
Here is the agenda for the day.
Tomorrow: David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, is in Luxembourg attending a meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council.
10:05 a.m.: Keir Starmer delivers a speech at the government's investment summit, before taking part in a question and answer session with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. At 4:20 p.m., Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, will give a closing speech at the summit. Our main coverage of the summit will be on Graeme Wearden's live business weblog, which is here.
11:30 a.m.: Downing Avenue holds a briefing in the foyer.
2:30 p.m.: John Healey, the Defense Secretary, answers questions in the House of Commons.
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