It's by now quite obvious that Anthony Williams, who stabbed 10 people on the LNER train last Saturday had an acute psychiatric illness. It seems that passengers and staff on the train appeared to him as devils and he thought that by killing them he'd rid the world of evil... Clearly, he was not responsible for his actions.

    This may be hard to understand. But the society in which we live provides scant, if any, information aimed at educating the general public about diseases of the mind. Even though there's endless "mental health" talk on the media, and royal patrons speak out about their own psychological struggles.

    So whenever there are incidents like this, inevitably media presenters give voice to those who believe that these actions are the product of a sane "but evil" mind, rather than a mind which is tormented and diseased. The "justice" system doesn't help, since it knows no category other than "criminal".

    Undoubtedly all these factors contributed to encourage the jeering crowd which gathered to throw cans and other objects at the police transport vehicle which brought Anthony Williams to court on Monday.

It would be preventable, if...

For once Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander spoke the truth when she said that there were no realistic measures which could be taken to prevent this kind of attack on the railway system.

    Indeed, as poverty and social degradation have been growing, every kind of illness has been on the increase - including potentially homicidal "madness". There were fatal attacks linked to mental illness in Birmingham in 2020, in Nottingham in 2023, in Hainault in April 2024 and, of course, in Southport in July 2024. And there were many others, often involving family members of the affected individual.

    A 2024 study of 50 homicides selected from Met police files by London's Violence Reduction, found that mental illness was a "key factor" in 29 cases identified from Met police files. It concluded that most killings were "potentially preventable", but that "some killers had withdrawn from treatment and others had untreated mental health problems".

    However, the NHS, which could "potentially prevent" such killings, no longer has the means to do so. Last year NHS regulator, the Care Quality Commission, said there had been a "notable decline" in the quality of care provided by specialist mental health services and noted too, that they don't have the staff, the beds or the clinics to cope due to "resource shortages and increasing demand for care". But while psychiatric services might be among the worst off in the NHS, having always been the NHS "Cinderella", the rest of the health service is hardly in better shape.

Cutting waiting lists won't crack it!

So what do we hear from Rachel Reeves on Tuesday morning, in her special 8.15am speech? The first priority she mentioned in this "scene setter" for her 26 November budget, was "protecting the NHS".

    And that would be well and good, if only the facts lined up. For instance, we are also told that the Labour government has already done wonders for the NHS by bringing waiting lists down - by 200,000 - when there are still 7 million people waiting for an appointment!

    Getting to see a specialist after a wait of many months (or years) is only a first step to being treated for a condition, however. So cutting waiting lists is hardly addressing the underlying problem. Which is longstanding under-funding, cuts and the non-filling of 120,000 vacancies for health personnel. As for the specific problem of managing serious mental illness, it's acute services which need urgent resources - that is, qualified and dedicated staff. But many are, on the contrary, resigning.

    So, to borrow from the language of Reeves, the "scene -setter" is the rapidly declining health of the population in the context of rising poverty, due to the rising cost of living... As Reeves herself admitted, people's main concerns are the high prices of food and energy - basic necessities, in other words.

    Reeves refused to say whether taxes would go up - which would be mandatory for even the slightest improvement in the NHS, let alone for improvements in all other failing public services.

    And why? Because for her and indeed all the other politicians who have been laying out "alternative" budgets this week, it's the anti-tax business class which matters. Although one has to wonder what she would have to lose if she decided to squeeze them so that they did "their bit" for the "country", which she so patriotically puts "first".

    Not that a "bit" of tax revenue would be able to rejuvenate the seriously ill NHS. That would take a total-body transplant - otherwise known as a working class revolution - to replace the whole sick capitalist system...