'We should all hang our heads in shame': On the picket line with Manchester psychologists

When Jeremy Hunt was health secretary back in the coalition years, he gave a speech to the Royal College of Psychiatrists. In his opening remarks, he talked about someone he’d met on a recent visit to Manchester, a man who had been diagnosed with a severe mental illness and was at the time volunteering to help people with similar issues.

The man Hunt met was Craig Hamilton. A little over a decade since then, he and I sit in his van with Yogi, a Spanish Podenco with a grey chin and squinted eyes that look out of the rain-mottled windshield. “He said he had met somebody in Manchester with a diagnosis of blah-blah,” Craig says with a wave of his hand, like he’s tired of talking about it. “[Somebody] who said he didn’t want to be another statistic.”