Ed Miliband must be careful when he talks about suicide

Jim Waterson’s BuzzFeed interview with Ed Miliband is well worth a read. But the opening paragraph stands out in particular:

‘Ed Miliband was in Nottingham last Tuesday when a man approached him to say that his part-time job at a petrol station wasn’t paying enough to take care of two children. This is an anecdote of the sort Miliband is always telling in his campaign to lower Britain’s cost of living, but what the man said next was “chilling.”

‘“He was really, really desperate because he felt couldn’t properly provide for his family,” Miliband recalls. “He was thinking of ending it all because he just couldn’t make ends meet.”

‘“Suddenly bacon sandwiches look slightly beside the point,” Miliband says.’

That word ‘because’, which suggests a direct link between government policies or government failure and a suicide is a high-risk political tactic. High-risk in the sense that simple causal links are the sort of thing that journalists are expressly advised to avoid in their reporting of these deaths.