When it was reported, last week, that the British government had appointed a “Minister for Loneliness,” the news was greeted by observers on the opposite side of the Atlantic with fascination and a certain amount of knowing humor. The title, Aimée Lutkin noted at Jezebel, might denote “a character from an alternate Harry Potter timeline where wizards battle ennui instead of snake magic.” Monty Python, which almost fifty years ago parodied Whitehall officialdom with its “Ministry of Silly Walks,” was invoked. Stephen Colbert, on his TV show, suggested that “Minister for Loneliness” sounded like “a Victorian euphemism for ‘gigolo.’ ” (Actually, the Victorian euphemism for gigolo was “Casanova,” but points for effort.) Colbert went on to riff upon the comedic implications of the appointment. “This is so British,” he said. “They’ve defined the most ineffable human problem and come up with the most cold, bureaucratic solution.”

While one might take issue with Colbert’s grasp of broad transatlantic national stereotypes—surely the nation best known for brisk bureaucratic compensations for the deficiencies of human nature is Germany—his performance of wonderment at Britain’s Minister of Loneliness is understandable. In a country whose citizens are, according to tradition, so buttoned up—so committed to the stiff upper lip, to the grinning and bearing of it—the appointment of a Minister for Loneliness provides an ironic counterpoint to the national caricature. If a country’s prevailing temperament is one of congenital, chronic emotional constipation, how would its inhabitants even recognize that they’re lonely in the first place? The appointment seems to address an ill that Britain can barely admit it is suffering from, as if the United States government were to install a Secretary of Humility.

Of course, the more serious commentary would go on to explain, loneliness is a real and diagnosable scourge. At the end of last year, a government commission issued the findings of a twelve-month investigation into the prevalence of loneliness in the U.K., conducted with the help of more than a dozen nonprofit organizations. According to the report, nine million Britons suffer from loneliness: fourteen per cent of the population. Among vulnerable cohorts, the rates are much higher. In a survey of the well-being of disabled Britons, half reported feelings of loneliness at least once a day. More than a third of elderly people reported being overwhelmed by loneliness. (This scourge is not limited to Britain: in Japan, elder loneliness is a recognized phenomenon.) The chief officer of Age UK, Mark Robinson, warned that social isolation could be worse for a person’s health than smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Still, such isolation could be relieved, the report suggested, by practices and programs that cultivated conversation, friendship, and empathy: the founding of community allotments where solitary folk might gather; or knock-on-door initiatives, with volunteers targeting lonely souls.

It was less widely noted that the announcement of a new minister was, in fact, mostly a clever public-relations move. The official in question, Tracey Crouch, is Minister for Sport and Civil Society, and therefore responsible for the government’s connections to charitable organizations such as those which contributed to the “loneliness” report. (Crouch works within the larger Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport; the incongruous yoking together of these disparate spheres of public life under one bureaucratic umbrella makes for a recurring joke on the brilliant television satire “W1A,” a show which might itself be read as a meditation on the distinctive contours of British loneliness.) As the minister responsible for civil society, a role to which she was assigned last June, loneliness is effectively already within Crouch’s portfolio, and the official announcement of her appointment included a summary of initiatives underway to combat social isolation, including a “pocket parks” program to transform unused outdoor areas into green spaces where lonely adults can volunteer or simply congregate.

It comes as no great surprise to learn that the cure for loneliness might involve a greater investment in shared institutions devoted to the common good. But, as critics on the left pointed out, there was a certain hypocrisy in the sudden attentiveness to the problem of loneliness by Theresa May’s government, given her administration’s established priorities. Funding for public libraries, which provide a social lifeline for many solitary individuals, has been cut, with close to five hundred libraries having been closed under May and her predecessor as Prime Minister, David Cameron. The Sure Start program, comparable to the U.S. Head Start program, has been gutted, a development hardly likely to help the more than fifty per cent of parents who, according to the government’s own report, have suffered from social isolation.

Taking care of an elderly or disabled relative, no less than taking care of a child, can be a terribly lonely business: the report also notes that eight out of ten caregivers have reported feelings of isolation as a result of looking after a loved one. And yet ongoing cuts in the social-services sector seem likely to produce far more consequential effects upon the well-being of the needy and vulnerable than can possibly be overcome by the actions of a Minister for Loneliness. Crouch’s first order of business, according to the announcement from Downing Street, will be to bring together government, nonprofit, and business groups to “identify opportunities to tackle loneliness, and build more integrated and resilient communities.” The opportunity presented by not dismantling cherished and effective social structures is unlikely to be up for consideration.

The real reason for the institutional and media attention given to the announcement of Crouch’s new role is the provenance of the report: it was published by the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness. Jo Cox was the member of Parliament who was brutally murdered in the streets of her Yorkshire constituency in June, 2016, two weeks before the Brexit vote. Cox, a Labour M.P., had been a vocal advocate of remaining in the European Union; her killer, a local man in his fifties named Thomas Mair who was later discovered to have neo-Nazi sympathies, was heard to cry “Britain first” as he stabbed and shot her.

The social dangers presented by loneliness had been a concern for Cox, and the commission, which was taken over by a bipartisan pair of legislators, Rachel Reeves and Seema Kennedy, sought both to extend Cox’s work and to commemorate her. That Mair was someone who fit the loneliness profile—he lived alone, had no partner, and reportedly shunned social contact—is only one of the tragic elements in a story that has many. (Cox, who was forty-one, was the mother of two young children.) A few years before killing Cox, Mair told a local newspaper that the mental-health problems from which he had suffered had been alleviated by getting out of the house and doing volunteer work. “I can honestly say it has done me more good than all the psychotherapy and medication in the world,” he was reported as saying in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner.

At Mair’s sentencing, in November, 2016, Cox’s bereaved husband, Brendan Cox, spoke movingly of her legacy, calling the killing, “An act designed to silence a voice which instead had allowed millions of others to hear it.” The murder—a shocking event, particularly in a country where gun violence is almost nonexistent—did not, however, tip the balance with regard to the issue over which Cox was killed. At the end of June, Britons still voted marginally in favor of separating themselves from the institutions of the European Union in a referendum. At the time, Nigel Farage, then the leader of the right-wing UKIP party, celebrated a victory that he said had been won “without a single bullet being fired,” displaying considerable amnesia, or callousness, or both.

Mair killed Cox because he was a bigoted and hateful white supremacist, not because he was lonely. It would be a facile conflation to suggest that his murderousness was derived from his loneliness, any more than to say that his case proves the inefficacy of community gardening as a salve for friendlessness. Isolation does not necessarily breed isolationism, and loneliness does not make people into killers. It doesn’t even make them into Brexit supporters, although, given the demographics—among voters aged sixty-five and over, two out of three voted leave the E.U., as opposed to only one in five under the age of twenty-six—it’s reasonable to assume some overlap.