(no subject)
Hello Livejournal. It's been a while.
Mostly, the reason for the lack of communication is that I have been Doing Stuff, but much of that stuff is not particularly blogworthy. Although I did recently write something for a different blog, about ongoing attempts to piss off High Street businesses.
My parents have been on their middle-aged gap year for about three and a half weeks now. The latest communique from mater was "need to find a waxing salon, I can feel my leg hair blowing in the wind" plus a vague addendum about how she's staying with relatives who pass on their greetings. They're in Australia at the moment, and going to New Zealand next. It may just be a coincidence, but natural disasters seem to precede their arrival as if they were bringing the Apocalypse in their wheelie suitcases. Somebody should probably warn Hawaii to dust off their emergency plans, just in case.
I'm trying to work my way up to writing a semi-serious political Thing, which will be based around two of my recent ideas. The first point is that if the combination of philanthropy and market forces really could deliver better public services, there wouldn't have been any point in having a welfare state in the first place. The second, and slightly more complex plank of the argument is that the reason we're seeing such a serious attack on the public sector now (for those who are in another country or don't follow the news, David Cameron wants to open up all public services (except for intelligence services and the judiciary) to competitive tender - basically, they're going to privatise everything in the name of making it more "democratic") is that there is are pitifully few people left to remind us of how awful things were before. Yes, there are still a reasonable number of people who remember the 1940s, but due to the effects of socioeconomic conditions on life expectancy, the people who were getting the shitty end of society's stick 60 years ago generally aren't around any more to remind us that it used to be a bigger stick with a lot more shit on it. I'm emphatically not suggesting that we should all doff our caps and be grateful for what few crumbs that we get - because our public services could and should be better - instead, I want you to think about the truly horrific conditions that millions of people in this country lived in the last time that we allowed the rich the power to divide society into "deserving" and "undeserving". We have council housing because the free market gave us slums, where entire families lived in one room and shared a toilet with half the street. We have an NHS because before that, people died from treatable diseases, or lived for years with debilitating symptoms because they couldn't afford to see a doctor (in the early months of the NHS, thousands of women sought treatment for was a prolapsed uterus; for many it had been a long-term problem). Neither of these are perfect, but they're a hell of a lot better than the private sector alternatives.
When hospital cleaning services were privatised in the 1990s, it didn't give us a more efficient public service; it gave us lowered standards and hospital-acquired infections, and shareholders making money off the back of it. The railways are more expensive and bureaucratic than when they were in the days of British Rail, except now there are corporations who are free to get rich on the profits, but leave the taxpayer to pick up any losses. These reforms were deeply unpopular when they were implemented, but the government pushed ahead anyway, and almost twenty years on, they still don't work. This time the reforms are just as unpopular, but because the government lied about their plans before the election, we're stuck with policies that nobody voted for.
Sorry, I lapsed into a full-on rant there. It doesn't take much to tip me into political mode these days, because I'm just so fucking angry about all of it. We have a Prime Minister who blithely lets this out of the bag, then jets off to the Middle East to promote British arms manufacturers to undemocratic regimes, for goodness sake. If anybody wants me, I'll be chaining myself to a public building while we still have some left.
Mostly, the reason for the lack of communication is that I have been Doing Stuff, but much of that stuff is not particularly blogworthy. Although I did recently write something for a different blog, about ongoing attempts to piss off High Street businesses.
My parents have been on their middle-aged gap year for about three and a half weeks now. The latest communique from mater was "need to find a waxing salon, I can feel my leg hair blowing in the wind" plus a vague addendum about how she's staying with relatives who pass on their greetings. They're in Australia at the moment, and going to New Zealand next. It may just be a coincidence, but natural disasters seem to precede their arrival as if they were bringing the Apocalypse in their wheelie suitcases. Somebody should probably warn Hawaii to dust off their emergency plans, just in case.
I'm trying to work my way up to writing a semi-serious political Thing, which will be based around two of my recent ideas. The first point is that if the combination of philanthropy and market forces really could deliver better public services, there wouldn't have been any point in having a welfare state in the first place. The second, and slightly more complex plank of the argument is that the reason we're seeing such a serious attack on the public sector now (for those who are in another country or don't follow the news, David Cameron wants to open up all public services (except for intelligence services and the judiciary) to competitive tender - basically, they're going to privatise everything in the name of making it more "democratic") is that there is are pitifully few people left to remind us of how awful things were before. Yes, there are still a reasonable number of people who remember the 1940s, but due to the effects of socioeconomic conditions on life expectancy, the people who were getting the shitty end of society's stick 60 years ago generally aren't around any more to remind us that it used to be a bigger stick with a lot more shit on it. I'm emphatically not suggesting that we should all doff our caps and be grateful for what few crumbs that we get - because our public services could and should be better - instead, I want you to think about the truly horrific conditions that millions of people in this country lived in the last time that we allowed the rich the power to divide society into "deserving" and "undeserving". We have council housing because the free market gave us slums, where entire families lived in one room and shared a toilet with half the street. We have an NHS because before that, people died from treatable diseases, or lived for years with debilitating symptoms because they couldn't afford to see a doctor (in the early months of the NHS, thousands of women sought treatment for was a prolapsed uterus; for many it had been a long-term problem). Neither of these are perfect, but they're a hell of a lot better than the private sector alternatives.
When hospital cleaning services were privatised in the 1990s, it didn't give us a more efficient public service; it gave us lowered standards and hospital-acquired infections, and shareholders making money off the back of it. The railways are more expensive and bureaucratic than when they were in the days of British Rail, except now there are corporations who are free to get rich on the profits, but leave the taxpayer to pick up any losses. These reforms were deeply unpopular when they were implemented, but the government pushed ahead anyway, and almost twenty years on, they still don't work. This time the reforms are just as unpopular, but because the government lied about their plans before the election, we're stuck with policies that nobody voted for.
Sorry, I lapsed into a full-on rant there. It doesn't take much to tip me into political mode these days, because I'm just so fucking angry about all of it. We have a Prime Minister who blithely lets this out of the bag, then jets off to the Middle East to promote British arms manufacturers to undemocratic regimes, for goodness sake. If anybody wants me, I'll be chaining myself to a public building while we still have some left.