Oh God. It really is awful. They've decided to take as their models the more unpleasant US States. The ones in which the poor, the sick and the old are encouraged to basically piss off and die quietly. The 'big idea' is 'small government'. Citizens are going to be encouraged to intervene all the time in policing, healthcare and the like: especially when local taxes are too high (there's no provision for intervening when they're too low, such as when Tory councils reduce services and taxes immediately before elections).
Basically, the Tories are bailing out on us. They want to turn Britain into a Social Darwinist community in which the rich, leisured and pushy can abandon everybody else and focus on their selfish desires. The poor, those who work 12-hour days on the minimum wage and those without the skills to engage in political activism will be left to sink.
I don't think the British see the government as an oppressive brake on freedom in American terms. Sure, nobody likes politicians, but when you think about what governments do, we like it. With government comes free, excellent healthcare, good schools, clean air, libraries, railways (selling those off didn't exactly work, did it?), roads, some workers' rights, safe workplaces and decent universities. Government, I shouldn't have to point out, saved the economy while the Tories said nothing.
If we abandon the benefits of government, we return to the 19th century. Businesses will poison their neighbours when they're freed from pollution laws. Schools will (and this is very explicit in the manifesto) be run for profit, which always means cutting corners. Councils will never be able to build social housing or a new library, because voters will be encouraged to complain every time money is spent collectively. Some police forces will concentrate on crowd-pleasing crime-fighting while others will protect only the loud and pushy. Complicated, expensive crimes like rape, or war crimes, will be pushed down the priorities. Immunisation, which requires 90% coverage to work, will fade away because pharma-funded pressure groups will insist that local hospitals divert money to trendy illnesses.
Let's be clear. This Conservative plan is designed to allow posh Tory meddlers to run free, while allowing everyone else to sink. A flagship policy is to allow groups of parents to open their own schools: by paying companies to do the actual teaching and management. So: taxpayer money being spent on spare capacity, run by businessmen, guided by whatever weirdo beliefs some idle parents have picked up. I bet you that these schools will be socially and ethnically selective. No Muslim, brown or poor people, guaranteed.
The problem with charity and voluntarism is that the public good comes to depend on the whims of individuals. With democracy and taxation, we elect a government to decide the best use of our money. In a government-free zone, we just have to hope that the local moneybags wants to pay for a new clinic rather than a second swimming pool and third Renoir. This is what happened in ancient Rome: as it became more decadent, prominent citizens stopped buying bread for the poor, and instead bought higher walls and more slaves. The result: social decay.
While you're spending your free time organising schools and bossing the cops around, down in Westminster the Tories will be deciding the really important stuff: abandoning environmental protection, antagonising our European friends, starting pointless wars, buying new nuclear weapons, removing union rights, abolishing financial regulation so that the bankers and speculators can do whatever they want. It's local democracy and national dictatorship. It assumes that you're too stupid and blinkered to care about the PSBR or international affairs.
This is the politics of selfishness. It doesn't believe in society. I think British people are brighter than that. They know that governments are good ways to achieve the common good.
We've all seen a country run without government. It's called Somalia.
4 comments:
I agree with every word and for the first time, I feel terribly uneasy knowing full well that Labour's fallibilities will be punished and in its place, a Tory Government with the empathy of a drug addled corpse or an advertising boss in the spirit of Roger Sterling in Mad Men, (highly recommended on DVD).
Essentially the City will continue to run without constraint as proved in the 1990’s in which Gordon Brown has admitted on national television he failed to regulate them in his capacity as Chancellor but I praise his honesty, in all fairness... to reveal something as damaging as that in the run up to the election takes balls. But in realizing his weaknesses and the pursuer of economic recovery, I believe he has a finer opportunity of salvaging his past mistakes then David Cameron who still ill-convinces me and when picking up my GQ magazine this week there he was in a double-spread in a typical eloquence broadening on robotic.
The greatest fear is Conservative rich and powerful parents will lead councils into the abyss of delusion and under-funded schools will have no chance of survival, the inner-city school I currently work at is already on a knife-edge with young trainee teachers everywhere, lack of experienced figures and cracking walls due to drained financial resources. So the manifesto of the Liberal Democrats is perhaps more highly anticipated than ever before and as a student with teaching aspirations, I can only hope they defeat their underdog status.
Finally, George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, said this morning: “So finally Gordon Brown admits he failed to regulate the bankers and increased taxes on the poor... “We’ve had 13 years of his economic mistakes. Britain can’t afford five years more”
Almost poetic and deadly accurate, he’s answered his own rhetoric as no we cannot afford 5 years more of increased debt but can we afford to collapse on our knees begging for Brown and Darling’s return?
Oh shite, I've just seen the Liberal manifesto.
Hung parliament it shall be, then?
And yes, that is a scenario we must avoid Benjamin Judge and if you morphed into the Hulk, what would Vole be?
Cynical: that's exactly what it is. A big plot to privatise everything in the name of 'empowerment'.
I'm up for a hung parliament: then the lefties of Plaid and the SNP can swing a more humane set of policies. Unless the Ulster Unionists help the Tories…
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