Brave New Rant

So I suddenly found myself ranting on Facebook. Looking back, I concluded that I was slightly proud of this particular rant, so I've decided to put it here too.

******

It would make a difference if some UK govt (any govt) would take a look at what the people of the UK can do for a living. There has been complete inaction by all sides on this score ever since WW2.

Basically, the left has believed in state subsidies for individuals left without meaningful employment, while the right has believed that market forces will provide a new gold dream to replace industry. Neither works - market forces drove the working classes into unemployment in the first place. What market will provide without an incentive?

Now, an incentive could have been a workforce willing to work for next to nothing, but with our cost of living, that's not going to happen. Current Osbornism suggests we should go down this route anyway. Consequently, our Govt is proposing a return to 19th Century social mores in a form way more acute than any accusation thrown at The Blessed Marge.

Stick and stick.

(TBH, though, this has been happening for a while. We are expected to live poorly in a very expensive country. Remove opportunity (because it costs) but leave high taxation. This is not a model that you'll find being advocated in many other countries. Of course, our politicians tend to suggest this is a modern dilemma that is an unsolvable balancing act. Only if you allow it to be. And they do. And we let them.)

And, worst of all, this current infantile yearning for creating a cheap whore of a country completely misses out on our actual advantages. Sure, we don't absolutely NEED comprehensive free healthcare and a complex and expensive welfare system. But we decided that we WANTED and DESERVED it, and history has shown that 'mature democracies' include these ideas because it takes these societies into areas where they can SHINE, like education, research, new technology, creative industry, and so on. And to do this, you need to subsidise the poor so that they have time to re-educate and adopt new skills for the future.

This, apparently, is a recipe no UK govt has been willing to follow properly, and some, as at present, find it ideologically impossible.

So we turn our education sysytem into a money-grabbing free for all and watch universities that ought to have remained colleges go bankrupt, while kids sink under the millionth curriculum change in a system still dedicated to top-down teaching for providing imperial cannon fodder, while we argue about whether private companies should be directly paid taxpayer's money for doing a public service we pay others to do anyway, while people who are primarily the casualities of this very political malaise have their subsidy made conditional on doing pointless tasks.

We, the people, need our governments to lead properly on forming the sort of society we want. Isn't it time we sorted this all out?