Erosian

I suppose if you run a country as a company then the need to show a profit and keep your major shareholders happy with substantial dividends is paramount.
Of course running a country is not the same since you have amongst the machinery that works, a lot of equipment that doesn't and you can't sell what doesn't to an Indian scrap merchant.
In some of our industries, we have sold our control to foreign interests and when the dividends are challenged we see these industries closed down irrespective of the social effect.
Of course if we were able, we could "cull" that part of society which is a drain on the Exchequer. The expectancy of the sick, the old and the undereducated. Their constant need for support places us at risk of needing to borrow from the Market to balance income with expenditure.
If only the fit and healthy, the workers, the doers, were the aggregate  with which we could work.
Perhaps, if we reduce the money and close the services, shut down the old people's homes, eject the sick and close the hospitals, and bring in the desperate from poor countries who are more malleable to improve the balance sheet.

Erosion is an incipient state of affairs. Millions are spent on painting the Forth Bridge in Scotland because we think the bridge is of value to us.  The thought that weakening the strength of the bridge and the danger to those who use it makes the expenditure pass through unopposed.
But what of the erosion to our State and the services which people had come to rely on.
If we diminish funding and expose people to danger, does this have any moral relevance. Would the argument  propounded  by the engineers and H&S regarding a bridge, have any meaningful correlation to to the public debate about the health of our nation.
Our concept of being a 'civilised' nation is also being eroded by the political willingness and the subsequent media propaganda to question why the poor have such sway, when offering so little in return.
UK, Plc has a boardroom stuffed with people who owe their place at the table to their birth.  Boris Johnson is an example of extensive breeding. Having learnt the black art of declension and conjugation, in pursuit of understanding an antiquated language, Latin, it evokes  for us "the public," the exotic mysticism of private education and its ingrained elitism. We listen in awe to his Etonian witticisms. We forgive his  frolicking between the sheets, (that's what the Toffs have always done), as we strain (in vain) to hear the undoubted elegance of an intellectual mind at work. To many the sound of a bumbling actor reaches our ears, who's part should be in the farce of his own making and not national politics.