The history of avoidance

Subject: A history of avoidance.

The great triumph of propaganda  lies in not doing things which need to be done and the doing things which don’t need to be done. Many of our current crisis were foreseen well in advance but the will to attend to them was too hard and instead, put off.

The need to provide for the older generation in their frailty, or the avoidance of a reliance on primary goods from suspect sources such as Russia and the wholesale destruction of our manufacturing industry by opting to have nearly everything produced in China. Only in the financial casino have we kept shuffling the cards like gamblers at the last chance saloon it was easier to bet on a pair of twos than to get up and leave the table.

The hot air that rises from the 'midden' which we call Parliament reeks of promises which were never meant to be fulfilled, the organisational commitment was simply too great for the minister to leave his drink in the bar and spend months prodding and probing the machinery of state.  Dinner at the Guild Hall was suffice acknowledgement. The job after all was all smoke and mirrors, it was about propaganda and toeing the Party line in preparation for the next election, the last one having been won was history as were the promises needed to win it.

The Aussies have a term ‘bludgers’, (lazy people) who prefer pontification rather than to be effective doers.  It’s one of the structural weakness in parliamentary democracy, this lack of action tied to words, there's no accountability, there’s no actual overview no site plan, no bill of materials only hypothesis built on more hypothesis. There's no real personal ministerial cost or price paid, no real downside for getting it wrong, only we the electorate pay.

How can we make the Minister more responsible how can we place on their shoulders the weight of his determinations. In what other area of life are we consequence free.

At least when a determination to embark on a course of action is set in motion the delivery and the direction of travel should be set out in some detail with its attendant downside so we, the paymaster can decide. Too many plans hatched in those great buildings of State are not accountable to us, too many choices are not in the public interest but in the interest of developers and pressure groups. The improvement to the shambolic old aged social services system would probably invoke a ring fenced increase on general taxation but it's never put to the electorate, instead for decades we have dragged our feet and become the poor man of Europe in old age provisions. Those very people making those decisions having gold plated pensions themselves see no urgency to make take care homes back into public ownership and revoke the travesty of years of privatisation with care being charged at ludicrous rates. Old people's care was a municipal responsibility until the 1980s then the Thatcher Government began to "outsource them", along with so much else. Municipal home rentals which provided controlled subsidised rents were amongst another things, swept aside by that dreadful woman in her urge to place Markets at the centre of all decision  making.

No country in Europe has treated its vulnerable people like that but then no country is so fixated on 'class'.