As usual I’m scribbling out the first sketches of this blog post sitting in the Barrel House, half listening to bits of overheard conversation and the music, drinking tea, and endeavouring to find the right note, the right key, to open the door into the conversation and to engage the conversation. A further analogy comes to mind as I become aware of the varied thoughts jostling, elbows out, shouting, but there’s also the quieter thoughts, the more reflective, I want to include those, listen to what they have to say: they are the troops, not elite troops, rather boisterous, anarchic prone to practical jokes, cynical, but kindly at times, ready to watch out for the slower ones. My task here is to listen, to capture those perhaps fleeting thoughts and form a few sentences, a couple of paragraphs that are reasonably coherent.
Tony Judt, in his Ill Fares the Land, writes, ‘In a survey of English schoolboys taken in 1949, it was discovered that the more intelligent the boy the more likely he was to choose an interesting career at a reasonable wage over a job that would merely pay well’ (page 39). It seems we are suffering under a distortion brought about by what we know in short hand as Thatcherism: the reign of the market and its camp followers – the accountants, the bankers, the infamous traders. Markets, the accountants et al, have a place in the grand scheme of things but overvalued, overemphasised and the great ship of society lists dangerously, its moral compass disengaged, so that even when a crisis like the 2008 banking debacle happens, governments can only shore up a desperately flawed system.
Poor old Pinky was flogging the dead horse of his Big Society the other day, the BBC reporter noting that no applause greeted that particular idea. But, bash the poor, now, that does get plenty of rapturous applause – we know what we like and if we can’t have public hangings at least we can bash those on benefits. We need clear targets for our hatred. We need to know ‘who is to blame’ and with this bunch of scroungers and cheats we can see them when we walk down the street.
I can own up to being one of the poor. I manage to survive on a couple of tiny private pensions that I paid into when times were better, a tiny bit of work and in a year I’ll be drawing my state pension. So allowing for the admittedly very slight risk of the government deciding to cancel all pension provision, I can see that economic survival is a good bet so it’s down to health, my own efforts to promote health with the backup of a health service. And let’s hope the much maligned NHS survives a madcapped reorganisation . . . wouldn’t it be sensible to reorganise when there’s more money in the coffers? I may be mistaken but doesn’t reorganising cost lots of money that they keep telling us is what the country doesn’t have.
Pinky and Perky, scrubbed and pink, suave and elegant have been joined by young Ed Duck . . . but if we can’t give them our trust (and that seems like a silly thing to give them) – what can we give them?