With great power comes...
"With great power comes great responsibility". A wise man once said that. Batman I think it was. Or at least his butler.
I've been thinking about that quote a lot recently, especially with the recent revelations in the UN report on austerity in the UK. I say "revelations", but I guess it just depends how much attention you've been paying. With all the talk of "taking our country back", how many of us knew what the country was really like to start with?
The UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights declared that levels of child poverty in the UK were “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster”, and that the UK government has inflicted “great misery” on its people with “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous” austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake social re-engineering rather than economic necessity. Oooft. Strong stuff.
But if that's true (spoiler alert: it definitely is), how did this happen? We give the governement power, and in return we trust them to look after us. Isn't that how it works? Well, that depends on your definition of "us".
The amount of support people think the government should provide varies widely, but the "age of austerity" has led to levels of support being drastically reduced. Safety nets were removed and replaced with the language of "personal responsibility" and "aspiration". And if we are to change that, we have to challenge the narrative.
There's good evidence that in general the British public are innately huminatarian. We forget that the vast majority of people want the best for everyone, they're just drowned out by the smaller number of loudly obnoxious people because it makes better TV and clickbait. In times of crisis, the public response to natural disasters and charity drives can be overwhelming. But recent government policy doesn't reflect that. Too often, politicians and press conflate "bad luck" with "bad choices", to convince us that people are in some way underserving of support.
There's always people who will try and game the system, but they jump on this and exaggerate the case. Focus on the relatively small amount of benefit fraud. Don't look at the much bigger cases of tax avoidance and evasion from the wealthy and from corporations. Look at those jokers, they say, give them more and they'll just waste it. Tough love's what they need. They just need to pull their fingers out and work a bit harder. They should've just made better choices - why couldn't they have had richer parents or be born in a country that's not on fire?
There's a tendency for people who are comfortably off to think that they are entirely responsible for their situation. It just feels better that way. I'm sure Trump honestly thinks he got where he was from good honest hard work, not the several million dollars he inherited from his Dad. And UK Cabinet ministers probably think they're all hard grafters, pulled-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps type of people, rather than a collection of folk whose parents sent them to the same posh school. Forgetting that you can be where you are due to good luck means you might also forget that you're just a few bad breaks away from needing support yourself.
But even if you think you were "truly self-made", in reality no-one works completely in isolation. Even the most impressive business gurus will be using public services and infrastructure - whether that's transport links or health and education of their workforce. It's not rocket science that having a healthy, happy, educated, safe population benefits us all, and providing a basic safety net for everyone ensures this.
You could make an economic argument that reducing the safety net and restricting access to services costs us all more in the long run, but in the end it shouldn't really be an economic argument. It's just the right thing to do. And removing these vital protections drives a wedge between us and between generations.
Up to this point there's been an unwritten inter-generational contract that each preceeding generation strives to provide a better quality of life for the next, and in return the next generation agree not to sell all the previous generation's stuff and put them in an old people's home. But that's not the case anymore. And it's difficult to generate the good will necessary in people who think that they've had it hard. Why should we give people help now, we didn't get that ourselves?
Politics is geared up to provide short term fixes to long term problems. But we need a radical rethink about the type of country we want to be.
The UN’s rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights declared that levels of child poverty in the UK were “not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster”, and that the UK government has inflicted “great misery” on its people with “punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous” austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake social re-engineering rather than economic necessity. Oooft. Strong stuff.
But if that's true (spoiler alert: it definitely is), how did this happen? We give the governement power, and in return we trust them to look after us. Isn't that how it works? Well, that depends on your definition of "us".
The amount of support people think the government should provide varies widely, but the "age of austerity" has led to levels of support being drastically reduced. Safety nets were removed and replaced with the language of "personal responsibility" and "aspiration". And if we are to change that, we have to challenge the narrative.
There's good evidence that in general the British public are innately huminatarian. We forget that the vast majority of people want the best for everyone, they're just drowned out by the smaller number of loudly obnoxious people because it makes better TV and clickbait. In times of crisis, the public response to natural disasters and charity drives can be overwhelming. But recent government policy doesn't reflect that. Too often, politicians and press conflate "bad luck" with "bad choices", to convince us that people are in some way underserving of support.
There's always people who will try and game the system, but they jump on this and exaggerate the case. Focus on the relatively small amount of benefit fraud. Don't look at the much bigger cases of tax avoidance and evasion from the wealthy and from corporations. Look at those jokers, they say, give them more and they'll just waste it. Tough love's what they need. They just need to pull their fingers out and work a bit harder. They should've just made better choices - why couldn't they have had richer parents or be born in a country that's not on fire?
There's a tendency for people who are comfortably off to think that they are entirely responsible for their situation. It just feels better that way. I'm sure Trump honestly thinks he got where he was from good honest hard work, not the several million dollars he inherited from his Dad. And UK Cabinet ministers probably think they're all hard grafters, pulled-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps type of people, rather than a collection of folk whose parents sent them to the same posh school. Forgetting that you can be where you are due to good luck means you might also forget that you're just a few bad breaks away from needing support yourself.
But even if you think you were "truly self-made", in reality no-one works completely in isolation. Even the most impressive business gurus will be using public services and infrastructure - whether that's transport links or health and education of their workforce. It's not rocket science that having a healthy, happy, educated, safe population benefits us all, and providing a basic safety net for everyone ensures this.
You could make an economic argument that reducing the safety net and restricting access to services costs us all more in the long run, but in the end it shouldn't really be an economic argument. It's just the right thing to do. And removing these vital protections drives a wedge between us and between generations.
Up to this point there's been an unwritten inter-generational contract that each preceeding generation strives to provide a better quality of life for the next, and in return the next generation agree not to sell all the previous generation's stuff and put them in an old people's home. But that's not the case anymore. And it's difficult to generate the good will necessary in people who think that they've had it hard. Why should we give people help now, we didn't get that ourselves?
Politics is geared up to provide short term fixes to long term problems. But we need a radical rethink about the type of country we want to be.
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