A Very Broken Country...

I wonder whether there is anyone in our government who actually understands just how broken our country is. Just how dysfunctional the services and institutions that used to underpin our society have become, under the ethos of [neo] liberalism. We now have a status quo where our National Health Service - the bedrock of the civilized and civil society we once were - has been bled to the point of collapse by the kind of politicking morons who now accuse the nursing staff of bringing politics into the NHS by threatening strike action: the crassness of that commentary absolutely beggars belief and is quite simply the worst possible insult to those on the front line who, because of shit right-wing politics and mindless economic theories, have been forced finally to take a stand against their own impending collective demise as a profession at the hands of our government.

Because of the blind pursuit of corporate profit, personal greed and obeisance to that 90-year-old and seriously outdated economic fallacy, GDP; everything you can possibly imagine is outsourced, subcontracted and devolved to third party companies, themselves outsourcing to smaller service contractors and overseas - usually Chinese - suppliers of goods: all hiding under the lie of cost-effectiveness. The received 'wisdom' is that stuff and services will be cheaper to supply and run, and because everything is 'on demand' with no warehousing or direct labour, will result in greater efficiency: utilizing that old and now very tired cliché of business economics, 'just-in-time'. Heads-up: JIT and outsourcing were created solely to maximize corporate profit, whilst simultaneously minimizing corporate risk. End of.

The practical results of this economic free-for-all can be seen and felt by any member of the public who has ever tried to interact with the real world without the curation of wealth-greased mediation: i.e. most of us. Ever tried contacting your bank, building society, doctors' surgery, hospital, dentist, broadband supplier, power company; just about anything or anyone in the last five years or so? Your call, should it even be connected, will be robotized and menu-fied, disconnected, reconnected and diverted so many times, that the natural tendency is simply to say 'fuck it' and give up entirely. This is what they want: it's easier and far, far cheaper to put people off interaction and then penalizing - in the case of bills and payments, overdue or not - people for failing to make contact through the proper channels.

More often than not, there will appear to be no alternative to mobile, online or endlessly circular telephony contact, because so many companies and organizations conveniently forget to include postal details: which, I might add, is still illegal in this archipelago state. As a family, we started taking the stance of insisting on communication by letter some time ago: forcing the issue of accountability back onto those we are forced to deal with. It works wonders eventually, but it's an almighty struggle to achieve, trust me. 

Always: get addresses, get names and positions, get managers' names and get managers' managers' names: above all, get everything in writing, either by email, or far better, by Royal Mail in the form of a letter, signed and dated, with full company details, including company and, if applicable, VAT registration numbers [the inclusion of company registration numbers on correspondence is a legal requirement, that if missing, indicates dodgy, anyway]. The easiest way to deal with these entities is by insisting that you no longer have any internet access or a mobile or landline phone: snail-mail is safe-mail, and they have to - legally - accommodate you. As to the debasement of the services themselves, I think that a broad-based paper rebellion of this sort would force the issue and would require a rethink of our so-called 'peerless service industry'.

In the meantime, the rather more serious issue of getting emergency and long-term - indeed, any - healthcare in a timely and safe fashion can only be addressed through - and yes, you laissez-faire, self-interested and governmentally ineffectual Tory bastards, like it or not - industrial action. This is not, as you are so fond of pronouncing condescendingly, insultingly and so utterly wrongly, playing politics [whatever that actually is]. It is real life, real people, real problems, real society. Never forget, you work for us: you are our servants; so negotiate, climb down, apologize and for once in your sorry lives, actually earn your bloody pay packets, on behalf of the people you represent and owe a duty of fealty to.

To quote a couplet from Kaveh Akbar's poem, 'The Palace': "There are no good kings, only burning palaces"