Poor Law

The oft-heard phrase '...x [insert name] is a very skilful politician...' neatly, if inadvertently, sums up what ails politics in the twenty-first century, and sheds light on the poor governance to which we are all subject. Skilful politicking as a virtue is essentially an eighteenth-century concept, born of a time when politics was basically a sport of the aristocracy: when there were the ruling classes, who possessed sole title to the franchise and hence carried the mandate forth practically by default; and the hoi polloi: the peasantry, the dispossessed and the dissolute, with no mandate or real possessions.

The use of that phrase now should, but unfortunately, doesn't ring hollow, at least amongst the more right wing elements of society. We should by now be operating a democratic system of equal representation: politicking really should have no place in the governance of a modern, equitable society: government should already have been internalized as simply part of state function, like emptying the bins or providing non-poisonous water to the population. The problem we face is the deification of wealth and its acquisition; of treating everything as if it were an entrepreneurial venture, just like running a car-hire firm or merchant banking, or some such.

When I read that NHS patients are being encouraged by 'health boards' to seek private medical assistance within our NHS itself, involving NHS doctors, nurses and facilities - all in public ownership, paid for out of our taxes - my blood boils; and to cap it all, there has been a suggestion - albeit as yet unattributed, but I can well believe it of this lot - that the Poor Houses: the Workhouses, were maybe quite a good thing after all! The mind boggles that there can still be people in this society who continue to believe that pauperism is still a natural condition of existence. Who still believe in the paternalism of wealth. Who still simply don't see that they are the problem itself. My great-great-grandfather died a pauper in a workhouse: I will fight tooth and nail on his behalf to see that this kind of injustice never, ever, happens again in the UK.