Sabotage

In this episode, we explore why some people engage in government solely to destroy good government, or even government itself

(This one’s going to get a bit mainstream-political in places: my apologies in advance for that…)

All around the world, there are governments and government-funded bodies that have committed themselves to provide good services to their citizens. Some of these are international, at the United Nations level and the like, or in multinational alliances of various kinds; some of these are more national, regional, and local. Public servants everywhere, supplying or supporting public services such as public roads, public transport, public utilities, public emergency-services, public health, social security, social housing, and more.

Yet also all around the world are people who want to be in government solely to make sure that none of this happens. Most of these people would describe themselves as ‘conservative’, though what exactly they’re aiming to conserve is often questionable at best. For some, the motivation is a rejection of even the idea of government, or that governments might have any right to raise taxes from them for those purposes - even though they use and benefit from those services themselves. For others, the motivation is more ideological, religious, racial or the like, about holding those services solely to themselves or denying them to others, following that old aphorism often attributed to Francis M Wilhoit, that:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect”

And there’s also a third type of ‘conservatives’ whose motivation is much more mundane and self-centred: every public service represents a loss of opportunity for privatised profit. They’re not real conservatives in either of those senses above: it’d probably be best to call them ‘money-politics conservatives’, since their only real interest in conservative politics is to use it as a means to make money for themselves by using government to take it away from everyone else.

The catch, for them, is that public services usually cost much less than their privatised equivalents, and also provide better outcomes for all. For example, it’s long been proven that the overall per-capita cost of healthcare increases in direct proportion to the extent that it’s privatised, and that overall life-expectancy falls to the same extent for the same reasons, too - so it’s hard for them to provide a plausible business-case for privatising it. And these services are popular with voters - so even when these money-politics people are in government, it’s hard for them to cut the services away and privatise them without causing an election-losing uproar.

Yet what they can do whenever they’re in government is to whittle away at the foundations of those services - what Australians call ‘white-anting’ - so that they slowly degrade further and further, and cost more and more, until voters can somehow be persuaded that the privatised alternative would be ‘better’.

Sadly, that cynical sabotage seems to be working…

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One of the more blatant examples of this has been the slow, relentless sabotaging of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). My parents were both GPs (family-doctors) in a rural health-practice, so I’ve been able to watch this process first-hand throughout most of my life. For the money-politics conservatives in particular, the NHS is an absolute anathema: they’ve hated it since its first inception almost eighty years ago, as part of the post-war Labour government’s overall package of social-support services “from cradle to grave” that were proposed in the Beveridge Report way back in 1942. Right from the start, they’ve wanted to find ways to destroy all of those services - for everyone else but themselves, at any rate. But for decades, they couldn’t find any real way to do it: the services were just too popular with the general populace, and in every case it was unquestionably evident that those services gave far, far better outcomes for the country as a whole than anything that had come before.

Yet with the rise of Thatcherism in the 1980s, they finally found a way to break through: and we saw the results straight away in my parents’ rural practice. For the first half of my life, the practice had been run in much the same way: three doctors, two receptionist/administrators, and one pharmacist. The area’s population had doubled, so eventually there’d been a fourth doctor added to the team, but otherwise the rest had remained much the same as before.

Then suddenly, in that early-1980s Thatcherist quest for so-called ‘efficiency’ in healthcare, the team was forced to change. The first stage was that the in-practice pharmacy was required to close down, and everything handed over to a new privatised pharmacy in the main town several miles away. The costs for prescriptions increased immediately, and the patients weren’t able to get their medicines straight away from the surgery any more - but hey, there was plenty of profit now for these new pharmacies’ owners.

Then the new paperwork to prop up that new thrust for supposed ‘government efficiency’ started to hit home. Within just a few short years, that small administrative team had to be doubled, then doubled again, and then almost doubled yet again. By the time my mother retired in the late-1980s, there were still just the same four doctors to serve an ever larger population; but now there were thirteen administrators - so many now that they’d had build an extra floor above the surgery just to accommodate them all. So in the name of so-called ‘efficiency’, the costs had increased enormously, and the overall effectiveness of that part of the healthcare-system had become far worse. Not A Good Idea…

And that was just in the more mundane world of family-health. Out in the hospitals, the ‘money-politics’ people hunted for yet more ways to cause more damage to the system as a whole. Perhaps the most infamous of these was the creation of ‘hospital trusts’, which were basically just privatisation under a different guise, and that mandated a focus on cost above everything else, including any clinical concerns. The main outcomes from this inanity have been ever-increasing costs from an excess of unnecessary ‘management’- and their management-bonuses, of course - and a stream of entirely preventable disasters of all kinds, of which perhaps the worst was the Mid-Staffordshire Hospital scandal in which at least 200 patients died.

Despite all of those issues, that white-anting has continued on, and on, and on, and on. The most recent impact was that with the combination of Brexit, Covid and general mismanagement and mistreatment by politicians, executives, managers and more, both the nursing staff and the ambulance crews have recently been brought to breaking-point, and for the past few weeks have gone on strike, for probably the first time ever.

The NHS is broken, possibly now near beyond repair. And all of that damage caused directly by the deliberate, self-centred malice and greed of so-called ‘conservatives’ over all of these years. Sabotage.

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So far, so bad. Yet for me it all became very personal over the Christmas week…

My mother is now in her late 90s, and still lives at home, though now with a team of professional carers who visit four times a day to help with food and cleaning and all that. But on Christmas Day, in the late afternoon, they found her lying on the floor in the lounge, after yet another bad fall, with evident injuries that made it unwise to help her up. They immediately called the ambulance-service for help.

NHS ambulance (image: CC-BY-SA by Lee Haywood via Flickr)

The last time this happened, almost three years ago, I was still living there as her full-time carer, so I was able to catch it straight away. In that case, it had happened in the middle of the night, and she’d broken her hip in the fall. The NHS wasn’t quite as broken back then, though it still took almost three hours before a paramedic arrived to assess her condition, and another hour or so before the full-sized ambulance arrived to take her to hospital. After that, it took her perhaps a couple of months of recovery and rehabilitation in hospital before she was considered safe enough to be sent home. By then, though, it was clear that she would need a level of care that I wouldn’t be able to provide - so that’s when the family handed her care over to the professional team, and I headed back to Australia at last. (Which is another story in itself, of course, but it isn’t relevant here.)

This time, at this Christmas, though, it was clear that the emergency-services system had almost completely broken down. As luck would have it, that region where she lived was almost the only one in the whole country where the ambulance-network was still working at all, so at least they did answer the call. But they warned the carers that it could take up to fourteen hours before the ambulance would arrive. Fourteen hours? Yikes…

In fact, it wasn’t just fourteen hours: it was more than a day later that an ambulance at last arrived outside of the door. A whole day for an elderly woman to be left lying on the floor in evident pain, and for the family members who sat with her throughout that long day and night and day again, unable to move her for fear of causing even more harm.

Once the ambulance had arrived, though, things did at last move faster. Somewhat faster, anyway. True, it didn’t take long to travel the mere three miles or so to the emergency-room at the local hospital. But they’re now so desperately short of staff out there, since the idiocies of Brexit forced thousands upon thousands of skilled nurses and other medical-professionals to leave the country, that she was left in there for yet another twelve hours or so, on a chair, and then on a gurney, before a doctor could do all the scans and tests and make a proper assessment. Dislocated shoulder, possible more damage to her previously-broken hip; and several broken ribs, causing possible further internal injuries to her lungs and other organs. I know she’s tough, but I’m frankly surprised that she didn’t die just from the pain during all of that agonising wait: I know first-hand just much just one broken rib can hurt like hell.

It’s okay, sort-of: she’s on the mend now, anyway, even in that still desperately-understaffed hospital. She may yet be able to return home - though at her age, and with all of that damage, even that option is now somewhat in doubt. Difficult times ahead for our family, it seems. Oh well.

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I don’t blame the emergency-services or ambulance-crews for this: the situation has become so dire for them these days that it’s understandably beyond bearing any more. I certainly won’t blame the medical-team in that hopelessly-understaffed hospital for anything at all: they did what they could, in near-impossible conditions, and did it darn well under the circumstances. In fact I don’t blame anyone, really: blame never helps anyway, all it does is make it even harder to change anything for the better.

Yet if I did blame anyone at all, it would be those money-politics ‘conservatives’: they’ve allowed themselves to wallow in selfishness and greed for the whole of their lives, whilst in terms of normal human development they should have grown out of that by the time they passed much beyond two years old. But they didn’t, and we live in a culture that still encourages that kind of pointless paediarchy: so for now we’re still stuck with that kind of stupidity throughout our politics and elsewhere. Oh well.

There’s only one real way to end that childish mess, and that’s to put an end to all of the incentives that make this sabotage seem so worthwhile to the lifelong parasites and thieves who infest so much of so-called ‘conservative’ politics. And in turn, the only way to do that is to eradicate the entirety of the money-system itself, and all of the possessionist delusions that underpin it. This Christmas I had yet another first-hand experience as to why that’s so important for us all, and why we must make that happen worldwide as soon as we possibly can.

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