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Got up. Turned on Radio 4. As usual. Within two minutes my blood was boiling and I was forced to hastily flick over to Radio 3, the classical music station. Why?
Because, in the interests of ‘balance’ in a discussion about NHS safety they had a doc from somewhere in the system and a woman whom I shan’t name from an organisation called ‘Cure the NHS.’ In the two minutes she delivered one howler of a false analogy and one outright falsehood. CtNHS is a small group of people (its own description) who campaigned to expose the disaster at MidStafford Health. Well done.
But here’s the problem: all that group had on its side was a) persistence and b) a genuine disaster which had been deliberately but clumsily hidden by the perpetrators. Note the absence of qualifications, expertise, objectivity or anything else which I would like to imagine plays a part in the selection of spokespeople on issues of national interest.
The spokeswoman’s tone of voice was one we all recognise in many amateur campaigners on an issue which has caused them harm: sustained, monotonous sadness. This person, in my opinion, needs a long rest and some counselling to get over the trauma she experienced in losing a relative unnecessarily. Not being elevated to a status for which she is not qualified and in which she is now doing serious harm.
The false analogy was that the airline industry gets it right, now the NHS needs to do as well.
Whoa! Stop the bus. Everything that can be known about an aeroplane is known and can be measured with high accuracy. The human body is literally the most complex system in the known universe. But, and here’s the problem, it sounds perfectly reasonable, and many listeners will be saying ‘Yes. Absolutely.’
The falsehood was another catchy statement: ‘The NHS spends a fortune on harming people.’ Sorry – it doesn’t. ‘On’ in that sentence is a synonym for ‘for the purpose of’ or ‘in order to’, in other words, intentionally. Not true, but again, sounds good.
And the harm she does? Blinding the citizenry to the fact that they still have one of the very best free health systems in the world. The only countries with better ones tend to have far higher rates of taxation than the British would tolerate, so value for money, it’s the best there is. They need to be defending it, not badmouthing it.

What galls me is that Radio 4 is paid for out of the license fee. It has no need to sensationalise, to grab listeners by any means possible. Its license is to inform, so the criteria they should be applying to producing balanced stories are to ensure the representatives of competing points of view are qualified, well-informed and articulate.
If they took that approach, that woman would not be allowed anywhere near a microphone and the world would be a better place for it.

Background: Bristol is the refuge city of choice for quite a few refugees and immigrants from Africa because the city has a policy of welcoming the world to Bristol.

• supporting  inner city out-reach to those in need or who are marginalised. We support and encourage Catholic social service agencies as well as the initiatives provided by other Churches in the downtown area.

The Dishonourable Sword: Workers’ Welfare as Covert Industrial Subvention.

The United Kingdom probably has the largest and most complex welfare system ever known. Much of its workings are the standard stuff of modern economics – the pretence that everyone should be in education, paid employment or retirement, i.e. full employment, continues as usual. This in defiance of the plain fact that for more than half a century standard economic theory has held that a certain level of unemployment is both desirable and necessary as a hedge against inflation. The clear and present threat of loss of employment is the sole available brake on wage demands in those economies such as the UK still locked into the adversarial employment relations model.
The German mitbestimmung, spectacularly successful as it has proved, is of course an effective alternative. Germany’s experience has shown that wages can effectively be limited by mutual agreement based on open books. Workers under mitbestimmung have shown themselves well able to recognise wage thresholds beyond which the success of the enterprise and therefore their jobs cease to be viable. This holds little political appeal in the left-right obsessed minds of British politicians and workers’ advocates, with each side holding the other to be unrestrainedly greedy. This is a pity and a waste, but it is business as usual, neither likely to change nor even particularly interesting, the quotidian folly of a society mired in 19th Century industrial relations philosophy.
I am more interested in the other, possibly larger slice of the welfare bill: payments to the poor in employment. In the mid 1980s New Zealand introduced a purer form of monetarism than that of either Britain or the United States; Thatcher was a fervent admirer of Minister of Finance Roger Douglas under the unfortunate Lange government, who swept away every single vestige of state support to the employed. Not that there were many to start with. The child benefit of around £7.50 per week per child had been around since Michael Savage’s far-reaching welfare reforms in the thirties. I part-funded the purchase of our first house by the common practice of child benefit capitalisation, which gave us 18 years’ worth of child benefit for both of our children – a substantial sum. The only other benefit was the ability for the employed to claim work expenses – study and training, work-related travel beyond the daily commute, clothing allowances, etc, which also went in the late 80s.
So arriving in the UK to see vast sums disbursed in welfare payments to the lower-waged was something of a shock. In my world it is now an absolute given – to go into work is to leave direct welfare behind. Free or subsidised health care is not viewed as welfare, but as a right, derived from the shared value that access to healthcare being dependent on wealth is immoral, an anathema.
So why is it seen as necessary in the UK? On the face of it, you could call it the good old British sense of fair play, simple compassion for the strugglers. But scratch the surface and we see a deeply unpleasant underbelly: a hidden subvention for British industry and agriculture, direct support being under the firm and ungenerous thumb of Brussels.
Suppose the housing benefit, the winter fuel payments, the child tax breaks and all the rest of it were swept away in one fell swoop. What would happen? Housing costs would white ant the rest of the family budget. Then what – imaginable, if unlikely, rent and mortgage default on a huge scale, hundreds of thousands of simultaneous evictions? If that were the only consequence, well, rents would simply have to drop. So what? The consequences of that are not hard to calculate – thousands of highly geared landlords going bankrupt, for a start. A squeeze on the income of thousands of retirees living off investment properties.
But that would not happen, because experience shows that most people will freeze and starve before they give up their home to go – where? If there were any slack in the system, the lowly paid might stand some chance of enduring the shock. But there isn’t any, at least not nearly enough. My son-in-law and his family simply could not survive on their meagre earnings alone. Most people would simply choose unemployment and continuing welfare support. And it would be a valid choice. You can’t hold your job if you can’t afford to get there. You can’t put in a day’s work if you’re constantly hungry. You can’t show up to a retail or office job in shabby old clothes. Of course the first to go would be the Smiths, the Perkins, the Jameses. The Wronskis, the Odungas and Wachikes would hang on longer, the ones who will live six to a room and subsist on rice and beans, a dynamic already observable under the current system. Cue deepening hatreds, the oppressed turning on the oppressed. So often ‘taking our jobs’ really means doing our jobs under conditions we refuse to accept and should not have to accept.
Shutting down workers’ welfare could not be made without declaring the whole plan, being an intention to divert those billions into supporting capacity and advancement in agriculture and industry, into research and development and where necessary direct price support. The British public has become so used to ubiquitous welfare it is likely that, even if the scheme were openly described as a reallocation of resources, the reaction from the street, the pulpit and the leader page would still be to flay the heartlessness of the politicians driving them. The British sense of entitlement to welfare has become endemic. I suspect very few see workers’ welfare for what it really is. From the other side of the fence, the beneficiaries of these hidden subsidies would howl about the unavoidable wage increases which would follow, ignoring or not trusting the intention to replace them in a more open and targeted manner.
It is a fact that, failing that strategy forbidden by treaty, many British products and services would become more expensive than those of their competitors. So we see what this really is all about – international competitiveness. A deeply dishonourable covert subvention that reduces its recipients to the role of part-time beggars on their knees before the armies of bureaucrats employed to administer their welfare. Their day-to-day existence haunted by the spectre of The Cuts. Perfectly honest hard-working workers who deserve decent wages and the respect due to those who thrive by their efforts are often driven to become cheats, sharing with their mates every new wrinkle to work the system, escape deductions, drive up entitlements through falsehood and secrecy. Absolute loss of belief in the political process and the law.
It is a terrible price to pay for staying in Europe and exalting the Holy Grail of free trade. This is the hidden cost of Europe: the humiliation of the British worker.
It is too high.

Thatcherism and Populist Capitalism. Virtually synonyms. The idea is that you turn everyone into a grocer, funding the project out of the sale of all those enterprises put together in over two centuries for the public good – water, power, broadcasting, railways and much more. Create shares for them to own, and trade in, giving everybody a chance to become even wealthier grocers.
It’s a brilliant idea and it works. Unless you’re no good at being a grocer. Then, you’re stuffed.
Well, the grocer economists respond, people must accept that if we are to be a strong and prosperous society people must get up to speed, stop expecting the state to watch out for them. We have provided the means, now get on with it.
Unfortunately Thatcher in England, Reagan in the US, and Roger Douglas in New Zealand who, it can be strongly argued, did it first and gave those other big fish the idea in the first place, were all blind to one toweringly obvious fact, something that any first year psychology student could have told them. Some people are just too thick. Low IQ. Born that way. Hardware, not software, and unfixable.
The old system had a place for those people, and not just paternalistically. It gave them simple, lowly paid but utterly secure jobs in the public service. The man behind the counter at the Department of Railways was dull, unambitious, knew his place and was happy to stay there stamping pieces of paper. Actually, the pieces of paper did need to be stamped, so we had a society that had an honourable use for everyone from the high flyer to the lowly plodder. It was a perfectly good system, and it worked.
Until, let’s be frank, greedy, selfish and corrupt unions wrecked it. Take careful note of the qualifier corrupt; I’m certainly not anti-union, but corruption will ruin anything. In the post-war era we had rotten trade unionism and it needed to be taken out. For that the United Kingdom owes Margaret Thatcher a huge debt, although the pendulum, probably inevitably, swung too far and needs correcting. Strong, honest unions are an essential component of a fair and successful democracy.
But back to the thesis. The neo-capitalists respond that society can take care of the incompetent with welfare support, a specious idea shot full of obvious holes. For one, a supply of money that can be ratcheted freely up and down is no substitute for essential services, because the services tend to be absolute, rather than unitised. You either see a doctor, or you don’t. In NZ if you don’t have any money you, or your child, simply does not get to see a doctor. The visits may be subsidised but they are not free. There’s no such thing as a part of a doctor’s visit, or a tap out of which water partly flows, in the way that a pound or a dollar can be reduced or increased in infinite fractions. So there’s that.
Then, there’s the opprobrium. Sure, we used to look down on and make jokes about the dummy behind the railway counter. But we did not vilify him as a parasite.
Worst, there’s the fear. When there is a real possibility of falling into utter destitution simply because you’re not bright enough to make the right choices at the right time, you feel fear. Fear which further cripples the already compromised ability to comprehend and succeed.
By creating the society we have to day, in which the least talented have no place, the neo-capitalists have worked evil.
Since the brightest and most avaricious will never choose to work for the Inland Revenue, there will always be an echelon of human swine smarter and more motivated than those we hire to collect their share from them. They may always make obscene amounts of money and pay little or no tax, growing inexorably wealthier at the expense of the rest. But in creating a society which venerates the individual acquisition of money as the greatest of all goods, the neo-capitalists have removed the stigma from these people, the true parasites. In this too they have worked evil.
Trust me – they were and are not stupid. They surely foresaw this, and see it now, and choose it. It is a simple, moral truth that these people, the Thatchers and Camerons of this world have been the agents of a great evil, and not unwittingly either.
Actually, there was another aspect to the great and failing neo-capitalist experiment. It was the choice to reject as superstition the old saying that money is the root of all evil, and instead turn to money for a single yardstick by which absolutely anything could be measured. And yes, they added, absolutely everything can in fact be numerically measured. Who is the best doctor? Why, the one who treats the most patients for the least amount of money. Reward that man or woman. Which is the best school? The one that educates the most pupils for the least amount of money. It may be squalid. The teaching might be rubbish. The doctor’s patients may be sick and in pain. No matter. The providers are heroically productive (and wealthy), and there is no greater good than that.
It is surely time to recognise that the experiment is a failure. The patient is miserable, possibly dying. Call it off.
If only we could unbreak that egg. In a better world we might set our minds to rebalancing the operational structure of society so that we intentionally created honourable work for everyone. I refuse to believe that human beings, who have learned to manipulate systems of far greater complexity than a modern economy, can’t do this. The solution is actually as simple as it is apparently unachievable: end the worship of money. Although in fact money is just the measuring stick. The underlying dehumanising principle is that idea of universal measurement, the belief that absolutely everything can be quantified. In business it is a time-honoured principle – if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. In that limited sphere the proposition stands, but you simply cannot measure the kindness of a nurse, the ability of a great teacher to inspire. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies even on this scale: it is impossible to absolutely measure anything without altering it, so it is theoretically and practically impossible to know everything about anything. Teachers preparing reports into the small hours, teachers who are restricted to dispensing named and quantified units of information according to an iron-clad curriculum cease to be great teachers. Nurses and doctors, a similar lot.
There are societies which seem to have a better grip on this – Sweden is one. And what do you know? They are not only happier places than most, they are also wealthier. Odd, that. I believe – no, observe – that a caring society where no-one has to live in fear of destitution enjoys a collective lightness of spirit which transcends the crude maths of economics and produces genuine prosperity.
A synonym to start, a tautology to finish.
Goodness is good.