A society that seeks only to meet the needs, answer the questions and aspirations of only one group needs fine tuning.
It’s uncivilised.
Austerity has been used for the past forty years as a weapon against understanding, insight into who we are, why we are here and what we need at home, at work and at leisure.
I think we’ve lost a sense of emotional connection, satisfaction, purpose or meaning in a job well done and I think that the weaponising of society against the underprivileged diminishes us, makes us all ill.
Uncivilises us.
Keeping some people on very low incomes, with little job or housing security isn’t creating a competitive, growth economy…
It’s gaming, casinoing us out of the purpose of work which is to do a good job, provide a great service to more people, more of the time. Becoming more human and more civilised in the process.
Not more like a dictatorship where the discipline of a military mind and way of life is misused to abuse and corral civilisation.
The military are our families, friends and allies, not the people we use to shore up all the mistakes of the market. (Not enough resources, not enough staff…I know get the military in: one solider can do the work of ten ordinary teachers, fifteen ordinary politicians and a brigadier…well…a brigadier can…run Crime Stoppers?). Or how about the prisons?
Mmmmmm…meanwhile… on the goodwill of ex-soldiers who may have their own PSTD demons to corral….
Corruption runs the riot.
Consider the HBOS scandal where the changes and mergers at the top of the bank allowed the conditions where corruption through the asset stripping of SMEs was allowed to flourish.
Most big banks are held to account by the unswerving loyalty of their dedicated employees, compliance and stronger and better informed customers but it’s taken eight years for those companies to be heard by the new owner Lloyds.
Here are two recent articles:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/serious-fraud-office-eyes-new-hbos-reading-probe-k67mrqrsw
I think we need less fake policing of ourselves and others and more practical, pragmatic understanding of the problems we face everyday in life and work.
We need to be able to go to work as ourselves: to work hard, do a good job, then just go home. (Remember homeless people can’t do that).
Until we move away from tolerating a society of succeeders who don’t just want their own success but who are allowed/socialised/gamed to want the failure of others as well: another trophy of success recently has been to make others failures.
Your success doesn’t, should never mean the humiliation or your right ever to humiliate another human being.
We all know that real success isn’t something that should have to be so carefully locked down.
Let’s support success, nurture it, grow it in girls, in boys, in adults of all backgrounds and ages because I don’t think we really know what success is.
The lottery has its funded heroes but the lottery gets its money from and is funded by the very poorest and most excluded people in our society, people who wouldn’t buy lottery tickets if they felt they had the same rights and opportunities as the rest of us who benefit disproportionally from the tickets they are forced into buying as their only social duty.
The resulting elite/exclusionary/humiliating form of culture from the bottom to the top of society is why we’ve allowed the Olympics and sport to be corrupted.
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