The issue of Assisted Dying is a place where all the problems of social inequalities, a socially exclusionary supply chain way of delivering services and a legacy of patronage are quite likely to overwhelm Kim Leadbeater’s brilliant mission to change things for the better. Below: Danny Dorling’s mapping of economic, cultural and social health inequalities.
Parliament needs to work for the future inclusion of everyone.
That means acknowledging the people who’ve been turned into an underclass and made to feel a burden by a lifetime of economic and social exclusion where already they’re inside a profit driven system and their care is managed by migrant workers who themselves are not listened to or treated properly, who themselves are being made unwell by this relationship with their profession.
The people we need to make visible are the ones structurally alienated from their own potential, living in spaces that are turned into institutions for convenience in local neighbourhoods by vested interests, sucking the economic, social and cultural potential out of people under plain sight.
This culture of ‘managed expectations’ for the ‘bosses’ is broken: you can’t see any consent as they’re being given what others already ‘determine as access’ in issues around ‘managing expectations’ and resources that has become the normative way of securing exclusion, getting into the habit of the desk top conversation about people, rather than ever to them. That this is the norm doesn’t ever make it right. People are waiting in myriad communities and neighbourhoods for listening, acknowledgment and enfranchisement.
It’s often the accretion of decades of substituting PR for acknowledgment and progress as we saw in the Letby Inquiry: but we see it in the culture of medicine and nursing, the hospitals, the care homes, the over reliance on voluntarism, the structuring of people’s lives by those who just want money, more money and more domination in the local, in the regional, in the national and in the international.
Like Al Fayed, stripping the lives of working class people of worth and value just because they can.
We need to refamiliarise and repurpose the social sadism that’s clapping its hands, thinking even though it’s not in power at the moment, ha ha, it’s won, more of the same old same old punishment for the excluded. Strategically manipulating the energy and brilliance of Kim on behalf of those constituents she represents in such an extraordinary way.
But we need to find a way to light up the whole energies of parliament because in our working class and middle class neighbourhoods we have a nightmare of social misunderstanding and distance created by the last forty years of supply chain capitalism and neighbourhood disenfranchisement, disorientation. This is not normal. This is greed. This is cruelty masquerading as health and wellbeing.
If you could imagine British society as a patient etherised upon a table all the images collide: Wealth and Power Rats gnawing at the democratic feeding tubes of access to the economy, to health. I see not only Gulliver, Frankenstein in the way the same people exploit tech, exploit the taxpayer’s pound but undermine our very desire for representation in the way access to health, to work, to a home, to a future in the kinds of Care Homes, Waiting Rooms, Over Medicalisation, Unemployment, Underemployment, Precarious Employment, Precarious Housing we’ve been socialised to accept as normal Britain.
This feudal way of disenfranchising people for profit needs addressing. I can see how and why individuals get mad on both sides of the fence, the law, in parliament.
‘Do something’ ‘Don’t be a bystander’
But it must be a collective move away from what is actually a kind of post modern reaction to the flatulence and corruption of feudal self interest because of the ownership of supply chain notion of what life’s about.
We know through all the disasters and tragedies of the late twentieth century that we’re now able to begin to fix that we have to seek collective solutions to the terrible harms that these ways of seeing and acting have done to us all and continue to do.
We do need balance: away from the desk top analysis of supply chains, social distance that isn’t interested in the actual, the real, what people feel, see, experience but we don’t have the right to think that because we have given some people more tax payer’s money than others that they have the right to determine the lifespan of others.
No we don’t, actually.
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