250 Words To Save The Union

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

Lincoln First Inaugural Scottish Independence 2

 

If your country faced annihilation by a foreign army, would you take up arms in its defence? Many would, and many have throughout our history – this year we honour the memory of the six million British men who fought in the First World War, many making the ultimate sacrifice for King and country.

But if your country was days away from a seemingly more banal kind of destruction – at the ballot box, following a largely dull and petty referendum campaign – what would you say to save it?

The Spectator has issued this challenge to its readers, asking them to submit letters to a wavering Scottish voter, imploring them to choose to remain in the Union. Entrants have complete freedom to say what they like within this broad remit:

You can make only one point, or make a bunch of them. The letter can be funny or deadly serious, clinically rational or a cri de coeur. The aim is to show that people in certain parts of Britain do care, very much, about the other parts – and that the Britishness which binds us together is worth fighting for.

The timing could not be better: a shocking new poll has given the “Yes” to independence campaign the lead for the first time, with 51% of respondents in favour of ripping up the Act of Union, and 49% preferring to maintain the bonds that tie us together. The Better Together camp long predicted that the polls would tighten as the referendum neared, but this latest poll is an absolute calamity, almost guaranteed to sew the seeds for further infighting and recrimination among unionists.

Immediately I got to work. I would gladly participate, I would find that elusive combination of words that would make Scottish independence supporters come to their senses and see reason. Where countless celebrities, politicians and statesmen had failed, I would succeed.

Four drafts later and I have nothing.

As a political writer and blogger I should be full of excitement and opinions about the latest opinion poll, and spend my time analysing the implications and wondering how each side will respond now that their fortune have apparently flipped. The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman does a typically fine job of this:

The question is who will this poll galvanise the most? Will it horrify wavering voters and send the Better Together campaign into a final frenzy to win over those lingering undecideds? One thing we can be certain of is more detail on what further powers Scotland would get if it stayed within the UK. Or will it give the SNP a final furlong spurt of energy? As we’re dealing with an expected turnout of around 80 per cent with voters who have never pushed a slip of paper into a ballot box before coming out to vote, no-one knows the answer. And that’s what makes tonight’s poll particularly terrifying for unionists.

I suppose I should also take the lead from many senior unionist politicians and pundits, and be ready and willing to say anything, do anything and offer anything by way of bribery or cajolement to convince wavering Scots of the readily apparent benefits of our United Kingdom. But I cannot engage in this flattery, just as I cannot engage in tactical speculation and analysis on this subject any more. The threat is too great and the imminent pain too real to treat the prospect of the end of the United Kingdom as just another political football.

I have written at length about my belief that our great country should remain united, and that we should not seek to create ever-smaller subdivisions on our small, crowded islands (though I strongly favour a federal United Kingdom). I have talked about the constitutional issues that would arise, and the fact that bespoke pandering to Scottish nationalists at the expense of the English, Welsh and Northern Irish is further unbalancing our constitution. I’ve argued in support of continuity for what has been proven to work in preference to an unresearched leap into the dark.

But at this point I have nothing left to say, not even 250 words. Not even in the face of the depressing news that Gordon Brown is to become the figurehead for the “No” campaign, further cementing the desperate idea that left wing bribes are all that wavering Scots want to hear.

If the Scottish people search their collective hearts and decide to destroy the United Kingdom in a bid for complete self-governance with no remaining ties to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, they should go. The UK will not be worth saving, because we will have forgotten who we are. We can await our diminished future as the fifty-first (and second poorest) state of America, or our balkanisation into soulless geographical regions by the European Union.

I watched the two awful televised debates between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling. I watched as the Better Together camp made the ludicrous, doomed decision to compete with the SNP in devotion to left-wing, big government principles. I watched as the Yes camp peddled their denialist fantasy in which an independent Scotland walks away from its share of the national debt, uses the pound while influencing UK monetary policy in it favour, accedes immediately to European Union membership and funds its socialist utopia with limitless oil revenues from the North Sea.

How does one engage in a debate when one side argues for what should not be and the other side clamours for something that cannot possibly be?

The Better Together side’s latest grand idea is talking up the prospect of David Cameron being defeated in the 2015 general election, and holding out the prospect of a more appealing, left-wing alternative in Ed Miliband. But must we really now start to base our national identity according to the same brittle rationale by which we choose our newspaper habits and prune our social media feeds, seeking to insulate ourselves from contrary opinions and perspectives, and identifying only with those people who agree with us politically?

This is the toxic, petty world inhabited by the likes of George Monbiot, who believes that a Scottish “No” vote would be an “astonishing act of self-harm”:

What would you say about a country that exchanged an economy based on enterprise and distribution for one based on speculation and rent? That chose obeisance to a government that spies on its own citizens, uses the planet as its dustbin, governs on behalf of a transnational elite that owes loyalty to no nation, cedes public services to corporations,forces terminally ill people to work and can’t be trusted with a box of fireworks, let alone a fleet of nuclear submarines? You would conclude that it had lost its senses.

There is no point attempting to reason with the likes of Monbiot, a man so determined to see evil in everything the United Kingdom stands for and so willing to buy the Scottish nationalist snake oil. But there may yet be time to prevail upon those Scots who are not so embittered by the mere thought of capitalism, private enterprise and a strong nation state as our best model for human governance.

At a time when people from the four home nations of the United Kingdom sometimes look at each other and see no common bond left, we would do well to remember the example of our former colonies in the New World. Each of the fifty United States of America boasts its own distinct culture, accomplishments and economic strengths. Each fancies itself the greatest state in the union. But when push comes to shove, almost everyone in that great land proudly considers themselves to be an American – even if, in the case of the Lone Star State, they may call themselves Texan first and foremost.

An American born and raised in Kansas may never set foot in the state of California, but they would be rendered incomplete if the land of pacific beaches, the Golden Gate Bridge and the great Redwood forests were to wrench itself away and start governing itself for the benefit of Californians alone. Those in the American heartland may be different from their coastal cousins in as many ways as you can imagine – taste in food, fashion, approach to religion, views on social issues and love of firearms – but they share the same historical bond, forged in war and peace, that Scots share with the English (and Welsh, and Northern Irish) whether they like it or not.

I have no words of my own left to flatter or bribe my wavering Scottish cousins into preserving something so precious and yet apparently so undervalued north of the border. I can’t participate in the ideological race to the left, nor do I think framing the debate as a competition to promise Scots the most left-wing gimmicks is in any way helpful or illuminating. I can only offer the words of another, a great man who rose to the occasion when his country seemed destined to tear apart at the seams.

At his inauguration in 1861 and on the eve of the American civil war, President Abraham Lincoln reasoned and pleaded with the restive Southern states, seven of which had already declared their secession from the Union, in this way:

That there are persons in one section or another who seek to destroy the Union at all events and are glad of any pretext to do it I will neither affirm nor deny; but if there be such, I need address no word to them. To those, however, who really love the Union may I not speak?

Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it? Will you hazard so desperate a step while there is any possibility that any portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from, will you risk the commission of so fearful a mistake?

And as Lincoln said in closing to the rebellious American South, I can only repeat to the United Kingdom’s restless north:

I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Scotland England crossed flags pin

The NHS Jarrow March Protesters, In Their Own Words

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

SOS NHS Jarrow March

 

It is easy to learn precisely what the people marching from Jarrow to London in support of the NHS do not want. To their credit, the protesters make their immovable red lines very clear indeed.

No privatisation, ever. Anyone who even thinks about delivering a healthcare service to the public must receive their pay cheque from the government and not a private employer.  No cutbacks, ever. Services can only ever expand and grow, even if they are poorly geographically located or less essential than they once were. And most importantly of all, no Tories are to go anywhere near the NHS.

By contrast, you have to search the internet long and hard to find examples of what the #MarchForNHS protesters actually support in any detail at all, beyond the most primal, inchoate instinct to keep spending money on an unreformed artefact from 1948.

The 999 Blog – 999 Call For The NHS’s collection of personal testimonies from the marchers – contains a lot of emotional accounts and expressions of gratitude for having been successfully treated in an NHS hospital, but it is generally deficient in explaining why privatisation is inherently bad and why centralised state ownership is the only model worth pursuing.

As this blog has already noted, many of the protesters have moved quite a long way from the founding vision of the NHS toward a more muscular but unthinking form of socialism that reflexively defends state ownership with almost no regard for health outcome consequences.

Since the British left’s most prominent politicians are unwilling to spell out exactly what they would do to improve healthcare in Britain – beyond preserving the unsatisfactory status quo for ever – the Jarrow marchers are some of the most credible voices from the left participating in the debate. Ed Miliband is certainly happy to exploit individual instances of NHS reorganisation to win strategic advantage in target constituencies, but good luck getting him to tell you his overall vision for the British healthcare system.

So, as the only voices on the left willing to express an opinion, what exactly are the NHS Jarrow marchers saying? Here is a summary, together with some essential counterpoints that should be considered by anyone who believes that good quality healthcare is more important than any emotional attachment to a government bureaucracy.

On a personal note, my youngest daughter was admitted to the special care baby unit when she was born with breathing difficulties. Without that care and support she would have died. Only the NHS can provide this. This service, like so many others in the NHS, was threatened with closure – Steven Sweeney, lifelong NHS employee

And more in the same style:

I know how the NHS has helped me. I was born in an NHS hospital with no complications for me or my mother. As a baby my elbow was dislocated, and an NHS doctor popped it back in place. As a toddler I was treated for severe asthma, which thanks to the NHS is no longer a problem for me. My father was treated for a heart attack and had life-saving heart bypass surgery.

Incredibly 10 years on, he is in excellent health. I have no idea how we could have possibly afforded to pay for his open heart surgery had the NHS not existed. And now I have the privilege of working with NHS doctors and scientists to hopefully find the next treatment for heart disease – Dr. Anusha Seneviratne

Fancy that. Someone was born in an NHS hospital and received treatment or minor ailments throughout their life without major incident, and from this heartwarming tale we are supposed to extrapolate that anywhere else in the western world, babies are routinely born in dumpsters and euthanised in the event that they dislocate a joint. This testimonial – from a doctor, most worryingly of all – is weak praise for healthcare in general, but has absolutely nothing to say about why the NHS is uniquely suited to deliver it.

In the day time on a ward there is a mass flurry of activity and a range of noises of people, equipment, talking, crying and laughter, and buzzers are muted, yet on a night the buzzers sound louder and appear to be rung often, and often. Whilst I sat with my dad I could hear staff moving around the ward making patients comfortable, caring and reassuring patients who felt scared for being there in the first place. I spent most of the night just listening to my dad breathe. It was reassuring – Rehana Azam, 999 Call For The NHS Co-founder

There is something almost unseemly about using the traumas and emotional family experiences of the general public to build support for a government bureaucracy in this way. What Rehana Azam describes here (in a moving account of her father’s hospitalisation and death) are the functions of any modern hospital, not just a publicly-owned and operated one. But taking this natural gratitude for lives saved or made more bearable and turning it into publicity for a campaign to prevent modernisation of Britain’s largest employer does nothing to advance the serious conversation that Britain needs.

We have a local vested interest in preserving the NHS as it is: the miners of Mansfield and district helped build it through their taxes, believing it would be there for themselves, their children and grandchildren and the common good – Sophie Hebden, bystander

Yes, we all “helped build the NHS” through our taxes – as we did the Navy, our schools, the road network and our nuclear deterrent. That’s how governments do things – they raise revenue by taxing the population, and then spend the revenues (hopefully) on services that promote the common good. But again (and this response seems typical of many bystanders who find themselves supporting the marchers without really being able to articulate why) it gives no reason as to why healthcare could not be provided free at the point of use using a different or improved model.

Yesterday I received a letter from my uncle in the US – “something to use for your campaign”. It contained his most recent medical bill for his cancer treatment. It made difficult reading, because it was such a stark reminder of how poorly he is. But it also made me angry on his behalf, and more determined than ever to fight this, and spread the word. Because there is a danger that we’re sleepwalking towards that situation here ourselves. I don’t want our healthcare to take even one step down that path – Emma Tyers, volunteer National Coordinator

No one in their right mind would advocate moving towards the example offered by the “best healthcare system on the face of the Earth”, as some myopic Americans wrongly view their awful creation. But the choice Britain faces is not some extreme binary contest between legions of undertreated uninsured people on one hand, and our tattered but plucky nationalised system on the other.

There are so many different ways in which the British government could provide its citizens with healthcare free at the point of use in perpetuity  – with either minor or major reforms to the NHS – but none of these can be discussed as long as the spectre of the American nightmare is held up to scaremonger and quell debate.

I am joining the March in Bedford & Luton as I cannot stand by and watch as the Tories systematically destroy and privatise our NHS — an NHS that was fought for by working-class people and represented a major step forward for the health of the nation. One Community. One goal. Save our NHS – Steven Sweeney

And here comes the ideology. No protest in defence of preserving the NHS in formaldehyde would be complete without the obligatory boasts from the left that they created the National Health Service, and warnings that only they can be trusted with it. And it is true – the NHS is far from the worst possible way of administering healthcare to a population, and represented a huge improvement on what came before. But again, we see too many people who are now more committed to the organisation itself than to the principles that it stands for (healthcare free at the point of use).

If you have been relying on the BBC for your news, you will have no idea that we now face the possibility of no longer having access to free healthcare by the next general election, and blunders could become the norm with a privatised health service, prioritising profit over welfare.

People from countries all over the world envy our national health service and yet our government is destroying it before our very eyes, just to gain lucrative business deals from their pals. If we don’t act now, our NHS will disappear and we could pay with our lives, literally. After all good health is not a privilege, it is a human right. So think to yourself, how has the NHS helped you and could you live without it? – Dr Anusha Seneviratne

Now the scaremongering really begins. Did you know that there might not be healthcare in Britain any more if the Tories win the 2015 general election? You didn’t? That’s because it’s not true, a blatant falsehood and fabrication deliberately and underhandedly put about to scare people into supporting the status quo.

Furthermore, encouraging people to think about how the NHS has helped them without pointing out that in its absence some other system would inevitably do a similar job is an intellectually dishonest approach to fostering debate. It could well be the case that universal healthcare free at the point of use was best delivered through a nationalised provider as Britain dragged itself through the post-war doldrums. But is this necessarily still the case? And why must people who dare to ask the question be labelled dangerous extremists who want to abolish healthcare altogether?

The latter-day Jarrow marchers will likely hate the comparison, but in their rigid, immovable opposition to healthcare reform of any kind, they are holding up the NHS as a paragon of better times past in the same way that Prince Charles waxes nostalgic about Regency architecture and despises anything modern. Just as the heir to the throne is convinced that Britain’s architectural heyday peaked in 1710 with the completion of St. Paul’s Cathedral and recoils from anything built of glass and steel, so it seems do many of the most ardent NHS fanatics believe that the NHS founding in 1948 represents the snapshot of Britain that should be preserved above all others.

The reality is that just as architecture went through many fashions and phases to leave the London skyline that we now recognise and love, government policy on healthcare also has to change and adapt to the times. St. Paul’s Cathedral is wonderful, but the building of Coventry Cathedral or the Shard did nothing to diminish its place in our hearts. Likewise, the NHS in its original form may have been the best option for Britain in 1948, but we should at least be allowed to talk about whether nationalised healthcare delivery is still be best way to go.

And we should be able to do so without being called callous, unfeeling, overprivileged elitists by those marching down from Jarrow.

 

Semi-Partisan Sam will be covering the final stage of the NHS Jarrow march live on Saturday 6th September, live-tweeting from the event and hopefully interviewing some of the marchers and the special guests at the concluding rally in Parliament Square. Stay tuned to @SamHooper on Twitter for real-time updates.

 

Cover Image: “South Shields MP joins protesters on modern Jarrow march”, Evening Chronicle, 20th August 2014

March For Better Healthcare, Not For The NHS

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Peoples March NHS 3

 

There is something awe-inspiring yet disconcerting about walking into an NHS hospital. More than any other institution in the free world (with the possible exception of the Pentagon in the United States) a visitor to an NHS hospital in Britain is quickly made to feel that they are but one very small and temporary part of an unimaginably huge and powerful organisation, one which hums with a life and agenda entirely of its own, far bigger than – and not accountable to – any one person or office of state.

That’s not to denigrate the standard of care which may be provided, or the empathy shown every day by many NHS staff. And yet to sit in a waiting room and watch the crisply uniformed workers – from the lowliest cleaner to the highest-paid consultant – hurry about their business, it feels slightly Orwellian to know that the exact same scenes are playing out, with zero variation, in every town and city throughout the country. The uniformed defence chiefs in Arlington, Virginia may hold the power to extinguish all human life with the push of a few buttons, but as far as the British hospital patient is concerned, the power of a harried, middle-aged manager in the NHS is no less absolute.

Why does this matter?

Healthcare – the way that it is rationed, delivered and spoken about – is a hugely important issue, one which engenders unusually strong feelings among people, especially when their own use of the service gives them an added personal stake. It should follow, then, that our national conversation about healthcare is equal to the weight of the subject matter – that it is informed, reasoned, respectful and always guided by a few core principles to which we can all agree as relatively decent, rational human beings.

And the conversation should focus on those core aims – say, providing the best, most holistic healthcare to the entire population that our finite resources can buy – above all else, with lesser considerations such as tradition, vested interests and organisational or partisan loyalty coming a distant second.

It hardly needs stating that we in Britain are not currently having that kind of conversation.

Sure, there are ideological zealots on both sides. They may be few in number, but read enough newspaper online comment sections and you will find the odd absolutist libertarian arguing his lonely case that the intentionally uninsured person who developed cancer made their own deathbed and must now lie in it. But if you want to see ideological fervour and vested interests taking priority over rational thought on a truly large scale, you must look to the British political left – and specifically towards the sound of footsteps steadily marching south from Jarrow to London.

Peoples Assembly NHS March Demo

 

This weekend, a pressure group called 999 Call For The NHS will complete its People’s March For The NHS, a rolling demonstration that has been following the route of the 1936 Jarrow March with the aim of increasing the British people’s already sky-high approval of our nationalised healthcare provision – or to scaremonger and raise false fears about its imminent demise, depending on one’s perspective. From the group’s site:

The People’s March is a perfect opportunity to build support for the NHS and to join up with amazing NHS campaigners across the country. Following the basic route of the 1936 Jarrow Crusade, the People’s March for the NHS will head to Parliament. On route we aim to make the public aware of what the coalition government has been doing to our NHS and what has been happening to our hospitals and health services.

According to 999 Call For The NHS, our national healthcare provider is under mortal threat from the Conservative-led coalition government, who have worked tirelessly to undermine the nation’s health by (counterintuitively) increasing NHS spending every year since 2010, and ringfencing the organisation from any future spending cuts at the expense of almost every other department, including our national defence.

The group’s purpose is clear, and summed up perfectly by their name, 999 Call For The NHS. According to this inverted world view, we the people exist to serve the state bureaucracy (in this case the NHS) and come to its aid in an emergency, rather than the other way around.

It’s like a perverse reimagination of John F Kennedy’s inaugural address – ask not what the NHS can do to make you and your family well; ask what you can do to unthinkingly support this sprawling, inevitably flawed organisation, and all with a level of fervour more commonly seen among cult members.

That certainly was not the case when the NHS was founded. Back then, the focus was very much on the people to be served by the fledgling organisation, rather than the appropriate level of financial and human sacrifice to throw at an unreformed, unresponsive behemoth. As Aneurin Bevan said in his speech at the second reading of the NHS Bill in 1946:

The first reason why a health scheme of this sort is necessary at all is because it has been the firm conclusion of all parties that money ought not to be permitted to stand in the way of obtaining an efficient health service … It is cardinal to a proper health organisation that a person ought not to be financially deterred from seeking medical assistance at the earliest possible stage … Therefore, the first evil that we must deal with is that which exists as a consequence of the fact that the whole thing is the wrong way round. A person ought to be able to receive medical and hospital help without being involved in financial anxiety.

Not only is this the case, but our hospital organisation has grown up with no plan, with no system; it is unevenly distributed over the country and indeed it is one of the tragedies of the situation, that very often the best hospital facilities are available where they are least needed. In the older industrial districts of Great Britain hospital facilities are inadequate. Many of the hospitals are too small – very much too small … There is a tendency in some quarters to defend the very small hospital on the ground of its localism and intimacy, and for other rather imponderable reasons of that sort, but everybody knows today that if a hospital is to be efficient it must provide a number of specialised services. Although I am not myself a devotee of bigness for bigness sake, I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one.

Even 999 Call For The NHS reference these founding aims in their own campaign literature:

In modern times it’s sometimes hard to have faith in what our politicians do and say. But not so long ago, politicians spoke about and acted on ideals. When Nye Bevan founded the NHS in 1948 it was formed on 3 core principles:
1. The health service will meet the needs of everyone
2. It will be free at the point of delivery
3. Healthcare will be delivered according to clinical need, not the ability to pay

This is how the NHS began. The dream of nationalised healthcare was a brave new world where a person’s financial means no longer determined their access to quality healthcare, and where poverty was no longer an implicit death sentence. There was less obsession over who delivered the services, and less paranoia about keeping certain types of undesirables as far away from the process as possible.

The emphasis then focused on the fact that healthcare was to be free at the point of use; today’s Labour politicians seem to care nothing at all about the healthcare itself, aside from their obsession that the person providing it must get their pay cheque from the government and not a private firm.

It is interesting to read some of these early speeches. Sure, many of them contain the same hyperbolic Tory-bashing that one now expects from Owen Jones or Polly Toynbee, but they are also lofty speeches that even political opponents can appreciate thanks to their nobility of purpose. These visionary statements make a stark contrast with today’s bitter, one-dimensional screeds accusing them (the evil Tories) of trying to take healthcare away from us (the good, decent folk).

And note the tough-minded defence of large, centralised centres of specialised service provision in Bevan’s speech. How many of the latter-day Jarrow marchers have also been involved in NIMBY-style protests and efforts to keep small, inefficient local services running at huge cost to the taxpayer and to the detriment of overall healthcare outcomes? This too, is in contravention of the NHS’s founding spirit.

Lest there be any doubt about the 999 protesters’ aim to preserve a 65-year-old institution for reasons amounting to little more than sentimentality, here is the movement’s hero, Owen Jones, in full rhetorical flight:

“It is not for us to allow our greatest national institution, built by the determination and courage of our ancestors, to be dismantled and privatised by a Tory party that did not even win the election. That’s why I’m backing this incredible march – which demonstrates we will not stand aside whilst our NHS is shredded by vultures.”

This is quite extraordinary. All this talk of ancestry, of national endeavour and shared heritage coming from the mouth of a UKIP or Tory voter would be immediately jumped upon as evidence of the worst sort of Little Englander mentality, and yet here is one of the doyens of the British left indulging in precisely the same rose-tinted nostalgia – albeit about a socialist cause célèbre.

Comparisons to a cult may seem overblown, but just look at the hagiography and aura of personality being carefully curated by NHS fanatics surrounding the life of Aneurin Bevan. As 999 Call For The NHS breathlessly boast on their own website:

A sister march and rally is being held in Tredegar, the birthplace of Aneurin Bevan. Organised by local people we’ll be linking with them via satellite.

When the socialist march to London is mirrored by a twin pilgrimage to the birthplace of the founder of the church, one cannot help but wonder to what extent this exercise is really about healthcare at all.

aneurin bevan hagiography

 

Reading the biographies of the 999 Call For The NHS Team, it is evident that a number of the movement’s leaders were spurred to organise partly because they felt they owed a “debt of gratitude” to the NHS for either having received treatment themselves, or through a loved one having done so. But this is a particularly poor reason to campaign for the status quo. The NHS (like any system or bureaucracy) has flaws and problems as well as good points, and it helps no one if people feel beholden to support an institution in its current form just because they once used the service that was on offer at the time.

Indeed, when considering the best way to administer healthcare to a nation of 63 million people and growing, any kind of sentimentality is probably best avoided. People may look with distaste at the work undertaken by NICE (and certain Americans may shudder and think of death panels), but these structures and organisations simply reflect the fact that there is unlimited demand for healthcare, and a limited supply. One way or another, from capitalist America to totalitarian North Korea, rationing decisions are made, be it by the invisible hand of the almighty dollar or the literal death panels of Pyongyang.

(It’s interesting that some on the left, more used to running Britain down and singing the praises of other countries and of international co-operation, have developed such a blind spot when it comes to the way that other, nominally more socialist countries such as France administer healthcare to their citizens).

But if sentimentality about the individual is an unfortunate distraction when planning healthcare delivery, sentimentality about the particular institutions and specific modes of provision is an almost unpardonable indulgence in 21st century Britain. In fact, the extent to which the interests of the latter are served will likely see a corresponding fall in meeting the needs of the former. Far better to serve the interests of human beings who think, breathe, bleed, laugh and cry than a soulless master built of bricks, mortar and organisation charts.

This doesn’t mean that ditching the NHS and making the abrupt transition to a completely different system is necessarily the right approach for Britain – it could well be the case that the costs of any such upheaval would outweigh the benefits, especially if made carelessly or in haste.

But to take to the streets in support of what is essentially just a government department (would that the Department of Agriculture had such devoted admirers), protesters should at least be clear of precisely what it is they like about the NHS, what needs to be preserved and what can go; and they should have a basic understanding of the costs and tradeoffs involved in all of these decisions. Seeing their opponents as more than evil, two-dimensional caricatures would also help.

To those people now marching south from Jarrow, and those many others who will join them in London on Saturday:

If you must be outraged at something, be outraged that a baby born in Britain is more likely to die before their first birthday than a child born in Brunei, Estonia, Greece, Italy, Israel, Portugal, Slovenia or eighteen other nations – if not more. And note that this was the case long before David Cameron entered 10 Downing Street.

If you feel compelled to take to the streets, grab a placard and protest the fact that British cancer survival rates stubbornly lag behind those of our western European neighbours, most of whom do not have nationalised health systems.

If you want to help the NHS trend on social media this weekend, invest some time looking at the healthcare systems of other successful countries and consider ways that Britain’s own arrangements could be reformed and improved, rather than preserved as close to their 1948 incarnation as possible.

But if you find yourself marching from Edmonton Green to Parliament Square on Saturday in support of the NHS in particular – and especially if you are one of the few who trudged the entire route from Jarrow in northern England to protest spending cuts that have not happened and to talk about delivery modes rather than outcomes – you have a solemn duty to make absolutely certain that you are really defending the interests of your fellow citizens rather than doing the bidding and furthering the ends of deeply entrenched special interests.

The protest’s organisers have failed to make a case for blindly “supporting the NHS” that is based on anything more than nostalgia at best, and scaremongering at worst – read their literature closely and dare yourself to reach any other conclusion.

This is no way to make policy. This is no way for politically engaged citizens to behave. This is no way to honour the legacy of Nye Bevan.

 

TV Debate – Is Gentrification Good For London, Or Social Cleansing In Disguise?

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

gentrification

 

Today, I will be back on the Headline London panel on London Live TV, debating whether gentrification is a good thing for London or an insidious form of social cleansing.

My overall take is that gentrification and the urban renewal it brings are a positive phenomenon, leading to the revitalisation of communities, the opening of new businesses and amenities, and increased economic growth for the neighbourhoods concerned. We do, though, have to consciously work to mitigate the negative side effects.

At present, we have a cycle that goes something like this:

1. Area is identified as relatively poor and un-redeveloped

2. Neighbourhood becomes attractive to creative types and young families

3. Hipsterisation and gentification begin

4. Improvements lead to rent and house price increases

5. Wealthier people arrive, displacing hipsters and original residents

6. Neighbourhood’s prosperity causes the cycle to begin again in adjoining areas

We need to do more to arrest the cycle at the point after young creative types and families move into an area and begin the process of gentrification, but before the inevitable rent/price hikes force all of the existing residents out. And you can’t do this without looking at the broader question of nationwide housing supply, where none of the main political parties have anything meaningful to say. For the Tories, it is not in their interests to allow a big increase in the housing stock, because the stagnation/fall in house prices would hurt their core voters. And Labour barely believe in home ownership at all, and only seem interested in building new social housing in furtherance of their goal to make us all clients of the state.

Achieving a balance means compromise and accepting that the pricing out of some long-term residents is the inevitable cost of urban redevelopment, but tempering this harsh truth with innovative solutions of keeping neighbourhoods viable for lower-income people. This means we have to be less squeamish about things like “poor doors” in new buildings, where some facilities are reserved for full price paying homebuyers.

Finally, we need to understand that short of buying your own property, no one has the inherent “right” to live in a certain area, especially if taxpayers end up subsidising them to do so. We already have a progressive tax system in London where wealthier citizens contribute more. Yes, it is in everyone’s interest that neighbourhoods are mixed, but Londoners can only be expected to pay so much to ensure that this happens.

I will be on London Live TV’s Headline London show today, from 1230-1330 UK Time, participating in a panel discussion in which we will debate this topic.

You can watch on Sky 117, Virgin 159 or Freeview 8 from 1230 onwards.

You can also watch online here.

When Will Labour Be Honest About Private Schools?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

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Another day, another “revelation” that Britain is a deeply elitist, socially segregated country thanks to the harmful influence of private schools and their irritating habit of setting their students up to succeed with a good education and useful network of influential contacts.

The Guardian reports on the findings of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. And on the face of it, the statistics are compelling:

Only 7% of members of the public attended a private school. But 71% of senior judges, 62% of senior officers in the armed forces, 55% of permanent secretaries in Whitehall, 53% of senior diplomats, 50% of members of the House of Lords and 45% of public body chairs did so.

So too did 44% of people on the Sunday Times Rich List, 43% of newspaper columnists, 36% of cabinet ministers, 33% of MPs, 26% of BBC executives and 22% of shadow cabinet ministers.

Oxbridge graduates also have a stranglehold on top jobs. They comprise less than 1% of the public as a whole, but 75% of senior judges, 59% of cabinet ministers, 57% of permanent secretaries, 50% of diplomats, 47% of newspaper columnists, 44% of public body chairs, 38% of members of the House of Lords, 33% of BBC executives, 33% of shadow cabinet ministers, 24% of MPs and 12% of those on the Sunday Times Rich List.

These figures certainly prove something, but not necessarily what the outraged commentators on the left think they prove. What these statistics show is a strong justification for the entirely rational choices of people with sufficient means to opt out of the state education system and go private. If you are at all normal and want the best for your child, why would you not place them in the hands of the system that is so much more likely to deliver the best social and educational outcomes?

Cue the inevitable wails of outreach from the usual suspects. First up, Owen Jones:

Why does the unfairness highlighted by the report matter? As it points out, elitism leaves “leading institutions less informed, less representative and, ultimately, less credible than they should be”, meaning they focus “on issues that are of salience only to a minority but not the majority in society”. If there are so few journalists and politicians who have experienced, say, low wages or a struggle for affordable home, then the media and political elite will be less likely to deal with these issues adequately. Instead, they will reflect the prejudices, assumptions and experiences of the uber-privileged.

No serious person would argue that this is not a problem – though many choose to quietly ignore the point out of self interest. It is certainly true that in journalism as with many other professions, a lack of people from diverse backgrounds materially harms the organisations doing the hiring. But an astute business or institution should already be aware of this fact, and have recruitment policies in place to ensure that they identify and attract talented people from non-traditional backgrounds. Jones and others never make a convincing case as to why the labour market cannot do this on its own, without the help of state coercion.

But as always, it is an active state to which the left instinctively turn. Jones’ take:

Certainly Britain is in desperate need of radical measures to ensure all can realise their aspirations, including the banning of unpaid internships, the scrapping of charitable status for private schools, investment in early-years education, and dealing with issues such as overcrowded homes that stifle educational attainment. But surely Britain’s chronically unequal distribution of wealth and power has to be tackled too.

Then, depressingly, the shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt chimes in:

Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, said the report showed the coalition was failing on social mobility. “Under the Tories, the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and the rest is increasing, millions of hardworking people are seeing their living standards go backwards and child poverty is set to increase,” he said.

And finally the Guardian’s editorial on the subject, which sums up the landscape well enough but whose only proposed solutions are vastly inadequate to their supposed goal of ensuring that state-educated people are proportionally represented in the top professions:

The fundamental reason why so few top families can grab so many top jobs is precisely because they are able to provide the education, the environment and the networks that will eventually make their children’s job applications stand out from the pile. It is a very human, and in some ways commendable, thing for people to seek to give their kids a hand-up. No Whitehall initiative is going to counteract this urge, which is in any case shared across families from all classes. It does damage only because bankrolling unpaid work experience placements and master’s degrees, which would be ruinous for households across much of the scale, is so easy for those at the top.

Governments can – and should – extend minimum-wage laws to cover more internships, encourage universities to pay special attention to top grades earned in tough circumstances and support new routes into politics and the professions, to replace those that have closed with the withering of the unions, the local press and the culture of the apprentice. They can, and should, take care not to fragment state education in ways which – Swedish experience suggests – can leave schools prone to class segregation. But they should not delude themselves that any of it will create the meritocracy of the rhetoric unless they also do something about a wealth gap that easily warps into an opportunity gulf.

All of these people are very good at pointing out inequality where it exists, and saying that it is an outrage. Where they fall short is coming up with suitable, intellectually honest ideas for tackling it.

Having identified that attending private school gives an advantage to those students over state educated children, Labour’s proposed correctives are all variants on the same woolly and inadequate remedy. Revoke the charitable status of private schools. Subject such schools to harsher inspections or more stringent teacher hiring criteria. Enshrine reverse discrimination against private school students into law, and actively encourage businesses to look past paper accomplishments at the wider picture of an applicant (which many of the world’s best firms do already, out of self interest).

But why will the darlings of the British left, always first to proclaim their outrage at the unsurprising news that an expensive education is a worthwhile investment, not be honest about their ideal outcome? If private schools are causing so much damage and inequality in our society, why not ban them altogether? Why be content with continually talking them down and making it marginally more difficult for them to operate?

Why, instead of continually carping at the success achieved by private schools (and indeed any school that struggles free from centralised control), will prominent left-wing politicians not openly promise to “destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland”, as one-time Labour education secretary Anthony Crosland muttered in private, and expand the threat to every fee-charging school as well?

If Labour is to maintain even the vestige of continued acceptance of the free market, they must hold that the final decision on hiring school and university leavers must rest with the business concerned, not with some faceless “equality and merit panel”. And this means that hiring managers must be free to compare the attributes of publicly and privately educated applicants and pick the candidates who they believe will do the best job.

A future Labour government then has only two realistic choices if they want to push down the stubbornly high percentage of professional jobs occupied by privately educated people, rather than just complaining about it – they can work to actively sabotage private schools through government policy until their educational outcomes fall back in line with their state school counterparts and the economic incentive no longer exists for most parents to choose them, or they can take the totalitarian path and simply order all of Britain’s private schools closed immediately.

In a million years, Ed Miliband’s Labour Party will never argue for the latter policy (though they might well attempt a little bit of the former on the sly) because, unsurprisingly, the modern Labour Party is every bit as stuffed to the brim with privately educated scions of privilege as is the Conservative Party. Labour do not want to see the back of Britain’s private schools because not only do Labour MPs, party apparatchiks and their families benefit handsomely from using them, a truly egalitarian education system where every child is held down to the same level of uniform mediocrity would rob Labour of it’s apparent core purpose – arbitrarily picking winners and subordinating the rights of the individual to some undemocratic, ghastly master plan that they constantly revise.

Today’s report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission does little more than reveal the obvious – that paying for a private education results in benefits commensurate to their cost. Ed Miliband and the Labour Party can either accept this as a fact of life and look at ways of expanding access for talented but disadvantaged children into that better system, or they can advocate eliminating the inequity altogether and propose shutting down the private education industry.

What we should not tolerate any more from the Labour Party is their tired habit of using social inequalities to build political capital while proposing no policy solutions commensurate with their scale.