Few decent people would find fault with a good deal of May’s speech about her new buzz trend, the Sharing Society. But what happened to Cameron’s Big Society, based presumably on Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the post Kennedy era? The common thing about all these societies is that they never happen. Because people are bigger than politicians and are less easily manipulated. They do not just talk about life in difficult places. They live it. Thatcher said there was no such thing as society, but that was perhaps going too far.
Johnson was trying to heal the racial divisions which divide America still, but were even worse in the days of segregation all across the Deep South. Cameron was trying to make his party electable. May is trying, well I am not quite sure and neither is anybody else. There is a lot of worthy talk and a good deal of drift. An action government hers is not, still paralyzed like cowering rabbits in the headlights of this stupid Brexit juggernaut.
Meanwhile crises are building in social care, mental health (yes I know she touched on it but again it was about stuff like roping in teachers to help as if they did not have enough on their plates already) the trains, the tubes, education funding, potholes (the local government people said £12 billion was needed and the government announced an extra £250 million and no that’s not a typo) and as always the NHS. This is now so strapped for cash that the system is in places breaking down altogether. Last week three elderly people died alone and unattended on trolleys in hospital corridors because there were no beds, no staff available and no proper care.
There was a time in this island nation of ours, when people did care about each other (although without a special label), that such news would have erupted into a national outrage of such ferocity that it would certainly have brought down the health minister, if not the government itself. But now it hardly made the news. We are just so used to hearing awful things like that. Why? One word. Every single bad thing leads back to it. Even Brexit.
Austerity.
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It will appear on or after January 10th.