zeoevil wrote:If the United Kingdom’s most prosperous and economically influential periods are often associated with the postwar consensus of the 1950s–60s, the market liberalization and growth reforms of the Margaret Thatcher era, and the relative stability and expansion of the late 1990s and early 2000s under Tony Blair, why is there such resistance to revisiting or combining elements of these policies today, especially amid concerns about stagnant wages, declining public services, weak economic growth, rising inequality, and falling living standards?
It worked, but it worked by selling off pieces of the house in the good weather. That doesn't leave you in a good place when it rains.
Moreover, the gains they counted weren't distributed evenly. A lot of people came out relatively worse while some people made a killing.
Things that benefit society often don't have easy ways to quantify their benefit. Let's say you're only thinking about money, and aren't fussed with making people's lives better just because.
Funding the NHS properly commits you to spend a lot of money in a way that just eats money. But you do it because making people well enables them to hopefully be less of a financial burden down the line. If they're all working and paying tax it's not a cost it's an investment, right? You're not paying for expensive treatments for things that would've cost less to fix with preventative medicine.
Successive governments cut funding to the service and tell the people working there "you've got to do more with less" which they do, but at the cost that everything looks more shabby and run down.
Companies who are motivated by profit know how this investment thing works and they don't have to explain themselves to voters. So they come in and say "we can help, just use our stuff and we'll buy you a new hospital wing" because they know there'll be money coming out down the line. So now your own spending cuts get hidden by flashy hospital facades and you've set up a pipeline for money to actually leave the system into shareholders pockets instead of being spent on patients.
That line about spending becomes "you have to be more efficient" because it presupposes that the reason that they need to make cuts is because there was waste and inefficiency. It means you get to be angry at a nurse rather than a politician. Nurses are understandably angry at this and strike, but over time you neuter the power of unions to effect change legally and you know at the bottom of your heart that people who are in caring professions are only there because they care about people, people you're now saying to the nurses "you're not going to look good if people die because you're standing on a picket line"
As time goes on the companies start doing deals with government directly, with politicians awarding contracts to companies that give them kickbacks. Corruption. Soon they're whispering saying "look this whole pretence that government runs health is kind of a drag, what we need is you to defund it all the way and when it collapses, we'll step in and save it, take it off your hands". (This is a policy called "starve the beast")
Eventually, you are having to make decisions about who you cure and who you don't based on finance rather than welfare. You set up a commission to score the effectiveness of drugs Vs their cost on a score called the "quality adjusted life year". You quantify the value of a human life in cold financial terms. You get patients arguing about whose treatment is more deserving. "Liver damage from drinking? Well, you did this to yourself. My child has leukemia." Etc
Now, this is a big wall of text. But I remember the 90s fondly too, I remember the time the money was being spent a bit more freely. But the point I'm making is that time you remember, the Blair years, was at the middle of a long story of robbery and decay that started decades earlier.
We don't have to go back to the Blair years, we should be looking to go back to the years when we realised, because we had lost so many lives to a world war, that all life was valuable and it cuts across class and has absolutely nothing to do with how rich you are.
We can do this, we can pull the private companies out of the NHS tomorrow and start funding it properly, but it's not in the interests of the parties in government
![:]](./images/smilies/icon_grin.gif "Happy"){kind=icon}
) is in my opinion truly unbearable and to call him evil is an understatement.
