“We can reverse our social atomisation by giving people the power to work collectively with their peers to solve common problems. We can reverse our society's infantilisation by inviting people to look to themselves, their communities and wider society for answers, instead of just the state.” David Cameron
Greeting citizens
Have you got a migraine coming on? Good! That means your brain is fighting back. Fighting back against the bombardment of buzz words and sound bites which if you actually sit down and try to make sense of, could make you blow a gasket.
We’ve been trained to believe that anything said slowly, in a “reasonable” tone with a posh accent and a few long words is correct, intelligent and true.
But is it really?
Don’t panic – it is not you who is stupid – it really doesn’t make sense.
David Cameron is inviting us to work collectively with our peers to solve common problems – what’s wrong with that you may ask? Nothing at all – that’s why I’m in UFO (the Union of Fabrication Obliterators). On June the 30th we’ll be taking collective action with our mythbusting peers and our allies in other unions to solve our common problem of working people (paid and unpaid), people on benefits and pensions (and those who’ve been kicked of them) and children and young people having to pay the price for the economic recession. David Cameron himself said (in May 2009) he understood people’s anger “….about the bankers who got rich while they were bringing the economy to its knees.” Do you think he’ll make headline news on June 30th by singing our praises for rising collectively out of our infantilisation? I mean that is what he meant isn’t it?
You see while we can’t fault him on what he’s saying, we have to question what he uses it to justify. He uses his ‘power to the people’ comments to justify bringing in NHS reforms that were never voted on by the electorate (that’s the people, Dave) - since the Conservatives promised there would be no major reorganisation of the NHS. He uses them to justify having a bunch of unelected GP consortia (NOT the people, Dave) running the Health Service in partnership with a load of unelected private companies and an unelected “monitor” making sure they are operating competitively – yes that’s competitively – not efficiently, not in a way that maximises health and prevents ill-health, but competitively. There’s not a patient, member of the community or elected councillor in sight and the private companies will all be using the NHS logo so we won’t even know whether they’re private or not (e.g. the “NHS” Treatment Centre in Nottingham).
So when David Cameron talks about empowering “the people” – who is he really talking about? Who is he listening to? Not Unite and five other health organisations who have said ‘….the sheer scale of the ambitious and costly reform programme, and the pace of change, whilst at the same time being tasked with making £20 billion of savings, is extremely risky and potentially disastrous.’
What about the private health care firms who have donated £750,000 to the Conservative Party since David Cameron became leader in 2005 and the Private health lobby out in force at Tory conference?
Come on Dave, you can talk all you want about giving power to the people and switching power from here to there, but we already have a system for giving people a voice and it’s called Democracy – it involves people voting for individuals to represent them locally and nationally. It doesn’t work perfectly – there are plenty of groups who are still marginalised and disenfranchised, but if you believe in people power the least you can do is start respecting the democratic process we’ve already got and acknowledge that you have no mandate for “reforming” the NHS and taking it out of the hands of elected representatives or for making massive cuts in public services.
ΩΩΩΩΩΩ OVER AND OUT ΩΩΩΩΩΩ
