Cameron’s Mythical Dragons

You know a Government is in trouble when they start slaying mythical dragons.

David Cameron announced this week that immigrants families would face being ineligible to apply for a Council house for up to five years. The Prime Minister has been under pressure from Conservative MPs since their appalling Eastleigh by-election result, where they slumped to third behind UKIP. The UKIP campaign was based strongly on an anti-immigration and anti-EU stance.

With a background of a stalling economy, poor poll ratings, internal conflict and a stress-cracked Coalition, the omens for the next election look poor for the Conservatives. With under three years to go, it would take a remarkable and unlikely turn around to reverse the trend.

So how does such a Government in this mess move forward?

They roll out their mythical dragons to slay.

For the Conservatives these are the EU, immigration, the public sector, unions, the welfare state and the so called deficit. Each is chosen for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the myth must be commonly shared. It is useful if your friends in the media will propagate helpful stories, using one-off extreme cases to demonstrate the rule. For example, a single mother with eleven children was the centre of a media storm last month. This case was used to demonstrate the ‘failing of an over generous benefit system’ , despite being a highly unusual case that represents a minuscule percentage of benefit claimants. The domination of the right-wing press ensures that such issues are rarely portrayed accurately, or with a fair evidential basis.

Secondly, each dragon should represent a group that is vulnerable and weak. This applies to immigrants and welfare claimants. These groups do not have the influence to seriously fight back.

Thirdly, the concept of scape-goating should apply. Are immigrants responsible for the lack of social housing? No, the issue is decades of not building them, while simultaneously selling the stock off. Are people on Job Seekers Allowance holding back the country and responsible for their own worklessness? No, our economy is so configured to ensure a permanent high level of unemployment to create a downward pressure on wages, and transfer wealth to global corporations and the super-rich.  Scape-goating also helps to ensure ordinary workers focus their rage on those they should unite with. Why should the elite fight everyone else, when they can have ordinary people fight among themselves?

The Conservatives know that organised labour remains a barrier to eroding employee rights and creating the  preconditions which would enable global capitalists to further asset strip the people of the United Kingdom. This is why the public sector and Unions are targets for slaying, not because they are bad, but for ideological reasons. The Miners strike in 1984-85 was a classic case of artificially constructing a fight, with the intention of destabilising the union movement and to justify a reduction in union rights.

The Conservatives always talk about the deficit as something Labour grew so large due to spending too much. This is nonsense, and even a cursory look at historical data blows this myth out of the water. The deficit is being used as a trojan horse to fragment and privatise our services for corporate profit.

So given the Conservatives inability to win the next election based on their performance or benefit they have brought to people, we can expect two years of further attacks on the classic Tory dragons.

Those on the left need to ensure that they fight every myth propagated by this Government, as it gets down and dirty heading towards 2015. No action should be done or speech made that gives credence  to these myths.

This lesson needs to be quickly learned by the Shadow Cabinet.

Are you listening Liam Byrne?

The Left Must Reform Public Services Too

The most feared word to our public services is reform.

Reform has become a by-word for cuts and privatisation. Take, for example, the NHS reforms currently going through Parliament, or the changes to DLA. Both are ideological changes designed to privatise one and simply reduce payments to the other.

However, while fighting these reforms, the left cannot rest on their laurels. Our public services do need reforms, but not the ones offered by the Coalition. They are needed to better serve the need of service users, in a way that maximises precious resources. They are needed to reaffirm to the United Kingdom that public services are the most cost effective way of delivering vital services, with the best outcomes for service users. Without changes, those forces that are pushing for privatisation will gain a stronger and stronger voice.

A major issue is the lack of intermediate community care. I have recently experienced this with a relative who is elderly suffering from early dementia and a heart condition. In the last 6 months she has been hospitalised around 10 times. Her heart condition and dementia are beyond the scope of her GP as her needs are complex. However, as there is no provision for community care, this resulted in her worsening on a number of occasions to a degree that required hospitalisation. This is invariably expensive and can result in people getting help when it is too late, so the intervention is less successful.

This is common with conditions like diabetes too. If managed in the community by more specialist community care teams, it is substantially cheaper than hospitalisation with much better patient outcomes. It would preserve hospitals for those matters that only they can handle.

We need to wean ourselves from too much concentration on hospitals. Many local hospitals provide a skeleton service, when nearby there is a larger, more equipped hospital with better specialists available. People do love their local hospital, but I believe diverting resources partially to bigger hospitals and to community services from local skeleton hospitals would result in better health care at a lower price.

Another area where co-ordination is poor is that between the NHS and social services. From September to October 2011 128,000 days delay were incurred by the NHS because of bed-blocking – when patients can’t be discharged as the services they need are not in place in the community [1] . This figure had been falling, but the impact of cuts to local social services budgets has reversed the figures. Each day in a hospital bed costs an average of £255. Therefore, the cost to the NHS of 128,000 days of delays amounts to nearly £33 million, annualised to nearly £196 million. This far exceeds the cost of providing care in the community.

In the last year or so, my Son has been going through the system for a diagnosis for a condition on the autistic spectrum. Quite frankly, no-one would believe how dreadfully poor this service is, and how badly under funded these services are. In this battle to find the required support at school, we are on our third school in year. Read any of the forums about parents battling this, and you get the same story time after time. It’s a national scandal every bit as poor as our national treatment of the elderly. The reform required here is a large increase in funding, much better training for teachers and a smoother journey between the different professionals involved.

Education services require reform too. Schools are in an excellent position to pick up problems with children who without intervention are likely to grow up into uneducated, workless adults who are at risk of getting involved with crime. Early intervention is far cheaper, as the right investment will be likely to produce a law abiding taxpayer. Without intervention the cost of benefit payments, the cost to the justice system, and most of all the personal cost, it is crazy to not intervene early. The transfer of resources from the justice system to the education system deals with the root cause and not the symptoms. The Coalition have promised to help 120,000 families at most risk, but this is not enough.

All this co-ordination and improvement is impossible with broken up and privatised services. The left should argue that these reforms are required and in the best interests of the country. Only a reformed truly public sector can deliver this.

Sources

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15198431