Going it Alone

The best analogy I can come up with is, you do not venture out into a wild, unpredictable, rapidly changing, volatile environment with complete uncertainty as to availability of food or shelter on your own. You just don't do it. Anything happens to you, no one will know or will be able to find you. Only if you are extraordinarily rich, well equipped with instant access to a rescue team might you possibly consider it. Harsh places are not for the sole venturer.

Harsh places are for teams, then there is always some part of the group that can go and arrange for help or rescue. More than this, in a harsh climate you have to carry everything you might possibly need. The basics are a change of gear, food and water. These make up the bulk of what you must carry and limit your time out in the terrain. Then there are the also necessary but more optional items of shelter, cooking equipment, first aid, navigation, communications and so on and on. The bigger the team the more support you can consider which extends further the time possible out exposed. Each extra spread out amongst the load carrying capacity of the team, in addition to their own personal survival requirements. So where does a rogue with you but not with you fit in? Wanting independence but not willing to carry any collective load.

Team work brings with it conflict of aims, personalities, abilities and contribution. Managed well teams can way out perform any aggregate of solo contributions. Handled badly and they tear themselves apart without making progress. Finding the leader, for the challenges of any particular stage, who has a commonality of vision and restrained ego is crucial. So how does this loner, part of but not part of the team, fit in? What contribution can he make? How are any opinions offered by this loner going to be regarded by the real team members? Are his claims of pending doom and disaster going to cut any ice? The answer is self-evident.

Obviously what I have in mind is that the basics we each carry of food, which is the nation's currency, and the water, which is the nation's wealth creation mechanisms of industry, commerce and services. The hostile environment is the global multi-national trading environment and the team of course is the EU. Our best and only chance of keeping our head up and making a contribution in this savage world of prey on the weak and defer to the strong and powerful.

All Change

Been thinking about my water supply, pressure seems to be low compared to what it was, but then that just maybe an ageing thing with me. If the Supply Company did set about reducing the water pressure there could be significant savings. Low pressure means less leakage, an insufficient pipe network can cope for longer before replacement and lower pressure means slower take up of reservoir water and lower volume to treat. These are big cost considerations. The point is, there is nothing to stop them from deciding to lower the mains pressure. Their objective is not any longer to provide the best possible service. Their primary, if not overriding objective, is to return an increasing profit to their shareholders. User concerns are not on their agenda other than running as minimal a service as they can get away with, just short of referral to any regulatory body or generating a nuisance level of complaint. Providing a good service cost them and brings them no dividends. There are not more customers to win, it is, to all intents and purposes,a fixed quantum. Their consumers have no where else to go to and no one to champion for them. So what, the water pressure is low, what are you going to do about it? There is no statutory requirement. The consumer is left in a hard place.

Not just water of course but all the old public utility industries, electricity, telephones, rail, and good old Royal Mail. Where are the safeguards that keeps electricity at the target voltage and not allowed to settle to the lowest percentile, or what is supposed to stop a next day delivery becoming 'within three days' norm, what checks are there in the time taken to renew a telephone line fault or what ensures there is a seat, on a clean train which is running on time? Nothing tangible that I can see or find. With the need to generate a profit replacing the previous desire to provide a good service, the luckless consumer, without any real alternate choice or options, has to get on with using these declining services. The politicians are in the clear, privatised, nothing to do with them, (except of course the creation of these monsters). The private companies are untouchable, they provide to the standard required when they were setup. Their regulatory bodies, which are supposed to provide a complaints procedure, seem unable to deal with the deluge of ordinary day mishaps and lack of performance. They have no remit to respond to your actual experienced real or imagined complaints. These private companies loyalty is to their boards of shareholders, (predominately pension plans to a tee), you as a consumer have no voice. Those individual share-owners who bought into the bonanza have no meaningful voice against the institutions that ended with the more than lion's share. So, within the prescribed remit, they meet the requirements and you have only to look at the profits and enhanced values returned to 'their' shareholders to see they are successful. Except by that one essential bottom line, service to the consumer.


When there is a more or less fixed market for your 'goods', when that market is stable and will not suddenly disappear, when the regulators have been left toothless, when the glory goals of 'privatisation' far out shines a dimly held desire to give a good service, when there is no tie between making profit and providing that high quality of service, then any incentive to do better evaporates. In this short-sighted flawed application of supposed commercial energisation the consumer has been sold out. Utility services are just that, essential core services to keep the country turning over efficiently, not optional, not marginal, smack dead central. A Nation has to get its utilities working if all other commerce and industry is to thrive. When shareholders around EU and the globe are in control of your utilities, controlling the infrastructure investment and the level of return required, you as a Nation are left powerless. Your citizens, the consumers of these utilities, doomed to declining poor unreliable services putting them disadvantaged against other nations better serviced. We were sold out of our birth right by a shrews fantasy, sold again into servitude for just a few pieces of gold. Long live the revolution.

 

Chav Culture

We have been taken over by the chav's. Their agenda for a quick fix, instant gratification, getting one over, doing a wheelie deal, never mind them look at me, now rules the roost.The presumption of all in the servicing the public industries is that they are dealing with a chav and gear themselves to deal with just that critture.


There have always been chav's or before them spiv's, just a small minority. It is just that chaviness now has become the mainstream. It has slipped into a normality that is used as a benchmark to judge all else by. So the daily expectation is that of a chav response with the reflex reaction of a hand-off against a chav onslaught. Not just in our person to person dealings but in our expectations of peoples likes and dislikes. This chav presumption is now widespread throughout our society. Long gone are the old presumptions of courtesy, concern, moderation, delight in culture, accommodation, any willingness to take time to discover. Now it's all instant, wham bam, three minute is all you's got, I'm only here for what I get out of it. 


Here because of our past, our willingness to shrug off difficulties without facing them, our eagerness to profit rather than to question and our failure to give due regard to role models who did stand for higher values. So how does a three minute wonder, with no life skills or experience and an autobiography at the age of 23 years stack up? We collectively buy into this creature yet shun lesser non-media hyped persons who have earned wisdom and contributed to enriching life. Shallow versus the profound. Banner headline against a tightly scripted paragraph. Gratification against quality. We made all those choices and are now living the consequence. Living a chav culture.


Nothing is ever unredeemable. The starting point as always is in recognising we have lost out but it will be a long journey back. Like so many of my posts, the starting point is to turn around our isolation. We have to redefine how we connect with each other and then go on to how can relate with each other. Finding the time for tolerance, withholding judgement and giving consideration to varied life experiences. Only then can we rediscover the joys of shared experiences, with the follow on of making possible the seeing and sharing in responses beyond our own limited ken.  

Standing Tall

Time to change, time to look after the small man, time at last to restore a balance and equality back into our land. Picking up from my previous posts, Time to Stand Up and Public or Private?, we need to move forward to where there is a safety net for the small man.The well-heeled and the big corporations surround themselves with pet lawyers who use a big purse to wear down and over-load any less endowed claimant until they give up and go away. Not because their claim has no merit just because their purse is insufficient to overcome the stonewalling defence put up against them. This is not right and has taken us to this point were we exist in a very unjust society. Not a tactic just used by corporations of course but also by government departments, who stonewall, hide behind layers of bureaucracy rather than admit they have exceeded their powers or worse, made a mistaken decision.


The small man with a just claim needs a robust and well-funded ally. So a number of prerequisite to sort out. Means tested, so those with the wherewithal make their own way up to the point where they have mortgaged their futures. Spurious, just trying it on claims weeded out by a common sense pragmatic collection of top of 'Clapham Bus' riders. Only claims where there is a self-evident injustice, misuse of power or a principle of application or interpretation to be established, to be taken up. Well-funded in that successes are re-cycled back into fresh cases, less recompense of losses incurred. Bearing in mind that most indignant victims only want to see justice served and are 'not in it for the money', they should be taken at face value. Well-funded in that some of the income generated from the crown baubles that are to be returned to the Nation, are to be used to champion the underdogs, as a fitting restitution. Robust as bottomless purse can afford to serially engage those with a social conscience and a proven track record. So a self-sufficency budget will emerge with victories ploughed back in and the weeding out the thin weaker cases that do not have a wider social impact.


Politically neutral it goes without saying, a terrier biting at the heels of government departments that exceed or abuse the powers they have given themselves or a rotweiller taking on the multinationals with a false sense of being untouchable. Maybe, just maybe then the small man can escape from being the perpetual underdog and can learn to stand tall and take an active and proud part in the magnificence this Nation has to offer. Now no longer just for the well-heeled or connected but for all with an actual fairness and equity, not just purported. However taking back the baubles from the few privileged family members who have until now had sole enjoyment, baubles extracted from the poor over the centuries, may require the storming of a few castles first. The result, a fair and just society. It is not a unrealistic pipe-dream, if could happen if we, all the small men wanted it enough.

Time to Stand Up

A silly little thing really, has sparked off this post. The Royal Mail smashed a bottle during delivery, offered six stamps as compensation and rigidly refused any other compensation. So what? Well the small man gets a raw deal. Nothing new in that, all down the ages the small man gets well trodden underfoot by all those over and above him. And yet, and yet times have changed. Ever since that woman with her narrow single-minded short-term focus ripped up our society, all prior presumptions have changed. 

Once the government was exemplar for truth, being correct, high standards, fairness and with a concern for the well-being of our Nation. Not any more. The focus and agenda has shifted as these former aspirations drift down the priorities and a new culture permeates the corridors. Performance, cost-effectiveness, media reaction, deniablity all take precedences to the old gold standards. When pride and public service was the watch word, the Royal Mail performance was held in high esteem. Not now, nobody cares and they shield themselves and their indifferent service behind reams of legal red tape. First class? Might be any time within three days but do not bother to query until three weeks have passed. Nobody cares. Yet the rigours of competition were supposed to put them on their toes, but where is the competition to deliver my letter to any where in the world? Right, the Royal Mail are in their death throes so it matters little in the end. But what does matter, is that a previous public service is allowed to lapse and drift into unacceptable levels of bad service and indifference. Not just the Royal Mail see also BT, electricity, gas, water, NHS, British Rail, household rubbish collection, parking wardens or any service to the public that used to be governed by civic pride and being answerable to the man in the street. Not any more. Commercial interests come first, user complaints are robustly refuted. The man in the street is held at a long arms length by legal parameters that were not drawn up with any intention that the common man could ever challenge their intrinsic inequality. The Common Law precept of a contract fairly entered into with equity of terms stood on its head, with the loser, the small man.

This is not just a rail against the commercialisation of public services. What I want to highlight is this drift, under the pretence of choice, commercial pressures, making 'providers' more accountable, these essential services, are actually becoming less answerable to the common man. This quasi 'commercial' element giving them a blanket of inaccessibility, beyond reproach, beyond the need to respond. They operate at a higher altitude able to ignore the real or imaginary complaints of all those people that have to use them and have no other choice. A real commercial operation has to listen to its users or they go elsewhere, there is real meaningful choice. Not with these services to the public. They are only the one providers we can goto, indifferent, passably bad, moderately reasonable, it matters not, we have to use them and acquiesce silently to all their failings, errors and consequential costs that might arise. Without recourse to any remedy. Yes, yes set up with a labyrinthine complaints procedure designed to protect the organisation from accepting fault, not to protecting the rights of the innocent victim of their failings.

I know the common man is prone to exaggeration, trying it on, going for those with big pockets with spurious legal claims but amongst all them are real victims suffering consequences, not of their making, and unable to get justice. Those not small people of course, like the ones that set up and operate these services for the public, are well placed, always have a contact that they can make to see their right answer comes out. Else they have the means to buy legal clout to ensure they get their just desserts. From their privileged view these organisations are answerable and responsive. Not in this two speed society for the small man.

Not just these services to public, but also the government organisations whose function it is to deal with the public. The old gold standards are gone, now it is fudge, obscuration, clear the desk quickly and on to the next, must meet the targets, never mind that problem resolution falls by the wayside. They is always a flip, glib answer that will see it gets buried and off the desk. Taking time to understand the nature of the concern, taking time to see what and how a problem might be answered are no long relevant. Information issued and released by the government is now no longer a model of factual correctness. It is now just a political tool to warp public opinion and win media support. A sad sick society that is not even able to answer honestly and transparently about itself. Wow, huge claims. For example, this really grates with me, some ten years ago the government stopped even trying to count the unemployed. The unemployed were redefined to be only those who complied with a state prescribed work search procedure and were therefore acceptable for signing on. Anyone else is disregarded and not counted. Served a political goal of the time but the (compliant) 'unemployed' are nothing like the best figure for the actually unemployed. Now the (compliant) 'unemployed' totals are taken as absolute, no question as to how many it leaves out. Word play with a hidden agenda. We the small man suffer and are denied usable mechanisms to seek relief.