Only the crassest and the most shallow minded consider that everything costs and therefore everything must pay its way. A way of thinking as befits a grocers daughter or some similar philistine banal mindset. We have to lift our heads up out of the mud our feet are wading through to see higher aspirations, to have hope for a better future, to be inspired by the achievements of those around us and most of all to have a vision for how all on this planet can experience a better life. Big dreams. In the real world there is not unlimited money and there are a thousand competing priorities. Put cost as your first and overriding starting point and the dreams will never even emerge. But without dreams we can never realise a better quality of life no matter how that quality might be imagined. Cost and payback are not the determining factor in a civilised society. Never to be ignored, always with a watchful eye but not the bottom line criterion that they have become.
I am ranging way beyond culture the obvious candidate for cost cutting. Yes culture of course to lift the spirit, to raise the hope even just to endeavour to reach beyond the immediate now, we need arts, we need crafts, we need music, we need graphics in all its forms to give shape and meaning to otherwise vague ephemeral glimpses beyond the mundane over familiar present day. Can we agree that culture, with its high costs and indeterminate payback, is a given must have, that frames us as civilised and not savages? If you think it is a no, then this site really is not for you, you must look elsewhere.
What I want to promote is the concept of service as an aspirational tool to achieve a better quality of life, for all. 'Service' this word is heavily overworked and has an extraordinary wide range of meanings and connotations. The common usages I want to focus on is, according to the sOED, 'Service' as conduct tending to the welfare or advantage of another and 'Service' as a branch of public employment of such body concerned with some particular work or the supply of some particular need. Service in today's climate is denigrated and demeaned, seen at best as a charity cause to help out those pitiful people too poor to do better. It didn't use to be like that, service industries were once seen as the powerhouse to lift and raise our aspirations as a nation and power us to a better more modern way of life. These are not bad or irrelevant objectives even in today's world? Being able to offer service to an individuals must be the hallmark of a democratic civilised society. Helping those in their moment of need until they can strike out confidently on their own again. Sounds like the sort of place I would like to be.
Maybe a ticket office manned to help cut through the complexities of tariffs, timetable and alternate conflicting options. Maybe a visible approachable and friendly policeman able to calm, reassure or direct, that would be nice. Of course the more obvious of a nurse with time to reassure, talk and to really understand what is troubling a patient. Or a teacher able to spend time one to one to help that one child overcome their confusion about some new topic. Service providers who are not seen as cost centres, who are required to prove their worth on a daily basis, who are not required to complete offers of help to some predetermined timeslot. The worth is there in payback dividends but not in profit returns the bean counters understand. So the list can go on, Tax Collectors able to spend time to understand the exception's and find more fitting rules, or JobCentre Advisers with the skills and time to actually understand a seekers capabilities with the realistic knowledge of local opportunities. Indeed wherever we as individuals interface with the providers of our wants or needs then there is an essential service input, an input which may not show a profit but certainly oils the wheels and helps society to move smoothly. What price do you put on that?
Services also include all the utility services, water, electricity, gas, sewers, telephones, refuse collection and the mail. Once state run they were sold off, amid a great fanfare, to companies whose driving force is profit first. Yet they are essential services, services that are at the foundation of the wellbeing to our UKplc. If any of these cinderella services are not there in place with the right capacity our ability as a nation to grow and develop is hampered. Look no further than the stranglehold the provision of highspeed broadband has on any commercial enterprise that is not located in a major conurbation. UKplc is held to ransom because it is 'not profitable' to provide in these smaller communities. Utility Services sold off because in some naive tunnel vision view of some other fantasy world, competition equates to efficiency. No. Equally, state run enterprise does not mean inefficient and extravagant. So make your choice, do you run them for profit for the benefit of shareholders, or, run them well for the benefit of the society that relies on them?
Finally, Public Service, another broad wide ranging category, now much maligned and held in disdain. Once the pinnacle of UKplc governance, held in esteem around the world, for its expertise, for its detachment and for its impartiality. What happened? Did we run out of good enough scholars to enter the civil services. No, of course not. A deliberate decision was taken to politicise the output of the civil service, overturning centuries of impartial advice. In this new way of thinking, unless civil services responses fully reflected the political aspirations of the government of the time, it was rejected and overturned. Such a small seemingly innocuous step but having catastrophic impact. Now there is no government edict, no report, no forecast, nothing emanating from government that can be trusted or relied on. Everything has to viewed with suspicion for political bias. There is no objectivity, there is no impartiality, everything is tainted with political expediency. Not any way to run a company let alone UKplc.
One woman overturned centuries of governance evolution and wrought chaos. Benefits? Once the initial feeding frenzy for the 'free' goodies on offer had subsided, are we better off, driven by profit for shareholder benefit? Have we totally lost the concept of service to the people to enable them to grow and blossom? Bring back Service to the People, bring hope for a better future for us all.
Saturday, 4 February 2017
Saturday, 21 January 2017
Normal Distorted
We live in a hyperPC (politically correct) world where we are all afraid of causing offence to one or other minority group by speaking out of turn. The media is fired up to seize on any example and balloon it into yet another demonstration of prejudice / victimisation / social discrimination with all the hullabaloo that follows. Quite right too, we all have the greatest sympathy for the oppressed or abused and willingly offer compassion to the underdog.
My problem is that by constant headlining of the trials and travails of these minorities distorts our sense of the normal. Whether it is single mums, gay partners wanting a child, disabled access, religious rites, whatever the subject the focus on their rights and proper concerns creates the impression that this is a concern for all of our society. No it is not! It is not 'normal' to be a single mum and raise children on your own. They are a minority group. The media may choose to focus on single mums for the instant high emotive appeal and easy message they make. But that creates a distorted view. The majority normal group are couples raising a family under one roof. That should be our datum of judgement and expectation. Not the travails of the single parent. Sure, some single mums are truly victims and deserve all our support but not all. Some just choose to be single for thin reasons and all the barriers should not be thrown down to help them. Our perspective that we use to for judgements should be firmly and squarely founded on the 'normal'. If the minority position overshadows and clouds our judgement we cannot come to a proper balanced view.
Gay couples, or if it comes to that post menstrual women or mid-career women coming late to conception are rich media targets to explain and justify high-tech solutions to creating new babies. But this is not the normal process. The normal way as used by the majority of adults seeking, or even just ending up with, babies, is do it the routine old-fashioned way. No scientific technology required, other than perhaps to defer the chance of success. In a world where there are just too many people having too many babies and where there are way too many babies dying for simple wants, or just as bad, babies growing up bereft of any hope of escape from intolerable conditions, why do we resort to scientific techniques to create even more? Understandably there is the scientific desire to advance our understanding and increase our skills in solving our human condition, but is that sufficient justification? Or is it driven by a selfish egoism craving for that trophy child that solidifies your status in society? By over-focussing on these minorities concerns we lose perspective and fail to consider the broader and more fundamental platform of that of the normal majority. We should be challenging the scientists right to use their ever sophisticated techniques, we should unite and focus their attention where the real creation issues are. The normal majority are getting on with it just fine.
On another tack we are a Christian based society. The overwhelming number of us subscribe to the Christian codes of conduct and moral standards. No longer are most of us practising Christian, going to church with any frequency, but the Christian background as to how our society holds together is deeply rooted in each of us. Part of that Christian background is the requirement within each of us to be tolerant and supportive of other faiths. Supportive in the narrow sense of not hindering rituals and practises of another faith but not to the extent of proactively promoting another faith. That clearly is for them. However if we take these rituals and customs of minority group faiths out of context, a minority group, and elevate each travail and setback as a challenge to the majority Christian society we again are getting the perspective out of kilter again. We are hosts to a wide range of people with a wide range of minority religious beliefs, whether Greek Orthodoxy, Jews, Seven Day Evangelist's, Muslim, Buddhist, it matters not, our duty as the host society is to be tolerant and accommodating of rituals which may appear as strange and out of place. Certainly there should be no discrimination based on a different religious belief. As guests within a host society it befalls on them as guest to constrain their beliefs and rituals, to go out and discover which of their practise cause the most unease amongst their hosts and find ways to tone it down or explain it so as to minimise the chance of causing upset. It is not for the host to set aside the majority position just to let a minority group carry on doing as it wishes regardless. If your religion requires the ritual killing of an animal, if your religion requires your girls to be genitally mutilated or submit to an arranged marriage, if your religion requires compliance with Sharia Law or your religion requires a full burka, don't expect your hosts to set aside their objectives of a free open society where women and men both have opportunities to succeed. You as a minority group in a society will have to defer to the majority expectations in the full knowledge that your desires will be met with tolerance and goodwill.
Just one final note of despair. In bald terms 20% of our populations are disabled in some degree or other and only 1% of out population are wheelchair disabled. A pretty small number, 1% against 99%, right. Disabled toilets are designed around the needs of wheelchair users as defined by the gold standard reference. Selwyn Goldsmiths 'Designing for the Disabled'. The author goes to considerable lengths to emphasis that each disabled person requirements are different and that there is no one suit all arrangement. Behold the Building Regulations lay down standardised disable toilet arrangements that are deemed to suit. Sense the irony? Of course disabled people should not be discriminated against and should be free to travel and move around freely without constraint. To counter discrimination there is a legal requirement that premises open to the public shall provide wheelchair suitable toilet facilities. That speaks for the 1%. The 99% other people also have a right to move around without constraint. The toilet they most frequently encounter in all the shops and public spaces, apart from the very few municipal conveniences left, will be designed for wheelchair disabled use. A toilet which will not suit many of the wheelchair users it is supposed to be designed to help. Wide open out doors. Extra space for a person to stand beside the wheelchair, space to side transfer from chair to seat. Hand holds, alarms, seat height heights, elbow action taps, basin and mirror height accessible from chair. Cosy for those wheelchair users that just happen to have the right handicap to suit that particular arrangement. As a member of the 18% or so of the elderly population I can confirm that the ability to hold on until a suitable public toilet can be located diminishes with age and begins to become critical. We have urgent needs to be met. Not to wait in a queue until the one oversized, occupying the space for at least two cubicles, unisex facility is free. There to be confronted with appliances set too low at that risk back damage from stooping, or fumbling with flimsy elbow fittings or even worse a toilet out of commission because the disabled friendly levers and handles just cannot cope with high public usage. It is ended up all-about-face. The majority, the normal person on the street has to accepted compromised facilities which are slewed to suit the needs of a very small minority of users.
A wide range of high principled objectives have resulted in completely distorting the wide spread recognition of what it is to be normal within the broadband of the majority. The majority now identify themselves from the narrow perspective of the small minority groups point of view. It is all an Alice in Wonderland distortion.
My problem is that by constant headlining of the trials and travails of these minorities distorts our sense of the normal. Whether it is single mums, gay partners wanting a child, disabled access, religious rites, whatever the subject the focus on their rights and proper concerns creates the impression that this is a concern for all of our society. No it is not! It is not 'normal' to be a single mum and raise children on your own. They are a minority group. The media may choose to focus on single mums for the instant high emotive appeal and easy message they make. But that creates a distorted view. The majority normal group are couples raising a family under one roof. That should be our datum of judgement and expectation. Not the travails of the single parent. Sure, some single mums are truly victims and deserve all our support but not all. Some just choose to be single for thin reasons and all the barriers should not be thrown down to help them. Our perspective that we use to for judgements should be firmly and squarely founded on the 'normal'. If the minority position overshadows and clouds our judgement we cannot come to a proper balanced view.
Gay couples, or if it comes to that post menstrual women or mid-career women coming late to conception are rich media targets to explain and justify high-tech solutions to creating new babies. But this is not the normal process. The normal way as used by the majority of adults seeking, or even just ending up with, babies, is do it the routine old-fashioned way. No scientific technology required, other than perhaps to defer the chance of success. In a world where there are just too many people having too many babies and where there are way too many babies dying for simple wants, or just as bad, babies growing up bereft of any hope of escape from intolerable conditions, why do we resort to scientific techniques to create even more? Understandably there is the scientific desire to advance our understanding and increase our skills in solving our human condition, but is that sufficient justification? Or is it driven by a selfish egoism craving for that trophy child that solidifies your status in society? By over-focussing on these minorities concerns we lose perspective and fail to consider the broader and more fundamental platform of that of the normal majority. We should be challenging the scientists right to use their ever sophisticated techniques, we should unite and focus their attention where the real creation issues are. The normal majority are getting on with it just fine.
On another tack we are a Christian based society. The overwhelming number of us subscribe to the Christian codes of conduct and moral standards. No longer are most of us practising Christian, going to church with any frequency, but the Christian background as to how our society holds together is deeply rooted in each of us. Part of that Christian background is the requirement within each of us to be tolerant and supportive of other faiths. Supportive in the narrow sense of not hindering rituals and practises of another faith but not to the extent of proactively promoting another faith. That clearly is for them. However if we take these rituals and customs of minority group faiths out of context, a minority group, and elevate each travail and setback as a challenge to the majority Christian society we again are getting the perspective out of kilter again. We are hosts to a wide range of people with a wide range of minority religious beliefs, whether Greek Orthodoxy, Jews, Seven Day Evangelist's, Muslim, Buddhist, it matters not, our duty as the host society is to be tolerant and accommodating of rituals which may appear as strange and out of place. Certainly there should be no discrimination based on a different religious belief. As guests within a host society it befalls on them as guest to constrain their beliefs and rituals, to go out and discover which of their practise cause the most unease amongst their hosts and find ways to tone it down or explain it so as to minimise the chance of causing upset. It is not for the host to set aside the majority position just to let a minority group carry on doing as it wishes regardless. If your religion requires the ritual killing of an animal, if your religion requires your girls to be genitally mutilated or submit to an arranged marriage, if your religion requires compliance with Sharia Law or your religion requires a full burka, don't expect your hosts to set aside their objectives of a free open society where women and men both have opportunities to succeed. You as a minority group in a society will have to defer to the majority expectations in the full knowledge that your desires will be met with tolerance and goodwill.
Just one final note of despair. In bald terms 20% of our populations are disabled in some degree or other and only 1% of out population are wheelchair disabled. A pretty small number, 1% against 99%, right. Disabled toilets are designed around the needs of wheelchair users as defined by the gold standard reference. Selwyn Goldsmiths 'Designing for the Disabled'. The author goes to considerable lengths to emphasis that each disabled person requirements are different and that there is no one suit all arrangement. Behold the Building Regulations lay down standardised disable toilet arrangements that are deemed to suit. Sense the irony? Of course disabled people should not be discriminated against and should be free to travel and move around freely without constraint. To counter discrimination there is a legal requirement that premises open to the public shall provide wheelchair suitable toilet facilities. That speaks for the 1%. The 99% other people also have a right to move around without constraint. The toilet they most frequently encounter in all the shops and public spaces, apart from the very few municipal conveniences left, will be designed for wheelchair disabled use. A toilet which will not suit many of the wheelchair users it is supposed to be designed to help. Wide open out doors. Extra space for a person to stand beside the wheelchair, space to side transfer from chair to seat. Hand holds, alarms, seat height heights, elbow action taps, basin and mirror height accessible from chair. Cosy for those wheelchair users that just happen to have the right handicap to suit that particular arrangement. As a member of the 18% or so of the elderly population I can confirm that the ability to hold on until a suitable public toilet can be located diminishes with age and begins to become critical. We have urgent needs to be met. Not to wait in a queue until the one oversized, occupying the space for at least two cubicles, unisex facility is free. There to be confronted with appliances set too low at that risk back damage from stooping, or fumbling with flimsy elbow fittings or even worse a toilet out of commission because the disabled friendly levers and handles just cannot cope with high public usage. It is ended up all-about-face. The majority, the normal person on the street has to accepted compromised facilities which are slewed to suit the needs of a very small minority of users.
A wide range of high principled objectives have resulted in completely distorting the wide spread recognition of what it is to be normal within the broadband of the majority. The majority now identify themselves from the narrow perspective of the small minority groups point of view. It is all an Alice in Wonderland distortion.
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