Privatisation not accountability
In the years of the social democratic consensus (basically, from the end of the Second World War to the late 1970s), there was a good chance that you would be employed by a nationalised company and live in council housing or a home whose rent was capped by the state. Political decisions at Westminster had a clear and direct impact on your life in fairly obvious ways. Announcements made at the dispatch box would have a direct and pretty rapid impact on the lives of millions.
After decades of privatisation, deregulation and spending cuts, the lines of accountability are tangled. Outsourcing means that, in England, if you have a health problem and call the NHS helpline 111, you reach one of a scattering of disconnected call centres run by a private US-based company called Sitel, who may well refer you to a clinic that is also run by another private company. And if something goes wrong and you want to complain, it’s not at all clear who you go to.
It’s the same in education, and elsewhere. More and more schools are run by academy chains with chief executives who have very little accountability to the local councillors you elect. Your gas and electricity bills aren’t set, as they once were, by nationalised companies, but by private businesses. You pay your train fares not to British Rail, but to one of an endlessly shifting background of brands, whose names all sound pretty similar.
If wages flatline and prices soar, driving people into poverty and the already poor into destitution, then that’s not a failure of government policy – it's an unavoidable consequence of the natural forces of the market, the result of a baffling, tangled web that only the big boys understand.
And there’s nothing you can do about it. Instead, we’re told, anything we do try to do about it – like asking for a pay rise – will make things worse.
Performance not participation
Politics has stopped being a negotiation about how we live together and has increasingly become a performance on our TVs or smartphones, a spectacle that we are supposed to watch, not take part in. Politics doesn’t happen in your daily life, but in Westminster.
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