You may have seen or heard that Rishi Sunak’s latest ruse to rescue his leadership ambitions in the race against Liz Truss, is to promise a £10 fine for those who miss NHS and Doctors’ Appointments.
Whilst some of those more likely to blame all this on a conspiracy amongst us have immediately blamed this as the sign of the first steps to widespread charging for health services, I’m afraid that the reality is far more prosaic. It instead tells us more about just how desperate these self-styled leaders have now really become.
I have not encountered one person and amongst them even teenagers, who have not been scratching their heads when discussing the promises that are being dished out by these two wannabe Prims Ministers, and the blaringly obvious absence of any solutions to the problems that we are experiencing now, or indeed any of those that a growing number of us recognise that will soon come.
The Tory beauty contest, or what we should really recognise as a race to the bottom, is not built on any policy ideas or even suggestions that are either tangible or have real meaning in any way. Simply because all of the tools they have are the very same tools that created the problems, and it was the same thinking that they are now offering us wrapped up differently that has created the pathway to chaos that we are now on.
That ALL of our MPs treat the electorate with complete contempt should now be a given. However, for many of us, there remains the childlike willingness to believe that what appears to be new is always guaranteed to bring change. The problem is that in this top-down system, the more we are told things change, the more they stay the same.
The reality that are MPs and this entire political culture refuses to face, is that all the problems and difficulties that we are now facing, have been facilitated by them in their ignorance and willingness to play up with every action and breath to their paymasters. Business leaders, bankers, elites and even union leaders who have never had to explain the consequences for real people when they have been passing out the metaphorical brown envelopes and stroking the palms of 650 useful fools.
Everything we have is broken and now beginning to wreak havoc and inflict pain upon us, because greed and selfishness are the basic foundations upon which everything has been focused, redirected and changed.
Cash handouts will certainly help those at the white-hot edge of the coming inferno. But that help will only repel the growing flames for a very short time.
The only way that people – and that means all of us – can now be genuinely helped, will be for the whole system to be overturned, broken and then rebuilt. Not in any way top-down as before with the focus on money and wealth. But putting people first, alongside localities and communities – recognising the real value of every relationship, of being happy to simply be and what it means to do right by everyone and everything, instead of this broken idea of living, that values everything in terms of what its price, cost or return will ultimately be or mean.
To the people who want to run this Country, real pain and hardship caused by the consequences of biased and unfair regulation is not something they have the capacity to understand. Indeed, they represent and give meaning to everything that is wrong with the world that we live in, and the only way they could change any of it would be to think, act and speak in a way which is completely at odds with the people and the thinking that makes them who they genuinely believe they are.
Adam Tugwell 