You Have Been Insulted
As regular readers of this blog will know, I occasionally get angry about things our government are doing. In fact, over the years, as I’ve become generally more aware of the politics of the UK, I’ve been getting ever angrier. Angry about the BNP, for example; angry about the invasion of Iraq, about our education policy (essentially ‘if you can’t take an exam in it, does it count?’ and, worse, ‘blame the kids’) and of course, most recently, angry about what our government is trying to do to the NHS. I think the thing which has me most worked up is this controversial issue of ‘duty of care’. According to current UK law, the government has a duty of care towards all its citizens, within which few precious words is implied a responsibility to damn well look after us regardless of race, creed, colour and – of course – income. But the NHS reforms currently proposed appears to scrap this, which does raise the question of what the hell it is our government is planning in replacing this idea with? This isn’t the place for my rant on the subject of our health services… I’ve had that one and you can all find it in earlier blogs. This is a more politics-specific rant, as, on the subject of the NHS, and in a rare moment for me, I protested. Not in a very dynamic way, not in a go-out-into-them-mean-streets sorta manner, but through an organisation called 38 Degrees I signed petitions, wrote letters and generally put my name to a collective cry of ‘whoa there jimbo, we’re really not happy about this’. Tens of thousands of others joined in this activity, and we achieved…
… well, not that much.
We didn’t stop the bill, we didn’t stop the government forcing the measures through to the House of Lords for a reading, but I damn well hope we raised questions, led to debates, made our voices known and all the things which frankly, the democratic process stands for. As they say… it’s not always the winning so much as the taking part, which seems the entire democratic system of the UK summed up, however dearly I do wish we’d won.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when a few days ago I received an email entitled ‘You’ve Been Insulted’. At first I assumed it’s spam – spammers these days being highly inventive about the ways they get you to open your inbox – but looking at the email address I recognised it as originating from 38 Degrees, the campaign group I’ve been protesting through.
“Yesterday Health Minister Simon Burns compared 38 Degrees members to zombies – for emailing our own MPs about risks to the NHS!” proclaimed the email. It didn’t seem very likely, and I rolled my eyes a little at the way people manage to dress these things up to promote an agenda even if, in this case, the agenda is mine.
“Watch this video clip!” it proclaimed, and so with a sense of ‘let’s see what you’ve done now’ I did indeed. And knock me down with a feather, but there indeed was Simon Burns, Health Minister, announcing not only that this organisation which, seems to me, to be little more than a movement of politically-aware citizens, has ‘zombie-like’ tendencies, but that we are ‘frightening people.’ Oddly enough, the accusation that I was a zombie (I suppose, therefore, blindly following in the steps of others rather than thinking for myself) didn’t make me nearly so angry as the suggestion that I and those of my ilk who had signed petitions on this subject, are ‘frightening people’. We may not have all the facts, we may indeed, be wrong, and I’m open to persuasion on this subject, but understanding MPs these days is a surprisingly difficult task. Both government and opposition use the same language to say different things, and both can prove their entirely contradictory points with absolutely contrasting, yet immediately testable statistics, or acquire equally reverent looking experts to testify to entirely opposing views. There is a language in politics which says very little at great length, discussing massive ideas without ever once saying a word which might have meaning.
Alright, I thought, perhaps I’m seeing this clip out of context, so off I trotted to BBC iPlayer to scan through parliamentary health discussions for that day and sure enough, there is Simon Burns, announcing that I am a frightening person and alas, the context does not appear to redeem him. Where before I might have been open to the government laying out its health policies in a rational and comprehensible manner, suddenly I sit up and realise that this man has no real respect for my views or, it seems, the nature of democracy itself. Democracy is a flawed system, but as Churchill put it, the least bad system available – it is reliant on discussion, debate, on differing views and argument, on listening to the people and either convincing them or acknowledging them. What arrogance – what mind-blowing arrogance! – to then turn round and dismiss tens of thousands of people and their views as ‘zombie-like’ and ‘frightening’. A whole segment of society, a whole mass of people, educated and concerned people, and what are we to our politicians, to our leaders? We are an irritating buzz, to be swatted away and disregarded. And that, more than anything else our government has said or done, I can not forgive.
