(no subject)

[chess]

First, a practical thing: does anyone know much about chiropody in Cambridge? I appear to have ingrowing toenails which keep being ingrowing again after I attack them viciously with toenail-cutting implements, and I'd like to find someone competent to work out what's gone wrong, but I don't really know how to go about this without it costing lots of money.

Second, http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/ is a very good website, and reminds me why I am distinctly puzzled how otherwise perfectly nice people can vote Tory, given their vast preference for the 'hanging/flogging' and 'free market' end of the scale. The free market is not very nice (it promotes inequality which makes people resentful, it means some people starve whilst others live in luxury, it is *not very nice*) and punishing criminals rather than trying to rehabilitate them is also not very nice. I probably have more cogent arguements why each is a bad idea, but fundamentally I object to them because they are Not Very Nice.

Thirdly, it's springtime and sunny, but everything still feels and tastes like dust and ashes to me. I just walked out of church this morning and went home because I felt I was harming the important things that were going on there (lots of prayer for the summer mission and some people going out to do primary healthcare stuff in rural India) just by being there. I'm not really sure what's wrong; I just have that big cloak of cobwebs back.

Comments

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

I should say that I voted Conservative last time round, but I'm not a party member; the question of for whom I shall vote is still an open one.

Yes, I understand that it's not fair for someone to spend a lifetime working for a pittance and then retire on a small state pension. But neither is it at all productive to pay people such unemployment benefits that it is more profitable to spend one's time working the benefit system than to work - and then to make such a thing socially acceptable! Such an attitude is at least as enforcing of the distinction between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' than any right-wing pseudo-apartheid. It's not just the fact that Tories dislike having their money taken from them and given to those more deserving of it. It's also that the complexity of the regulations to prove whether one is deserving of it or not deters many actually deserving people from claiming benefit! Would it not be easier to charge less tax on pensions, say, than to give pensioners a tax credit? And while we're on the subject of pensioners, I have never been given a good justification of the taxing of pension funds that has left black holes in the retirement provision of millions of people and seriously damaged companies that provide pensions.

At the same time, there is a perception (true or false) among the British public that the law has much greater provision for protecting the rights of criminals and punishing the minor misdemeanors of law-abiding folk than for actually punishing crime. There are endless stories about how careful the police need to be, how much paperwork needs filling in for each reported crime (let alone an actual arrest), and so on. This leads on to the question of waste in public services.

There is such regulation in the public sector that people have to be employed to spend all their time doing nothing but ensuring that these targets are met - not on the regulatory end, but at the point of provision. Specifically in healthcare, promises to add additional money in return for increased 'results' will result in much of that money being taken up in tracking whether or not those results are occuring. In schools, the linking of funding and prestige to test results has led predictably to children being schooled precisely in how to pass the tests rather than in any particular knowledge. And it's not as if the tests result in useful qualifications; does nobody understand what a rising pass rate on a standardised test means?

Toryism is about decentralisation and middle-class values, about decreases in central control and about simplification of the whole system; it is about improvements in efficiency and attempts to have a competently run country rather than a country that concentrates on appearing as if it is competently run. Tories believe that the country is tired of the concentration on style over substance that has dogged this Government.

I'm not sure how much of the above rhetoric I believe, to be honest. It's full of simplifications and I know there are counterexamples (but I can actually back most of that up; it's not just trolling). But the above would be some of my basic arguments, if not for voting Tory, then at least for voting 'Not Labour'.

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

Since you're not sure how much you believe, it's probably best I don't get too bogged down in a big argument with you :) but rest assured you don't come across as at all trollish. There are certainly many reasons for not voting Labour; my main reason for avoiding Labour is because of the way they've failed to deliver on their promises in the field of education, scrapping free university education (thereby putting "rich" middle-class kids at the mercy of parents when it comes to university choice) and introducing endless SATS.

But neither is it at all productive to pay people such unemployment benefits that it is more profitable to spend one's time working the benefit system than to work - and then to make such a thing socially acceptable!
It sounds as if you +do+ adhere to this part of the Tory ethos (though I may be wrong!), and I agree that, if it was really the case that working the system was generally easier than working full stop, then they might have a point. But myself and several members of my family have run the gauntlet of the dole office when claiming JSA and sickness benefit, and have found the whole process quite nightmarish! I would much rather spend my life working at a respected, decently-paid job than navigating that bureaucratic midden.

"It's also that the complexity of the regulations to prove whether one is deserving of it or not deters many actually deserving people from claiming benefit"
This sentence confuses me, as it sounds as if it might contradict the presvious statement I quoted - is it easier to draw the dole than to work, or not, in your opinion? Personally, I think that the best way to encourage the scroungers among us to get back to work is to bring in a minimum wage that isn't laughable, and pay "unskilled" and manual workers a lot better (not to mention nurses!); sadly neither the Tories nor Labour have done anywhere near enough in this department.

I'll have to take your word for it about decentralization, as I've not heard any Tories mention that lately.What do you mean exactly by "middle-class values" though?

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

"It's also that the complexity of the regulations to prove whether one is deserving of it or not deters many actually deserving people from claiming benefit"
As in, if you can't afford to spend much time finding out what your rights are because you're working all day at some minimum-wage job...

Yes, one way to get scroungers into work could be to raise minimum wage. It's a difficult problem, because raising the minimum wage hits the economy by increasing overheads for labour-intensive companies - they then go abroad. Witness the callcentre people.

----
'Decentralisation' as in the relaxing of central control somewhat (targets and so on) - linked to the cutting of waste in public services. I guess 'decentralisation' isn't so much the right phrase as 'letting public service providers just get on with doing their job'.

'Middle-class values' - generally, the promotion of ethical and honest behaviour, the protection of law-abiding citizens, the promotion of marriage and the family unit (*without* the gay-bashing that people associate with that position), the idea of self-betterment through hard work, and other things people really shouldn't have a problem with. All the cool parties promote them. For more information, see the broadsheet news.

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

"As in, if you can't afford to spend much time finding out what your rights are because you're working all day at some minimum-wage job..."
I was more wondering how that statement fitted in with the previous one, than confused as to it's actual meaning.

Regarding the middle-class values you mention, I have indeed seen a lot about them in the "broadsheet news" (though they vary wildly from broadsheet to broadsheet, hence my need to know which values in particular you personally were referring to), and am currently hard put to name a single middle-class person I know who espouses all those values, though I guess most people from all walks of life espouse one or two. For instance, though I am middle-class, I feel nothing but contempt for the ideal of marriage; I also question the universal worth of the family unit as it seems to be defined currently. I think the nuclear model of the family owes too much to patriarchy and social control of the working classes. These are just examples, but what I'm getting at is that the Tories' (or any political parties') claim to voice the deep emotions of the middle-classes is deeply suspicious.

[chess]

I dislike, in general, the idea of 'letting public service providers just get on with doing their job', because I've seen it translate into 'letting public service providers get away with seeing almost no patients, having endless meetings about what colour the paper of a certain form ought to be, getting expensive caterers in for said meals, and generally being lazy and living it up because there are no managers to check the budget is being spent sensibly'.

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

I agree. Whatever one's views on privatisation in theory, I don't think it's possible to argue that it's been disastrous in practise over a number of sectors in this country - my local NHS is a sorry farce, and so are my local bus and train services (I also seriously doubt whether they could be improved by greater decentralization, because I'd hate to think of the current brood of chimpanzees running the Devon NHS having sole say in the matter of my health.) Obviously setting as many people to watch public services raises the question "who will watch over the watchers?", and increased surveillance won't be enough to eradicate all abuse of power (an actual work ethic is required too) but I do think the current public services need to be far more accountable to the public than they are.

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

The NHS is very far from privatised. Even the Internal Market set up by Ken Clarke was pretty much dismantled under Labour; the NHS is your classic inefficient state-run mess.

The statistics about rail privatisation are pretty much unanswerable - capacity, total number of passengers carried, investment and number of services have all actually increased rapidly since privatisation - despite the fact that it was done horribly badly, and it could be improved very easily by introducing (gasp) actual compettition, which the public appear to be scared of. What has fallen (by about five percent) is punctuality; but this was almost inevitable and is mostly due to mass obsolesence (which is due to the country being unable to afford to run a nationalised rail service...).

What's also unanswerable is the American and Australian rail networks, both of which are *necessary* to each country and are therefore run privately, as it's far too serious a business to be left to the politicians.

Furthermore, consider our own history. The time Britain lead the world in rail transport was pre-1945, when the Railways were privatised.

The most obvious example of privatisation working is British Airways; a dead weight nationalised, a profitable corporation (even now, when most airlines are losing money) privatised.

[joysilence.livejournal.com]

I'm not suggesting that whether a service is privatised or not is the only factor in its efficiency and success. For example, Britain's private railways may have led the world pre-1945, but back then, there were no cars. Likewise a service can be public-run and still be in a mess, especially if the bureaucrats in charge are left to quietly run their own rackets and dip their hands in the till.

I understand that many consider the NHS should be +more+ privatised, but to my mind it is still considerably more privatised than, say, the French system. I suppose peoples' definitions of what constitutes a privatised company could vary.

Regarding your series of corporate examples, if yo look back on my comment, I never at any point suggested privatised companies were all doomed to failure, just that much privatisation has been disastrously managed in this country. If you want my opinion about whether privatisation as a whole is "good" or "bad", I'm broadly opposed to making any core service (e.g. the NHS or public transport) profit-driven, but believe that any government-run core service needs to be far more tightly regulated than is currently the case.

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

If your vote is in Peterborough, vote Conservative; it's a vaguely-marginal (4% swing would take it) Labour-held from Conservative seat in which voting against Labour is the correct route for a Libertarian of any stripe.

If your vote is in Cambridge, it really wouldn't matter who you vote for, Anne Campbell will almost certainly be returned barring disasters for Labour (such a swing replicated nationwide would produce a Conservative majority).

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

North West Cambridgeshire, safe Tory seat (Brian Mawhinney). Except that he's stepping down and I know /nothing/ about the new man Shavinder Kalcutt.

[tienelle.livejournal.com]

Is he the same guy who sends out Institute of Physics e-mails? I seem to remember him associated with e-mails about Nexus.

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

Don't count on Anne Campbell being re-elected. She's only got a majority of a few thousand and Cambridge is particularly full of wooly anti-war liberals.

[ilanin.livejournal.com]

It'd need a ten percent swing.

This will not happen, in Cambridge or anywhere else.

Last election Cambridge had the biggest anti-Labour swing of anywhere I'm aware of nationwide, and it wasn't anywhere near enough. The protest vote is already protesting and in the Liberal column.

AND Anne Campbell resigned from her government job over the Iraqi war, as I'm sure she'll be reminding people, repeatedly.

[edith-the-hutt.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced. Last election a lot of Labour voters stayed at home. This time they'll be actively voting Lib Dem. The war has really got people riled and I'm not sure a simple resignation will help.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

David Howarth | Liberal Democrat | 19,152
Anne Campbell | Labour | 14,813

Wonders will never cease.