I've been back in the UK for a few months now, and one of the first things I wanted to do when I got back was to catch up with friends and family around the country. What I decided to do was take a mini road trip up the west side of the UK toward Scotland, then down the east side, ultimately back to Oxford. My trip lasted 7 days, it was really good to share a brew and a conversation with friends, but also to photograph some of the beautiful spots around the UK.
The following post is based on conversations I'd had during my road trip, and illustrated with the stills I'd managed to take in between the rain showers.
The profession she decided upon was caring for the elderly, this particular direction was chosen out of a love of talking to the elderly, and learning from their experiences. This is a very demanding line of work. The job involved travelling to the houses of the elderly and tending to their basic needs. In addition, a great deal of patience is needed when working with those who are potentially suffering from mental or physical illnesses, or even both.
It's often the case that elderly people living on their own only come into contact with other human beings when their carers come to visit, so it simply can't be understated how important this job is. Carers often have to bathe their clients, feed them, get them dressed, and even administer their medication. And all of this is done for not much more than a pittance.
The work proved to be very distressing but not for the reasons you're thinking. After several months my close relative felt she could do this job no more, and so it was with great sadness and frustration she handed in her notice. In a phone conversation I was told which straw had broken the camels back.
One of the elderly patients my relative had on occasion cared for was a lady who was unable to get out of bed of her own accord. She was on prescription meds that she was only to take on an empty stomach. The problem was the carers were only allotted 10 minutes a day to tend to this old lady, and in this 10 minutes the carers had to wash, clothe, and feed the patient.
When my relative got to the patient on this particular day, the lady had been in her current clothes for nearly 3 weeks. In her allotted 10 minutes she did her best to get her up, wash her, and change the dirty clothes she'd been in for around 20 days. But the other choice she had to make was whether to feed her and not give her her medication, or to give her the medication and not feed her.
She chose to feed her and leave the medication because she didn't know when the lady would eat again. By the time my relative had done the basics for this lady she was well over her predetermined 10 minutes, but she was so sickened by the neglect shown to her fellow human being she stayed for a few hours to simply keep her company.
The next conversation I had was with a good friend of mine's fiancée. She's a school teacher in the North East of England. She told me how teachers were hamstrung by a constant fascination with statistics. The government league tables can classify both schools and teachers as failures simply by how they perform statistically. What this leads to in reality is a culture that teaches to pass exams.
There is no reward for how inspiring teachers are, or how inventive they are in their ability to motivate young people. They are so restricted in what they can teach in this never ending pursuit of statistics, that it can be quite demoralising. But far worse than this as my friends fiancée pointed out, is that children as young as 6 can be branded failures.
My friends fiancée went on to tell me about a visit she had to a school in Denmark when she was a student. She said the first thing that struck her about this Danish school is that it didn't have any fences, gates, or locked doors. When she asked how they kept the children in, the response was elegantly simple:
The Danes said, "why would they want to leave?"
She went on to tell me how the children's school day was about discovery, and how they were still free to play and have fun. In Denmark they don't begin testing till the age of 14, and yet they still appear higher in the OECD education league tables.
One of my friends mothers who's been a teachers for several decades, has spoken on occasion about how she's seen education change over the years, and generally not for the better. Her basic argument comes down to this, "teachers aren't free to teach anymore".
The last conversation was one I had with another good friend of mine, he's been a housing officer for over 10 years. He works for a company that bought up a huge chunk of council housing in the North East, during a government encouraged sell off scheme. He told me how the company had bought tens of thousands of houses for what worked out to be a mere 7000 pounds per house.
I found this figure to be totally shocking, you can't even buy a new car for 7000 pounds. It's even more shocking when you consider we are constantly told there is a shortage of housing stock in the UK.
Our conversation then went on to discuss how he's seen things change since the austerity measures were introduced by the current government. His description was painfully clear.
He said, " ten years ago you had people who wouldn't pay their rent, but now you only have people who can't pay their rent".
"For far too many people now it's literally a choice between, heating, eating, or paying your rent".
"Which would you pick?"
He went on to tell me about the controversial scheme, nick named the bedroom tax.
He told me sad stories of widows who had been moved out of a house they may have lived in for up to 30 years when their husbands passed away. Up rooting someone at that potentially late point in their lives to save the council maybe 100 to 200 pounds a year, which is a mere drop in the ocean especially compared to the emotional damage it can do.
I asked if these were views shared by all housing officers, and if so how come this message hasn't got back to the local authority. He told be it was, but the harsh reality is that council housing is ran by private contractors, and so as long as they are still making a profit no one cares.
It also seems obvious to me that as long as the government are perceived to be being hard on "welfare scroungers", then the tabloids are happy and so are the people who read them.
The above stories are by no means unique, these stories of neglect, contempt, and statistical cover up occur all over the country.
In the first story, the inhumanity we display to our elderly is utterly shameful. The local authorities set aside "X" of cash amount for the care of each person. This is then out sourced to a private company who's sole job is to work out they can extract as much profit from this "X" as possible. What you're left with is a token gesture of "care", the carers themselves perform a truly amazing job, but they are hindered at every angle by a private firm who's main concern is the contentment of their share holders.
Just recently Jeremy Hunt said that we should follow an Asian model for care of the elderly. What this means is that the burden of care should be placed on the children of the elderly. So now as well as having to work all the hours God sends to keep a roof over your head, and food in your children's stomachs, you need to find time in your day to care for your parents.
This is a mere pipe dream from the mouth of an over privileged and out of touch Tory minister. Doesn't he think that if people had the time and resources to care for their own relatives, they'd already be doing it?
I recently read an interview with the journalist and author David Simon, the creator of the HBO smash "The Wire". In the interview he talks about society needing an alternative metric to measure success by. The second story illustrates this perfectly.
At an early age we teach our children that to succeed you need to have the highest scores, they are taught that the only thing that matters is being better than the next person. As soon as statistics are brought into the equation people are encouraged to fudge the figures, after all the person at the top wins all.
This theme runs through everything from school league tables, to the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market in the US that triggered the collapse of the global economy. Poor performance is massaged statistically to look like gold, and then sold on to the highest bidder.
Is this what success looks like?
What's wrong with letting children just be children?
What's wrong with rewarding people for putting something back in society?
What's wrong with instilling an attitude of social responsibility from an early age?
The third and final story can be summed up in just a few lines:
"The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members"
Ghandi
It saddens me deeply to hear about people in the UK who have to choose between eating, heating, and paying the rent. I recently read an extremely sad story about a food bank in Oxfordshire.
The article was constructed around a middle aged man who ran the food bank. He told the interviewer that people visiting the food bank would refuse food parcels that required cooking, instead insisting on items that could be eaten cold, or straight from the can because they couldn't afford to pay for the energy to cook.
This is the state of the forgotten in the UK today.
This is the result of Mr Osborne's austerity measures.
The average Joe in the street has been squeezed to breaking point, whilst the top earners have never had it so good. Banker bonuses are back to the levels they were before 2008, before the banking crisis, and we are currently taking the EU to court to prevent a cap on corporate pay.
Just recently the Archbishop of Canterbury called for what he described as a "social licence". What he means by this in my opinion, is that services we have no choice but to rely on should be operated on a non-profit basis, or with consideration for those at the thin end of the wedge. This would apply to fundamental services like energy and health care.
Although these stories leave us with an extremely bleak outlook there is still some hope, and it comes from the first story.
My close relative, 10 years my younger said she wanted "to put something back". If this is the attitude of the majority of today's youth, then maybe it's not as bad as it looks.
If we all had an attitude conclusive to an interconnected big society, but also the means to practise it, then surely a time will come when the balance is reset.
However, it's still my belief that until we find an alternative yard stick for success, the disparity between the under class and the top tier of society will increase, and with ever more disturbing consequences.
