While taking a walk in the local woodlands recently, I was surprised to find a sign at the end of a trail with words along the lines of 'People camping. Homeless so the council can find us - no other reason.' I may be wrong, but I'm guessing this has something to do with there being so few council houses that they are only available for those with absolutely naff all, which you may even think sounds OK until you consider the sky-high rents that private landlords are charging and the kind of salary you need to get a mortgage on even the most basic flat.
It has often been said that if you put a frog in water and gradually turn up the heat it won't notice that the water has become unbearably hot. This seems a great metaphor for the property market to me. In spite of all that has happened in recent years (killer-viruses, megalomaniac invasions...), the result of the drive to keep house prices accelerating above the rate of inflation is surely still the biggest drain on most people's monthly budgets, where the cost of just having a roof over your head is outstripping the kind of wages being paid for jobs that society needs. Since when did a home become a luxury item?
Back here in deepest Kent the only homes being built in my village are priced from approximately half a million upwards. For me, it is impossible not to ask whether or not society is truly being run for the majority. And is any political leader up to the challenge of doing something about it? Er... don't answer that!
I often feel that many who believe that the world is basically fair simply don't want to think about it. Or maybe it's just more comfortable to believe that you are closer to the millionaire class than to homelessness.
At the same time I hear that almost all railway station ticket offices are earmarked for closure due to the majority of tickets now being bought at machines. It is true that younger, more technologically-minded people might choose to use a machine over human interaction, but older people generally don't, yet it feels that they have been coerced into doing so because many ticket offices are now only taking card payments and older people are more likely to use cash. Thus, it does feel as if the rail operators have engineered this situation somewhat. I get a similar feeling in supermarkets where you can choose to use the self-service checkouts or queue up to see a lone cashier.
I am informed that there may still be somebody assisting customers to use the ticket machine and that it is unlikely that a small village station will get to keep its ticket office when even central stations in large cities are earmarked for ticket office closure, and I guess nobody is going to pay somebody to twiddle their thumbs.
However, in a general sense, if the majority of jobs are going to be performed by machines in the future, what will happen to the workers that are laid off? For instance, what will happen to all the driving roles when driverless vehicles finally stop crashing into walls? You can't stop progress, but my concern is that the jobs being phased out generally aren't being replaced with other jobs that the majority of people can do. Politicians seem to only focus upon 'high quality' jobs, which let's face it, only a minority will be able to get. It seems like it's going to be like a game of musical chairs with jobs. And gosh, won't the wealthy kick up about having to pay more tax in order to support the newly jobless masses? As with climate change I guess our leaders will finally start thinking about it when it's too late.
The optimistic logic of TV programmes like BBC's 'Tomorrow's World' in the 1980s was that if machines are going to be doing all the work, we will all have more leisure time and be able to work less. Life was going to be one big holiday with the leisure sector booming. The problem with this is that managers and shareholders rarely want to share the savings. Look at how the water companies have failed to invest in infrastructure in spite of huge profits. It's trickle-up economics, right?
Also in the news, the NHS recently celebrated its 75-year anniversary, but this came with a warning that it will not make a hundred years if we carry on the way we are. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it often seems as though things are just being left to slowly fall apart so that anyone who can afford to switch to private healthcare will do just that, but what happens to the rest of us? It seems pretty obvious that most don't have the spare cash kicking around for private healthcare.
It all seems to come back to ideology at the end of the day. The NHS was founded with a view to society looking after its citizens regardless of wealth, whereas today it seems to me that the prevailing view is that if you don't have the bread it's your problem. As establishment figures are often seen in cathedrals for events such as coronations, I wonder how these advocates of the 'modern' view manage to make that fit with their supposed religious beliefs. Anyone would think they're just pretending!
The economist Richard Layard in his book 'Happiness' provides plenty of graphs showing that the greater the gap between rich and poor is in a country, the greater the prevalence of social problems. I no longer have the book but the graphs were plotted for things like illiteracy, violence, homelessness, drug abuse, etc. It was a pretty comprehensive list that sounds like your average episode of 'Eastenders!' I have found that in pointing this out, one can often be taunted as being a 'communist,' a 'Marxist' or worse, but in truth the solution is never black and white. Any system with no restraint generally ends up destroying itself, and unrestrained capitalism is no different. If life gets seriously bad for a large proportion of the population you tend to get a revolution. Do we really want this? Or should we put the brakes on a bit? Business leaders would probably say 'no, we shouldn't,' while those living in a Kentish wood because they have no other option would surely say it's gone too far already.
Closing the debate down by viewing all criticism of our society as heretical is certainly not my idea of freedom. It sounds more like the something George Orwell would have written about. Keep minds open and speech free at the point of use!
Sorry it was a bit heavy this time. I actively try to avoid seeing too much news, and I guess you can now see why!
