Politics

My worrying about politics has been brewing for quite some time.  I've not quite managed to put it all in to words, hence my lengthy radio silence, and actually for the last six months I have been the happiest I have been for the last few years.  But the time has come for me to stand up again on my internet soap box and worry publicly about something that is important to me, and this time it's important to all of us.

I called the doctor this week, suffering with what I assumed to be an ear infection.  The new process in my surgery is for all callers to be put on a list, prioritised by the GP in question and called back in order of life expectancy urgency.  My GP duly returned my call, listened to me explain my deafness and pain and wrote me a prescription for antibiotics.  It wasn't until I was reclining in my sick bed later that it struck me what had happened: I had self-diagnosed an infection and received prescription medication without ever being in the presence of a medical practitioner.  Now I can see two ways of looking at this: The Opportunist - "I could make this work in my favour, get some kind of racket going with black market medications" - and my natural fall back position: The Cynic.  The Cynic notices that her GP is paid a handsome sum by the NHS (read taxpayer) to be the primary care giver for non-emergency medical requirement.  I (one of the aforementioned taxpayers) just did his job for him, by telling him what was wrong with me.  He got paid for writing "amoxicillin" on a slip of paper and signing his name (actually they don't even write it anymore, they click a box on the computer and print it out). So, to whom shall I send my bill?  Why is the NHS under such strain that GPs can no longer do what they are employed to do viz. actually see patients and diagnose illness?

Bedroom Tax, which isn't a tax, is putting people into rent arrears and making people homeless when there is no other option for them.  I don't think that anyone should be entitled to council housing, or housing benefit, for more than the requisite number of bedrooms per head that the law permits.  But that doesn't make it reasonable to suddenly start charging people for the extra bedroom with no availability of smaller properties for them to move in to, or sensible period of time for them to make arrangements.  There must have been a better way to balance the system than the way the government decided to go. There is so much I want to say about this, it rattles around my head day after day, sometimes I get angry- for and on behalf of both sides of the Bedroom Tax debacle - but debacle it has been and continues to be, nonetheless. 

So the NHS is being torn apart, the lowest earners and poorest families are being squeezed the hardest, disability benefits are being cut, public sector pensions are being cut, more and more people are relying on food banks to survive, retirement age is continuing to rise, the country is only barely out of recession but MPs are being recommended an 11% pay rise to £74,000.  I know there are an awful lot of people earning an awful lot more than that, but the average UK salary is something in the region of 28k. Our MPs are earning more than double that already, and that is before their expenses claims and second home allowances come in. 

Russell Brand, in his usual showy and verbose manner, tried to incite revolution recently.  He said what so many of us feel: that we are disillusioned with politics; that we don't trust our politicians or our government to make the right decisions for the majority of the populace; that we don't think our politicians are in touch with the people of Great Britain.  But his answer to the problem was a silent, apathetic revolution, a revolution where  people show their disdain for the current way of things by removing themselves from it, by standing to one side and letting others make the decisions, in the hope that things will be forced into change by their refusal to be involved.

I'm not the first person to notice that this won't work.  I'm no great political strategist, I don't have the answer, but I know that even if 1,000,000 Britons decide not to vote in support of Brand's rhetoric, it won't make a blind bit of difference.  Of the 45,597,461 registered voters for the 2010 general election, only 29,991,471 actually voted.  We now have a coalition government that not even one of us voted for. No encouragement is needed from Russell Brand for people not to vote, what we need is encouragement for people to vote.  We need more people worth voting for, more politicians who we trust and believe in, who understand us and will represent us honestly in parliament.

I recently interviewed for a new job at the company where I currently work.  I really, really want this job. I worked hard in preparation for the interviews and I would be very disappointed not to get it. But if it doesn't go my way then maybe it won't all be bad.  I could become a politician, get paid more money than I would know what to do with (I'd learn), and lead the revolution.  Either that or cash in on my new found expertise as a GP.... K x