Tag: nonfiction

The NHS versus the Weasels

Posted on by weeks4send

I’m going to have to repeat what I said on Facebook:  What fuckery is this?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/ournhs/richard-grimes/government-moves-to-consider-nhs-user-charges

Now, I’m not stupid- I know this isn’t exactly an unbiased source.  I know this article was written last July, and a lot of things have changed since then (Jeremy Corbyn things!).  I know my Facebook feed is largely made up of hardcore left-wingers, which means I’m probably primed to accept any story that makes David Cameron look bad.*  And I know these quotes could easily have been taken out of context- maybe every other peer in the room responded with shouts of Eh?  What are you smoking? and the article just didn’t mention it.  But a) I doubt the writers made these quotes up out of whole cloth, and b) the fact that they were even brought up with a straight face should provoke howls of rage in the citizenry.

I mean, just look at these things.  It’s not even just the Tories:

 Another Labour peer, Lord Desai, suggested bizarrely that patients should be issued with an “Oyster card” which is deducted whenever a patient uses healthcare, and patients should receive a “bill” at the end of the year, saying this would “help make it clear to people that a free National Health Service is not a costless one.”

In other words, “let’s charge sick people for getting sick.”  You know, the exact thing the NHS was created to avoid.  (Also?  “Free” and “costless” mean the exact same thing, numpty.)

It’s a terrifying vision of a dystopian future- attempts to take away our rights couched in weasel words like “begin the process of helping the public engage in a discussion,” just to add insult to injury.  But luckily, Britain is still a democracy, and our MPs all have email accounts.  Let us join forces and spam them into submission.

 

 

* Although David Cameron himself hasn’t exactly helped in this regard- not one of us saw Piggate coming.

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Secondary School is Frequently Awful

Posted on by weeks4send

I wrote this article just over a year ago:

http://womenmakewaves.co.uk/targets-detention/

I still stand by what I said at the time, but every time I reread it, I think about other things I should have added.  Granted, if I added everything I’ve thought of, the whole thing would be novel-length, but I think I can work out a bit of an appendix here.

A major problem with secondary schools (from the point of view of the students, anyway) is that children aren’t that hot on long-term planning.  You can tell a twelve-year-old at the start of Year Eight that they only have six years left in school, but six years is half of their life so far.  Your average twelve-year-old thinks of their eighteenth birthday in the same way religious people think of the afterlife- they have faith that they’ll get there one day, but it’s so distant and so removed from their current lives that it’s hard to get a meaningful picture of it.  As far as the twelve-year-old is concerned, school might as well last for the rest of their life.  In a way, it does- the eighteen-year-old who leaves the school will be a very different person to the twelve-year-old who’s still stuck in it.

The child’s parents might encourage them to think of university or career possibilities, but those are too distant to mean much.  If they really enjoy a lesson, they’ll be motivated by that, but mostly, they’re going to be motivated by “what will and won’t get me yelled at.”

You get yelled at a lot when you’re twelve.  For my Year Eight class, it all started on the bus to school in the morning, where we could get yelled at by the bus driver for not moving down the bus, or move to the back and get yelled at by the older kids who’d claimed it as their territory.  Then it was time for registration, where you’d get yelled at for making too much noise or not having your homework diary signed, even if it was because a relative had been rushed to hospital the night before (because you should have seen that coming and got it signed earlier in the week).  When your lesson had been unexpectedly moved to a different classroom, you got yelled at for being late.  When your lesson had a supply teacher, you’d get yelled at for behaving in the way your usual teacher expected you to instead of the way the supply teacher did.  If you waited at the same bus stop as the boys from the school next door, you’d get yelled at by them (half of them telling you that you looked like a man, and the other half calling you a dirty bitch and ordering you to shag them as soon as they learned how).  Then, finally, you’d be off home, where your parents may or may not have found a reason to yell at you as well.  In a case like that, your only options are to scurry about like a frightened mouse and hope nobody notices you, or to hit the surly, “I hate everything” stage of adolescence and decide that, if you’re going to get screamed at no matter what you do, you might as well behave as badly as you like.

All of which is to say that, at that stage of life, it’s difficult to concentrate on a lesson even before you factor in the cramped classrooms and the target sheets.

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