The 51st State.
May be it’s me or may be I’m right. I know my memory isn’t what it was and it probably wasn’t when I thought it was, but! I remember growing up in the seventies. I recall the election of Thatcher The Milk Snatcher; by a very small majority, yet history doesn’t like to reflect that fact. Prior to her coronation, oh, you thought it was an election. I can assure you it was a coronation. The woman, I use the term in a biological sense and not one of gender, reigned for 11 years (1979-1990), not a long reign in Monarch terms, but still far too long for British society. I may be losing you here so I’ll expound on my introduction.
Back in the good old days, prior to and including her first year of power, I recall talking about America and its society. Little was I to realise, although somewhere there was a portend banging around in my brain, that what we discussed would now be a part of our reality.
I recall, fondly, how we were appalled by how the USA treated its own citizens. The idea of having to pay for health care was an anathema to me and those I spoke to on the subject. I can hear the echoes of those words, as if they are bouncing off the walls of the room I now sit in. ‘Do you know that some Americans can’t even afford to go to hospital? Some don’t even get medicine because they can’t pay for the prescriptions.’ Even then I understood how unfair and ridiculous that was. (The richest country in the world and it couldn’t look after its citizens) I knew that being poor in America was a crushing and horrid life. Thankfully, I was a Brit and that would never happen in this country. We had learnt that society pays for society, because that’s the only way we can all be looked after and look after.
Today I look at a health service that is privatised in all but name. To believe otherwise would be naive in the extreme. A fool I may be. Naive? Never!
In the same conversations we talked of how wicked it was that American children had to get into debt just to go to college. How, state schools were badly managed and delivered poor education, that they were infected with gang cultures. Oh yes! Gang culture in the good old…has been around a long time. This was an infection we, as a nation, contracted after far too many family holidays to the other side of the pond. Not one I’ve ever been on. Even if we could have afforded it, I fear my family wouldn’t have enjoyed it. This leads me onto my point. I recollect that, very few British people I spoke to, wanted to emulate American society. I remember. Yet, now we have our children getting into debt, just to go to college, never mind University. We are making the next generation pay for their own generation. Surely we should be paying for them, on the basis that we’ve been here and should have made sure there was enough money to educate the next in line.
What I’m trying to say is: we have become the 51st state. Something we should never have been. If anything it should have been USA the 5th county of the UK. But we’ve had far too many butt licking politicians who were more worried about their own advancement that they forgot they were there to do the best for us.
We now have: Private Health companies embedded into our NHS. Monies from NHS budgets now streaming into private hospitals, making them stronger and the NHS weaker. Health Insurance companies flogging us dodgy insurance. An old adage that I remember: Insurance only works as long as you don’t claim on it. Ask a huge proportion of American citizens who have been diagnosed with terminal or regressive diseases, who find that their insurance doesn’t cover them for that.
Our Children are indebted to make a better society through their penurious time in academia and beyond.
We have gang violence of epidemic proportions. Poverty extremes, and the least mobile society for generation. We have become the stomping ground for the worlds plutocrats and right-wing ideologues.
All that I found offensive about America is what as come to the UK. Private injunctions, blame-claim culture, Tuition Fees, private health care, private dentistry, gun crime, fast food, obesity, and ignorance. May be the only way back is to cut up our passports and promise not to go there again. May be it’s just time that we said no more to this nonsensical, self, egotistic greed and say it’s time to be British again. We were moaners, but we could fight when we needed. We may have liked a good fry-up for breakfast, but we were never obese. We may not have been as wealthy as America but at least we could afford to educate and treat our population. We may even have been a little reluctant to jump on the 7 day work till you drop dogma of the Yanks, yet we still created the Industrial Revolution. We may well have liked a couple of beers in the pub, but at least we knew it had been brewed with hops and barley and not some chemical process that had no relationship to such a process. All of this may be true, but….We were British, we closed on a Sunday, half day on Wednesday, was looking forward to shorter working weeks, to our kids going to university for free. Retiring young and being human. So let’s be British again. Let’s tell the Yanks to take back their cranky neo-con economists and let us run our country as we like!
