Voicing Opinions

When a political party is elected into power to govern many millions of people, it is recognised that the audience is split into two broad categories :

1. The general public
2. Businesses

Whilst the former work for the latter, the distinction is pretty clear-cut, defining two very different types of audience.

The general public are significantly larger in number, but they are diffused in comparison to businesses, especially large corporations.

Big business act in a unified way that has no parallel with the public – the only significant non-political voices acting on behalf of the people are trade unions. These are narrowly defined organisations that cover only a small subset of the public and their needs.

As well as focus and representation (of the interests of the corporation as a collective), the corporate voice has penetration via lobbying and party donations.

Politicians are swamped with business influence and only hear pockets of concern from the public and unions. It is human nature to respond to the loudest voices. So it is no wonder that government tends to side with business needs ahead of public needs.

In light of this fundamental bias, the public need to have a focused representation that can match the business voice. I would advocate that these features of a true democracy would start to give people voice to effect a rebalancing of political influence :

1. Active, non-political representatives in each town and city that regularly feed local and national concerns to government.

2. More referendums to enable collective decision making on key matters, such as the privatisation of the NHS and Education. These could be instigated by point 1 via sufficient national consensus.

It has always puzzled me why the standard wait for certain NHS treatments seemed pretty invariant over time. That a major operation would entail something like an 18 month wait, for example.

So I thought it prudent to look at the logistics of waiting lists.

I will describe 3 waiting lists, with an NHS one as the last.

1. Waiting list to get a season ticket for Liverpool FC

The wait is normally a few years as hundreds of applicants on the existing list are served by a yearly trickle of un-renewed season tickets each season. The trickle may expand or dry up in accordance with the success of the team. Unless non-season-ticket seats are made available for new season ticket releases, or prices are raised, there is not much that can be done to reduce the wait.

2. Waiting list for a bespoke cabinet to be made be a master cabinet maker

Here there is a single conduit for the product. If he completes one cabinet a week and has a waiting list of ten customers, then new customers will have a ten week minimum wait. This ten week wait will be static if one new customer rate arrives each week (lets exclude holidays and sickness to keep things simple). If the cabinets become popular, the rate will exceed this and a backlog will build up so that new customers have to wait 12, 15, 20 or so weeks as the months pass. If he employs extra staff or demand lowers, the backlog can be cleared to give a shorter waiting list time.

3. Waiting list to have an MRI scan for an injured limb

I had one of these in November 2012. I was told that the wait was about 3 or 4 months and I duly received my appointment after 3.5 months wait.

They deal with around 10 patients a day (I cannot remember the exact numbers). Like the cabinet maker, it is a single conduit – a single resource that must be scheduled. They might increase the number of slots in a day, or buy an additional scanner to decrease waiting times.

But if the wait is a pretty regular 3 or 4 months, then supply matches demand.

A question that comes to mind here and with the cabinet maker is how a backlog – a queue – was established in the first place. With 10 patients a day, that would represent about 130 patients on the waiting list.

But lets suppose that this backlog was whittled back to a much smaller number by temporarily increasing the number of slots available for patients. We could then get to a position where the wait would be a much more acceptable 1 month.

If all things were equal, would it eventually slip back to 3 to 4 months? Only if the demand rose above the supply. If the demand actually dropped below the supply capability, then the wait would drop below 1 month.

But the point is that a one-off exercise is all that is needed to rectify an ongoing problem where everyone waits 3 to 4 months unnecessarily (or much longer in terms of operations).

Unless, that is, the waiting time is contrived.

In the case of surgery, with 12, 18 and 24 month waits, this would serve to lose some patients who actually died before their slot was available. But it also makes many choose private treatment instead.

In summary, if the wait for a resource is long and at a stable level, then it can be reduced – but there may not be the will to do that. There may be ulterior motives to retain an artificially long wait.

One of the vital, but less trumpeted foundations of good health is our sense of autonomy – that we have some control over our life and destiny.

Not only are many trapped in mechanical, prescribed job roles, but our consumption of products and services has been so entrenched and manipulated that we tend to abdicate the rule of our lives to others. We seek the authority of a doctor to fix us, and we buy a new product when its predecessor stops working rather than fix it ourselves Or make our own. We have lost the sense of our own autonomy.

As unequivocally elucidated by Levine^1., education has been hijacked to indoctrinate and straight-jacket us rather than enable and expand our sense of autonomy and potential.

On a much larger scale, as Kohr^2. eloquently explained way back in 1957, countries and industries have grown to become large and powerful at the cost of the quality of the health of the people – an individual may have some traction against a local council on a local matter but will have almost none against centralised government even though both are paid for and ‘elected’ by the people to serve the people.

There are, however, examples of respect for, and retention of, autonomy that serve as pointers to how much better life could be for more of us.

Workers on the production line in Semco, a manufacturing company in Brazil are empowered to make their own decisions. They redesign equipment, processes, choose their own work hours, and grow to love and cherish their work. They are owners of their jobs, not puppets. The company was slated for an early demise for breaking the rules like this, but remain prosperous and profitable with very low attrition rates and a long waiting list for prospective employees^3..

Switzerland comprises a set of mostly independent cantons or regions, with little in the way of centralised power. This takes them closer to the healthy way humans lived for thousands of years – small, self-sufficient, autonomous communities.

The European Union is in a fractious state right now, with Greece on the verge of leaving, but it may benefit in the long term from separation. To leave behind a life dictated by bureaucrats in distant countries. This is similar to employees of a large corporation, beholding to owners – the shareholders – who are physically remote and have little or no knowledge of these people, interested only in the financial welfare of the company as a whole. Cooperatives like John Lewis here in the UK show that anonymity of ownership is not the only way.

So when you choose, if you can, where you work or live, bear in mind the matter of autonomy. I left mainstream employment for health reasons in 2001 to work from home, and only regret the loss of companionship. I relish the autonomy of self-employment. I remember years back as an IBM employee how they announced one day that we were all going to be ‘empowered’. They had evidently read about the benefits in morale, innovation and efficiencies. But as soon as we started dong things we decided were sensible, we are told, that no, we could not do those things. IBM wanted the benefit of empowerment but failed to change to enable it. They did not really want what they saw as the ‘anarchy’ of autonomy, and the idea faded away. It is no surprise in such a large, hierarchical organisation, where the central processor – the CEO and cohorts – were far removed from the employees at the work face. Delegating – enabling autonomy – requires a breakup of such hierarchies. This is precisely what happened in Semco. true, it is a much smaller organisation, but the principle is the same.

1. “Commonsense Rebellion” 2001, Bruce E. Levine
2. “The Breakdown of Nations” 1957, Leopold Kohr
3. “Maverick” 2001, Richard Semler

Since I am most certainly not blessed with a natural understanding of economics, I can only write about money in a naive, lay-person manner. I leave myself open to correction, but feel free to indeed correct my understanding.

The currency, sterling, of my country, was so named as it represented sterling silver on which it was linked. Each bank note was convertible into silver if needed – the note was issued on that promise.

But eventually, the artificial, abstract nature of bank notes was exploited – the link to tangible metals was removed. This allowed governments to print even more money than they had done before since they had no duty to back it up with tangible assets. The world’s financial assets can and have grown out of all proportion to the world’s assets they are meant to represent.

In parallel, capitalism was flawed from the start because it was predicated on growth. The context for such growth – our planet – is finite in resources. To ease ourselves from the immediate plight of economic problems can only be a temporary solution, a fudge to the big problem.

The key to the world problems, as elucidated in the excellent Michael Ruppert film “Collapse”, is that these two distortions to sustainable human life are colliding with massive population growth.

But no one country or government owns the population problem, much as none own the global warming problem. Who can afford to make strides? History shows that unified efforts are slow and lumbering and fractious.

So my feelings share those of Ruppert. That we are on a crash course, and the best advice is for each of us to seek self-sustainable life-styles.

But one final thought. The vast bulk of the money in the world sits with people who have no time to spend even a fraction of it. But even if it were now distributed to the poor and needy, that would help sustain an even further population growth. And even greater consumption of the world’s resources. So, you see the problem is a deep, almost intractable one. In the much-studied pond-life, there are boom and bust cycles – populations grow too big for the resources available and collapse rapidly, only to recover as the balance is regained between resources and living things. So it may simply be that this is what is and will be happing to us.

In a sense, it is like a time-bomb ticking. The run on banks when people suspect there money is at risk can close them down. If the rich decide to do something similar and liquefy some of their vast fortunes by buying tangibles, then prices can rapidly escalate for the rest of us. We would get caught up in a financial game that of course suits the rich minority far more than the relatively poor masses – we would be pawns in the game. But the point is that we are already there, teased into submission and dependent on institutions for the bulk of our needs.

One way or other, I anticipate brutal times ahead.

For more on this subject, read The end of money.

After Margaret Thatcher sold out the British to industry, we have become cynical about government. There are two youngsters acting out the role of Prime Minister and side-kick, and with some of their clumsiness it is terribly easy to belittle their policies and judgements. But I would suggest it is worth looking closer.

The central focus seems to be a matter of plain common sense. The antithesis of political correctness. An approach to politics that employs common sense as a guiding force must almost by definition has to be applauded.

By way of example, they will treat those many hundreds of thousands who provide occasional help to children as honest by default, and not subject them to CRB checks.

They will address the escalation of the benefits claim culture, where many thousands are capable of work but find it too easy not to, by simply making it financial attractive to work rather than loaf around the house.

But my favourite example of the out of tune prevailing thinking that they are seeking to address is that of court judges. At last, at long last, they are recognising that judges are frequently out of touch with the common man they pass judgement, and that common sense should take precedence. No longer should the rights of a criminal so easily usurp that of their victim.

Cameron and Clegg lack experience and may lack muscle to carry through their ideas, but I truly appreciate the refreshing approach they are taking and applaud their ideologies and actions so far.

It is a sad reality that for many people, crime does pay. Certainly, the current economic climate can push the poor into crime simply to survive. The real criminals are, however, the excessively greedy very rich who rule the World.

Crime often pays because the police force are so frequently constrained by resources, paperwork and political correctness. Paperwork that obsesses with crime stats. Paperwork whose removal would improve those stats.

But it is the criminal that works with stats most effectively. He knows that the chance of getting caught burgling a house is small enough to justify the risk. Even if caught, he can claim for an infringement of his human rights in some fashion.

But when he does get caught, and get punished what is the net effect? His punishment will in general be made to fit the crime. But this is, I am afraid, a statistical failing.

The deterrent of punishment for getting caught should be one that does not fit a single crime, but that deters against a series of crimes. Only then will they see the risk of crime as too high. Such as the sevaraging of a limb in some countries for theft. Barbaric though that is, and a punishment I do no accord with, it does act as an enormous deterrent.

The reports today of the aftermath of the unseated president Hosni Mubarak reveal a degree if greed that is hard to accept. After 30 years of undemocratic and inhumane ‘leadership’, he has spent the last 18 days shifting his assets to other countries in an attempt to protect it. This money is essentially the money of Egypt, and fundamentally not his to take. That it amounts to billions – far more than he could possibly ever justify – is callous to an extreme.

But we tend to gloss over such matters – the numbers are too large to really register.

If we look beyond the money, we can only see a man who categorically does not care about other people. For 30 years, he has been his only priority.

Looking at another extreme in life, we can maybe see this brutally psychopathic nature for what it is. By way of example, picture the loving father of a child born with crippling autism. He nurtures and cares for this trapped person for years, receiving no communication back, because that is the nature of the trapped state of extreme autism. Yet he still gives, hoping one day that his child will unfold and make contact.

We, as humans, underestimate how far we can go – how far apart these two people are. The daily routine for carers is so starkly different from that of a despotic, greedy, narcissistic leader that we simply cannot get our heads around it. So we don’t. We generalise and thereby dilute the two extremes. But for the leader, a few moments a year are spent selflessly helping others, and the rest of the time making sure his empire is secure and prospering. For the carer, he has occasional moments for his own needs, and the rest of the time is spent giving without hope or expectation of return.

If only there was some way of arranging for the ruthless, uncaring despots to actually experience the care given by the carers – to see the other side of the coin, then maybe there would be hope. But I suspect that many brutal leaders simply do not possess the genes that allow them to care. Genetics will continue to support such people because the rewards are so large. Egypt has, however, started a trend that may look to make such a genetic profile less prevalent.

It is madness that a council has taken the effort to write a letter of complaint to the father of a 7 year old girl, claiming that he is flouting child safety laws by allowing her to walk alone to the bus stop to catch the bus to school.

And the distance? A full 20 yards. Or metres if you want to be politically correct.

The father is necessarily furious that he cannot start encouraging independence in his daughter, who is happy with the arrangement, and enjoys the opportunity to develop street wise skills.

Councils are supposed to be cash strapped, so what on earth are they up to wasting time and money on such overt interference? Over protecting children is actually more damaging than beneficial.

If you want a fabulous perspective on this, you need only seek the viewpoint of one of the healthiest nations on the planet – Switzerland – where you are deemed to be an over protective parent if you do not let your children set off for school unattended. And at what age do they deem it wise to start?

5 years old.

The same age I started walking a mile to school. Given a choice then of a lift to school I would have jumped at it. Because I was lazy. But in hindsight, I loved the experience. It gave me a great sense of self confidence to explore the World. And I never tired of seeing the horses in the field on the route.

Richard Branson was 8, I believe, when he was told to go and visit his relative on his own. To find his own way along a route of 2 miles that he had only ever experienced by car. His parents literally encouraged him to embrace the World.

Sure, there was a risk. But risk is part and parcel of life and the more you smother your children in cotton wool, the harder it will be for them to take risks when they eventually leave home. Branson took many risks, and still does, as head of the Virgin group of companies.