Give Me A Future I Can Believe In

Over at the London Review of Books there’s a rather interesting essay - The Destruction of the Public Sphere - about the political landscape of the UK.

I think Ross McKibbin, the author, is particularly insightful in his comments about the NHS and education - “Few ask why the educational and health systems seem now so subject to (failed) permanent revolution, given how stable their regimes were before the late 1970s. One answer is that ideological utopias can never be achieved precisely because they are utopian. The other is that the competitive market simply does not work in such systems.”

It’s rather depressing reading though, for there’s no clear solution to re-connect the electorate with the politicians, and none of the major parties look they might be capable of sorting out the NHS or the education system, and make it somewhere where the actual people staffing the services don’t have their enthusiasm and drive ground out of them with bureaucracy, league tables, and performance targets.

Maybe now it’s time for some leaders who actually acknowledge that the world isn’t perfect, and that it won’t be possible to make it so. Then we can stop this futile pursuit of a world where nobody dies, no mistakes are made, and every child is a genius mathematician who can write better prose than Shakespear…