Government of the people or for the people?

This blog is named to honour a hero of his day who took on monarch and dictator without fear or favour in support of the rights of ordinary people. In the end it cost him his life. Would that I had the courage of Freeborn John Lilburne. For some this blog will be a rant, in part it is, for others it will be the rantings of a lunatic. To those I say, you are as entitled to your opinion as you allow me to be to mine.

This is a blog about balance and the lack of it. It is my response to what I hold to be a corrupt and failed form of government. By this I do not mean just the many failings of this bunch of ‘New Labour’ neo-con puppets, or its short-sighted Thatcherite forebears. I mean the system the whole shebang where words do not mean what they say, where personal integrity and responsibility are regarded as a weakness. Fairness is once again lost to this land and its people.

Let me state at the outset I regard no person responsible for how they are born. Gender, race and station are beyond our control. What we say is important, how we say it matters a little too, but it is what we do that is paramount. That applies to all individuals in whatever walk of life they find themselves, including Ministers, Doctors, MPs company directors and me. Let me tell you a story to illustrate the point and I will try to make it as honest as I can.

I was born nearly 60 years ago to a very average working class family. Through good fortune and hard work I managed quite well and by 2002 had a 6 bedroom house, a business, a comfortable lifestyle and reasonable prospects for my old age. I had paid my taxes, exercised my democratic right to vote when required and, save for one shameful incident when I drove after drinking two pints on an empty stomach, I had not broken the law. To the best of my knowledge I have never deliberately hurt anyone since childhood. So I think I can claim to be normal, average and therefore what happens to me could happen to you.

By December of 2008 the house is gone, along with the lifestyle, my pension has disappeared into some corporate black hole and my government is doing its utmost to kill me, literally. Why did all this happen? I fell ill that’s why. I ceased to be a cash crop for governments and corporations. I still buy stuff of course but not so much. I still pay tax, not as much in cash terms but orders of magnitude greater than I used to in relative income terms. I have changed columns on the government books from credit to liability. I am not alone.

When I was born it was with a congenitally deformed heart, nobodies fault just one of those things. I didn’t know about it, nobody did, medicine wasn’t as good then. When I started smoking I wasn’t shown disapproval as I would be now, life was different then and everyone will be a child of their own time. By the age of 31 I started getting occasional chest pains, bad ones. My age and the limits of the technology of the time determined a diagnosis of inflamed diaphragm due to too much coffee. It was the wrong diagnosis but not one resulting from negligence or malice. In 2002 I had a heart attack, a huge mother of a heart attack, my world tilted on its axis, fell off its pedestal and rolled in a somewhat bumpy fashion into the gutter. It wasn’t without its funny moments and I may come back to that if anyone’s interested.

We were living in North Wales, the ambulance crew had to travel 10 miles from their base on wet mountain roads it took them nearly half an hour and that’s good going in the mountains. It took best part of an hour to stabilise me so that I could travel and a further 40 minutes to get through the mountains to the hospital. That’s the two hours you have until your heart starts dying used up. A&E was a hoot. Nobody could find a vein, I’ve always been awkward, I was like a dartboard by the time they got a line into me and started treatment. Then I reacted badly to the drugs and my blood pressure fell through the floor, but I survived.

To cut a long but sometimes funny story short I finally ended up with a diagnosis of deformed heart leading to up to four undiagnosed heart attacks plus one diagnosed, ischaemic heart disease and a heart that functions at 80%. Oh yeah, and I got angina, breathlessness, joint and muscle pain and chronic indigestion as a sort of medical buy one get one free special offer. That’s how I became public enemy number one for failing to die when expected.

I have been judged fit for work by a doctor from Atos, a government contractor. He judged me fit on the basis of my drug controlled pulse and blood pressure. He didn’t need my records, or doctors report or those of the cardiologists so he didn't look at them. He didn’t use the million pounds worth of equipment that the hospital used or the 30 years experience of the professor of cardiology who treated me so ably. He didn’t need the reports of 3 previous doctors from the Department of Work and Pensions. All he needed was for me to be able to attend the medical. That’s logical, if I was really ill I wouldn’t have been able to get there would I?

He was doing his patriotic duty, plugging the holes in our government’s finances caused by the quite reasonable gift of billions of pounds to those poor bankers. I guess we only have ourselves to blame, after all, if we hadn’t forced the banks to give us credit we couldn’t afford we wouldn’t be in this position now. We would still have the money to spend on necessities like two wars, MPs pensions and expenses and the like. Of course we still wouldn’t have the money to give our troops an extra two sheets of aluminium foil to cover their cardboard armour but you can’t have everything.

No, all this doctor needed was a nod from the minister. A minister who has indicated that in two years time he will pilot a scheme requiring that anyone unable to find a job or unable to work for a normal employer will have to work for the state in return for government largesse (for the benefit of older readers that’s the workhouse). The minister presides over a cynical system designed to avoid political embarassment or legal actions for negligence. The decisions are produced by a method of splitting responsibility so that nobody can be held accountable. The doctor is not my doctor he is contracted through an agency to give an opinion about my condition at a specific hour on a specific day judged against a set of truncated criteria drawn to non medical specifications. A non-medically qualified manager at DWP can then pronounce on the evidence to hand which is - "the doctor has pronounced you fit". No qualifications of your fitness, no shades of fitness just fit or not fit, black and white.

Ah, I hear, you’re a smoker you brought this on yourself. Yes, guilty M,lud I took up smoking tobacco in my teens. It might just be as a result of one of the 600 chemicals the government allows tobacco manufacturers to put in cigarettes but I was addicted. Undoubtedly it was a contributory factor. Should you, reader, be made to pay for that? My view, held long before I knew I had heart trouble, is that I will conform to any system that applies equally to all, I am prepared to submit to any law that has universal application. So judge me as you like but remember this if you judge me guilty on the logic that I contributed to my own downfall and therefore it is right that I should be punished you must do so across the board. The person knowingly taking up a dangerous sport, climbing, rugby etc. is equally guilty and I have no wish to see the spectacle of refusing benefits to young quadraplegics. You think they won't do that? The government has a record of using legislation designed for one purpose to tackle another unrelated one. But lets leave the ‘anti-terrorist' legislation for another day. Government expenditure on smoking related illness is 1.5 billion an awful lot of money I agree. However, the tax income from tobacco products is 5 – 7 billion so maybe there’s whiff of hypocrisy there.

Fit for work means just that. Fit for any and all work that someone is prepared to offer, refusal on grounds of danger to health is not an option. And just to make sure no-one gets too comfortable on benefit its been reduced by 25%. Its only being done for our own good. Contrast that with the £700,000 bonus paid to the director of Northern Rock on his departure from that wonderfully run company. I don’t suppose I’ll get the chance to ask him about that as we wait in the long queue at the job centre. Maybe I’ll ask one of his ex-employees.

Maybe I should have put aside money to cover me for a rainy day, that would have been the sensible thing to do wouldn’t it? Well strike me blind, I did, wasn’t I clever? No, unfortunately I wasn’t. I believed government when they led me to believe that my savings were safe on their watch (Tory and Labour). When they allowed companies to run their employees pension schemes because corporations had the necessary experience and expertise to do so, I took their word. When the corporations (not the scheme members) were allowed to take contribution holidays because it was safe to do so and improved corporation balance sheets, yep, you got it, I believed them. When regulations changed to allow corporations to invest more of their scheme's funds in their own companies I didn’t complain. The government wouldn’t lie, wouldn’t allow unsafe practises, would they?

I’m going to end this entry here, I don’t know if there are any other democrats out there who agree with me but if so I’m happy to hear from you. If you don’t agree why not write up your own point of view and drop me a line about it. Maybe I’ll find something there that makes me change my mind, I will read it and see.