What went wrong?
Discussion
Just been watching the 6 oclock News and there was section about the ongoing Teachers Strike where they were citing the strike was about wages and that the service was not being funded properly, and I wondered why it was that back in the 50`s and 60`s when I grew up we were able to build Hospitals and Schools and huge Council estates (one which I grew up on) and we managed to fund 3 different kinds of V bombers and also Concorde despite the fact we were supposedly broke due to the 2nd World War ? any thoughts
ric19 said:
Just been watching the 6 oclock News and there was section about the ongoing Teachers Strike where they were citing the strike was about wages and that the service was not being funded properly, and I wondered why it was that back in the 50`s and 60`s when I grew up we were able to build Hospitals and Schools and huge Council estates (one which I grew up on) and we managed to fund 3 different kinds of V bombers and also Concorde despite the fact we were supposedly broke due to the 2nd World War ? any thoughts
All the cash is being hoovered up by overpaid civil servants and hospital consultants compared to years of old!
My guess would hover around back then we had productive capacity (not as in money to buy something, but as in manufacturing knowledge and raw materials) and a political will to do it.
Today we have Investment banking - you can can't eat or build a hospital with a structured note - for much of our GBP.
Onshore Manufacturing is greatly reduced.
Politicials now care more about making introductions for a % from the trough than cross party co-ordonated difficult multi-term decisions.
My 2 pence
Today we have Investment banking - you can can't eat or build a hospital with a structured note - for much of our GBP.
Onshore Manufacturing is greatly reduced.
Politicials now care more about making introductions for a % from the trough than cross party co-ordonated difficult multi-term decisions.
My 2 pence
Well on the social housing side: loans were made to build such estates on 60 year and more terms.
That’s why very little council owned housing still exists: most of it transferred to not for profit, newly set up housing associations who would borrow at a better rate and the historical debt was written off
Eg in the 90’s maybe 30 % of rent paid went to the council to repair homes. The remainder to central government to service historic loans. That’s not the case and 100% of rent paid to an association, goes to it. Of course they have loans: but not as they were.
There must be an element of the cost of repair/ maintenance not being as it was. On estates now, scum just smash the f out of everything. A council house in the 50’s was like winning the lottery without them millions would have been in slums.
Plus a single glazed window in a house with just a gas fire is clearly cheaper to build/ repair than a super insulated, hi tech unit you’d build now.
Which a good proportion of tenants will smash the f out of it.
That’s why very little council owned housing still exists: most of it transferred to not for profit, newly set up housing associations who would borrow at a better rate and the historical debt was written off
Eg in the 90’s maybe 30 % of rent paid went to the council to repair homes. The remainder to central government to service historic loans. That’s not the case and 100% of rent paid to an association, goes to it. Of course they have loans: but not as they were.
There must be an element of the cost of repair/ maintenance not being as it was. On estates now, scum just smash the f out of everything. A council house in the 50’s was like winning the lottery without them millions would have been in slums.
Plus a single glazed window in a house with just a gas fire is clearly cheaper to build/ repair than a super insulated, hi tech unit you’d build now.
Which a good proportion of tenants will smash the f out of it.
Our last few governments do seem to have had a love of privatising what were once public services and then funding the subsequent private enterprise (which is very often not even a British company) one way or another from the public purse, so we're still paying for the services but we're also paying for the profits of a private company which essentially has a monopoly on providing those services. Then in order to guarantee that they are getting "value for money" from the aforementioned private contracts, the government employs ever more civil servants to micro-manage (or at least micro-monitor) the private companies and, in doing so, stop them from doing their jobs efficiently even if they wanted to.
Taking the NHS as an example, a depressing enough of the money which goes into it either gets fed into the profits of the private companies running the hospitals or into paying middle-managers and clerical staff to fill in reports to show how the money is being spent (or both).
For health specifically I think social media campaigning hasn't helped - the NHS gets pushed into providing million-pound treatments for individual patients while tens if not hundreds are dying because they don't have enough doctors or ambulances to run A&E properly. In many ways the prioritisation of funding has become more political than clinical.
Taking the NHS as an example, a depressing enough of the money which goes into it either gets fed into the profits of the private companies running the hospitals or into paying middle-managers and clerical staff to fill in reports to show how the money is being spent (or both).
For health specifically I think social media campaigning hasn't helped - the NHS gets pushed into providing million-pound treatments for individual patients while tens if not hundreds are dying because they don't have enough doctors or ambulances to run A&E properly. In many ways the prioritisation of funding has become more political than clinical.
Edited by kambites on Tuesday 28th February 19:44
My dad died at 64 with a heart attack. He didn’t drink or smoke and had an active job.
He went to hospital but there really wasn’t anything they could do for him and he died there.
Today he’d very likely have survived and been given treatments they could only have dreamt of in 1979.
A small example.
He went to hospital but there really wasn’t anything they could do for him and he died there.
Today he’d very likely have survived and been given treatments they could only have dreamt of in 1979.
A small example.
It's largely demographics, compounded by stupidity so outrageous it is hard not to see it as malice.
In the 40s people had kids which meant in the 50s and 60s we had a huge working population, while older people retired and died after a couple of years of gardening. Half decent schools turned out a small number of academically bright kids and a large number of relatively capable workers for abundant industrial jobs they started in their teens and kept for decades.
From the 60s onwards people started having fewer children and living longer. This 50 years warning must make it the most predictable crisis in the history of civilisation.
It would have been a great time to build a sustainable welfare state, a well funded pension scheme, a useful education system, an industrial sector that could sustain an aging population and an economy free of burdensome debt.
So of course polticians did the exact opposite, and built an economy around property speculation and imported cheap labour while sending the kids they do have to learn some b
ks at a made up university then go on a gap year or 3.
When the whole scheme falls to bits every decade or so Plan B is to print a load more money and pretend it's a recovery.
There are no easy answers to the fundamental demographic problem that the average worker now is supporting many times more people than the average worker in the 50s, but there are some really obviously bad ideas that have been implemented with great enthusiasm.
In the 40s people had kids which meant in the 50s and 60s we had a huge working population, while older people retired and died after a couple of years of gardening. Half decent schools turned out a small number of academically bright kids and a large number of relatively capable workers for abundant industrial jobs they started in their teens and kept for decades.
From the 60s onwards people started having fewer children and living longer. This 50 years warning must make it the most predictable crisis in the history of civilisation.
It would have been a great time to build a sustainable welfare state, a well funded pension scheme, a useful education system, an industrial sector that could sustain an aging population and an economy free of burdensome debt.
So of course polticians did the exact opposite, and built an economy around property speculation and imported cheap labour while sending the kids they do have to learn some b
ks at a made up university then go on a gap year or 3.When the whole scheme falls to bits every decade or so Plan B is to print a load more money and pretend it's a recovery.
There are no easy answers to the fundamental demographic problem that the average worker now is supporting many times more people than the average worker in the 50s, but there are some really obviously bad ideas that have been implemented with great enthusiasm.
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