Something is rotten in the State.
Cottam's thesis is that William "Charterhouse, Balliol" Beveridge's 1942 vision for a Welfare State is no long fit for purpose in a post-industrial society top heavy with extractive plutocrats and ranks of declining Olds. And always the ♇!⊗king market, as if competition was always obvs better than community and cooperation. Maybe Capitalism = Koyaanisqatsi = "a state of life that calls for another way of living": Caring for each other is not about efficiency or units of production. It is about human connection, our development, and at the end our comfort and dignity.
In the UK, there are 100,000 neighbours-from-hell families, each of which is costing The State about £250,000 every year. One case study of a (single parent four offspring one preg) family in Swindon clocked 74 different professionals from 20 different agencies (tutors, counsellors, police, housing, health visitors, the social) involved in the family's care and attention. Cottam's people shadowed (with a time sheet) the eldest boy's social-worker and found that 74% of his time was spend on Admin (the forms, the forms); 12% on the phone haggling with other agencies; leaving 14% of the working week for actual work with the chap. But that social-worker's case load was much longer than one troubled teenager. 5½ hours a week spread across a dozen kids barely gives a social worker time to take off his coat, and in-fill another questionnaire before driving off to the next meeting. FFS don't use neighbours-from-hell and the like, it lacks compassion and smacks of hubris - the overweening complacency that it could never happen to me coupled with victim-blaming.
Cottam sets out the stall for the UK welfare state as it now stands. The Irish equivalent is not substantively different. When novel "obvious to all thinking people" good things are suggested, The State puts the kibosh on them double-quick:
- See the same doctor? Too expensive
- Help another person? Too risky
- Provide solutions through a known community group? Against the rules of competition
Manage need vs develop capabilities
The middle section of the book looks at left-field "Experiments" or pilot-studies with which Cottam has been involved; professing, if not actually solve, to ease the burden of problems in 5 areas where The State is only rearranging the deck-chairs and not delivering a lot. Well 1 million people are employed to help make things better for their fellow citizens - 1 million adults not collecting the dole, so there is that. For ten years, Cottam's NGO Participle did the state some service and demonstrated how agile, focused orgs might deliver more QALYs for less money.
- Family. Their Life programme set in place mentors / listeners who had time to listen to the manifold problems of the dispossessed; develop a holistic view rather than silo-thinking; engender self-respect by respecting the troubled rather than joining the line of comfortable people who want to beat on them
- Youth. Their Loop programme swept up lost youth and found them work-placements in the community - a bit like the best examples of Irish Transition Year work experience. The pilot study was going gang-busters with obvious benefirs accruing to The Yoof, The Community, The Employers. But when they held an open day for government agencies, the scheme was immediately closed down . . . because teens were developing a relationship with an adults who was neither a family member, nor a teacher. In the eyes of The State, all adults are potentially if not probably predators on the young.
- Employment. The first thing in Backr was to call out the complete failure of Job Centres to place the unemployed in work. They then created a network of MeetUps where job-seekers could network, commiserate, and even crowdfund money to get small businesses over the threshold for creating a new position.
- Health. Another problem, another daft label. Wellogram applies similar holistic views to health and well-being. It's normal now to refer people with unlabelled malaise deeper into the maws of the NHS. Maybe it's better to take them out of that mill altogether and treat their loneliness, stress, and feeling crap with kindness and a cup of tea. The GP has no time to listen and for some people some of the time, tea and chat is at least as effective as [and FFS cheaper than!] anti-depressants, anti-biotics or anti-inflammatories. Health education is the unsexy, unfunded, unseen part of the health service: but it doesn't have to be like that..
- Aging. The End is Circle. This experiment facilitated Elders getting together and telling each other that they could so do more for themselves rather than relying on the State or it's agents. Call me the complacent patriarchy but I've found that fixing stuff, making stuff, myself is empowering. It also frees me from dependence on someone else's timetable, engagement and priorities. And it saves money. I know, I know it's a short step from victim-blaming but making people do for themselves can be done with kindness, with panache, with respect.
There you have it. Dozens of ideas, thrashed out round a conference table, and rolled out into the local community. Some of the schemes are still chuntering along years after the initial funding dried up. Related to this is Samuel Smiles [prev] and his vision for the world in Self-Help (1859). But what do I know? I've returned Radical Help to the library. You can read it next. It might outrage you enough to do something different.
Change Islands? A decade ago The Blob wrote a neat 900 word essay about fishing on the North shore of Newfoundland, parcelled it up, tied it with a green white & pink ribbon and launched it into the blogosphere. The next day I butterflied off to write about Sellafield / Windscale about which I was marginally better qualified to express an opinion. That was then, this is now, and flitting about long ago and far away won't butter no parsnips.
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