This new age of austerity
This new age of austerity means different things for different people and it’s clear that we’re going to have to get used to it for a while.
Part of the problem, as always, is that we have become used to receiving a media diet of misinformation and disinformation and many of us tend to treat any reporting as being potentially suspect unless we see it with our own eyes – so much so that we tend to remember the visual images more powerfully than the more detailed written information.
All of us recall, and probably will do so all our lives, the images of 9/11, the flooding in Pakistan, the terrorist attacks on Mumbai and the images of starving children which return with ghastly regularity to our TV screens and newspapers. Transmission of these images and countless like them, has become the new way of driving awareness or selling newsprint, depending on your personal degree of jaundice with our modern world. Alongside it, runs a growing reluctance on the part of most consumers to tackle the detail and become sufficiently involved with understanding the issues. It’s far easier to give the seller of the Big Issue £2 than it is to engage him in conversation to find out why he or she needs to do this and, gradually, inexorably our level of understanding of the key issues continues to diminish while our blind acceptance of muddied facts and brand messaging continues to gather pace.
Take the story of the mulberry trees in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, South London, as an example. Lord knows, there’s precious little to give the residents of Vauxhall much pleasure at the best of times and how the residents must have rejoiced at the idea that these gardens, which until recently were known as Spring Gardens, were to be restored to their former glory by Lambeth Council. When the 12 acre park opened in 1661, it attracted large crowds who flocked to see this ‘garden of Eden’ close to the South Bank and, in the 1800’s, up to 20,000 visitors who would come to watch musical performances, illuminated fountains and hot air balloon races. Lambeth Council has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in restoring the gardens, including new granite paving sets near the entrance to the park. Somewhat unfortunately, the two 70’ mulberry trees which also celebrate the entrance to the park, drop red berries which stain the new granite sets so the council has ordered the two trees, which are possibly hundreds of years old, to be felled in order to avoid the necessity for additional expenditure on cleaning services for the new granite.
Clearly there is a strange paradox here if two, aged and beautiful trees need to be felled in order to beautify a park which has been restored in order to allow more people to enjoy an inner city oasis of beautiful nature but, perhaps, as in most stories, there is more to this than meets the eye. I doubt that we’ll ever know.
One story where there is clearly more to understand is the revelation that more than 50,000 doctors, nurses, midwives and other NHS workers will lose their jobs in the latest plans to effect health cuts as part of the Government’s austerity measures. Under the Freedom of Information Act, most NHS trusts have been forced, by the TUC, to reveal their plans for the next four years and, at face value, the facts are grim. Ever mindful of the power of the soundbite, some trusts have insisted that a significant number of these staff will be relocated elsewhere but, as all those trusts are making up to 24% of their workforce redundant, and today’s newspapers struggle to see quite where such a degree of relocation could take place. I stopped off at my local, last night, and found myself chatting to someone who is quite high up in these circles in the West Midlands, an area already blighted by a higher than average degree of economic slowdown. He painted a rather different picture whereby any meaningful overhaul of the NHS would require a sever rooting out of a whole raft of ineffectual, unproductive workers who will never achieve or deliver what others could in their place. The malaise is, apparently, endemic within the NHS and the Government sees this as a one-time opportunity to get rid of the millstone which will continue to drag down the NHS and then to hire back those whom they do want to keep in post, under a slimmed down management system. Speaking personally, I have no idea whether there is a ha’porth of truth in this perspective but I far prefer it’s covert promise of righteous correction of a national ill to the unctuously hypocritical pecksniffian tone of the broadsheet newspapers. Now, should I ever be a mealy-mouthed, oily employee of a national newspaper I know which version of this NHS story I’d lead with but, as in everything else, we’ll probably never know the real facts.
In some areas of life, this uncomfortable state of affairs is unavoidable and as Piers Morgan said a decade ago, his job was to sell newspapers and not to report the news but could we not do better than this in our professional life? As I understand it, the principal job of the RCVS is to offer protection to the consumer by ensuring a minimum level of skill and performance by practising veterinary surgeons while the role of the BVA is to champion the cause and to offer assistance, wherever possible, to the veterinary profession. In a world of misinformation and disinformation, let us ask the BVA to step up to the plate and to produce a well researched and properly informed guide to the state of the nation. If we are to commit to employing new people, this represents a significant business risk for a practice, if we are to redevelop or rebuild, this will represent a major degree of financial risk and, in the most general of terms, a period of four years of national economic austerity is something no-one in Britain has experienced since 1945. As individuals, it is outside our experience and our imagination and, therefore, we remain ill-equipped to deal with it.
If the BVA is suitably equipped to represent our interest to government in some areas, it is surely better equipped than we are as individuals to properly research, investigate and report back, with the help of economic experts, a guide to what we might expect from the next five years, what levels of unemployment and redundancy are we likely to see, what should we expect the bank rate to do, other than to rise quite soon, and how will this knock on to unemployment and growth rates in GDP over that period?
As a profession, we might well be better advised to keep our mulberry trees and give up on the granite paving but it would be so very helpful if the BVA were to provide this detailed advice before it’s too late.