the brilliantly leaping gazelle

With a predictably that was as tedious as it pointless, the scandal of an unknown number of schools having been built using a less than concrete concrete, has been used by some in the media to have yet another swipe at this government. Today it was the turn of of Gabby Hinsliff, who penned an article in The Guardian with the headline, ‘Collapsing schools are the latest sign of a crumbling country – and a lesson in Tory cost-cutting’. It was a Guardian readers wet dream, combining parents fears for their children’s safety, bureaucratic penny pinching, departmental incompetence, ministerial buck passing and of course, Boris’s Jonhson. It ended at the point where I thought it was going to be more than just another piece of click bait for people whose smugness is only superseded by their self-righteousness.

‘The more disturbing question is how many other quick fixes, cheap compromises and questionable solutions to tight budgets have been quietly invented not just in construction but across the public realm during the past cash-strapped decade, with unseen consequences still yet to unfold for decades to come.’ To my way of thinking, this isn’t the more disturbing question. The really disturbing question is why successive generations of the UK electorate have been all too willing to buy into the patently absurd idea that you can have better public services and lower taxes.

For once, the blame isn’t all the fault of politicians; much of it is, but most of that is due to circumstance and that circumstance has been dictated by the electorate. Political parties only get to form governments if they’re elected and they’re only elected if they’re selling something the electorate want to buy. If not, then voters can make their feelings clear through by-elections, council elections, and ultimately a general. But usually it doesn’t come to that, because the incumbent government will proffer some mealy mouthed self serving justification of why a policy has to be ditched. Doesn’t always work that way though. Sometimes it is the politician who’s ditched. Thatcher and the Poll Tax leap to mind.

So it seems to me that since the mid 1980’s, the British people have been more than happy to enter a political equivalent of a Faustian pact, one that not only which obviates any need for them to examine in any great detail what exactly are these chimeric ‘efficiency saving measures’ that will deliver better public services and lower taxation, but also to complain about its necessarily calamitous shortcomings when they are exposed as if they were innocents in the whole sorry affair.

Politicians have a limited culpability in the less than concrete concrete scandal. From the ideology of privatisation that inexorably led to the decimation of once state owned public services under Thatcher, to the financial incontinence that is the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) aggressively enforced by Blair, Brown and Cameron, none of this was a secret. None of this was hidden. It was all out in the open. Politicians quickly cottoned on to the fact that whilst the electorate liked easy answers to complex issues, they weren’t so keen on asking too many questions.

I’m as guilty as anyone, anyone that is who isn’t suddenly concerned about how things are done on the cheap but with no diminution in quality. Schools, hospitals, libraries, care homes and many other municipal buildings built using PFI are now of concern. Now they are.

Hindsight. Wonderful thing.