What is Government For?

This is not a stupid question: What is Government for?

It's not stupid, because government actions affect your life in a major way, from the amount of tax they take from you to (hopefully) invest and spend wisely, to the policies they enact to provide security, stability and a safe environment.

At it's base level, government exists to provide safety, security, opportunity, health and to plot a path to the future.

Sadly, it seems that Government itself has lost it's ability to understand it's mission.

Security.

Government is currently failing on the security front, by allowing undocumented migrants to arrive on the shores of the UK. It them allows them inside the borders and houses then for months or even years in insecure accommodation. We don't know who they are, or their intentions once they arrive in the country. Ostensibly they may want a job, they may want money, but what else? What are their allegiances? Are they allied to this country? Would they life and if necessary die to support the country that gave them shelter? Or are they allied to an ideology that seeks to destroy this country or overthrow the ideology that has provided centuries of stability and prosperity? 

On the mission to provide security outside these shores, the government has completely failed. The Navy is a shadow of it's former self, unable to defend the shores of the UK from a bunch of dinghies, let alone project force and capability across oceans. One aircraft carrier, a frigate and a destroyer do not a strike force make. Such a small force can be quickly overwhelmed and dispatched by numerically superior forces. Yes, the advanced weapons may be force multipliers, but it's all lumped on a single asset and once that asset is eventually dispatched, it is gone. 

The RAF has a handful of aircraft and a minimal early warning capability. It gave up the responsibility of defending the UK, so we have no protective missile batteries to defend us against rogue actors that may want to turn a city or two to glass. Instead we rely on deterrence: do it to us and we'll do it to you. Hardly comforting to the occupants of major cities or those living close to military installations. 

I can't even say we only concentrate on the small stuff, because our borders are being infiltrated daily.

In WW2 the Sherman and T34 tanks weren't good tanks, but they were good enough and crucially, available in numbers. So the Axis forces faced wave upon wave of them until the Allies overwhelmed them. A lesson we have sadly forgotten.

Score 0/10 for security then.

Safety.

Government is failing on the safety front, by not ensuring the rule of law is enforced. Right now we have an epidemic of stabbings, of young people being murdered. Not only that, but occasionally the stabbings spread to the wider population and an innocent bystander gets murdered. People are now not safe on major cities. The streets at night are the realm of the gangs. At least the countryside appears safe. 

The current Covid enquiry shows that when a big event hits, the government is woefully inadequate to keep us safe. Instead of relying on decades-old plans agreed amongst medical experts, the government panicked and ran around like headless chickens. The Prime Minister refused to attend important meetings. His adviser plotted behind people's backs and the health secretary..... yeah, he wanted to be the arbiter of who was worthy enough to save and who was trash to be left to die. In a way they already made the decision by the widespread use of do not resuscitate notices that were handed out like confetti to the old, infirm and impaired.  

So sadly 0/10 for safety.

Opportunity.

Hmm, lets have a look at opportunity then. Ah, can we have a minus score at all? Education now costs. A lot. University tuition fees are at a ridiculously high level to gain a qualification that has all the weight of a teabag. "Get your degree, then go work on the tills at Aldi" is really a good motto for Universities, but it should be there. What is the point of spending 20 or 30 grand attaining a qualification if hundreds of thousands of other people have the same or better qualification?

Degrees were elitist because they were supposed to be. They were supposed to be difficult to attain, they were supposed to only be given out to the cream of the crop, they were there to indicate the level at which the person possessing it had worked.

I speak as someone who never got a degree. I didn't want one. I worked straight from school and worked at the level I did out of sheer hard work and by recommendation from other people. I didn't really need a degree. 

Now for those less fortunate souls at the bottom of the pile. Where is their opportunity to improve their life? What has government done for them? Absolutely nothing. It has trapped them in welfare, provided to such a level that if they start work they lose money. Employers rely on government to subsidise wages (only for families though) so they can continue to provide cheap wages and maximise profit. The taxpayer fills in the rest.

So score 0/10 for Opportunity. I haven't seen a policy to help the individual for decades.

Health.

Really? Do I really have to make any comment about the actions of Government during the pandemic and other health scares? The current huge waiting lists? The excess deaths we are having that go underreported or uninvestigated? 

Oh, the silver lining may be the eventual banning of smoking, but that then puts government into the authoritarian camp. It also forces smoking underground and into unsafe, unregulated practices. 

Then add excess undetected cancers thanks to the pandemic and the health service effectively closing down for two years.

Oh and the Health Secretary during the pandemic basically wanted to be allowed to leave us to die. Be under no illusions, the old, the infirm and the poor would have been cast aside and left to rot, while government allowed their cronies and the middle classes into hospital. Just look at the masses of DNRs that were created for just those people. It's a fucking scandal that hasn't been investigated. Those in power at the time and those writing illegal DNRs should be up on criminal charges.

Yeah, 0/10 for health. 

Planning and the future.

Well, I think everyone will agree that the government have failed on this one to. No major infrastructure works for years and then along comes HS2. What a shitshow! Badly managed so costs spiral out of control. Initially underbid in order to make the thing look viable. But those of us knew the current planning laws and the costs of land and houses in the south would cripple the project. Fairly recent Infrastructure projects like the Newbury bypass led the way in how poorly we do them. The only recent success I could name would be Hindhead tunnel, but the costs for that doubled from 150 Million to 370 Million pounds. So the cost of HS2 doubling and even trebling isn't unprecedented. But the question to ask is why the additional costs weren't factored in.

But that's moot, as now the Northern section of HS2 has been cancelled. Basically it's been made unnecessary because the greatest gains in travelling times were further North.

So I think we can safely rate government a solid 0/10 for planning.

I think it's safe to say that government is failing badly to deliver the things that governments should deliver. The question is why? Why is government failing to provide basic, essentials for it's citizens? 

The reason is it's been hijacked by corporate interests. It doesn't care about it's citizens other than to spout platitudes that may afford it another election victory so it can support it's corporate masters for another 5 years.