am I getting my money’s worth?
I was very pro Europe, pro euro, and now I live here I don’t see the UK gaining any benefit at all. The UK endlessly subsidises larger countries, invariably with smaller populations, pays due heed to every EU edict while every other country ignores them. Seriously, the EU takes the piss out of the UK.
I stumbled across this comment from Roughseas on a post by Clare Flourish about Britain’s currently successful right-wing and anti-European party, UKIP. The comment goes to the heart of issues we are dealing with here in the UK, particularly with reference to the upcoming referendum on Scottish independence.
There seems to be an obsession with getting out what we put into any agreement in financial terms only. Is the UK putting more into Europe than it’s getting out? Is Scotland putting more into the UK than it’s getting out? The fact of life is that for any kind of fair society that even attempts to provide equality for human beings, over half of the population need to put more in than they get back. There are always going to be people with more opportunities and better luck who are richer and more able to contribute to raising the living standards for those who aren’t. As a society, indeed as a species, we have a choice – do we accept real suffering at the bottom of the scale so that we can eat better food, buy bigger houses and go on better holidays or do we accept that life is better for everyone if we pool our resources?
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the core differences in political leanings between England and Scotland – why is Scotland more concerned with looking after its population than England? Why are we more concerned with preserving a nationalised health service and welfare support for the poorest in society? I came to the conclusion that it’s to do with scale. We live in smaller communities here in Scotland and within our smaller communities we have a larger social and economic backgrounds – we grow up, go to school and live in communities with a wider economic cross-section of the population. I suspect in England there are larger pockets of affluent people who don’t actually in their day to day lives have to interact with anyone from different a economic reality. It reminds me of meeting up with my rich American cousin in downtown San Diego, going for a walk with him through the streets and his shock and distaste at seeing homeless people. His life in a gated estate, safe in huge cars to affluent work areas and affluent shopping malls and affluent churches, meant he never had to look at, nevermind interact, with anyone outside his bubble of wealth. In that kind of world, ‘poorer’ people are a different, unknown tribe that created their own misery and really need to just take care of themselves, not people you’ve known from birth who are just living their lives or may have struggled with schooling, poor health and other unfortunate circumstances.
We can’t measure how successful our society is solely on whether we are personally getting our money’s worth. Sure, money is important and shouldn’t be wasted through either mismanagement or corruption – but we have to accept that we’re a long way from eradicating these unfortunate occurrences in any society. More important considerations are freedom (the freedom of movement we have in the EU is fantastic), living without fear (our societies are generally peaceful) and knowing that our basic needs can be met, even if the most dire circumstances befall us (and our welfare safety nets just about cover that in terms of health, housing and food). I don’t just want this for Scotland, or just for the UK, or even just for Europe. Obviously, everyone would have greater peace of mind if images of war, disease and starvation weren’t still so prevalent around the world. But we’re never going to reach the point where these experiences are eradicated if we continuously naval gaze about how much personally, or as a small nation, we are getting out of co-operative arrangements we make with other people and other societies. By openly pooling our resources, our talents, our knowledge and our money, we have a much better chance raising living standards for everyone.
I wondered why Wellingborough has a Tory MP. It has a serious Radical heritage as a centre for the Diggers, and it still has a coffee bar called Oliver’s in a hotel which claims to have hosted the Protector before a certain battle. It had a great influx of people kicked out of London in the 70s for being poor, and an Ofsted report I read on a children’s centre said that people round there knew unemployment was so endemic they had no chance of work. The wee villages around- one or two are posh, but mine isn’t. Wellingborough was part of the Northamptonshire shoemaking industry, so it like the North of England has had mass employment destroyed in the 80s and 90s. At least some of those Tory voters are very much outside the bubble of wealth.
I don’t get it. I really don’t.
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That’s interesting. I guess one of the biggest determiners for voting preferences is, like any football team or religion, what everyone else around you is doing. Do you think there could be any kind of long-standing stigma attached to voting ‘the other way’? Perhaps most people don’t look at policies when they’re voting, but just do what they were brought up to do …
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I really don’t have anything to say, except for perhaps praising your identification of smaller communities being more mindful of the whole. I guess this all harps back to Gandhi’s socio-economic idea of Swaraj.
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Wow, I just re-read it and found a million typos. I’m clearly out of practise. Are you back on full blogging duty again? Are you back from Chile?
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Had to push Chile back. Schedules got flipped.
Yeah, saw all the typos but just figured you were drunk 🙂
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“By openly pooling our resources, our talents, our knowledge and our money, we have a much better chance raising living standards for everyone.”
That’s the theory Violet, but the problem with it is that it perceives the world, the economy, as a pie with a limited number of pieces. We have to make your piece of pie smaller so somebody else can have a piece. It completely ignores the idea of simply baking more pies so there’s enough for everyone. In order create less poverty, you have to create more prosperity. Otherwise what eventually happens is the pieces of pie get smaller and smaller, until people finally blow up.
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That’s a great analogy! Makes no sense at all, but I love it – especially the bit about people blowing up! 🙂 Just look at reality – look at Scandinavian countries with high levels of tax and low levels of poverty, then compare that to the shocking levels of care and immense wealth gap in your own country that promotes the ideas you’re spouting.
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A comparison could well be drawn between the US and the UN, yet we keep on keepin’ on because it’s in our best interests to keep the UN strong.
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The UN isn’t strong, Arch. I wish it were. I wish it had an actual standing army. I wish it coordinated/financed space exploration.
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Maybe not, John, but how much weaker would it be if the US wasn’t subsidizing those nations that don’t pay their fair share?
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Ahhh, I get your point now. True, the US does fork over the lions share.
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You may correct about the experience of small vrs big towns.
But you might be overlooking the element of trust. In a rural community (at least in the US) there are strong bonds of trust among the people, and the main currency is favors: when somebody needs a hand, everybody is willing to help, because they assume the person would do the same thing in a different situation.
But if someone proves himself unworthy, does not pull his weight, does not return favors, he will not get help from anybody.
Big towns tend to be low-trust: there are more people than you can possibly know, and there are bigger economic and ethnic differences between them. You don’t help people because you don’t know them, they might be trying to take advantage of you… and they usually are.
I don’t think anybody would object to the welfare state if they really thought the people receiving benefits were trustworthy. But we see too many able bodied adults mooching off a system that rewards laziness.
Vice versa: there would be less moochers if they understood that they were getting a hand from a neighbor, and not from an impersonal state.
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“But we see too many able bodied adults mooching off a system that rewards laziness.” I don’t think receiving money from the state is ever the rewarding option. It’s true that some people get lost in terms of their other options, but it’s not an enviable life. If in the meantime we’re lessening the suffering of fellow human beings, I can’t see what the objection is.
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I so agree with you.
I was against Finland joining in the EU, because I did not accept the way the idea was marketed to us. We were told it would increase our economy, commerce and security. Perhaps they have. The most important thing was of course, that booze would become cheaper. Even then, I thought that something good may yet come from the bigger and stronger EU as more effective coexistance of the European nations and perhaps even a higher ability to act in a crisis. The sad reality is, that only strong co-operation of democratically chosen governments can withold any reins within a society against international capitalism and corporations, that have no end to their thirst of exploiting any single nation.
If not controlled by governments the greedy corporations become so strong, that they may cause wars and even control elections, their shareholders and bosses may become political leaders and if they do not have a sense to keep welfare of the society at large in focus, but rather concentrate on making far more money than they ever could need, revolutions and chaos will inevitably follow. This much has history taught us.
Now the same people who wanted to join EU feel disappointed as it was not only a system for our country to benefit from the rest of the EU. Pfff… I have heard it over and over repeated here, how every other nation in the EU disregards the rules and only us Finns are stupid enough to follow the directives to the letter. I bet this is the same complaint in every other country starting from Greece.
A society has to support its weaker members, not the strongest. That is an age old survival mechanism, that has made us a social species in the first place. Societies, that admire and serve the strongest always suffer defeat to the more socially able societies in the end. We need not look examples of this further than from the fascistic societies of WWII and the reasons of their demise. Sometimes such defeats happen rapidly, but sometimes it just takes time and suffering.
Who would really want to live in a society divided into few rich protected by security systems, fences, wals and guns against the many poor living in ghettoes, squallor, gangs and guerilla movements? That may not be reality for most of Europe today, but if we move our society towards inequality, we may find ourselves in the same reality in wich so many people live in today.
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“A society has to support its weaker members, not the strongest. That is an age old survival mechanism, that has made us a social species in the first place.”
I think everyone here knows I’m not religious, Rautakyy, but that’s exactly what Paul was saying in 1st Corinthians, to the people of Corinth, where the wealthy elite felt themselves superior to the masses.
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And there you have the big book of multiple choises. Like any religion, the many, many Christian doctrines and teachings provide us with confirmation of any of our own predispositions. The question is, do the ones we agree with also validate them?
That is how religions resonate with people. As they are made by men, they either have some good and natural ideas in them, or they perish, because not too many people find them plausible. Religious philosophies often derive from, and succeed by stating stuff, that is obvious to the crowd. Sometimes what is obvious to us, is such because of what is obvious and true, sometimes because of what seems inherently true to us as representatives of our particular species and sometimes just because of what is percieved inherently true within a certain cultural sphere.
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“I have heard it over and over repeated here, how every other nation in the EU disregards the rules and only us Finns are stupid enough to follow the directives to the letter. I bet this is the same complaint in every other country starting from Greece.” I’m really happy to hear this! I don’t think the EU is by any means a perfect body, but what political mechanism is? I do think that the collection and co-operative model is ultimately beneficial.
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