Thursday, July 15, 2004
Another report
I adore this quaint British tradition of having an independent enquiry into a government misdoing and getting Lord something-or-other from the heart of the establishment to carry it out.
Monday, July 12, 2004
The tyranny of choice
It can’t be just me who is turned off by this political rhetoric that what we really want from our public services is ‘choice’.
I don’t want choice. I want a good all round standard. For me, having good public services doesn’t mean I can choose which hospital I go to. It means I don’t go into the local hospital knowing I’ll spend half the night in the waiting room or worrying I’ll come out with a worse disease than the one I went in with. It means, if I had kids, that I’d know they’d be okay at the school round the corner – which, incidentally, they could walk to. It doesn’t mean being able to compete with other parents and pull whatever middle class strings I can muster to send them to a posh school on the other side of town.
These days we suffer from an excess of choice. There’s far too much choice in our wealthy, Western societies. I’m beginning to feel choice anxiety threatening to turn into choice burn-out. A person naturally disposed to prevaricate, having to make choices left, right and centre is leaving me paralysed. Can I get through the day without making choices? In London we’re all working hard, living fast lives, burning candles in the middle as well as both ends, and I feel I lack the time or energy to spend on choice. I want someone to take some choice way from me, to simplify things. I don’t want 20 different versions of coffee. I want reduced options, and free grey matter to think of higher things.
Okay, I concede that what happens when people have kids is that they turn selfish by proxy. The middle classes will move mountains if it means getting a more privileged position for their children. Decent, normally caring people fall victim to Diane Abbott Syndrome: getting their kids as far as possible ahead of the unprivileged becomes, it would seem, an overpowering motivation. (And the terrible thing, of course, is that those middle class children grow up and become adults who believe that they achieve what they achieve in life entirely thanks to their own efforts.) You hear people saying that they might have principles, but why should their child’s future suffer for the sake of those principles? Since when did principles become negotiable? Choice here is only entrenching privilege and making it ever easier to forget your principles.
The ludicrousness of introducing ‘choice’ into public services, had, I thought, reached its peak in the railways. To stand at a railway station and have a ‘choice’ of three different railway companies to take you to your station, with different fares and journey times, and of course tickets that aren’t valid on each other’s services! This did not feel liberating, merely confusing. To experience the chaos of choice at its fullest, arrive in England at Gatwick Airport. Recently, as I stood by the carousel waiting for luggage, a revolving sign told me that the best way to get to London was on the Gatwick Express. The sign turned and the next face told me the Southern railways was the best, cheapest route to London. I was only surprised Thameslink didn’t reveal itself at the next turn of the sign. Visitors to England, new to the money, perhaps struggling with the language, are offered a ‘choice’ of railway companies to take them to the capital, with the exciting prospect of penalty fares if they hit upon the wrong ticket / train combination. I have arrived at a fair few airports in my time, but I have never seen anything like this. Tourists stand befuddled gazing at screens. Welcome to our country of choice!
Political parties compete to be the one which offers us the most ‘choice’. This apparently is what we will vote for. But where is the party that just promises to make public services uniformly good enough? There’s a box that will get my cross. These days, I’m spending longer in the polling stations on election days, my pencil stub hovering uncertainly over one party and then another – and for once, that’s not because I feel overwhelmed by choice.
I don’t want choice. I want a good all round standard. For me, having good public services doesn’t mean I can choose which hospital I go to. It means I don’t go into the local hospital knowing I’ll spend half the night in the waiting room or worrying I’ll come out with a worse disease than the one I went in with. It means, if I had kids, that I’d know they’d be okay at the school round the corner – which, incidentally, they could walk to. It doesn’t mean being able to compete with other parents and pull whatever middle class strings I can muster to send them to a posh school on the other side of town.
These days we suffer from an excess of choice. There’s far too much choice in our wealthy, Western societies. I’m beginning to feel choice anxiety threatening to turn into choice burn-out. A person naturally disposed to prevaricate, having to make choices left, right and centre is leaving me paralysed. Can I get through the day without making choices? In London we’re all working hard, living fast lives, burning candles in the middle as well as both ends, and I feel I lack the time or energy to spend on choice. I want someone to take some choice way from me, to simplify things. I don’t want 20 different versions of coffee. I want reduced options, and free grey matter to think of higher things.
Okay, I concede that what happens when people have kids is that they turn selfish by proxy. The middle classes will move mountains if it means getting a more privileged position for their children. Decent, normally caring people fall victim to Diane Abbott Syndrome: getting their kids as far as possible ahead of the unprivileged becomes, it would seem, an overpowering motivation. (And the terrible thing, of course, is that those middle class children grow up and become adults who believe that they achieve what they achieve in life entirely thanks to their own efforts.) You hear people saying that they might have principles, but why should their child’s future suffer for the sake of those principles? Since when did principles become negotiable? Choice here is only entrenching privilege and making it ever easier to forget your principles.
The ludicrousness of introducing ‘choice’ into public services, had, I thought, reached its peak in the railways. To stand at a railway station and have a ‘choice’ of three different railway companies to take you to your station, with different fares and journey times, and of course tickets that aren’t valid on each other’s services! This did not feel liberating, merely confusing. To experience the chaos of choice at its fullest, arrive in England at Gatwick Airport. Recently, as I stood by the carousel waiting for luggage, a revolving sign told me that the best way to get to London was on the Gatwick Express. The sign turned and the next face told me the Southern railways was the best, cheapest route to London. I was only surprised Thameslink didn’t reveal itself at the next turn of the sign. Visitors to England, new to the money, perhaps struggling with the language, are offered a ‘choice’ of railway companies to take them to the capital, with the exciting prospect of penalty fares if they hit upon the wrong ticket / train combination. I have arrived at a fair few airports in my time, but I have never seen anything like this. Tourists stand befuddled gazing at screens. Welcome to our country of choice!
Political parties compete to be the one which offers us the most ‘choice’. This apparently is what we will vote for. But where is the party that just promises to make public services uniformly good enough? There’s a box that will get my cross. These days, I’m spending longer in the polling stations on election days, my pencil stub hovering uncertainly over one party and then another – and for once, that’s not because I feel overwhelmed by choice.
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