Friday, September 08, 2006
The caring state.
The Times here reports (in brief) on the death by starvation, of a 79 year old grandmother.
Apparently there was no food in her house, what caught my attention was the: "“lack of mindfulness” by welfare services".
It's a total disgrace, I mean food, it's a fairly basic need, it's not something that can be just overlooked, the so called "welfare agencies" were clearly involved in the care of this woman, but somehow they seem to have missed food.
What annoys me particularly, if it was a private company who'd somehow "forgotten" about the food aspect of care this story would have been big news, there would have been questions asked of the chairman about how they could be so incompetent etc etc. There would have been a breach of contract and the family would have had an action for damages.
Here of course the state is involved, the state has taken the money to provide this care, it has then failed miserably in its duty. What happens? Firstly the story is relegated to a couple of small paragraphs, no great interest from the MSM, but it's a story that affects anyone who has or might need to have state "care". Secondly there's no accountability or indeed any expected, the state won't refund us the money that's been provided for the care of this woman, there won't be any compensation paid to the family. More significantly, no one will be held to account for this failure, but there must have been both failures of individuals and failures of supervision. As it is the "caring" state that's responsible, at most there'll be some sort of internal enquiry that will regurgitate some wishy washy phrases like "procedures have been tightened" and the like and everything will carry on as before.
When it comes to the caring state, I want to out of it. I don't want it caring for me, and I don't want to be supporting such unaccountable bureaucracies with my tax money.
Apparently there was no food in her house, what caught my attention was the: "“lack of mindfulness” by welfare services".
It's a total disgrace, I mean food, it's a fairly basic need, it's not something that can be just overlooked, the so called "welfare agencies" were clearly involved in the care of this woman, but somehow they seem to have missed food.
What annoys me particularly, if it was a private company who'd somehow "forgotten" about the food aspect of care this story would have been big news, there would have been questions asked of the chairman about how they could be so incompetent etc etc. There would have been a breach of contract and the family would have had an action for damages.
Here of course the state is involved, the state has taken the money to provide this care, it has then failed miserably in its duty. What happens? Firstly the story is relegated to a couple of small paragraphs, no great interest from the MSM, but it's a story that affects anyone who has or might need to have state "care". Secondly there's no accountability or indeed any expected, the state won't refund us the money that's been provided for the care of this woman, there won't be any compensation paid to the family. More significantly, no one will be held to account for this failure, but there must have been both failures of individuals and failures of supervision. As it is the "caring" state that's responsible, at most there'll be some sort of internal enquiry that will regurgitate some wishy washy phrases like "procedures have been tightened" and the like and everything will carry on as before.
When it comes to the caring state, I want to out of it. I don't want it caring for me, and I don't want to be supporting such unaccountable bureaucracies with my tax money.
