What’s the solution then? Should the government give house calls to every scott and bring them groceries and cook them a meal. Should the government provide every citizen with their own PT? Regardless of our opinion about the multitude of migrants that try to get into Europe, they at least show some agency and dream about a better life. So things are tough and I don’t move unless it’s to go to the pub, I eat unhealthily and of course, it’s not my fault! It’s the “elites” and Margareth Tatcher. I can’t find a job and I stay put? Let me ask you a question, if I go to Glasgow today, and look around at the people doing menial jobs, how many Scotts will I spot?
Read the entire, long article twice to confirm: not a single sentence or suggestion on how these people can do something on their own behalf to take charge of their life or do something to improve their life themselves.
So to answer your question
“What’s the solution then? ”
Not responsibility or self respect, clearly.
What’s your point. Someone has to do the menial jobs.
Saul D
1 year ago
The classic handwringer’s malaise of ‘more funding needed’ without saying what you fund, or articulating the detail of how it would work to solve the problems of “overeating, excessive drink and drug use, gambling” or how you stop doctors leaving due to “work-related stress and the effect on [her] home life”. What do you get for your extra (11.2-10.7 minutes) 30 seconds of doctor time that cures this? How does the NHS help if the community “don’t want to live a longer rubbish life”? The author helicopters over the issues just as much the politicians he criticizes. What does the community actually want for themselves?
That’s a bit tough on Scousers after Paris isn’t it?
However, on reflection you are correct.
Last edited 1 year ago by ARNAUD ALMARIC
Dominic A
1 year ago
I’ve lived on council estates in Aberdeen, and in London. Social and medical services were broadly similar in both, probably a little easier to access in Scotland, whilst social and health problems were off the scale in the former (alcoholism, hard drugs, crime, ill health, domestic violence – made trainspotting look like a documentary). Other note-able features of the former were a culture of helplessness, and goals that did not extend beyond welfare payments, a bit of illicit cash earning, and getting high. Thankfully my immediate friendship group had the nous to get out of there (geography and jobs) before we got succumbed, which involved our rent going from £50 a month to £200, best money I ever spent. At least two that did not, didn’t make it beyond 25 years old.
Sally North
1 year ago
Comments below are a bit harsh imo. Poor, disenfranchised people don’t have a lot of agency. It’s fine to talk about giving up smoking, cutting down on the booze and so on, blaming people for having bad health. But have you ever been to a poor post-industrial neighbourhood/town? No offence, but they are shitholes: ugly, filthy, noisy dumps full of ugly, damp housing. Everything in their environment is telling the people who live there that they are worthless. Maybe start there – clean the streets, maintain public spaces, outreach assertively into the community to find out what people really need and give it to them. These people are not stupid, they are beaten down with multi-generational poverty and the low expectations which go with that. Change the culture of failure by caring.
Well said. We had a plan along those lines in the Labour party had we won back in 2015. In addition to better funding the NHS, as part of our ‘inclusive prosperity’ package, it included a Job Guarantee, which would of given those fit enough public sector jobs, so they’d had dignity at work & reasonable pay doing some of those tasks you mention.
Public Sector jobs doing what? We are already overborne in many departments (take the Motor taxation, Dept. at Swansea. Because they said they were “snowed-under” when the place was built they were given 50% extra manning and all we’ve had since then is industrial strife and they still complain of lack of staff.) These “special” workers will all want their guaranteed 6 weeks on ‘the sick’ on full pay (There’s a person in each work group whose sole job seems to be going around reminding people that they must take Sick Leave before a certain date or they’ll lose it.) Never mind their gold plated CS pensions!! Besides many people who really do care get taken advantage-of by these “Poor Downtrodden.”
But precisely what has been taken away is agency. Working northern towns had sports clubs, brass bands, gardening competitions, people dressed up to go out on a Friday or Saturday night, they did jobs and looked after where they lived. There was a community pride, and part of that pride was people looking after each other and being part of something mutual. Now it feels like they’re not allowed agency. Can’t do anything unless the council/welfare/state does it for you. Politicians (cf Adam Bartlett’s comment) believe people are looking for charity from some benevolent state machine when often what they want is to feel valued, for their opinion to count and not to feel powerless or treated like children.
There’s something missing here, which seems to have been buried or ignored. Some time ago, I recall seeing a TV documentary (possibly Horizon) that looked at the ‘Glasgow Effect’, where life expectancy is lower even when compared to equally deprived areas around the rest of the UK, controlling for similar patterns of poor diet, unemployment, substance abuse, etc. (and there are plenty of them). There has been lots of waffle about how ‘toxic masculinity’ is worse in Western Scotland and other such ways of reasoning it all away, but the arguments presented were interesting.
The hypothesis was that overcrowding in Glasgow tenements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was especially bad compared to other cities, led to very high levels of childhood disease and infant mortality before mass vaccination was available. Children with especially active immune systems were more likely to survive to adulthood, but with a cost that their hyperactive immune systems led to life-limiting conditions in later life; crucially, after the point where they had children of their own. Essentially, a short period of a few decades created an acute selection pressure, the results of which would be passed on to future generations. One piece of evidence was that life expectancy was still much lower for people who had not grown up in poverty or deprivation, but whose parents or grandparents had, compared to people with similar lives elsewhere, or indeed who had moved to Glasgow and did not have family roots there.
I’m not suggesting that this explains everything, far from it. The effects of the loss of middle income manufacturing jobs, with nothing to replace them bar very low paid service industry work, can be seen in many UK towns and cities. What is interesting is that this idea seems to have disappeared, while the sociological ideas continue (as does poor life expectancy). I don’t know if it was, in fact, disproved, but have my suspicions that any suggestion of genetic determinism simply attracts brickbats and accusations of supporting eugenics. If so, this is a pity as you cannot solve a problem if you focus on the wrong reasons for its existence. Much easier to blame Thatcher, isn’t it? Does anyone else (from the UK) recall this programme?
I didn’t see the programme but have heard of, and can understand completely, the Glasgow Effect.
My interpretation was the famous “See you Jimmy!” attitude and the effort required to maintain it – surely more than most non-Glaswegians can manage.
I have also witnessed that council estate effect in a number of areas around the UK, and seen the energy that people put in to say, buying/selling drugs or stolen goods. It’s all very well for people with the nous to escape, but many lack the resourcefulness to do so, and end up stuck through inertia and poor life choices.
Tony Reardon
1 year ago
I have just read Theodore Dalrymple’s book “Life at the Bottom” and I would recommend it to anyone interested in topics such as poverty in the U.K. I would like to quote some observations he makes about a public housing estate. He has various third world doctors coming in to the NHS and wants to show them some aspects of British life> He says:
“The houses along the way are, as public housing goes, quite decent. … Each has a little front yard of grass, surrounded by a hedge, and a much larger back yard; about half have satellite dishes. Unfortunately the yards are almost as full of litter as municipal rubbish dumps. I tell my doctors that in nearly nine years of taking this walk four times a week, I have never seen a single instance of anyone attempting to clean his yard. …I ask my third world doctors to examine the litter closely. It gives them the impression that no Briton is able to walk farther than ten yards or so without consuming junk food. Every bush, every lawn, even every tree is festooned with chocolate wrappers or fast-food packaging. Empty cans of beer and soft drinks lie in the gutter, on the flower beds, or on top of the hedges. Again, on a good day we actually see someone toss aside the can whose contents he has just consumed, as a Russian vodka drinker throws down his glass.
Apart from the anti-social disregard of the common good that each little such act of littering implies (hundreds a week in the space of 800 yards alone), the vast quantity of food consumed in the street has deeper implications. I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I’ve made hundreds, never – not once – have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave. And by the same token, I have never seen any evidence of meals taken in common as a social activity – unless two people eating hamburgers together in the street as they walk along is counted as social. This is not to say that I haven’t seen people eating at home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They eat alone, even if other members of the household are present, and never at the table; they slump on a sofa in front of the television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating, therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative obedience to impulse. Needless to say, the opportunity for conversation or sociality that a meal taken together provides is lost.”
Colin MacDonald
1 year ago
Glasgow industrialised early, there isn’t even a race memory of good peasant cooking, maybe that’s why the standard of home cuisine is pretty dire. You can castigate the natives for their poor eating habits, but habits are hard to break folks! If you’re from Gdansk and your habit is salted herrings chances are it’s easier to eat healthy than someone from Lanarkshire where they’ve lived on fry ups and pies for five generations.
My Glaswegian mother-in-law used to cook vegetables well, by which I mean; for hours.
While they cooked, she smoked.
(That said; she was a lovely person.)
Last edited 1 year ago by Colin Elliott
Wayne Gault
1 year ago
Crivins! I’m shocked, not at the article, but many of the responses to it. Summarised, they say:
Your lifestyle choice – your fault.
Get off your arse and get a job.
To hell with redistribution of wealth.
Survive or die.
I thought I lived in a more understanding and insightful country that recognises:
Most people don’t choose a crappy life but for many it’s inevitable for no other reason than for where they were born.
Not everyone had the chances in life you had.
The science (epigenetics) says pretty clearly that people’s experience before and soon after birth conditions their vulnerability to stress, addiction and many other things. If your body’s response to stress is identical to a civilian in Donbas after 100 days of shelling, no wonder you’re not concerned about sticking in at school, eating your greens or having an appreciation of a litter free environment. Your only concern is how to survive the next 24 hours.
And please, don’t reply to this with the ‘I was thrashed as a kid and I turned out OK’ line. If that’s the case, I’m glad you’ve done well but please recognise the survivorship bias inherent in that statement where most don’t have the ability or means to overcome their inherent and profound disadvantage.
Well done to Unherd publishing this article – entirely consistent with challenging the herd mentality and divisive stereotypes.
There are judgey & cruel notes & comments.What you are missing is the pernicious culture of low expectations. This is every bit a killer as low or no social services. The difference is that if you only stress the latter, you can pose as a saint.
John Broomfield
1 year ago
Do more mixing of the housing of the poor with the housing of the folk who are buying their own homes.
1 in 6 seems to be about the right ratio but that may vary around the country.
It is essential to disperse the poor among the better off instead of further wasting resources on the ghettos and their coaches living remotely from them.
By living and learning together all our children benefit from such mixing to spread more aspirational learning and lives.
Unfortunately, when a ‘poor’ family is housed in a ‘better’ area, they often drag the place down to their own standards or there are conflicts with the neighbours and the whole thing ends in tears. Seen it too many times locally.
Miguel Alvarez
1 year ago
Many poor people in the Westernize Countries, not just Scots have no discipline or drive.
They refuse to take care of themselves, work, exercise, eat clean, study, prep etc.
They are literally the Grasshopper from the “Grasshopper and the Ant.”
They have Culled THEMSELVES.
Shall we talk about the OPIATE/HARD DRUG USE IN SCOTLAND AND WALES?
Single mothers with multiple kids from multiple fathers…No one works…Everyone drinks, eats grease, does drugs, is on the dole.
Obesity, drinking and smoking is a way of life.
NOW you want to demand help?
Nizzle please.
J. Hale
1 year ago
The Republicans in the U.S. will use this article as evidence that socialized medicine doesn’t improve health outcomes.
E. L. Herndon
1 year ago
The title said everything about the agenda of the author. An opinion piece. Is there a problem? Yes. Will dirigiste government interventions (except for severely limiting immigration, perhaps) solve the problem? No. Just as in the so-called “gun violence” in the US, it is not the surface components, it speaks to a dysfunctional social matrix. As much as it pains me to admit it, bin Laden’s assessment of many aspects of Western society was more accurate than we’d like to think.
Andrew Dean
1 year ago
“My life’s rubbish, I know if I did all these things, I’d live longer but I really don’t want to live a longer rubbish life,’” Is this really the government’s responsibility? Surely this is the perfect example of freedom for the individual?
Christopher Barclay
1 year ago
A one-sided article. There is also a disconnect between communities that are unproductive and the rest of the country that the unproductive communities expect to pay for their health care.
There are currently great shortages of many groups of workers. That means salaries that would greatly improve people’s lives are going unpaid and unearned. The author never explores how unhealthy idleness is. Nor does he explore how mobility or respiratory problems develop in young adults.
The author starts the article by noting that many jobs in social services are for the benefit of the employee and not for the benefit of the people that person is meant to be helping. At the end, he asks that ‘politicians in charge of the purse strings’ increase the number of such positions. At no point does he suggest or discuss how communities suffering from high levels of multi-morbidity would use new resources to improve their health outcomes. Should young people from such communities graduate as doctors, there is no greater likelihood that they would hang around to work as GPs in these communities rather than heading for a nicer life elsewhere.
Christopher Barclay
1 year ago
A one-sided article. There is also a disconnect between communities that are unproductive and the rest of the country that the unproductive communities expect to pay for their health care.
There are currently great shortages of many groups of workers. That means salaries that would greatly improve people’s lives are going unpaid and unearned. The author never explores how unhealthy idleness is. Nor does he explore how mobility or respiratory problems develop in young adults.
The author starts the article by noting that many jobs in social services are for the benefit of the employee and not for the benefit of the people that person is meant to be helping. At the end, he asks that ‘politicians in charge of the purse strings’ increase the number of such positions. At no point does he suggest or discuss how communities suffering from high levels of multi-morbidity would use new resources to improve their health outcomes. Should young people from such communities graduate as doctors, there is no greater likelihood that they would hang around to work as GPs in these communities rather than heading for a nicer life elsewhere.
I think that if you haven’t experienced what the writer has, and have no knowledge of the reality of life in these situations then maybe you should refrain from passing an opinion.
What’s the solution then? Should the government give house calls to every scott and bring them groceries and cook them a meal. Should the government provide every citizen with their own PT? Regardless of our opinion about the multitude of migrants that try to get into Europe, they at least show some agency and dream about a better life. So things are tough and I don’t move unless it’s to go to the pub, I eat unhealthily and of course, it’s not my fault! It’s the “elites” and Margareth Tatcher. I can’t find a job and I stay put? Let me ask you a question, if I go to Glasgow today, and look around at the people doing menial jobs, how many Scotts will I spot?
In answer to your final question; None.
Read the entire, long article twice to confirm: not a single sentence or suggestion on how these people can do something on their own behalf to take charge of their life or do something to improve their life themselves.
So to answer your question
“What’s the solution then? ”
Not responsibility or self respect, clearly.
It was so long, I didn’t read it all. Did it mention Christianity or the church at all?
Nope.
(Cheated. Had to do CTL F “Christ”.)
Yes, we do have problems with your scotts, but little or no problems amongst us Scots.
potato, batata…
Or as Dr Johnson would have it “Scotch”.
The solution is to cut the dole, stop all immigration and temporary workers, allow wages to rise and insist on self sufficiency.
Robustly control, rather than stop all. Every country needs immigrants, just not in overwhelming numbers.
The story wasn’t about immigrants.
What’s your point. Someone has to do the menial jobs.
The classic handwringer’s malaise of ‘more funding needed’ without saying what you fund, or articulating the detail of how it would work to solve the problems of “overeating, excessive drink and drug use, gambling” or how you stop doctors leaving due to “work-related stress and the effect on [her] home life”. What do you get for your extra (11.2-10.7 minutes) 30 seconds of doctor time that cures this? How does the NHS help if the community “don’t want to live a longer rubbish life”? The author helicopters over the issues just as much the politicians he criticizes. What does the community actually want for themselves?
Could almost be a scouser.
Comment of the week
That’s a bit tough on Scousers after Paris isn’t it?
However, on reflection you are correct.
I’ve lived on council estates in Aberdeen, and in London. Social and medical services were broadly similar in both, probably a little easier to access in Scotland, whilst social and health problems were off the scale in the former (alcoholism, hard drugs, crime, ill health, domestic violence – made trainspotting look like a documentary). Other note-able features of the former were a culture of helplessness, and goals that did not extend beyond welfare payments, a bit of illicit cash earning, and getting high. Thankfully my immediate friendship group had the nous to get out of there (geography and jobs) before we got succumbed, which involved our rent going from £50 a month to £200, best money I ever spent. At least two that did not, didn’t make it beyond 25 years old.
Comments below are a bit harsh imo. Poor, disenfranchised people don’t have a lot of agency. It’s fine to talk about giving up smoking, cutting down on the booze and so on, blaming people for having bad health. But have you ever been to a poor post-industrial neighbourhood/town? No offence, but they are shitholes: ugly, filthy, noisy dumps full of ugly, damp housing. Everything in their environment is telling the people who live there that they are worthless. Maybe start there – clean the streets, maintain public spaces, outreach assertively into the community to find out what people really need and give it to them. These people are not stupid, they are beaten down with multi-generational poverty and the low expectations which go with that. Change the culture of failure by caring.
Well said. We had a plan along those lines in the Labour party had we won back in 2015. In addition to better funding the NHS, as part of our ‘inclusive prosperity’ package, it included a Job Guarantee, which would of given those fit enough public sector jobs, so they’d had dignity at work & reasonable pay doing some of those tasks you mention.
Public Sector jobs doing what? We are already overborne in many departments (take the Motor taxation, Dept. at Swansea. Because they said they were “snowed-under” when the place was built they were given 50% extra manning and all we’ve had since then is industrial strife and they still complain of lack of staff.) These “special” workers will all want their guaranteed 6 weeks on ‘the sick’ on full pay (There’s a person in each work group whose sole job seems to be going around reminding people that they must take Sick Leave before a certain date or they’ll lose it.) Never mind their gold plated CS pensions!! Besides many people who really do care get taken advantage-of by these “Poor Downtrodden.”
But precisely what has been taken away is agency. Working northern towns had sports clubs, brass bands, gardening competitions, people dressed up to go out on a Friday or Saturday night, they did jobs and looked after where they lived. There was a community pride, and part of that pride was people looking after each other and being part of something mutual. Now it feels like they’re not allowed agency. Can’t do anything unless the council/welfare/state does it for you. Politicians (cf Adam Bartlett’s comment) believe people are looking for charity from some benevolent state machine when often what they want is to feel valued, for their opinion to count and not to feel powerless or treated like children.
The lowest expectations are those that they have of themselves.
Well said.
There’s something missing here, which seems to have been buried or ignored. Some time ago, I recall seeing a TV documentary (possibly Horizon) that looked at the ‘Glasgow Effect’, where life expectancy is lower even when compared to equally deprived areas around the rest of the UK, controlling for similar patterns of poor diet, unemployment, substance abuse, etc. (and there are plenty of them). There has been lots of waffle about how ‘toxic masculinity’ is worse in Western Scotland and other such ways of reasoning it all away, but the arguments presented were interesting.
The hypothesis was that overcrowding in Glasgow tenements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was especially bad compared to other cities, led to very high levels of childhood disease and infant mortality before mass vaccination was available. Children with especially active immune systems were more likely to survive to adulthood, but with a cost that their hyperactive immune systems led to life-limiting conditions in later life; crucially, after the point where they had children of their own. Essentially, a short period of a few decades created an acute selection pressure, the results of which would be passed on to future generations. One piece of evidence was that life expectancy was still much lower for people who had not grown up in poverty or deprivation, but whose parents or grandparents had, compared to people with similar lives elsewhere, or indeed who had moved to Glasgow and did not have family roots there.
I’m not suggesting that this explains everything, far from it. The effects of the loss of middle income manufacturing jobs, with nothing to replace them bar very low paid service industry work, can be seen in many UK towns and cities. What is interesting is that this idea seems to have disappeared, while the sociological ideas continue (as does poor life expectancy). I don’t know if it was, in fact, disproved, but have my suspicions that any suggestion of genetic determinism simply attracts brickbats and accusations of supporting eugenics. If so, this is a pity as you cannot solve a problem if you focus on the wrong reasons for its existence. Much easier to blame Thatcher, isn’t it? Does anyone else (from the UK) recall this programme?
I didn’t see the programme but have heard of, and can understand completely, the Glasgow Effect.
My interpretation was the famous “See you Jimmy!” attitude and the effort required to maintain it – surely more than most non-Glaswegians can manage.
I have also witnessed that council estate effect in a number of areas around the UK, and seen the energy that people put in to say, buying/selling drugs or stolen goods. It’s all very well for people with the nous to escape, but many lack the resourcefulness to do so, and end up stuck through inertia and poor life choices.
I have just read Theodore Dalrymple’s book “Life at the Bottom” and I would recommend it to anyone interested in topics such as poverty in the U.K. I would like to quote some observations he makes about a public housing estate. He has various third world doctors coming in to the NHS and wants to show them some aspects of British life> He says:
“The houses along the way are, as public housing goes, quite decent. … Each has a little front yard of grass, surrounded by a hedge, and a much larger back yard; about half have satellite dishes. Unfortunately the yards are almost as full of litter as municipal rubbish dumps. I tell my doctors that in nearly nine years of taking this walk four times a week, I have never seen a single instance of anyone attempting to clean his yard. …I ask my third world doctors to examine the litter closely. It gives them the impression that no Briton is able to walk farther than ten yards or so without consuming junk food. Every bush, every lawn, even every tree is festooned with chocolate wrappers or fast-food packaging. Empty cans of beer and soft drinks lie in the gutter, on the flower beds, or on top of the hedges. Again, on a good day we actually see someone toss aside the can whose contents he has just consumed, as a Russian vodka drinker throws down his glass.
Apart from the anti-social disregard of the common good that each little such act of littering implies (hundreds a week in the space of 800 yards alone), the vast quantity of food consumed in the street has deeper implications. I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I’ve made hundreds, never – not once – have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave. And by the same token, I have never seen any evidence of meals taken in common as a social activity – unless two people eating hamburgers together in the street as they walk along is counted as social. This is not to say that I haven’t seen people eating at home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They eat alone, even if other members of the household are present, and never at the table; they slump on a sofa in front of the television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating, therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative obedience to impulse. Needless to say, the opportunity for conversation or sociality that a meal taken together provides is lost.”
Glasgow industrialised early, there isn’t even a race memory of good peasant cooking, maybe that’s why the standard of home cuisine is pretty dire. You can castigate the natives for their poor eating habits, but habits are hard to break folks! If you’re from Gdansk and your habit is salted herrings chances are it’s easier to eat healthy than someone from Lanarkshire where they’ve lived on fry ups and pies for five generations.
My Glaswegian mother-in-law used to cook vegetables well, by which I mean; for hours.
While they cooked, she smoked.
(That said; she was a lovely person.)
Crivins! I’m shocked, not at the article, but many of the responses to it. Summarised, they say:
I thought I lived in a more understanding and insightful country that recognises:
The science (epigenetics) says pretty clearly that people’s experience before and soon after birth conditions their vulnerability to stress, addiction and many other things. If your body’s response to stress is identical to a civilian in Donbas after 100 days of shelling, no wonder you’re not concerned about sticking in at school, eating your greens or having an appreciation of a litter free environment. Your only concern is how to survive the next 24 hours.
And please, don’t reply to this with the ‘I was thrashed as a kid and I turned out OK’ line. If that’s the case, I’m glad you’ve done well but please recognise the survivorship bias inherent in that statement where most don’t have the ability or means to overcome their inherent and profound disadvantage.
Well done to Unherd publishing this article – entirely consistent with challenging the herd mentality and divisive stereotypes.
Epigenetics says nothing of the sort. It borders on pseudoscience at times, and is very dubious at best.
There are judgey & cruel notes & comments.What you are missing is the pernicious culture of low expectations. This is every bit a killer as low or no social services. The difference is that if you only stress the latter, you can pose as a saint.
Do more mixing of the housing of the poor with the housing of the folk who are buying their own homes.
1 in 6 seems to be about the right ratio but that may vary around the country.
It is essential to disperse the poor among the better off instead of further wasting resources on the ghettos and their coaches living remotely from them.
By living and learning together all our children benefit from such mixing to spread more aspirational learning and lives.
Unfortunately, when a ‘poor’ family is housed in a ‘better’ area, they often drag the place down to their own standards or there are conflicts with the neighbours and the whole thing ends in tears. Seen it too many times locally.
Many poor people in the Westernize Countries, not just Scots have no discipline or drive.
They refuse to take care of themselves, work, exercise, eat clean, study, prep etc.
They are literally the Grasshopper from the “Grasshopper and the Ant.”
They have Culled THEMSELVES.
Shall we talk about the OPIATE/HARD DRUG USE IN SCOTLAND AND WALES?
Single mothers with multiple kids from multiple fathers…No one works…Everyone drinks, eats grease, does drugs, is on the dole.
Obesity, drinking and smoking is a way of life.
NOW you want to demand help?
Nizzle please.
The Republicans in the U.S. will use this article as evidence that socialized medicine doesn’t improve health outcomes.
The title said everything about the agenda of the author. An opinion piece. Is there a problem? Yes. Will dirigiste government interventions (except for severely limiting immigration, perhaps) solve the problem? No. Just as in the so-called “gun violence” in the US, it is not the surface components, it speaks to a dysfunctional social matrix. As much as it pains me to admit it, bin Laden’s assessment of many aspects of Western society was more accurate than we’d like to think.
“My life’s rubbish, I know if I did all these things, I’d live longer but I really don’t want to live a longer rubbish life,’”
Is this really the government’s responsibility? Surely this is the perfect example of freedom for the individual?
A one-sided article. There is also a disconnect between communities that are unproductive and the rest of the country that the unproductive communities expect to pay for their health care.
There are currently great shortages of many groups of workers. That means salaries that would greatly improve people’s lives are going unpaid and unearned. The author never explores how unhealthy idleness is. Nor does he explore how mobility or respiratory problems develop in young adults.
The author starts the article by noting that many jobs in social services are for the benefit of the employee and not for the benefit of the people that person is meant to be helping. At the end, he asks that ‘politicians in charge of the purse strings’ increase the number of such positions. At no point does he suggest or discuss how communities suffering from high levels of multi-morbidity would use new resources to improve their health outcomes. Should young people from such communities graduate as doctors, there is no greater likelihood that they would hang around to work as GPs in these communities rather than heading for a nicer life elsewhere.
A one-sided article. There is also a disconnect between communities that are unproductive and the rest of the country that the unproductive communities expect to pay for their health care.
There are currently great shortages of many groups of workers. That means salaries that would greatly improve people’s lives are going unpaid and unearned. The author never explores how unhealthy idleness is. Nor does he explore how mobility or respiratory problems develop in young adults.
The author starts the article by noting that many jobs in social services are for the benefit of the employee and not for the benefit of the people that person is meant to be helping. At the end, he asks that ‘politicians in charge of the purse strings’ increase the number of such positions. At no point does he suggest or discuss how communities suffering from high levels of multi-morbidity would use new resources to improve their health outcomes. Should young people from such communities graduate as doctors, there is no greater likelihood that they would hang around to work as GPs in these communities rather than heading for a nicer life elsewhere.
Far more Guardian than Mail!
Bit of an overreaction there, I think.
I think that if you haven’t experienced what the writer has, and have no knowledge of the reality of life in these situations then maybe you should refrain from passing an opinion.
People should be silent because they have a different opinion to you?
The poor were born to die.