Social policy
Where all (or most, anyway) of the money goes
Education policies
Not only is education a vital aspect of people’s life chances, it is essential to a vibrant society and for prospects for individual change and social adaptation. How we fund and deliver education as well as whom we educate, when and about what are all matters that require constant review. And we badly need some new ideas. Or do we?
Welfare policies
In the UK, transfer payments absorb around 22.5% of the Government’s total managed expenditure. While payments to pensioners are now broadly similar to their 1978 level, payments to working-age beneficiaries and children were around 10.2% in 2023, up from 8.5% in 1978-9 but down from a peak of 14.9% in 2008-9. More importantly than the numbers are the individual and social effects of the policies that drive the numbers. The structure of welfare in the UK is labyrinthine, widely creating perverse incentives, thus trapping beneficiaries in dependence on welfare and limiting ambition, opportunity and scope for action. A simpler, clearer, more rational approaches to selfare and to social security is desperately overdue.
Domestic violence
To many, domestic violence is unfathomable. Sadly, to very many more, it is an everyday reality. While it takes many forms, the vast majority is male violence and against women and girls, whether it be physical, sexual or psychological or a combination thereof, or controlling and degrading or a mix of any an all. It may be predictable or unpredictable. It may have triggers or come randomly. The only thing that is certain, whatever its form, is that it is wholly unacceptable and equally inexcusable. Yet, so often, we, society, social and policing agencies, do accept it; we do excuse it. Certainly we do not do enough to eliminate. Until we do, we will not have earned the right to think of ourselves as civilised.
Health policy
Health is not only a big deal, it is big business, consuming 18.3% of the government budget in . Of late, it feels as though the perennial problems of the UK’s NHS have proliferated. We examine policy issues in health in search of a more robust and effective system, starting with ‘what is the NHS?’ — a deceptively simple question.
Care for the aged
The state of care of the aged in the UK is poor and declining. It is caught in a political log-jam driven by scarcity of funds, immigration restrictions and a failure of political will to address the searching, long-term funding issues involved. Meanwhile, the state of that sector impacts directly the health sector and immiserates tens of thousands of people who deserve more dignified and more comprehensive care. This deficit transfers enormous care responsibilities to families (usually to women), straining relationships and finances. There has to be a way through the impass.
Focus on mental health
Mental health affects everybody. But it certainly affects some more than others, especially when it becomes mental ill-health. As such, it ranges from feelings of low self-esteem to inadequacy to seasonal affective disorder to panic to disruptive impulse-control, and conduct disorders to eating disorders addictive disorders to depressive episodes to severe psycho-pathologies including dissociative disorders, psychoses and schizophrenia-related disorders.
Some people live with mental ill-health all their lives. Some experience only occasionally or within the bounds with which they can deal personally. Some overcome it. Some are overcome by it and try to take their own lives. Some succeed.
What we must not do is ignore it or decline to talk about it. We must all work to end the stigma associated something that, at some level, affects each of us.
And we must treat it compassionately and consistently. No-one should live in a dark place in to which light came be shone.
Animal welfare policies
Despite thousands of years of settled civilisation, humans are yet to appreciate the significance of their roles as apex predators with consciousness and the capacity for conscience it implies, at least in relation to other species. We must accept our active duty to preserve, protect and sustain other species and to treat them humanely. This extends to both wild and domesticated animals whose mistreatment must be viewed as comparable to mistreatment of other species, such as humans.
Drug policy & addiction
Presently, UK law makes drug users criminals. Undoubtedly some are. Others have been forced to become so by their addiction and the criminalisation of supply. The approach is neither humane, nor rehabilitative. Almost worse, it is neither effective no preventative. While drug use and, especially, addiction is clearly undesirable, it need not entrap those afflicted in a criminal environment as well as in dependence. We need to find a more humane and constructive approach that minimises rather than rewards criminality and crime.
Non-typical learning styles and disabilities
We all learn differently. We all have different abilities. We are all individuals. The Monty Python scene from the once-controversial Life of Brian captures the idea perfectly. “Yes. we are all individuals.”
But for some, being an individual means learning differently from others. It may be more slowly, it may be more quickly, it may be difficulty with abstraction or radically shortened attention spans. it may be problems with motor skills or numbers or letters or a need for visual cues over auditory cues; it mat be as simple as differences in cultural appreciation.
In educational setting, these differences are allowed to persist undetected for far too long and, once discovered are chronically under-appreciated. Education must not shift curricula for other reasons, it must shift in its attention to differential learning abilities, cognitive styles and needs. The failure to do so not only impairs the development of the affected child, but everyone else in the classroom as well.
We have to do better, both to be compassionate and to stop wasting valuable educational resources on the wrong responses to those who don’t fit the standard mould.