Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
[00:00:00] The Y curve with Phil Dobby and Roger hearing.
[00:00:04] Trains cancelled, operations delayed, cold and collapsing classrooms.
[00:00:09] Why has the fabric of the UK reached breaking point?
[00:00:12] Is it part of an inability or an unwillingness to fund the maintenance of our society?
[00:00:18] Are we living beyond our means?
[00:00:20] Are there new steps a new government could take to make sure that things work,
[00:00:24] that the system that we pay for actually functions for everyone?
[00:00:28] Can Britain be mended? things, whatever it is, you maintain them, you try and make sure they keep working. And that seems, it seems to me, is what hasn't been going on. Now, whether that's to do with government short-termism, lack of money, I mean, I don't know. Well, the government will say it's lack of money. Well, you know, they'll say, well, we can't spend any more. No, no, no, no, no, that is the question. How do you make things stack up? Because we went through a long period of austerity. We were told, well, if the government spends more, there'll be more debt.
[00:01:42] And that'll create more inflation, supposedly.
[00:01:45] We've got the inflation anyway, even with austerity. is the fact that the wealth divide is getting so much greater. So I wonder whether Britain is broken for the wealthy. I suspect not. No, but there are certain basic things, you know, power supplies. I mean, the absolute thing is you don't replicate even if you are wealthy. You don't build yourself an environment that has no interaction with the rest. So you have to use some of these things yourselves.
[00:03:02] So even the wealthy would begin to say,
[00:03:04] hang on a second, this stuff trains don't run out of time. All the people travel over 100 miles to find an NHS dentist. You can do all of those. There's no prioritising. It's like everything has to be fixed. How do you do that when we have come down so far? But is it just Britain or is it the whole of the world facing this problem? I think it tends to be much more, I think there's a sense that systems in Britain are
[00:04:23] not being made.
[00:04:24] This maintenance principle, the idea that you not only have to have a system, you have
[00:04:27] to make sure it actually works. But we certainly got enough sick people though. Well exactly. We're determining factoring. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So all of these things have to be done. And well, so an impossible question we ask. Well, it's a question we're going to ask George Mombio, who the guardian columnist and writer of environmental subjects, but on many other subjects as well. And he's going to give us his take on this and he joins us now. So George, I mean, sounds like, I mean, just, you know,
[00:05:42] as we've been saying in our introduction there,
[00:05:44] there's just so much collapse of special educational needs provision in many parts of the country.
[00:07:01] And some parents as a result have had to give up their jobs in order to look after their there was really serious sustained investment, what was in the Victorian era. And we are just way behind. We have pumping stations which are suitable for half the size of the population we have today. We have water treatment works which are just antiquated. They're falling apart.
[00:08:21] I mean, everything is falling apart. invest now because it's going to take 10 years for that investment to be felt and whoever's in power then will be the beneficiary of it. And so political short termism is kind of baked in, but there's also the ideology. And there's ideologies which say the state shouldn't be competent. The state shouldn't be spending money. The state shouldn't be providing public
[00:09:41] services except the absolute bare minimum. And other is to pursue their fiduciary duties to their shareholders, which is to maximize revenue. And the two things are simply not compatible with each other. You can't optimize both variables.
[00:11:00] And so yes, it's true that there were big problems
[00:11:02] with our water and sewerage system, even before privatization.
[00:11:06] But those problems have become much worse public money should be being invested. Yes, so the issue here is austerity. You know, it's these two great fists crunching the public sector. One of them is privatization and the other is austerity. And in this case, absolutely austerity is what we're looking at. Labour had something called building schools for the future. It was beset with problems. It wasn't perfect, not least because they tried to do as much as possible in right across
[00:12:25] the public sector through something called the private finance initiative, which has turned Granite. Yeah, it was amazing, isn't it? The first of all, 30 years would be seen as being acceptable. If you're running a business and something was going to last 30 years, you'd have it on a spreadsheet somewhere saying, right, we've got to replace that in 25 years, but it seems to get forgotten about. When you're saying that's a business would do that, that kind of goes back to the idea that perhaps private sector will be doing it. Well, maybe because they don't know
[00:13:42] what they've got as well as that's part of the problem is that when you inherit a public asset So, for instance, with Grenfell, there were loads of political choices made before that disaster happened. And there were loads of inflection points at which local government or central government could have said, these red lights are flashing, we should respond to that. We should respond to these warnings. They failed to do so again and again.
[00:15:00]