All of these things other people have said these things much more eloquently than I ever will, but I’m going to say them anyway.
So a lot of people ask me ‘Why America’, and rarely do I give the real answer. I say “My wife’s American, and it’s time for us to be near her family”, or I explain about wanting space and land to live, and to build, and to keep a goat or two. All of these things are true.
But up until a few years ago I said I’d never go to America to work, because the health care system there seemed so uncaring compared to that in the UK. The Affordable Care Act has started on a path that I really, really hope America continues to follow. One to Universal Healthcare. I doubt it’ll ever be healthcare free at the point of use, but perhaps it will.
But why abandon Britain? When I was at university, I’d get told I was the most English person most of my friends knew. I listened to Radio 4, loved the BBC and drove a Morris Minor (still do, still love the concept, still do). I think the NHS is the best thing since sliced bread. I adore the lake district… And have a great fondness for this little island. But what I have watched is the destruction of all that I cared about.
The BBC has become naught but a puppet for right wing ideology. I still love the concept of a not-for-profit, state funded, independent broadcaster. But I’ve watched as it has been eaten away to being a gnarled stump of what it once was. The morning shows berate anyone left of centre, and extol the virtues of destroying the NHS, cutting all welfare, and letting rich people avoid their taxes. It’s depressing. The news doesn’t cover any left-wing protest, or the privatisation agenda of the current government. They barely reported the passage of the bill that removed any necessity to actually provide healthcare from the government and ripped the NHS from from public ownership, chopped it up, and gave it to the donors of the conservative party. So my beloved BBC is a mere shadow of a once great thing.
And given my love for the NHS, they question, why abandon it, and leave it to the less than tender mercies of British politics?
Because the NHS barely exists anymore, and I don’t believe the British public have the will to fight for it. When I discuss it with people, the broadest sense I get is one of apathy. People who’re using it? The best I might get is some ramble that its unsustainable. Despite the fact it’s cheaper than pretty much any other system, other than not having healthcare at all, for anyone. It’s ridiculously efficient, because it’s fundamentally very simple. It could be a hell of a lot more efficient if the government stop fiddling with it. But the vast majority of people rarely need it, at least, not until they get older. They don’t consider that one day they’ll be staring down the barrel of a cancer diagnosis. That they’ll be putting out the rubbish, slip, and suddenly find they’ve broken a hip. So they mutter that its unsustainable and that they don’t really think that everyone should be able to use it free.
People are inherently bad at planning for the unexpected. Or even the expected but distant. And people also don’t understand what’s happened. When you present them with statistics about how much has already gone – they are shocked. But then they don’t really understand what that means in the long term. What it means is companies that are in it for the money will take all the bits that make money. That they won’t run a loss-making service because it’s what people in the area need. That they don’t give a monkeys about anything but the bottom line. That they will cut training to the bare minimum, because it’s more important to make a profit than to develop their staff.
The companies that want to buy rock bottom priced chunks of NHS aren’t in it for the love of providing healthcare.
And morale? In the last decade I’ve never seen morale so low. The NHS ran on it’s staff. What Hunt, the media and many others fail to realise is just how much people gave for free. People don’t love crappy low wages. People don’t love their real-terms pay going down year after year after year (whilst watching MPs give themselves a 10% pay rise). Most people don’t love working nights and weekends. Most people aren’t deeply in love with never having family time, or not being at home on Christmas. But they do it, because they care.
But it’s not just that people turn up and do the bare minimum. No. People give their souls for the NHS. They work through breaks, they stay late, they come up with ways to extract every last red cent from the measily stipend the government’s provided for running the thing. They train on their days off, on their evenings at home. They pay for courses with their annual leave, they put their own money in to fund courses to gain qualifications that they’ll never see any financial benefit from. When hospitals cut one thing, staff often quietly make up the missing chunk.
But people are now running to leave. They’re tired of being abused, of being told they’re worthless, wasteful and incompetent. They’re tired for of the media denigrating all that the NHS is, and does. No one in the NHS believes it’s perfect. No one believes that nothing could be improved.
But ripping it to shreds and handing it to people who care only for the bottom line and lining their own pockets is not the way to improve it. Cutting it up and making it harder and harder for joined-up services to be formed is not the way to improve it. Slicing the profitable bits out and handing them, like candy treats, to your favourite companies and leaving the remainder of expensive, difficult to run, and unpopular services for the NHS is not going to improve it.
But that’s just one element of many of why I decided to go.
Another is the fact that none of the major parties are willing to try and stand up for civil liberties. The state of civil liberties in the UK country terrifies me. It seems to largely be based around “If you have nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear” which is a frankly terrible way to run a country. Watching both Labour and the Conservatives tweak the law further and further towards a near totalitarian monitoring of every individual is deeply scary. As someone who suffered the government’s censorship of the existence of LGBTQ people as a child, who truly felt for much of their childhood that they had something to hide. A person that was disturbed by knowing that they weren’t like everyone else, and that the government had said they were bad.
Perhaps that gives you a different perspective.
And then there’s fracking. This is a little island, and it won’t take much to fuck it up completely. Unlike much of the rest of the world we seem to be hellbent on fracking. And burying nuclear waste under an area of outstanding natural beauty. And building more nuclear power stations rather than trying to switch to any kind of sustainable future. And cutting green energy investment for no readily apparent reason (other than that some slimy politician wants a few extra quid for a few extra years).
And y’know what, I can’t deal with it anymore.
And that’s not even getting in to the way we’re treating people from countries where we committed acts so terrible the government here won’t even open the archives. Where the Empire imprisoned tens of thousands and tortured them. And we’re still standing in the way of getting any kind of reparations for the damage we did.
I can’t be in the UK any more.
So that’s why.
I don’t think America’s perfect, but it’s different. And it’s somewhere I don’t have the baggage of believing it to be my country, that should be the way I was brought up to believe it was.
