The Campbell Academy Blog (84)

The crisis in the news - this week

And so, as someone who works as a dentist, I sat and watched the crisis unfold in the news this week.

It is a story of politicians breaking promises, a story of people pretending that they would put money into society from political budgets (which are actually ours) but not actually doing that, a story of something decaying and becoming worse and worse over decades where everyone could see it happening but nobody was actually brave enough to take responsibility for it.

Fixing broken problems is painful and takes sacrifice and a long-term view that modern-day politicians rarely have.

It's election year, so what they want to do is fix the big problem right in front of them so they get re-elected, not so they can make a difference for the long term, because when they're re-elected again, all they want to do is get re-elected.

And so, people on the fringes shouted and barked and said this isn't right and we said we would fix this, but nobody did and then the news changed to something else.

And so this blog could read about the 'crisis' in dentistry in Bristol and people in queues punching each other to try to get to a dentist, but that wasn't the news this week.

The news this week was the fact that the Earth is 1.5 degrees hotter for a consecutive full year for the first time ever, and during this time, the Labour Party decided to bin £28 billion a year of green investment that they pledged because they've realised they can't afford it and they'd have to make tax cuts to get elected, and so they'd rather get elected.

I'm not labour, and I'm not conservative; I'm not anything here, but the climate crisis is disastrous for billions of people.

The NHS dentistry crisis is terrible, but it's just a distraction from the main attraction.

The whole of NHS healthcare is f*ck*d, the whole of UK education is about to break, and so dentistry on the fringes on the outside here is a tiny little thing that the government will not pay any attention to once this week's crisis is over.

Problems of a societal nature are the responsibility of society to fix.

It's worth remembering that we always get the politicians we deserve.