The notion of ‘early intervention’ is raising its really ever-present head in British politics. The idea is that we can save £37K in on-costs by getting amongst crap families early. In research terms this has been the bleedin’ obvious since I can remember – at least since teaching social policy because someone was off sick in the 80s. The question is why so little has changed in 30 years – or since pre-Victorian times if you do some digging down at the history dump. The answer is that our politicians and ‘professionals’ for a self-interested hunk of shit. Polite criticism hasn’t worked and politicians and over paid bureaucratic clowns know what to say and how to do nothing except take the resources for themselves and their cronies. It all may go down in history as the ‘Louise Casey’ syndrome’. The basic idea is to do pilot schemes and publicise them as successes. In the meantime disabled couples who can’t cope commit suicide and criminal turds have children in order to hide behind them – etc.
To make an early intervention you really need a time machine and go back to that time before the research told us about the situation. What’s needed is knowledge on why we don’t do what is needed, even when we know what to do. In this, a standard ‘professional’ answer is “resources” – i.e. the lack of same. The people saying this have resourced lives and know enough about the problem to ensure they never live anywhere near it. In the meantime we have an economy that facilitates the creation of poverty for many and vast , unusable riches for one percent. It’s not rocket science, though the banksters pretend it is.
Those of us who care – and frankly you can’t care too much without being driven crazy by the squalor and intransigent attitudes in and around it – end up working in highly malfunctioning bureaucracies, cutting corners to get anything done. Our bosses are increasingly not once decent pracitioners promoted to incompetence, but a vile, obscenely overpaid class of jerks running devolved budgets involving a smidgen of arithmertic and attendance at dubious management development events at which they learn to form a clique of performance managers around them – and what a performance that is. It’s image management in much the same manner as guest tours of the Soviet Union (without the excellent, drunken brewery tour). Whistle-blowing is acted on as an act of terrorism, and scapegoats are occasionally thrown into the public gaze in pretense of any real evaluation and accountability.
There are many ways we could deal with the problems and the only ones I know will work involve a different attitude towards what an economy is and the dissolution of centralised power and secrecy. The most massive change needed is in the way we currently earn our way out of the problems, leaving them behind to fester. In short, we don’t give a shit (forget bleeding heart liberalism or personal polite manners) if it’s not affecting us – the criminal mind-set of the upper-class in ‘An Inspector Calls’.
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