Posted on 01/03/2008 12:19:34 AM PST by bruinbirdman
Somewhere, some time, the United Kingdom lost its pride in itself. Let's start at the toilets at Gatwick airport...
It's the small things that take you by surprise on returning to Britain after a long break, as I did over Christmas. Not the weather or the headlines or Labour's plunging fortunes, but things like the speed of cars, the cost of a train ticket, the convenience of cash machines (do we know how much they encourage profligacy?), and the number of newspapers on offer.
For me it was the smallest thing of all that gave me the greatest shock. It was the toilets at Gatwick. I was tipped, mid-morning, off a plane from Houston after 24 hours' travelling from Central America: three flights, three countries, endless hours of waiting around and a lot of toilet visits. We traipsed, blearily, through what appeared to be a temporary construction and down those long, long walks in which certain far-flung corners of Gatwick seem to specialise.
And into the loos. Or at least, into a queue outside the loos. A line of American visitors spilt out into the corridor. It quickly became apparent why. One of the three cubicles had been locked shut, presumably blocked. Another I was told not even to show my daughter into in case it frightened her. I glanced, saw blood, retreated. The sole final cubicle, for which everyone was queueing, wouldn't flush without a repeated pumping of the button and most people were coming out embarrassed and apologetic that they had not managed it.
Thence to wash their hands in a row of basins spattered with dried-on, encrusted vomit. It was extraordinarily embarrassing. I found myself apologising to these American visitors, saying that Britain wasn't usually like this — and the words dried up in my throat. Because it so often is. Somewhere, some time, the soul of the United Kingdom lost its pride in itself. Public spaces are dirty, people from ticket salesmen to immigration officials are rude, life operates on some invisible financial level that entirely passes by the needs and desires of ordinary people.
And so it was that I read Gordon Brown's new year messages with a sinking heart. One was all about riding out global economic forces, lots of long-term legislation and social reform, great challenges and firm convictions; the other, a sort of paean of praise to the Government dressed up as congratulations to NHS staff, with a pledge to give patients greater control over their healthcare and a proposal for a new constitution for the health service.
There was quite a lot about cleaning up hospitals in it as well. Mr Brown knows that, just as those American visitors' view of the UK will be for ever coloured by their first experience of it, the Gatwick toilets, most people's experience of hospital care ends at A&E and can be fixed for ever by the state of the toilets they find there. And they are quite right, too: public services experts will tell you that you can tell the state of a hospital by looking at the state of the loos in A&E, just as you can tell a good school by standing in the main corridor for five minutes.
Or, I suppose, the state of a country by the state of its airport toilets. Go to Houston, Texas; you could eat off those loo seats. Go, even, to Belize. You wouldn't want to eat off them, and you might pay 25c for a bit of loo roll, but then you can at least use them, and flush too, and someone will even wipe the sink after you.
I have no doubt at all that the loos at Gatwick are attended to (or not) by badly paid foreign workers who couldn't give a damn what an American tourist might think of the UK on first arrival. I know that the airport itself is run by a Spanish company that probably couldn't give a damn etc. I expect the cleaning of the loos is contracted out to some ghastly low-paying employment agency. And I have no doubt that if I was in charge of cleaning them, even as a British citizen (is this what Mr Brown meant when he said British jobs should be held for British workers?), I would find it hard to take much pride in my work.
But find the reason why the public loos in North and Central America work — a 25 cent financial incentive for someone, or a decent contract, or simply some pride — and why those in Britain are often squalid, and you will find the reason for the dissatisfaction that British people feel in public services and the State today. The complicated mix of public and private, foreign and domestic ownership of so many things that we still consider public services, the jumble of foreign workers, the temporary contracts and the corner-cutting in the drive for productivity, productivity, productivity: these have so muddled the lines of responsibility and removed the traditional British pride and courtesy that no one seems to care who should clean a loo at Gatwick any more.
That, and not the fear of global economic forces or concern about carbon emissions in China, is what accounts for the sense of cynicism and powerlessness about government in Britain today; yes, whether it is really government's responsibility or not. (You can see it, too, in the disrespect for poorer rail users, people without private transport, implicit in Network Rail's last-minute decision to disrupt train services on New Year's Eve, just as it does every Sunday for ordinary families trying to enjoy a weekend out.)
I see that a think-tank is proposing the anniversary of the creation of the NHS for a “British Day”, which the Prime Minister has long hankered after to remind us of our common values; I would go for a Thomas Crapper or an Alexander Cummings Day (Cummings was the real British inventor of the flush toilet), and have us all out cleaning public loos. I volunteer for Gatwick. I should think it's particularly revolting after the new year: anyone with me?
Alice Miles won the What the Papers Say Columnist of the Year award last month
Lesson given? If you are a "hyphenated-American" of any stripe, you may be more loyal to your own ethos or origins than you are to the Republic that gives you the freedom to live there. And if you are in Britain, you may be hip deep in immigrants, legal and otherwise, who don't give a Union Jack about keeping the toilets in YOUR country clean...after all, it's not really THEIR country is it?
Bravo. I support every color and shade of people...who want to work hard, take care of their families, keep their lawn mowed, and not plot to kill me in my sleep. MLK, Jr. had that one right...and I wish I saw more “leaders” in every community today that were as colorblind as he hoped we would be.
The students were (legal) immigrants from some African country, who came here to achieve greatness in the greatest nation in the world. They wanted to work hard and get good grades so they could get rich, and they were encouraged to achieve by their (married) parents, most of whom were successful businesspeople in the community. But some of the "native American" black students, as it were, thought that the way these newcomers were getting great grades was "disrespecting" them and making them look bad, and so, in the classic solution used by brawny underachievers, decided to beat the tar out of those "uppity" black Poindexter's.
Not a word about this in the national networks, of course. And the one newspaper article, which all but called it a "hate crime", completely left out the color of the attackers, letting your brain fill in the wrong answer.
In the end, it is not about race. It is about culture. If your culture glamorizes drugs, calls women "Hoes", accepts petty crime from your young men and blames the police for "shooting our babies" when your babies pull a gun on the cops, then your culture is morally bankrupt. If you really want to change things, you should accept judgment and work to change your culture, not spend eternity blaming "the man" for keeping you down. MLK is probably spinning in his grave.
Socrates, the father of philosophy, said that countries should be managed by its best well-rounded citizens (well, he said philosophers) and not the masses. According to his theory, modern day politics and politicians in Western Civilization is domed to fail!
“Is it still that clean, I wonder?”
I spent a week in Stuttgart in 2000.
It was, without a doubt, the cleanest city I have ever been in.
pingferlater
Perhaps there are toilets with foot baths provided in the name of diversity that are far cleaner.
Take TONS of money!!
I was in Gatwick last month and noticed nothing particular about the loo. British toilets tend not to be as clean as German, though.
Yes, we have problems, the same social problems that afflict most Western nations now thanks to 40 years of laissez faire morality.
But Britain is still a great country, and well worth a visit, from the Highlands of Scotland to London, from Belfast and the Antrim Coast to Wales,the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. A hugely diverse nation in landscape and culture...
I imagine now, with the current valuation of the dollar, I’ll need even more “TONS of money”! Thanks for the reminder.
"Jacksonian vs. Jeffersonian democracy" as I recall from my high school studies! The eternal question: Is a "true" one-person-one-vote democracy actually good for the nation, when it means that someone with no facts who votes their heart's (uninformed) conviction can cancel the vote of a citizen who has studied world politics for thirty years? Or is it better that the more educated, assuredly more wealthy and more powerful have a monopoly on how things work that excludes the "man in the street"?
How do we balance the two? The Founders thought the vote should be granted only to landowners, whom it was assumed would have a stake in any public policy, and wouldn't be willing to promote laws that would damage society. IIRC, there was a French philosopher who toured the young USA in the early 1800's, who opined that it would last just as long as it took the average man to realize he could, with a popular vote, enrich his own self from the public till.
You have hit upon one of the classic questions. I suppose it is why we have endured so far by relying on a representative democracy (with it's "electoral college" checks) rather than a pure democracy where everything goes to a popular vote.
As I have written in the past, our society is the absolute worst form of government...except for all the rest of them!
I'm a pretty fundamental Christian, but Scott Peck once wrote that if you examined Christian "sin" completely outside of the strictures of relgion, you end up with "humans getting what they want the easy way." That is, smash and grab the stereo from the store, kill somebody and take their stuff, con somebody out of what they earned by work, that kind of thing.
It is a fundamental statemenet of human nature that in the Eden parable, when Adam & Eve were presented with the directive that they could never eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that neither of them ever said "Why?" The urge to do the crafty thing (and steal it) is written in our human DNA...left alone to our "Nature", humans will most often choose the easy way, the crafty way. Only being aware of our shortcomings will allow us to overcome them.
Love you homepage by the way.
Love you homepage by the way.
Yes, I tend to think that 98% of humans are predictable products of genetics and conditioning and just maybe the remaining 2% are where the battle between "Good vs. Evil" is fought but Twain's "a lie can travel half way around the world before the truth has a chance to put is shoes on" gives evil a chance but "time fears no one" means Good will eventually win. So, in this sense, I like a Spock from Star Trek trapped on Earth and trying to understand her complexities.
The same thing is happening here, except our 3rd world immigrants aren’t legally coming from former colonies, they’re illegally invading us like a foreign enemy and our government is inviting them in by offering inducements to come and sanctuary if they stay.
In one of Nimoy's books, he wrote something like: "I was born either fifty years too late, or 600 years too early. I guess I'm just an old fashioned spaceman."
Sometimes I turn to my Young Bride of twenty five years and just say, in exaspiration, "Humans!"
I tend to think the same about my wife of 7 years. Who was Mohammed? A young man who never received love in his life and only found it with an older woman who died after only a few years of bliss. Who was Hitler? A man who never received love in his life and reacted predictably. Who was Stalin? A man who never received love in his life and the only woman who could melt his hardened heart died and so he acted predictably. Who is Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, a man who was a bit normal until his wife died. The comparisons are endless in understanding the predictable nature of humans.
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