A review of Generation Care

My cousin and her husband, Fiona and John Macmillan, sent me the following opinion on the book 'Generation Care':
....thank you for the very impressive book of poems that you sent us. Thanks so much. Beautifully presented and formatted!
John and I had a good read through and we both thought that there was considerable thoughtfulness and sensitivity about the many poems. Well done indeed.
I guess as you would no doubt expect I am not convinced however by the idea of a 'caring capitalism'. To me the terms are really contradictory: capitalism being the pursuit of individual wealth, and of itself then in competition with the needs of others; caring being about putting first the concern for others - which in fact is the fundamental principle of socialism. Christ of course being the first socialist! Thatcher probably summed up the capitalist philosophy most succinctly when she said that there was no such thing as society. Everything for her was about the pursuit of wealth by the individual, perhaps most clearly demonstrated in the selling off of council houses in the 1980s, the consequence of which is now coming home to roost with the dire shortage of affordable, decent housing to rent for those who cannot afford to buy. Perhaps most ironic is that many of those council houses are now in the hands of private property developers, renting them out at exorbitant rents, a considerable proportion of which comes from government funded housing benefit!! What a travesty!!
Of course in these days of appalling cost of living crisis, decent working people are having to choose between paying for heating and paying for food, and the services that people expect to operate effectively to live comfortably, like energy, water, transport are shockingly poor and yet way overpriced! And yet there are still a proportion of people who fully espouse the capitalist philosophy of making money and who indeed are making lots of money, so much so in fact that they cannot possibly know what to do with it all!
I notice that the architect of austerity - George Osborne, who is now a partner of the banking advisory firm Robey Warshaw is in line for a £3 million annual pay out for his services. There are apparently 3,500 bankers in the UK earning 1m euros a year, which is the largest number by far in any European country. And that really is quite extraordinary when you consider the mess that banking left the global economy in 2007! These are also the sort of figures that really impact inflation, especially as these are the sorts of people who spend their money on inflation-boosting assets like mega-expensive mansions. Apparently more houses over £5m were sold outside London in UK than at any time since the financial crisis of 2007. This is where our inflation problem comes from not from public sector nurses, paramedics, teachers, teaching assistants, and care staff seeking a living wage, as the Telegraph would have us believe!
So, as you can tell, I am not a supporter of the capitalist philosophy.
In my view the desperate state of affairs in the UK at the moment really requires a complete rethink politically and economically. By focusing on the needs of the many not the few, to quote a Jeremy Corbyn mantra, we might just turn this very sad and economically depressed society of ours into somewhere worth living! Society is currently at the most unequal it has been since the early 1980s, which ironically was when economically society was not only at its most equal but also its most prosperous!! Taxes were high but the quality of public services more than made up for that.

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