Make Life Worth Living Exhibition, Nick Hedges - Edinburgh 2015

​http://www.shelterscotland.org/lifeworthliving
This exhibition is a set of photographs of tenement life in Glasgow between 1969 and 1972, taken by Nick Hedges for Shelter. I would love to see the whole exhibition, as, from looking at the selection on Shelter's website it is an incredible body of work.

Mother living with her children in an overcrowded single end tenement flat Glasgow 1971

Mother takes her baby inside her condemned tenement block Gorbals 1970

Looking at them made me reflect, both on my own childhood and on current issues:

The children in these pictures are of my generation but what a different start in life to mine, how much harder to realise potential, to achieve health, education, even a secure roof over ones head.

This lead me to think of what the current government is doing, what divisions it is encouraging, nay even enforcing on society today - is this stratified society what we want to exist as the norm?

We need to WAKE UP and act, we need to STOP a generation of children being consinged to the scrap heap of life.

Each and every life in this country has value, has EQUAL value, with every other life. That is why I believe a taxation system in both it's giving and taking should be helping those that have less, those that are struggling, those that have ill health - to promote, increase and maintain the equality that we all have a right to. Equality of health, education, opportunity, safety and self determination. The basic Human Rights.

A different set of photographs from the same collection, when the collection visited Bradford a year ago:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/photography/11128331/Make-Life-Worth-Living-Nick-Hedges-photographs-for-Shelter.html

Give refugees a home

http://www.citizensuk.org/help_find_homes_for_syrian_refugees

George Orwell from Politics and the English Language

"If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs."

Must read article by Lucy Mangan in The Guardian (24/01/2015)

If you don’t understand how people fall into poverty, you’re probably a sociopath

Why don’t abused women just leave their partners? Why don’t poor people just spend less? Why do people in positions of power ask so many stupid questions?

• 
• • Lucy Mangan
  • The Guardian, Saturday 24 January 2015

Excellent article not least due to the line from comedian Bridget Christie, who

"...finished her act with a plea for all laydeez to stop waxing, spraying, deodorising, strimming and surgically trimming their – well, let’s call it “that part of ourselves historically judged to be the seat of all our femininity and womanly powers” – and instead celebrate our individuality by thinking of those parts as “unique, special – like snowflakes. Made of gammon”"

I was listening to Bridget Christie delivering this line on Radio 4 whilst driving - R4 should issue warnings to drivers before broadcasting such knicker wetting humour!

Drugs in prisons...

Surely an increase in drugs seizures in prisons is due to more drugs getting in and not better security! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30859350

Government spin in operation here!

A huge increase in drugs found does not equal better searching/security, there could be a link but it's unlikely and who would actually think that it was a direct link when the biggest increase is in private prisons. Private prisons do not have a good track record! The more obvious conclusion to draw would be that there has been a major increase in drugs smuggled into prisons - now this might just go alongside an increase in security but the uderlying factor is likely to be an increase in drugs.

The government is desparately trying to prove privatisation works before the general election. Well on recent evidence it doesn't:

• Hinchingbrooke Hospital inadequate - Privately run by Circle
• HMP Northumberland: Prison 'stand-off' comes to an end - Privately run by Sodexo
• Oakwood Prison: 'Near riot' claim as inmates damage cells - Privately run by G4S

What price privatisation of our NHS?

Hinchingbrooke Hospital - Inadequate

To me this doesn't just say NHS 'privatisation doesn't work', it also says something very fundamental about our NHS. If our NHS is failing it is because it is UNDERFUNDED. If a private company, that chose to bid to run Hinchinbrook, can't pull it off it means we are not putting enough INTO our healthcare system. What do we have, if we don't have health?

Furthermore, do you, YES YOU, think that someone should be making a profit out of health care? Making a profit out of our taxes? Should my or your ill health line even more private companies pockets? Isn't it enough that our health is held ransom by 'Big Pharma'?

Read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Pharma

To finish with a little food for thought...

If we all become healthier what future do the private healthcare companies have then? Ok, I know this is the silly extreme but think about it! There is no profit in private healthcare companies reducing our need/dependency on them whether it be reduction in a need for their drugs, their hospitals, their care homes or their anything else!