‘Change’ is everywhere in this election. Nick Clegg is offering change by the bucketload, David Cameron is doing his best to out-change Clegg, and Gordon Brown’s silence on the matter is noticeable – because he knows the change many voters would like to see would involve him not being Prime Minister.But do people really want change or do they just like hearing about it? I often feel that our resistance to real, concrete change that actually affects us is apparent in our reaction to plans to reduce the number of post offices or restructure healthcare services.
The latter is particularly pertinent for me right now because where I live in Islington there is long-running and very popular campaign to save the A&E at the Whittington hospital, whose closure is part of NHS London’s restructuring plans. Local politicians of all parties are queuing up to rubbish the plans and support the local campaign, and similar campaigns are being run across London.
Restructuring health services in the capital so that more care is provided in local or specialist centres, and less in hospitals, is apparently more cost-effective and likely to deliver better care to local people. But local people don’t like it because they’ve got used to having their local hospital. Tuesday night’s BBC London evening news featured a local leader whose main argument against closing the nearby A&E seemed to be simply that people had got used to it. If we took this approach to every public policy question, nothing would ever change.
On the one hand, you could simply argue that local NHS managers have done a bad job in communicating the benefits of the changes to local people, or that on this occasion the changes in question are just wrong. But I also think it shows that people’s first reaction to real, visible, concrete change that affects them directly is negative: we like things just the way they are, thank you very much.
I think this creates a real challenge for all those politicians promising change in this election. We will need many more radical changes to our economy and society if we want to drive forward a fair and sustainable recovery. Politicians need to show us how they will deliver real change which doesn’t flounder on our inbuilt preference for inertia. Otherwise ‘change’ will continue to be just another campaign slogan that means very little once our votes have been cast.
Kayte Lawton
Change is marketed like an antibiotic. Take change and banish this disease that affects us. Change will cure all of our ills. Some of us may have at times in our lives wanted to 'change' our parents but for most of us it was a passing and in most cases, situational desire that we were glad did not come to anything. Likewise we all want our destiny to be addressed and to be in the capable hands of someone who will be there in the longer term through thick and thin. The misnomer that change cures is simply fallacy.
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