The "Horrible" Nanny State
Here are some wise words from Zadie Smith…
“Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds.
Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.
Things change. I don’t need the state now as I once did; and the state is not what it once was. It is complicit in this new, shared global reality in which states deregulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss.”
…they could almost be my own, except for the NHS baby and the University grant (I had a loan). But if I had somehow got myself pregnant at the age of 33, I’m sure the NHS would have delivered it without any quibbles.
And my brother actually was knocked over by a transit van, aged about 10 or something, and the NHS managed to get almost all of his brain back into his head.
But the state did educate me and clothe me and check my eyes. It let me borrow books and jump off swings. It fed me and transported me and gave me an opportunity. It didn’t matter that the clothes generated such static electricity that you would nearly kill yourself every time you touched something metal. And it didn’t matter that the glasses were hand-me-downs from Ronnie Corbett or that the school custard had a skin on it that would make me gag.
The point is: the state did it.
“Some people owe everything they have to the bank accounts of their parents. I owe the state. Put simply, the state educated me, fixed my leg when it was broken, and gave me a grant that enabled me to go to university. It fixed my teeth (a bit) and found housing for my veteran father in his dotage. When my youngest brother was run over by a truck it saved his life and in particular his crushed right hand, a procedure that took half a year, and which would, on the open market—so a doctor told me at the time—have cost a million pounds.
Those were the big things, but there were also plenty of little ones: my subsidized sports centre and my doctor’s office, my school music lessons paid for with pennies, my university fees. My NHS glasses aged 9. My NHS baby aged 33. And my local library. To steal another writer’s title: England made me. It has never been hard for me to pay my taxes because I understand it to be the repaying of a large, in fact, an almost incalculable, debt.
Things change. I don’t need the state now as I once did; and the state is not what it once was. It is complicit in this new, shared global reality in which states deregulate to privatize gain and re-regulate to nationalize loss.”
…they could almost be my own, except for the NHS baby and the University grant (I had a loan). But if I had somehow got myself pregnant at the age of 33, I’m sure the NHS would have delivered it without any quibbles.
And my brother actually was knocked over by a transit van, aged about 10 or something, and the NHS managed to get almost all of his brain back into his head.
But the state did educate me and clothe me and check my eyes. It let me borrow books and jump off swings. It fed me and transported me and gave me an opportunity. It didn’t matter that the clothes generated such static electricity that you would nearly kill yourself every time you touched something metal. And it didn’t matter that the glasses were hand-me-downs from Ronnie Corbett or that the school custard had a skin on it that would make me gag.
The point is: the state did it.
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