Consult then Ignore: Official Govt. Policy?

Gordon the Moron want's more public consultation.
That's official.
He wants us to tell him what we want him to do.
Then he can ignore what we tell him and do what he always planned to do in the first place, and say that he's taken our views into account.
It's an expensive and futile way of pretending that democracy is working.
Too many of us already know that it isn't.
Now, down on our little allotment in South Gloucestershire in the good old Dis-United Kingdom Nosher and I indulge in an age old tradition of talking to our plants.
And when they talk back to us (and plants have various ways of communicating if you're perceptive enough) we try to take into account that they're telling us: 'more fertiliser', 'less water', and so on.
If we choose to ignore them it's our prerogative, after all they're only vegetables and we're in charge.
We're the ones with an agenda.
We want to grow good vegetables and then exploit them by eating them, so if we pretend to listen and then eat them anyway, they shouldn't be too surprised.
The way democracy works in the Dis-United Kingdom has now sunk to this level.
We're being treated like vegetables.
Only this week the recommendations of the Government-funded expert inquiry into drugs were ignored and cannabis was upgraded in criminal status against their advice.
So the inquiry was a waste of taxpayers' money.
Now the Government has announced it wants to consult over what to do about the estimated shortfall in funding for the social care of the elderly that is set to rise to £1 billion in a few years' time, due to the numbers of elderly people rising, and Government funding for their care not keeping up with need.
In fact, there's been a shortfall of many millions of pounds for some years, and as a result social social care for the elderly has been ever more severely rationed and means-tested.
More and more elderly people are having to sell off their assets to meet their care needs, or are going without.
And the number of elderly people living in poverty is increasing, which means that as care is more tightly rationed, they'll have nothing to sell off to pay for care, so they'll deteriorate at home until their condition is bad enough to satisfy the ever-tighter criteria for receiving what little care is available.
Government action was needed to address these issues years ago, but instead they commissioned the Wanless Report, which cost millions of pounds, took several years, and is now sitting in a desk drawer somewhere.
How many times does Gordon the Moron need telling that old people are suffering because care for the elderly is grossly underfunded?
And what does he expect the expensive public consultation exercise to tell him?
The groups campaigning for proper care for the elderly will tell him that millions of people are suffering because Government provision has consistently lagged behind actual need for care (although the demographics have been known for years).
Most ordinarypeople will say what they usually say, which is that they want more services for less money.
And all the voluntary care agencies will say they need more funds to meet the growing demand for their services.
Then Gordon will tell us that someone's got to pay, and he'll do what he always planned to do in the first place: fiddle around with the system to make it look like he's putting much more money in, when in fact he'll put very little more in relative to the actual shortfall.
The entire public consultation process is now in disrepute, because the Government spends millions of pounds on advisers, experts, inquiries, and consultations, and then does what suits itself rather than responding intelligently to what emerges from the people who could reasonaby be expected to know best what needs to be done on the issue in question.
Down on the allotment neither Nosher nor I were in the least surprised by Gordon the Moron's latest proposal for more consultion.
It's a strategy that indicates a lack of good ideas on the Government's part, or a sneaky way of looking for excuses to do as little a possible dressed up to look as much as possible. And than blaming the predictable outcome on the public 'after all, it's what the public wanted' I can hear Gordon the Moron's pathetic excuses already.
We'll just have to wait and see how it all pans out.
But we are not expecting many smiling faces at the end of it.
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