A terrible place to grow up
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Britain 'one of the worst places in Europe to grow up' - Telegraph.
No kidding. Since the "experts" quoted in the story want more of the government involvement that has been such a stunning success, it's not likely to get much better either. Britain is also one of the worst places to be an adult. Perhaps that's because the government doesn't allow citizens much practice at being adults?
This is so sad, mainly because the Britain I grew up in was so different. Such a short space of time (I'm not harking back to a golden age of lashings and lashings of ginger beer or anything) but it seems as if we were freer, not so rigorously classified and tested, able to sneak off into the countryside to hear friends play music to a few hundred people, less debt-ridden on leaving Uni, and so on.
Like the other comments, I think that the article is an example of satire writing itself: 12 years of action has achieved nothing, so we need... durr! More action, of course!
Posted by: Julia Smith | Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 09:49 PM
I suspect, just a little bit, that Britain being not so good a place to grow up in is more due to:
Too much government, too much legislation, too much of people thinking they know how to run other peoples lives better than the people who's lives they are and around 60 years of social engineering...
But maybe a little bit in the imagination too?
Posted by: Moggsy | Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 07:07 AM
Yes, it comes down to the infantilization of society and weaning onto the mother state, more BNW than 1984.
Posted by: jameshigham | Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 12:59 PM