I spotted this (Carer survey launched – 3FM Isle of Man (three.fm)), which, on the face of it, offers carers a long awaited chance to tell government about the practical problems they face.
Except that if you follow the link (The Carers Survey 2022 – Cabinet Office of the Isle of Man Government – Citizen Space) you discover that it doesn’t. Because the survey is being run by Crossroads, an ‘independent’ puppet charity set up by government to divert attention from the problems caused by…. well, social services cutbacks and every inefficient government social policy which followed, to be honest.
Crossroads was set up and originally administrated by the chief executive of the island’s council for voluntary organisations – an organisation so free of government oversight that he had government e-mail and phone numbers listed in the civil service phone book, operated from a government office and drew a government salary. I know because I was in that office several times during the setting up of a local housing charity, which he also oversaw on behalf of government, which had refused to take effective measures to deal with homelessness but also refused to work with any charity set up by concerned citizens who wanted to do so unless it could choose the trustees.
In practice, that choice boiled down to ensuring that all trustees were compliant members of evangelical churches with which the government already had understandings. You can judge the high moral fibre of those trustees if you know that the housing charity’s first secretary and only paid employee (another evangelical and government stooge) was recently sentenced for sex offences involving minors.
So, if you were to respond with any view that was not in Crossroad’s favour would they pass it on? Doubt it. Crossroads, along with the social services, being itself a major obstacle to a carer’s ability to care this makes the whole survey a little suspect, perhaps even perpetuated in order for the Manx government to push through plans it already has to further cut services while pretending to seek public feedback.
But this is hardly new. A few years ago, our government also claimed to be running a public survey on end-of-life care, before introducing plans it had secretly made already to hand the whole business over to the island’s hospice. The survey was run by… oh, you probably guessed it…. a hospice employee, god-botherer and pro-life fanatic. You can probably also guess her findings and the government decisions that followed.
Since then the hospice has also run ‘public surveys’ on all aspects of care of the elderly and been awarded government monopolies to oversee such care. Most worryingly, this now extends to care of elderly people with Alzheimers, an area which it is doubly incompetent to oversee.
Even by the usual standards of the hospice movement, the island’s hospice is a mess. For 20 years now, whenever asked, I have said that I would not send a dog to die in the hovel they run…and I do not share the soppy attitude to animals held by most Manx people.
Manx ‘third sector’ organisations are, at best, run by people made redundant by government cutbacks, more usually by people fired by government because even there they were not considered up to the job and almost exclusively by close-minded god-bothers.
I have to suggest that if there is a genuine social problem the LAST person government should ask to define the nature, find out the details or frame possible solutions is an employee of an empire-building barnacle on the public purse.
Manx Low Life 