Brexit demands referred to as “ransom note-like” have dominated discussion on the site today. We also look at your reactions to an article on burnout at work and a community looking after its lonely.
To join in the conversation you can click on the links in the comments below to expand and add your thoughts. We’ll continue to highlight more comments worth reading as the day goes on.
Tory MPs’ hard Brexit letter to May described as ransom note
Discussion on Andrew Sparrow’s politics live blog this morning has spun around a set of demands laid out in a letter to Theresa May by a group of 62 Tory backbenchers.
‘Do these people not understand that free-trade by necessity requires a legislative framework?’
Their ransom letter is nothing more than an attempt to have their cognitive dissonance made manifest in legislation. Do these people not understand that free-trade by necessity requires a legislative framework (or as that’s known to them “the evil bondage of red tape that isn’t administered by nanny). Their letter shows their ignorance and what’s more lays clear their goal. It is nothing less than an attempt to demand dairy ice cream whilst at the same time insisting all cows and other milk producing ungulates from donkeys to rhinos be banned.
This is their folly. They want free trade without the frameworks that make free trade possible. They want to trade with the world without asking firstly if we have anything that the world isn’t already buying from us. They’re touting the mythical beast of burdenless commerce as a panacea for all our ills but have neglected to ask if there is anyone out there willing to swap our baubles of Bank accounts and bombs for their advanced pharmaceutical research or rare earth supplies.
Tintenfische
‘These people may have noticed that 48% voted to Remain’
I have not researched the ERG membership but my guess is that the members are mostly English. These people may not have noticed that 48% voted to Remain in the EU and many people are very angry at the course of events that have led us to Brexit. These people are the far right of Brexit, they are fanatics, they are out of kilter with the mood of the nation, the majority of leave voters and their party. They should be the English Radical Group not the European Research Group. These people are the real ‘enemies of the people’ and the ‘’saboteurs’. Do they think their proposal is likely to bring any sort of consensus?
Heliopower
How burnout became a sinister and insidious epidemic
Moya Sarner has been speaking to people – including readers who shared their stories via a callout – about burnout in the workplace. Stories of both suffering and successful recoveries are explored, and you’ve been adding to the debate in the comments.
‘I’d been taking myself too seriously’
I suffered from something like this years ago. I’d worked successfully for a company in sales and product management for years, but decided I wanted something different and quit to follow a new path. A few years later, I was asked to return to my old company and, like a fool, agreed. After a few months, I started finding it more and more difficult just to get to work, I lost interest in the other stuff I used to enjoy, and ended up feeling like death warmed up.
The thing that put me back together was a TV comedy – The Office – which let me see that I’d been taking too many things, including myself, far too seriously, and putting everything into something that, in the scale of things, really wasn’t that important. I learnt to laugh at myself and, once I could do that, I could laugh at life.
For doctors, carers and others involved in critical functions, it’s different, as it can be a matter of life or death, and that must take its toll in stress but, for the rest of us mere mortals, it helps if we learn not to take what we do quite so seriously.
MissingInActon
The town that’s found a potent cure for illness – community
Frome in Somerset, writes George Monbiot, has seen a dramatic fall in emergency hospital admissions since starting a project fighting isolation and loneliness.
‘The consequences of early intervention with socialising strategies removes a cost from the system’
My instinctive understanding of the problems around looking after people when they get old or ill was that the cost of that care was merely a consequence of the getting old or ill. To the system as a whole it is essentially a cost of doing business, and the job of policy is to determine the distribution of that cost, with the current preference being increasingly to starve formal social and health care structures of resources in order to compel charity and personal suffering to pay the bill. And that while personal suffering of the otherwise inactive might be an efficient allocation, the unmeasured ministrations inspired either by good will or by being lumbered is not.
What I’m now beginning to grasp is that this is only part of how I should look at this. Because the consequences of early intervention with socialising strategies removes a cost from the system. There is no fixed cost to getting ill or old. This is a sort of “social” network effect. And your description of patients as people regaining their agency is key: being a passive recipient of care defines you as a debit in the accounts before you even start. Agency goes in the credit column. Thanks George – you’ve changed the way I think about social care.
Wuss
Comments have been edited for length. This article will be updated throughout the day with some of the most interesting ways readers have been participating across the site.
