If you use any public service in the UK now, be it an NHS hospital, National Rail/TFL train or Job Centre, you’ll nearly always see a cutesy poster, sporting some arms-crossed, uniformed and diverse public servant, with words to the effect of “DON’T ABUSE OUR STAFF” threateningly emblazoned above.
The first thing you might draw from seeing this plastered everywhere in public service is that, as society comes apart and social trust splinters in what was once a high-trust nation, even in its metropolitan areas, the decency and respect that the public showed towards the police, medical staff and bus drivers has evaporated. They now have to put up with periodic abuse from drunken, drugged or just plain delinquent citizens that they are paid to serve and have to actively remind their clientel not to treat them like dirt - a sad proposition.
Something that strikes me, though, as a reasonably respectful young man, is how factional and adversarial these materials are. They feel like a call-out; a warning to us, the disgusting public that if you mess with us, we’ll get ya’.
The orientation of it feels inherently factional - the language of “our staff” etc pronounces a kind of in-group loyalty to the institution they’re a part of, as if it weren’t something set up directly to serve the public, but a pork barrel of vested interests that those occupying need to guard from us. They never say “don’t abuse people”, but always emphasise the unique crime of targeting one of their own ranks. I guess this is obvious, but it’s not insignificant.
I’m absolutely not saying that these posters aren’t justified in one sense - we’ve all seen people act like twats to public servants and the advent of google reviews has made verbal nastiness into a consequenceless and flippant tap of a screen. Shouting at minimum wage grunts is always dipshit behaviour. The tribal attitude of our institutions comes directly as a result of the increased unpleasantness of British society - altruistic “Public Service”, where these bodies are run for our benefit at large, is an unfortunate further loss in our social health.
“Abuse” is also quite creatively interpretable these days, I’m sure. I’ve worked in retail, I know the culture of outrage at being held to even the lowest standard by customers and how little people in such sectors want to work (it’s an attitude I found myself falling into at times). When expecting any level of attentive service lands you at risk of being named a “Karen” and sullen faced immigrants, clearly miserable to be in the country in the first place, now increasingly fill the roles once held by friendly staff that had something in common with you, it’s difficult to lay the blame entirely at the foot of the customer.
Everything is getting worse.
The public are getting ruder and more obnoxious; the staff are getting lazier and more arrogant; the customers are getting more agitated with them and the institutions are increasingly identifying against the public.
This adversarial relationship is a social disaster. It’s a calamity that points to total collapse - a collapse of the mass society that was designed in the 20th Century.
The Sainted “en-ay-chess” that is so robust and wonderful it required a devotional ritual of applause to pump it with psychic energy enough to endure COVID, is now well into its full-scale disintegration. Waiting lists are millions long, people in their twenties are dying of undiagnosed cancer and that’s not even talking about the experience of an overcrowded A&E. You might spend hours waiting in an airport-terminal style room full of wailing babies, only to be told that the staff lost your urine sample. I have actually heard of this happening.
The fact is, the public is not getting good service. I would never endorse taking this out on overworked staff, but their quality and attention has also noticeably plummeted as the strain on them has gone up. Any medical practitioner who can manage to is going to the private sector, or abroad, and who can blame them? It’s Bedlam out there.
So we have a slew of institutions that are haemorrhaging talent and increasingly closing ranks against the public at large, understanding them as a threat.
Mass society is coming apart and so are its public institutions. These entrenched governmental bodies are increasingly resembling feudal “estates” more than civil organisations that blindly serve a public need. Libertarian philosophers saw this coming years ago and they weren’t wrong. I suppose the missing piece was realising that, rather than seeing this as an inexorable “new serfdom”, this is the end-phase of 20th Century statism and spells its doom.
Once these institutional estates fully decouple themselves from social obligation and terminal societal decline in other arenas leaves them woefully underfunded, the social provision that they once provided and the huge burden that this was on the resources of society will also be lifted.
By now, the notion of a shared community that the public institutions exist in support of is a blatant lie; the tribalising NHS, police etc are simply acknowledging this. The nation that the National Health Service was founded to provide for no longer exists. Britain is a hollowing out economic extraction field no more significant than anywhere else, the public that these insitutions serve has no essential identity or necessary attachment to institutions that likewise have none.
In the classic pro-cop Film Noir The Blue Lamp (1950), London bobbies who patrol the streets and know their inhabitants by name meet on Thursday nights for choir practice. The decent public trust in them and help them at every turn in catching the rotten criminal who “shot a decent old copper dead, guv'”.1 Try finding that kind of sympathy, trust, or affection for the police nowadays. There is nothing binding us to our government or its institutions and we view them with open distrust. Modern British police would, likewise, rather terrorise middle aged feminists for suggesting that possession of a cock and balls is incompatible with having a menstrual cycle, than prosecute foreign paedophilic rape gangs in our towns and cities. You don’t get this situation without a breakdown in a sense of identity in public life.
Mass society bred its own destruction. In broadening the ring of concern from local and familial ties to national and then going the radical step further of opening the state’s remit to essentially the entire world, the fragile bonds of trust and shared expectations were torn apart very quickly (more or less since the Blair government, 25 odd years ago). We are transitioning out of gesellschaft and back into gemeinschaft.2
The raucous clattering about of these weighty, overburderned projects is frightening and will undoubtedly cause widespread misery. Huge numbers of people in our societies are completely without capital and dependent on the state from cradle to grave. Something has to give at some point, by no choice of mine, and the tribal realignment of these public bodies, to me, spells the beginning of a revertive process.
Wave goodbye to the modern state.
One of the oldest examples of the “killed day from retirement” trope.
Ferdinand Tönnies’ designation of more local communal ties and informal organisation gemeinschaft, from the earlier sociological theory of Max Weber, and then more modern societal projects born out of post-enlightenment rational self-interest; association, corporation and the endowments of the modern nation state.
Don't know about UK or Britain or England (we tend to use all the terms interchangeably over here) but I do know that when my nation was a /nation/ consisting of +95% actual swedish swedes, and those 5% being largely made up of finns, norwegians, danes and the odd german or romanian and such, there were no such signs.
"No parking", sure. "No smoking", sure. "Mind the gap"-signs in the underground. "Please give up your seat to elders or handicapped or pregnant women"-signs on the buses.
But no globohomo multikulti-stuff. Also, no assault on bus drivers. No assault on postal workers or ER-crew or firemen. No brown kids throwing stones from the tenth floor trying to hit the garbage man. No parents throwing their kids off of the tenth story balcony either, just because she dated the "wrong" guy.
Sure, correlation is not yadayadagabbagabbahey - but when you hear horses, you don't think zebras, no? And I'm old enough to be able to compare the beforetime with present, and modestly clever so I can project trends for what is coming on like the Evening Star.
To be blunt: I could put crows in the henhouse. Doesn't mean they'll start laying hens' eggs.
This is a really solid observation, see the exact same phenom in Canada (and Ontario where I live). Politicians make a habit of insulting certain cohorts of society with whom they have philosophical disagreements, then turn around and bemoan the increased incivility of the public towards elected officials. Go figure.