I was listening to Bob Harris the other day and in his section about The Old Grey Whistle Test he played an interview he’d recorded with Grace Slick back in the mid 70s. He asked her what changes she’d noticed over the years and she talked about how a few years earlier in San Francisco she and her band could set up freely in any park and just play their music, but by the mid 70s that was no longer allowed. You had to get permission from the city, and it was all more controlled. She said the change she’d experienced was a loss of freedoms.
That “losing freedoms” resonated with me. I’m 71, and it seems to me that over my lifetime we’ve, collectively, lost a lot of freedom. But why do I think that?
I worked as a General Practitioner (a family doctor) in Scotland from 1982 to 1999. Over that period of time the contract which GPs had with the NHS changed frequently and in the latter years there was a significant shift in the contract towards more item of service payment for certain services, treatments and procedures ordained by the authorities, and fewer fixed payments. I didn’t like financial incentives to prescribe particular treatments or interventions clinging to the belief that patients should be confident I always offered them what I thought was best for them as individuals, not what was best for my bank balance.
Alongside that came controls on referrals to specialists as the NHS moved to restrict the freedom of a GP to refer to a named specialist, replacing that with referrals to particular hospitals, not particular individuals, then limiting the choice of hospitals to which any individual GP could refer. That loss of referral freedom broke down the personal professional relationships we GPs had built up over years.
Those lost freedoms became too stressful and I left General Practice in 1999, going on to work full time for the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital until I retired in 2014, aged 60.
In the early years in Glasgow homeopathy was experiencing a bit of a hay day. We had way more referrals than we could cope with, which came with the downside of a lengthy waiting list. But the sheer number of referrals we received demonstrated the demand from patients and doctors throughout the country.
We also ran training courses in Glasgow for doctors, nurses, pharmacists and vets which were followed by dozens of professionals each year. But then a concerted campaign against homeopathy began and new management teams gradually restricted what we could offer, while regional health boards removed the freedoms of practitioners to refer to us, and for patients to continue to be treated by us.
In those early years I was frequently asked to participate in radio programmes giving a medical homeopathic perspective on health problems, then one day, under the new management regimes, I received phone calls from five separate managers at higher and higher levels of management telling me they’d heard I was to go on BBC radio the following day and forbidding me from doing so. I found this particularly upsetting because it wasn’t even true that I’d been invited to do so – so I was being banned from accepting an invitation which hadn’t even been offered.
I felt that loss of freedom of expression acutely.
As the anti homeopathy campaign gained strength I encountered more and more patients whose freedom to choose our approach was lost to them, and as GPs began to lose their freedom to offer homeopathic treatment the numbers joining our courses dwindled.
As our services, beds and staff numbers in the hospital were reduced year after year I finally had enough and decided to take early retirement at 60.
When I retired I emigrated to France. All was pretty straightforward…then came Brexit with calls for an end to free movement and a rising tide of anti-foreigner, anti-migrant sentiment pouring out of the UK. The Conservative negotiators ramped up their anti-EU rhetoric and frequently claimed they were ready to walk away without any deal. So for months we lived with the uncertainties around our right to remain in France. Eventually an agreement of sorts was reached but a lot of freedom disappeared. I won’t list all the freedoms lost here but there are now more border controls between the UK and Europe, trade and customs controls resulting in significant restrictions which weren’t there before, and an increase in administrative bureaucracy in ordinary life. The relationship between the UK and Europe now feels more restricted, clunkier. There’s more friction than before. It’s less free.
As I reflected on these examples of my personal sense of loss of freedom, I wondered if my experience was representative of my generation….so I asked ChatGPT.
“I’m a 71 years old heterosexual Scottish man. What freedoms have been lost or gained in my lifetime”
The answer was interesting. According to ChatGPT, the only freedoms gained over my seven decades of life weren’t very relevant to my lifestyle – there was more acceptance of LGBTQ people and recognition of single sex marriages for example (I mean, I’m glad these freedoms expanded, and happy for those who have benefitted, but they didn’t expand any of my own freedom)
ChatGPT highlighted several areas where there had been significant losses of freedom over my seven decades on the planet.
Firstly, it mentioned the loss of freedom of movement. Restricting that freedom was even part of the Labour Party’s pitch in the last UK election. The loss of British peoples’ freedom to live and work anywhere in the EU has caused me headaches and anxiety, but, worse than that, it has, and will continue to have, an even greater impact on my children and grandchildren. What a shame the barriers have been raised for them, and what a shame they have been raised for EU citizens who, in the past, contributed greatly to British life and the UK economy. I wish my children and grandchildren could still have the freedom of movement I experienced before Brexit.
The AI also highlighted the severely increased restrictions on the right to protest in the UK. I took part in several protests when I was younger, as an active member of CND, “The Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons”, and Friends of the Earth. My own children and grandchildren can’t do that so easily. I’ve been really appalled to see how “Just Stop Oil” protestors have been treated, and the mass arrests of people for wearing a T shirt that says “Stop Genocide. I support Palestine Action” astonishes me.
People talk about “cancel culture”. At universities and online, there have been shameful examples of bullying and harassment. That kind of trolling and bullying is another way to restrict freedoms, but, what strikes me more is how controlled the mainstream media appears to be. It seems that the press barons still set the narratives for everyone to get concerned about and their narratives have been highly divisive, xenophobic and anti-immigrant for a long time now. All such hatred of others, of those who are from other countries or cultures intimidates and excludes. It is a main area of loss of freedom.
Alongside that, ChatGPT mentioned increased surveillance. I can’t quite believe just how far past Orwell’s 1984 we have gone. From CCTV, facial recognition, internet monitoring and data retention, not to mention corporate scraping of personal data to target commercial and political messages, we are far beyond what Orwell feared and imagined.
But, perhaps the greatest loss of freedom has come through economic and political choices. In the excellent “The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism”. Clara E. Mattei, describes in detail how austerity politics and economics have been, and continue to be, used to control whole populations by subjugating them to capital.
“It is a trope of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life that governments faced with financial shortfalls look first to the services they provide their citizens when making cuts. Instances like these are innumerable and span every country in the world. When this happens, they produce highly predictable, uniformly devastating effects on societies. Call it the austerity effect”
Here’s where we see the greatest loss of freedoms.
As ChatGPT reports – In everyday life: the cost of housing, transport, and energy have risen much faster than wages for many, reducing real autonomy — especially compared to the 1960s–70s when living costs were lower relative to income. Trade union powers have been steadily reduced since the 1980s through legislation limiting collective action. And, the rise of zero-hour contracts and gig work has reduced freedom from economic precarity.
I recently walked past the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, outside of which were dozens and dozens of young people wearing academic gowns. They were surrounded by family and friends, who had come with them to celebrate their graduation day. When I enquired, it was, specifically, graduation day for nursing students from Napier University. That got me thinking about another area where we’ve lost a lot of freedom.
When I started working as a Junior doctor in 1978, young people could leave school and start to work as nurses. They started work in hospital wards, attending College for lectures and training in eight week blocks, whilst staying in subsidised accommodation, and all the while were paid a monthly salary from day one. Over the next three years some would pass exams and rise to the level of “Staff Nurse”, while others would achieve more limited qualifications and work as “State Enrolled Nurses” (staying at that level for life, or taking further training later to become “Staff Nurses). There was also another grade of nurses, known as “Auxillaries”, whose job focused on personal and physical care, rather than on clinical and medical procedures. That all changed when nursing became a graduate profession, and all aspiring nurses had to complete an undergraduate course at university, taking out student loans, while not earning a monthly salary.
The situation in England is worse than that in Scotland. Scottish resident nursing students have their university fees paid for them and receive a £10,000 bursary, whereas, in England they have to take out loans to pay just under £10,000 a year in fees, and any support for living expenses have to be paid for through further loans. Those young graduates have a lifetime of student loan debt around their necks.
This same issue is replicated throughout higher education. Students now graduate with debt. That wasn’t the case in the past. And debt is a restriction, reducing freedom to make other choices, not least related to buying or renting a home, and starting a family. It’s no wonder that young adults in their twenties are more likely to be living with their parents now, and that the average age of first birth has climbed higher and higher.
Once they are ready to enter the workplace, young people now don’t have the securities that my parents, and my generation had. My father started work as an apprentice for Alexanders Coach builders when he was 15, and continued working for them until he retired at age 65. That pattern of work has all but disappeared in favour of short term contracts, and considerably weakened protections in the workplace.
In this twenty-first century wages have stagnated while riches have increased for the rich in the fastest increase in inequality in decades. So, while the 0.1%, and the 0.001%, have seen their freedoms increase on the back of their larger share of the country’s wealth, for the vast majority of the population the last fifty years have brought increases in poverty, insecurity at work, insecurity in housing, and the consequent rise of both mental health problems and multiple co-morbidities, which restrict freedom, and increase suffering.
Austerity politics squeezes the poor and working people, while cutting back health services, education and cultural facilities. All of which reduces the average person’s freedom to enjoy a satisfying, fulfilling life.
We can choose a different set of priorities. We can work towards greater equality, rather than greater inequality, and we can create better health and security for all by funding and developing our “commons” – good housing, clean water, nutritious food, clean air, secure, satisfying employment, free education and health care for all. Can’t we? Because without changing tack, we’ll simply continue further down this road of steady erosion of freedoms.
Will we see a new political movement demanding a return of the freedoms we have lost?
Heroes Not Zombies 