Rating: 5/5
Review:
Exceptionally good
I thought The Nanny State Made Me was excellent. Stuart Maconie is a
very good, engaging writer who combines thorough research,
intelligence and genuine interest in people with a readable style and
just the right leavening of wit and humour to lighten the subject
without ever trivialising it.
The book is
self-confessedly polemical; Maconie writes passionately about the
public services which helped him throughout his life and which so
many of us rely on but often take for granted. He uses aspects of
his own life to link subjects the NHS, council housing, public parks,
libraries, schools, transport, the benefits system and so on. He
comes from a left-wing stance, but is never doctrinaire. He
recognises some of the failings of the left and supports his
arguments with facts, statistics and human stories, plus his own
visits to important people and places which illustrate his points and
show pretty conclusively how much we all need these state-organised
institutions. His conclusions can be largely summed up in his own
words: “We may be coming to realise that the people who complain
about the nanny state are the people who had nannies.”
It’s a delight to
read. The following passage about a personal experience of the NHS
gives a good flavour of the style:
“It was quiet and
tense in the room where I sat as a young doctor, Malaysian/ English I
think, was telling me and my stepdaughter that my gravely ill
ninety-year-old mother-in-law would probably not last the afternoon.
However, he said, there was one slim chance of keeping her with us a
while longer. It was tricky and risky and would involve him inserting
a thin wire in a vein in her arm and trying to manually guide it up
and into her torso via a maze of arteries and eventually to her heart
where, with luck and skill, it would remove the blockage there. He
made it sound a little like the fairground game where a steady hand
around the curves of a steel pipe is needed to avoid setting the
electric buzzer off. Except the price of failure was rather more
serious than a mild jolt, of course. We told him to try, and away he
went.
“Forty-five
minutes later, he returned, rolling his sleeves down and mopping his
brow. ‘Well, it worked,’ he said, breezy and matter-of-fact.
‘She’s weak and very poorly but she’s still here. You can go up
for a chat in a minute. I have to go now.’ With that, and the tired
but satisfied air of a mechanic who had just replaced a fan belt, he
strode away to perform another minor miracle. I thought then, as I do
every time I recall that morning, that in those forty-five minutes
that young man achieved more, did something more important, than
anything and everything I will do in my whole life. Yours too,
probably, if you’ll forgive me. When I think about the NHS, I think
about him, and then I think about those people not fit to scrub his
hands who make his job and his life – and the jobs and lives of his
tired, overworked, dedicated, brilliant workmates – harder every
day. And I know whose side I am on, and who my enemy is.”
The Nanny State Made
Me is thought-provoking, touching, amusing, informative and a
pleasure to read. Very, very warmly recommended.
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