/lgbt/ - LGBT

It will win me no friends to say so, and perhaps be screencapped and used in endless bad faith, but the UK is an excellent worked example of why simple state-centralisation cannot be trusted. It is all well and good to have nationalised hospitals, but you need an administrative structure which allows local decentralisation and experimentation. Yes, this means that some will fuck up, but the important thing is that they will rarely all fuck up and it will be much more difficult for bad faith actors to purposefully fuck them all up at a stroke. It is also important that this decentralisation is real: the NHS is regularly broken up into administrative regions, but these have less than zero democratic accountability, so are entirely pointless in practice.

Wales, ironically, demonstrates both cases. Decentralisation of the Welsh NHS is why the Welsh gender service functioned well (because it was not controlled from England, which has higher wait times - hence why the WGS was referring more people per capita) but centralisation is also what destroyed it. (It's all controlled in Cardiff, rather than local hospitals being able to go "lol fuck off, we're still doing referrals", so when a political controversy arose politicians and administrators in Cardiff could just go "lol okay no more healthcare i guess")

The original article also reveals the utter insane controlling depravity of the UK. It does not just say that trans people are getting on "irreversible life altering hormones" (god forbid - as we know the last thing we want from healthcare is to alter lives), it fearmongers that 26 year olds are doing so (This is the average age at which people are treated). 26! The UK is a country that does not trust 26 year olds to make decisions about their own lives!
Britain is like the country a libertarian straw man would come up with to illustrate the perils of state control. What if poor government administration leads to 200 year waiting lists? What if the state health system arbitrarily decides to withdraw care? What if the legislation designed to promote equality and ban discrimination is interpreted in bad faith to promote inequality and mandate discrimination?
Unfortunately for everyone, Britain exists. So the strawman has to be seriously engaged with as a failure mode. Britain has to be engaged with as a failure mode. It has failed not just by the better standards to which we should hold all societies, but by the absolute minimum standards to which we would hold any capitalist society.

Although it isn't ideal for trans healthcare, I must always remind Britons that migration to Ireland is an option. The common travel area means you do not require a visa or skilled job offer or any of the other gatekeeping barriers that usually keep you trapped here. You can just go to Ireland right now, just like that. After 5 years you become eligible for citizenship. After obtaining Irish citizenship you become eligible to live and travel anywhere in the EU visa-free. Britain is a country in freefall with no realistic avenues for improvement. Ireland is still broadly on the trajectory of moderate improvement over time. At the very least, it is nice to have options.

>>10456
>Britain is like the country a libertarian straw man would come up with to illustrate the perils of state control. What if poor government administration leads to 200 year waiting lists? What if the state health system arbitrarily decides to withdraw care? What if the legislation designed to promote equality and ban discrimination is interpreted in bad faith to promote inequality and mandate discrimination?
This is just neoliberal politicians gradually enshittifying welfare programs so they can gain more consent to privatize stuff. It's a strategy that's also employed most elsewhere.

>>10618
Nah, if that were the case the UK wouldn't also have banned or crippled many forms of private-sector trans healthcare care + have such a suspicious and restrictive attitude towards private sector diagnoses of autism/ADHD + refuse to let you use what is supposed to be a general right to go private (at public expense) if NHS waiting lists are too long to access care. Britain is that rare thing, a country that would unambiguously be improved if a true believer in neoliberalism took over and tore its existing institutional arrangement to threads. Thatcher was anything but this, almost everything she did undermined markets and created rent-seeking non-competitive non-market cutouts. Contrast this with US deregulation which for the most part, had competition enhancing effects.
To understand Britain on a fundamental level you have to think not in terms of the class interests of international capital, but in the terms put by Richard II against the Peasant revolt.
>You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were, and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal. Choose now which course you want to follow.
This is and has always been how the people who run Britain have seen the rest.

>>10620
>Nah, if that were the case the UK wouldn't also have banned or crippled many forms of private-sector trans healthcare care + have such a suspicious and restrictive attitude towards private sector diagnoses of autism/ADHD + refuse to let you use what is supposed to be a general right to go private (at public expense) if NHS waiting lists are too long to access care.
So? That just means trans healthcare is especially targeted since it's less sympathetic in the eyes of the public.
>Richard II quote
There's no aristocracy anymore, though. If you just want to say there's an out-of-touch political milieu, then just say that.

>>10624
You're handwaving, Bernard. If the purpose is to gain consent for privatisation, why would they explicitly prevent you making use of private sector provision? You can't just go "oh, because it's not sympathetic" - you'd win plenty of approval from anti-trans reactionaries for just banning such care on the NHS, which would functionally make it unavailable to most.

Those who run the country are not merely out of touch, they are actively hostile. They could and would make sacrifices to their own prosperity for the purpose of ensuring yet greater suffering on the part of those they rule over. (hence why Britain is in freefall, soon to fall behind Poland)
For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity.

>>10456
congrats anon, you have discovered that democratic centralism is difficult to achieve, and that it entails constant struggle
>when a political controversy arose politicians and administrators in Cardiff could just go "lol okay no more healthcare i guess"
that is what should happen. if a decision is reached centrally, after an appropriate democratic process, then you are to obey it. like all aspects of production, it is ultimately up to the center to decide whether to slacken the leash or to tighten it. your health is a political question. the main issue here is that the UK is a bourgeois state

>>10626
if this is democratic centralism, democratic centralism is asinine. there is no appropriate democratic process which could possibly justify those completely uninvolved vetoing those with a direct stake.

>>10627
everyone has a stake, anon. it is ex-post apparent from the actions taken by Cardiff, even if you disagree with them

>>10626
What the fuck are you talking about you pseud? You think this was democratic centralism lmfao