when I talk to Finns about the differences between here and the UK, I find some of them are kind of surprised to learn that the free national health service (still) exists - they’ve somehow gotten the impression that the UK has a US-style healthcare system, and I can see why you’d make that assumption. when you mostly hear vague horror stories about the rise of poverty in the UK, it’s easy to assume that social care there hasn’t historically been quite secure compared to most countries, and that it must have always been very different to Finland. alas, no.
It worries me when I see Finns casually supporting government “säästös”. From what I read and hear, it seems very similar to the “austerity” that the UK has been under for a decade now, and I can’t help but think that a huge part of people supporting it is the assumption that people would never go too far cutting the social services. Not here, right?
It’s so unfortunately familiar to what I heard 10 years ago in the UK. Right before the waves of rising homelessness, and the rise in malnutrition cases, and the food banks multiplying while honest-to-god rickets cases rose too.
Most Finns I’ve heard recounting their trip to Manchester or London have a moment where they pause uncomfortably and say “…and yeah, some things weren’t so nice”, because when you’re used to a basic level of social care existing, the amount of homelessness in the UK is rightly, honestly shocking. And so is the scale of a huge number of other social problems, so many caused by the UK equivalent of Kela no longer functioning.
You think Kela is slow now? Give it 5 more years of “savings” and “sensible re-organisation”, like the UK did. The people who’ve been in power there for a decade are essentially the same sorts that fill the more right-wing side of the current Finnish coalition, and they will take a country’s social net and gut it like a fish if you let them.
Before the current right-wing government came in, satisfaction with the free healthcare in the UK was at an all-time high. Then the “innocent questions” about whether it was the best way came, and after that, the question of “do we need it at all?”. The dialogue has moved within a decade from “access to healthcare is sacred, even we on the right would never touch the health service!” to “oh, since we took the money away, mysteriously nothing in the health service works anymore… hey, what about an American-style system instead?”. Doctors, teachers and friends all said ten years ago that this would never even become a question, not in the UK, “not here!”. Every time someone here in Finland goes “but maybe we should give more private businesses a try, just to see if it’s more efficient!” I feel like the whole last decade is flashing before my eyes. I won’t make this post even longer with too many examples, but the privatisation and cuts in the UK have, to say the least, made people suffer.
I can’t tell anyone what to do, I don’t want to tell anyone what to do, and I hate that I still have to write longer things like this in English. However, I really do believe the following questions are worth thinking about. Do you feel like Kokoomus are safe? Keskusta? Does that feeling of safety have anything to do with the idea that because they’re Finns, they would never truly go too far and leave hundreds of people to literally die in the cold? Or to die hungry, with no way to keep your insulin?
An awful lot of British people thought they could get away with voting right-wing a couple of times, just to see if something new would be nice, just to see if the “more consumer choice, less tax, it’s a modern world!” thing would be fun. They really thought it would never happen to them. I would really hate to see people here make the same mistake, because once the problems of growing poverty have begun, they take decades to fix again. If they ever get fixed at all.
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