DIY SOS

Why can’t our whole world be like DIY SOS? It’s one of the few programmes on telly that I watch almost religiously. People at the end of their tether, their lives impossibly complex and desperate. Then a large group of volunteers turn up, rebuild a house to suit the needs of a family, for no reward whatsoever, and lives are changed forever.

I watched last night, tears streaming down my cheeks, as Nick Knowles and his team altered a house where a family and their son, who had a beyond rare condition where his lungs literally didn’t work, lived a terribly difficult life. It was so difficult, the family couldn’t even live in the same house. Yesterday, situation hopeless. Today, situation hope has arrived.

I know that DIY SOS is only able to deal with a tiny number of the requests it gets for help. And the requests surely represent only a tiny proportion of people in our country whose lives are near to impossible. What Knowles and his team do is to change lives. They show the art of the possible.

It’s charity giving really. It’s people stepping into a situation where people have been left to their own devices. Situations where governments and local authorities choose to provide nothing beyond very basic care.

DIY SOS reminds me that situations last night’s show exist because of choices we make in terms of who we elect and the parties they represent. We are constantly told that cutting back on public spending is A Good Thing and higher taxes are A Bad Thing. For as long as I can remember, public spending represents ‘waste’. It represents no such thing.

That people volunteer to help others on a national TV show and donate their time and materials for free suggests to me that perhaps not all of us do believe desperate people should be abandoned. The fact that so many people watch shows like DIY SOS also suggests there are millions more who would like to see the government – our elected government – do much more, even if it means the rest of us paying a few more quid in tax.

The ghost of Margaret Thatcher still hangs over our country, the ‘me first, I want it all and I want it now’ attitude outlived the wretched woman who inflicted it on our people some 40 years ago. The last decade reinforced the very things Thatcher believed in, like the non belief in society which she did not believe in.

More than ever, the society which many of us do believe in is underpinned by the work of the low paid and by volunteers, helping others for no reason other than they want to make people’s lives better.

I like to think that good will always triumph over bad, although that belief has been severely tested in recent days. Nick Knowles for PM, perhaps?