The Elephant We Pretend Not to See

There comes a point where you get tired of playing along with polite fictions. Everyone in policy circles talks about homelessness, mental health collapse, substance use, austerity, fragmented care, but very few will say the part that actually matters. The part that explains why nothing changes, no matter how many reviews, strategies, or bold visions get published. The truth is simple and ugly. The real driver of this mess is neoliberalism, the ideology that has shaped the last half century of social policy and the last fourteen years of political cruelty. The system is not failing. It is working exactly as designed.

Neoliberalism taught us to treat markets as wise, public services as burdens, and human suffering as a cost that must be contained. It rewired the foundations of the welfare state so that everything essential became something to be monetised or managed. Housing became an asset rather than shelter. Mental health became a risk management exercise rather than care. Substance use became a story of moral defect rather than a response to pain. Once you see that shift, the outcomes stop being surprising and start being inevitable.

This is where someone like Gary Stevenson becomes essential. He has become one of the clearest voices calling out what many professionals whisper about but rarely say openly. Wealth extraction, manufactured inequality, the myth of trickle down, and the way political power bends itself around the interests of the already comfortable. I bloody love Gary Stevenson because he cuts through the fantasy. He names the ideology, traces the mechanics, and explains how we ended up in a country where people freeze in doorways while asset portfolios soar. He says the quiet part out loud, and in a political climate built on denial, that is radical.

Look at homelessness. The numbers rise, the stories get worse, and every report warns of crisis, yet the core machinery never changes. That is because the machinery is working exactly how neoliberal logic intends. Create scarcity, hand power to the market, outsource responsibility, and then blame individuals for being crushed by conditions they never created. We wring our hands about rough sleeping while ignoring the political decisions that produced it. Then we commission another review that reads like a eulogy for a system that never truly existed.

Look at mental health. Services are stretched to breaking point, practitioners burn out, and people in distress find themselves caught in waiting lists that might as well be locked doors. None of this is accidental. When you hollow out public systems, you force people into crisis, then punish them for reacting like humans. Risk assessments replace relationships. Gatekeeping replaces care. People become problems to be managed rather than citizens who deserve support.

And substance use. The most damning example of all because it exposes the philosophical heart of neoliberalism. Pain is ignored, survival strategies are moralised, and the individual is blamed for drowning in water they were pushed into. The system offers help only when people behave, stabilise, abstain, comply, or become tidy enough to fit into its metrics. It is punishment dressed as policy. It is bureaucracy pretending to be compassion.

Here is the part that is hardest to swallow. The ideology is not an accident. It is not a by-product. It is the blueprint. Neoliberalism thrives by shifting responsibility from systems to individuals, from the structural to the personal, from the political to the moral. If people suffer, it tells us it is their fault. If services fail, it tells us there is no alternative. If communities collapse, it tells us the market will fix it. All of this is fiction. Yet it shapes every service we work in and every life caught in the machinery.

Naming it is not negativity. Naming it is clarity. It is refusing to keep pretending that homelessness is a mystery, that underfunding is an accident, that moral injury in frontline staff is unfortunate rather than structural. Neoliberalism explains the gaps, the fragmentation, the waiting lists, the crises, and the quiet everyday cruelty that people in distress face. And once you name the ideology, you stop blaming the people for the outcomes created by the system.

People are not failing. The system is.

And the system was built this way.