Tragedy of impending policy a rug placed over a trapdoor over an oubliette
The Care Review, now Children’s WellBeing + outriding legislation, is for Residential Child Care “no more than a rug placed over a trapdoor” (TLS 08 08 25) over an oubliette.
Tragedy is frightening because it provides (TLS 08 08 25) “a sense of the limitations of human agency and knowledge.” (Publicover: Fathoming the deep in English Renaissance tragedy, 2025).
The tragedy of the CR/CWB+ is being out of one’s depth and the consequences being a mystery to those who designed the drama, and to those that then played out the characters unaware that they were in a fiction.
Though it seemed real it was a fantasy, an escape from the crushing unthinkable anxiety of current reality of unmet needs escalating as the means to fund required responses diminishes, as do the means to meet the responses.
What is needed is an emotionally holding and containing environment, able to explain the psychology and emotional world being impinged by an economic irrationality posing as reason to achieve a social and political end.
There is then an inevitable anger to be faced soon. Better that than the primitive rage of needs unmet without containment.
Surviving this anger often brings deep cataclysmic depression.
No-one is seeing it, or is yet prepared, hence the opening paragraph
Oubliette definition = a secret dungeon with an opening only in the ceiling, a place where prisoners were cast and abandoned, often never to be remembered again
