Imagine yourself as a civilian caught up in a global conflict while being drip-fed a range of selective and unconnected news items such that you had little or no time to gain much understanding of what was really going on, or of the overall strategy of your leaders. This blizzard of information would consist of advertising slogans urging you to buy more, rapidly changing economic forecasts and snippets of political, fashion, celebrity and sports news etc. Unless you tried to cut yourself off from all of this, and make a serious attempt to make sense of what was happening to you, your neighbourhood and country, you would have little comprehension of the nature of the dynamic forces shaping your life, and of the whole architecture of the planet. I believe this is the position of most people today.
I would like to try and share something of my own understanding of what is happening to us all.
There are now over 7 billion people living on earth today, all of whom aspire, and are being encouraged to attain the same standard of living and affluent lifestyle that we enjoy in the ‘developed’ world. Fact: long before every Chinese, Indian, South American and African were eating and drinking as we do, stacking their fridge, driving a car, using a mobile phone, watching a flat screen television etc, the earth’s fertile land, available water resources, oil and rare earth minerals would be exhausted. Bluntly speaking, as has been said so often, our own wasteful, consumer lifestyle cannot be sustained if we continue to live as we do, let alone extend the same consumer model to the rest of the developing world.
Against the rush to seize the earth’s remaining resources, where do we in theUK and in the rest ofEurope stand? As we all know Europe (apart perhaps fromNorway) is heavily indebted. In fact, that debt is equivalent to 80% of the region’s economy, and is still rapidly increasing. Do we print more money (quantitative easing) and cut back on public spending, or ‘go for growth’? But where are the new jobs going to come from?
In the UK, nearly a quarter of the workforce are paid employees of the state – NHS, teaching, police, prison, probation, social services, civil servants and local authority workers etc. They pay taxes, but they do not earn the money for the nation’s export economy, the main driver of economic growth. Small manufacturing companies have been starved of capital by successive governments who have courted International Conglomerates, Media Empires and Banks in their own drive for political power. An increasing number of other businesses are now fattening themselves on tax-payers’ money in an attempt to deliver the privatisation of public services.
Against this background, the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, etc have access to huge natural resources, burgeoning sovereign wealth funds, cheap labour, and in China’s case in particular, an increasingly educated and innovative work force – just as we once had in Victorian and early Edwardian times.
To put it bluntly, our developed economies are now old and increasingly decrepit, while theirs are young and vigorous. Indeed, they an easily purchase or imitate any new technology we may invent, as well as offer, for a price, to build our Nuclear Power Stations, run our infrastructure, buy our Car factories or brand names such as Weetabix – now Chinese owned!
However , China, India and Brazil have their own very real problems, not least being the rapid migration of people from the countryside to the cities to seek work in factories producing consumer goods for the western world. If we no longer buy such goods in the quantities we have previously bought, many of these factories will go bust, with potentially huge social disruption.
So, with increasing national debt and rising unemployment, where are the innovative, export earning jobs going to come from in the UK – jobs that will put people back to work as they make products to sell abroad to pay down our national debt and maintain our standard of living?
We have only to look at the collapse of the Greek economy to see what may happen to us here in theUK. There, many are starting to move out of the cities into the countryside, while many who remain are living without electricity, and denuding the forests around them to get firewood. A minority, as yet, are voting for a type of national socialism.
As others have been warning for some years now, we have been on a binge, and are now waking up to the reality of the physical and mental hangover, and the broken glass and furniture around us.
If enough people wake up, and begin to ‘think globally and act locally’ it may not be too late to begin to salvage some of the good things that contribute to the health and harmony of real community life.
I finish with three quotes (not quite accurate);
‘A man who does rich is a fool’
Carnegie
‘Gross National Product measures nothing that is really important in life’
Bobby Kennedy
‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth have been set on edge.’
The Bible