I worry for my children. Every parent does. I stress the word 'for'. Of course I worry about them too, but that's something different. Worrying for your children is about the situations they will face that are largely beyond their control. Worrying about them is concern for what can, within reason, be controlled.
If I am honest I know previous generations worried for their children too. I can well recall one of my grandmothers declaring when I was quie young that she 'wouldn't have children today' and thinking in response 'thank you, very much'. She was wrong. Maybe I am too. But I do it none the less.
I worry because the impetus towards improvement seems to be waning.
Freedom is not advancing. It is positively and deliberately under attack.
Inequality is increasing, and with it hope goes.
The environment is not looking good, and neoliberal thinking simply wants to deny the fact.
Security is a pre-requisite of a good life. Economically, at the very least, it is in trouble.
Some time ago I said I felt any succesful political movement had to offer freedom from fear - packaged as hope - as the basis for its offering. That meant it had to offer dignity, employment, housing, education, security, healthcare, provision in old age and uncertainty, and - overall - a sense of shared purpose if it was to truly inspire.
Not one of our mainstream parties currently does that. I am not even sure anyone within them has the vision to dream such meta-narratives. Instead we get offered VAT free double glazing and pennies off pints of beer. Underneath, the similarities are more obvious than the differences.
And that's why I worry. As is I hope fairly obvious, my work revolves around a belief that people are of worth, and that this matters whether I know them or not, whether I like them or not, and whether they are my immediate neighbour or not.
At the same time I respect difference, because we all are different.
The inherent conflict between respecting the value in everyone whilst valuing their diversity creates a tension which is, I think constructive. It drives thinking towards mechanisms and structures that can accommodate diversity.
The prevailing narrative in society now - the neoliberal narrative which is alien to the narrative I grew up with - does not do that. It does not respect everyone. It does not value diversity. It is not open to compromise. It is inherently self interested. It does as a result, I think, demean the human spirit.
In the process it does not seek to alleviate fear. In fact, it deliberately promotes it. Fear is the diving force that is used to emphasise difference. It is the mechanism used to induce compliance. It is the process used to promote control.
The result is we have a prevailing political narrative that talks cuts, promotes job insecurity, cannot even tthink of meeting the demand for housing and all whilst saying we cannot afford healthcare and provision for the elderly when we know that this is untrue as the people who could undertake this work are sitting idle instead. It is turning education into a product, and the children subjected to it into outputs. The consequence is people living without dignity and so worried that manipulative politicians seek to direct them one against each other.
That's why I worry for my children. I worry that this is the world they will have to live in.
They may fight it. That will, of course, be their choice.
But what I wish for are those who could explain that there is hope that we can resolve the conflicts within society within the constraints of the world we live in and can deliver the vision we need for a world where people can live without fear.
It's not much to hope for, I think. But it's fundamental to the future. And right now the mainstream is not delivering.
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Agreed. What can we do about it (apart from read your stuff and try and explain it to others)?
yep!
Some time ago I said I felt any successful political movement had to offer freedom from fear — packaged as hope — as the basis for its offering. That meant it had to offer dignity, employment, housing, education, security, healthcare, provision in old age and uncertainty, and — overall — a sense of shared purpose if it was to truly inspire…Not one of our mainstream parties currently does that
And the corollary to that is that when you have a fringe party purporting to do that by saying “we can be free of fear if we get rid of immigrants” – like UKIP do – people will listen to them.
It happened in Germany with a group called the NSDAP in the 1920s…
This is spot on. I think k the lesson from countries such as the US and Canada is that diversity is the key. Monocultures (as in agriculture) set the stage for their own failure by enforcing conformism, snuffing out dissent and giving no one the freedom or the space to be different.
Neo Liberalism is, in the end, a humanistic dead end. It may last decades, just as Communism did, but will.eventjally make slaves of us all.
An excellent and very timely blog, Richard, as we move deeper into pre-election territory and, presumably, therefore the approach of the gag that will apply to this blog in the near future. As you’ll appreciate, it also echoes the late Tony Judt’s lament for the demise of post-war social democracy and the values and beliefs that underpinned it, and fear of what is and will replace it (‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay.’ Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, 1770, cited in Judt, Ill fares the land, 2010).
I think that for many of us that share your values and beliefs – and there are many of us – fear is not to strong a word to use for what we’ll have to confront as we grow old, and what our children will inherit. First and foremost, it will be a world in which every government – and thus democracy itself – has been bent to the will and wishes of an elite: corporations and the rich. In many cases, democracy and democracies will still be portrayed as functioning, of course, but they will simply be an exercise in legitimation – window dressing – as they already are in the “managed democracy” of today’s Russia. Indeed, I think we can safely say that within 20 to 30 years all states will be some variant of “managed democracy”.
Second, citizenship and the act of being a citizen will be entirely shaped and constrained by the “managed” society that must inevitably flow from a managed state/democracy. People will be able to exercise their free will and agency as long as it does not interfere with the operation, structure and ethos of the “managed” world they inhabit. In short, primarily people will be free to consume, assuming they have the means to do so, but not to criticise, confront or seek to develop any form of alternative to the specified norms.
Third, surveillance will be endemic and will be the primary means of maintaining the “self” control (i.e. compliance) of citizens. Thanks to Snowden, The Guardian and its partner newspapers, we now know that mass surveillance is already practiced and that scaling it up even further is not an issue. Furthermore, and far more importantly, we also know that relatively few people are actually worried about such practices, or willing or able to grasp the implications of them. Consequently, once sufficient time has passed, the spotlight that has been turned on by the Snowden revelations will be turned off, and business will be resumed, uninterrupted, as it was from 2001 to 2013.
Fourth, fear will be manufactured and maintained as another form of “self” control. Fear of others more of less fortunate than you, of other nationalities, races, creeds or colours. Indeed, most fundamentally it will be fear of diversity itself: anything that deviates from the tightly specified, managed, norms.
I could go on, but I need not. All that’s required is a reading, or re-reading, of George Orwell’s 1984, but with the addition of 21st century technology. If my doom-laden prediction is correct that would mean revising the title to 2034. ‘Ill fares the land’, indeed. And as things stand our current batch of politicians – not just in the UK but globally – are either cheerleaders for, or slaves to, the forces pushing us toward such a promising land for the 1% and those willing to help them manage it.
We are on the same wave length
Very well said Ivan – and Richard too of course.
And how apt is that splendid, but spine-chilling, quote from Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ – it rings a particular bell with me as this was one of the poems we had to study for O-level English (a very long time ago, but I remember it well).
Judt’s book was excellent – except when it came to solutions
Richard, Ivan raises a really important point at the start of his post about the “gagging bill” – is this nefarious piece of legislation likely to curtail your activities from September onwards, or will you be pressing on regardless? I think many organisations are planning civil disobedience over this law.
I have read the Electoral Commission site
You do not have to register if you do not spend £20,000 on your activities
I do not get a penny in grant for this blog
My only generic funding is from Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust anf they have never considered – and nor do I – that they fund the blog, which I mainly do in my own time (usually starting pre-6 in the morning)
In that case I can see no way it could ever be said I spend £20,000 doing this
I will very carefully monitor the eventual guidelines as this is a well known blog, but my belief right now is that I am outside the scope of this
Extremely glad to hear that you’re pretty sure your blog won’t be hit by the gag, Richard. To be honest, I’d forgotten about the £20,000 clause.
So, we know what is needed but the frustration is that 12 months out from the General Election it simply isn’t on offer. There is a hunger out there, literally, for a new thing. I can only see right now someone who get’s it standing as an Independent in a marginal constituency (ideally three-way), casting a vision and declaring that there is direct choice, and that choice is between “the other four”, who are actually different factions of the “one”, and me. That candidate wins on a ground-swell of anti-neo liberalism and then when they get to Westminster they begin to gather like-minded people around them and change then begins. The big shift then comes in 2020.
This is no short project but I can see no other way of anything materially changing in 2015.
Are you standing?
Richard
Hmm…
I think we may well see some major political realignment after 2015. Len McCluskey has suggested that Unite may pull the plug on funding Labour after 2015 and do something else with their money instead – for me the best way forward would be for the Green Party to merge with the trade union left and some other groups such as Left Unity. I think we need something along the lines of the Syriza coalition as Greece, because Nu Labour may well go the way of the Greek PASOK centre-left party after 2015 – marginalised, with collapsing support. Sad but inevitable if they continue to capitulate to austerity.
In 2015 itself I think the best we can hope for is Labour as the largest single party brokering a deal with the Greens and other left groups like Plaid Cymru. I don’t really want those shocking “Fib Dems” anywhere near the govt, thank you very much!
I will be quite surprised now if that realignment does not take place
Richard- like you, many of us feel disenfranchised. neo-liberalism has become the ‘mental wallpaper’ of our culture over the last 35 years-the financial crash of 2008 clearly was not big enough to demonstrate the absurdity of the money system-largely due to increase intervention by central Banks who are now considered lenders of FIRST resort!
As Ann Pettifor points out in her book ‘Just Money’, neo-classical economists are accepting that boom-bubble-bust-debt-deflation cycles are acceptable. Unless we have a party that can reform money creation so that banks do not control it and are transformed into true ‘intermediaries’ of social purpose then nothing will change. At present we have Government by bank and a glove puppet Westminster that is no more than a tourist attraction.
My fears for my children centre on all of the above but also, and fundamentally, the lack of mitigation of climate change or the restructuring of our dependency on oil. It seems that the ‘madmen’, the global elites, are blocking any real attempts to address these crises, in the belief that there is money to be made out of technological fixes. Inevitably, the poorer people will suffer the most and undoubtably many will die, not to mention many plant and animal extinctions in the natural world.
I do that one too
And water
It isn´t just UNITE, UNISON is also re-thinking things, and others have their contribution under examination too. After all, they have donated tens of millions (sorry, their MEMBERS have donated millions) and been largely derided. If the unions balloted their members on the political levy, now, they would fall under 50%, and far under…and the Con-Dem government know this.
Of course, they could all be in favour of moving into the regime of state funding of political parties, along with other tinpot dictatorships, which would then stick us with the largely corrupt system we have at the moment; ad-infinitum.
It may well be that unions eu-wide decide to stop funding ¨local¨ politics, and move much more into international activity. After all, while UKIP states that 75% of UK regulation now comes from the EU, they have failed to realise that most of that 75% comes from higher-up the food chain and is passed down to the EU to enact as they see fit. The role of various UN bodies is almost totally unknown at national level !
Without having globally prepared prepared fossil fuel alternatives, the governments and will retain a large stockpile of fuel and food which they can use after it has run out for the ordinary citizen. Without transport and power, famine is inevitable and food becomes the new currency. When chaos descends and your neighbourhood is like a scene from The Road or 28 Days Later, the Eloy will have fukked off to some solar-powered Pacific paradise with whatever they could fit in their arks.
Howzat?
;^}
Nice bit of social engineering…A fearful population is so much more controllable.
The Greens seem to doing what you describe, a UBI would alleviate a lot of fear.
I wondered if you had caught this article in the Telegraph?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10755598/Global-solar-dominance-in-sight-as-science-trumps-fossil-fuels.html
For once, an article which spells out the increasing cheapness of solar energy and the profound geopolitical impacts likely to follow. The Centre for Alternative Technology have produced a blueprint for a ZeroBritain 2030 which is based on current renewables so it is an underestimate but it seems that the real requirement is for a nationalised HVDC grid to link the different sources together. Upgrading and filling in might take 10y but in the scale of things, relatively easy to achieve. Scientists for Global Responsibility audited the potential for renewable energy production in the UK and considered that we should be a net exporter. It is just the political will to remove the stranglehold of the corporates which is lacking.
Btw Re: water – Desalinated sea-water is a waste product from concentrated solar plants. No need to ask why Egypt is seeking to build nuclear power stations – it has to involve the transnational corporations/finance!
I have to say that is encouraging
A more direct approach is to pursue an e-Democracy, as I am currently doing. Please go to http://theclickrevolutionis.wix.com/digitaldemocracynow to see how this will work and then support it directly to the Government here http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/56879
This is now a 38Degrees Campaign as well at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/ask-government-to-give-us-a-vote-on-issues