It's \u00a0Christmas. If Christmas Eve does not, in many ways, embody the\u00a0spirit\u00a0of Christmas then nothing does. But my wife is at work, my sons are still in bed, and the Christmas shopping and present wrapping that are my job for the day can wait for an hour or so and I can muse for a moment on what, if anything, this means.<\/p>\n
I'm a Quaker, and therefore see every day as sacramental.<\/p>\n
I'm a Christian who knows full well there's a one in 365.25 chance Jesus was born on 25 December.<\/p>\n
I admit that the nativity story has no bearing at all on my faith, much as the resurrection narrative has little either. Maybe that's why I am a Quaker. I'm sure the those stories are told in good faith: their literal truth is something about which each must decide.<\/p>\n
And that's relevant to what I feel today. We view the world through\u00a0narratives. They're not all, by any means, of our making; indeed, most are not. They're also, very rarely, exclusive. Our lives are full of\u00a0competing\u00a0narratives. We\u00a0continually\u00a0make and remake the\u00a0narrative\u00a0of our own lives, and so do those all around and\u00a0beyond\u00a0us. Others have to decide if they\u00a0believe\u00a0our\u00a0narrative or not (and daily I am reminded right here that some do not believe mine). We have to decide if we believe theirs.<\/p>\n
At the core of those\u00a0narratives\u00a0are not facts. Indeed, facts are rarely more than\u00a0narratives\u00a0 in themselves, as Andrew\u00a0Mitchell\u00a0is discovering. At the core of everything is\u00a0belief, on which is built trust. We simply can't know most things embracing any complexity, or human\u00a0action with any certainty. In that case objectivity is for all practical\u00a0purposes\u00a0so near enough impossible we might as well ignore it as a quality for\u00a0guiding\u00a0behaviour. We therefore have to rely on something\u00a0much\u00a0more intangible, and so much more important, which is that someone means what they say.<\/p>\n
Just about everything we do is built on trust. I'm\u00a0trusting\u00a0my sons will get up so that when we need to go out soon they will be ready. That may be a little naive of me; experience tells me that at least one of them will push his time in bed to the limit. I am absolutely confident my wife is at work. Not because I'll be checking; it's just the basis on which we run our relationship. We tell each other what we're doing. After a long time \u00a0knowing each other I've\u00a0never\u00a0had\u00a0reason to doubt.<\/p>\n
And what we learned this year is that we do have\u00a0reason\u00a0to doubt so\u00a0much\u00a0of the economic narrative of this country.<\/p>\n
The crash of 2008 was not because of light touch\u00a0regulation. It happened\u00a0because\u00a0bankers were trusted and\u00a0resoundingly\u00a0abused that trust; indeed criminally abused that trust. We now know that. A narrative has to be rebuilt as a result. Banking should never be the same again as a\u00a0consequence.<\/p>\n
We now know George Osborne's promise that if only he promised to cut\u00a0government\u00a0spending and taxes then business would expand, invest and people\u00a0would\u00a0spend more was a myth. None of those things would happen. The assumptions on which he built that\u00a0narrative\u00a0were wrong. His refusal to change his mind in the face of that failed narrative means people no longer trust him: his judgement was not just\u00a0flawed\u00a0for believing the wrong\u00a0narrative\u00a0in the first place, because we've all done that. It's been proven\u00a0flawed\u00a0for not being able to change in the face of the evidence that the belief was wrong. People have lost faith as a consequence<\/p>\n
We know that large companies have acted immorally on tax. We know that they have made a choice to tax avoid when there's a shortage of tax revenue, knowing that their choice will mean that either others have to pay the tax they seek not to pay or that other people, real people, even their customers, will lose vital\u00a0services\u00a0they need as a result. Once, when tax\u00a0revenues\u00a0were plentiful pre-2008 we did not see the reality of that\u00a0choice. In 2012 we did. And we didn't like what we saw of the choices that these companies made, or what it told us about their narratives. We lost trust in them.<\/p>\n
2012 has been a year when\u00a0narratives\u00a0have been shattered and have been shown to be myths; myths on which society has been built for\u00a0sometime\u00a0 The myth that those who\u00a0handle\u00a0money can be trusted. The myth that the economics of the market works. The myth that\u00a0corporations, even the ones whose products we make a\u00a0key\u00a0part of our lives, can be trusted to do right by us. All those narratives are now in need of replacement.<\/p>\n
2013 presents us with the challenge of\u00a0building\u00a0new narratives to replace those\u00a0that\u00a0are broken.<\/p>\n
What's that got to do with Christmas, or even the\u00a0narrative\u00a0of the winter solstice if Christmas really does mean\u00a0nothing\u00a0to you? Simply that both are the tale of new life and new hope coming out of the darkness. That's what the festival at this time of the year is really about; it's why, no doubt, Christians appended the\u00a0Christmas\u00a0story to the winter\u00a0solstice\u00a0celebration.<\/p>\n
This Christmas I wish you a new narrative: a sustainable narrative; a narrative of hope that endures in 2013 because it is a narrative based on trust, on human concern one for the other, and of respect based on the\u00a0belief\u00a0that each of us have a right to be here and a right to enjoy our time here in peace, with sufficient to keep us, and in the company of those who care about us.<\/p>\n
My musing is done: sometimes a blog post gets a life of its own. This one did.<\/p>\n
And what's more, both boys are up now, despite my lack of faith!<\/p>\n
Happy Christmas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"