A few nights of rioting by a minority, soon squashed by an increased police presence, followed by offenders swiftly brought to justice. On its own, this recent string of events hardly signifies a broken Britain, but it has generated much debate about what is wrong with our country and why the riots took place.
Back on the table is the thinking that our society is in moral decline, we have let our standards slip, personal responsibility has been abdicated and we need some new initiatives to restore things back to the way they were.
Some of the above may be true, but why? If we take a look back in history we have enjoyed a fairly long period of peace. We have had battles on foreign soil and terrorist attacks affecting parts of the country, but not wars on the scale of the 20th century. Huge conflicts and disasters create solidarity. Post second world war Britain was filled with an attitude of “we’re all in this together, together we can rebuild our lives”. Community, support, giving and relationships became the focus, encouraging people to make sure they had enough food for themselves and those in their community. Nothing was wasted in a spirit of austerity and “saving for a rainy day”.
Take a look at Japan following on from the terrible tsunami – it is a unified, different Japan with different values than before. When your life is wiped clean and everything you had before is gone, the world is just the people around you, possessions and money are irrelevant. We are reminded that shelter, food, water, clothes and human companionship are what really matters and that kindness, caring and the giving of ourselves without the expectation of payment enriches our lives and those of the people around us.
So what of Britain, what has happened since the period of mass solidarity after the war? Well the baby boomers came. They were helped on their journey with Thatcherism. The conversion of the electorate to a nation of home owners fuelled the rise of capitalism and the quest for possessions and money. The free market economy was unleashed and we consumed as never before.
New Labour continued our journey, deregulating the financial sector and fanning the flames of our spending. Debt, for a long time a dreaded word, lost its stigma as we were encouraged to borrow more and more. The “Now” culture of instant gratification was born! No longer prepared to save up or wait, money, power, greed, celebrity and possessions became our all-consuming focus.
We, here in Britain – and like many in the so called “developed” world – are on some sort of drug. We are hooked on a capitalistic lifestyle, which, like a virus, will eventually destroy both itself and its host. Our voracious appetite is not sustainable and we are close to the tipping point.
If we need some evidence of this, let us take a moment to review the bigger picture. We are experiencing huge shifts in the economics of our planet. China, India and Brazil have huge economies, growing fast and now large cash reserves. The developed West who consume the products and services from China, India and Brazil, have equally large balances – but these are debts. The West cannot keep borrowing indefinitely to finance their spending, quite simply we have to consume less or produce more ourselves.
Producing more is a real challenge, costs in the West are too high, we all want more money for doing less work nowadays: we have lost the behaviours which brought us the wealth in the first place – austerity, patience, saving and working hard.
We are left therefore with the only option – come off the “drug”, we have to exit from the unsustainable capitalistic path we are on, and we must do it soon. It will not be easy and the repercussions are extreme.
Europe and the US are bloated, the EU is in real trouble, the US with $14 trillion of debt is in a financial meltdown. And once we stop spending, guess what? The countries who have been scaling up to service our demand, such as China, will not have the domestic demand to replace the spending of the West, this will end the period of boom in those countries too!
We are all in this together and, as the battalions of broom-wielding helpers last week showed, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Britain is renowned for being at its best when the odds are stacked against it, and we will need all of that tenacity and “never say die” attitude to come through this one. Let us not underestimate the task before us though: we may not be fighting a war or experiencing bloody battles like we have seen in the Middle East, but our revolution will make demands on us every bit as challenging as anything we’ve been through before. If we need some evidence of the challenges that lie ahead we need look no further than Greece to witness some of the withdrawal symptoms brought about by severe austerity measures.
Our destination will ask us to think outside the box, we are going to a place we’ve never been before. The human race is growing up and we are entering a period of adult responsibility, not only for each and everyone of us, but ultimately as guardians of our planet.
We will move now slowly but inexorably into a new era, an era dominated by personal responsibility, and where we live our lives within our needs – the concept of “enough”. This requires new thinking and new leaders – not new and ever more complex controlling legislation from those who remain stuck in the old capitalistic machinery. Britain can lead the way, we can be a pilot, the proving ground for the changes that must take place. We remain an influencer on the world stage but are no longer a major player anymore. We are undoubtedly one of the most innovative countries in the world, we are in the right place at the right time – it is time for us to step up to the plate and lead once again!
And we now have the final piece in the jigsaw available to us, something that enables all of the above to happen… the Internet… How this affects everything and why it is so crucial to the human journey will be discussed in great detail in a second post coming shortly!
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