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Over recent months and likely to continue over the next year or so there is lots of Media coverage concerning the “Recovery” and or the threat of a “Double Dip” Recession. Now whilst I am no economist, it does rather strike me that people are looking down the wrong end of the telescope on this one, my gut feeling is that the whole “system” and our approach to it needs to change radically and that is what this and a following essay is about but first a couple of samples from the Press:

Real Unemployment: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7257667/Eight-million-people-economically-inactive.html

The Double Dip: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/hamish-mcrae/hamish-mcrae-recovery-was-never-going-to-be-easy-1908331.html

The Whole System is Up the Creek

Although human beings at times seem to learn nothing new, there is an evolutionary pattern to human existence and I feel that we might just be on the threshold of another major change. The current “expectation” or is it just hope is that the Global Economy will return to where it was in 2007/2008 and I don’t think that is right. To me that seems very much “yesterday’s model and even where that is happening in say India and China, it is all doomed to fail sooner rather than later.

In some sense the accepted “capitalist model” is/has failed and primarily because it has lost it’s self correcting ability and the creative destruction that was the hallmark of what it was and there are particular social/political reasons behind this which I will explore shortly. In fact one might more correctly say, capitalism has become shackled and rather than failing has been prevented from working properly.

It goes without saying that the “socialist model” has totally failed decades ago and all modern day socialists have managed to do is kill the Goose that laid the golden eggs that produced the wealth for them to redistribute by endless petty regulation and copious pointless legislation.

Wealth Creation

The real problem in all Western countries is that genuine “wealth creation” has ceased some time ago and been substituted with commerce eating their own seed corn through endless and pointless “deals” which rarely produce any benefits for the companies, workers or shareholders although the “deal maker/broker” walks away with a fat commission for acting as the midwife to a still born child.

I would guess that in both India and China individuals are making genuine fortunes but certainly in the latter case there are severe controls on those people, not because it is a Communist country but simply because it is Chinese and authoritarian as it has been throughout its history. Unshackled by democracy and human rights, just as in Britain during its Industrial Revolution, people displaced from the land become the industrial human fodder to fuel commercial expansion.

In such societies just as in Britain during its Industrial Revolution and the USA during the late 19^th and early 20^th Century s, it is possible for both the talented and the unscrupulous to amass great wealth because the mass of the population had few “rights”. But for Britain and Continental Europe as a whole, the watershed experience was to be the First World War when “the flower of Europe” was destroyed in their hundreds of thousands and the political environment was to change dramatically and forever.

Change Over Time

After WWI there were so many women who were now “Heads of Households” due to their menfolk dying in Flanders Fields, the widening of the vote to include women became not only unstoppable but a necessity, the casualty lists did far more than Pankhurst and her Suffragettes ever could. However women getting the vote rather than leading to a massive explosion then was really just the lighting of a fuse that was not due to explode until some 40 years or so later.

The reason that the difference wasn’t both dramatic and immediate was that in the post war world, not much had changed for ordinary people in the pace of life and the “deference” to a social order that had existed as long as most people could remember. In addition, the most significant post war event when people struggled to survive economically, was the “Great Depression” rapidly followed by the Second World War.

It is important to realise that these two wars were fairly close together. Both my Grandfathers fought in WW1, my parents who were born in 1920, were only 19 years old when war was declared in September 1939. In comparison and whilst British Forces have been engaged in many “small wars” since 1945, the last significant British Military operation was the retaking of the Falklands in 1982 some 28 years ago.

The 1960s

For Britain the consequence of both these World Wars was to leave it virtually bankrupt, the “Age of Empires” was certainly well and truly over. First the loss of the Jewel of the Empire, India, then came the Suez fiasco and the often painful process of decolonisation. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was obvious that the “ruling elite”, actually the upper middle classes had lost the plot and it was at just this time that working class youth “assaulted the Citadel” and “The Swinging Sixties” took over, a great explosion of creative talent.

That fuse lit in the 1920s finally led to an ‘explosion’ and the demand that the mass of ordinary people or if you like the “working class” to have a share of a place in the Sun, no more the Elite only. The concept of a “Meritocracy” was much discussed by ordinary people, that people should not have a “right” to succeed but that they should have the opportunity to rise by their own merits and abilities.

However running parallel to this was a country in crisis that had lost its self confidence of which, joining the Common Market on very unfavourable terms was the culmination of many follies. The leadership of the Heaths and Wilsons was both hollow and confused which is still echoed today in the current crop of politicians of all parties. They too lack the courage and vision to see that this, as any country in the World, must be prepared to stand up and go it alone if necessary and more than that, likely the time is approaching when we in Britain will have to do so anyway.

The Consequences of the Sixties

The 1960s are, like a tuning fork that resonates, consciously unheard but ever present across the decades right up until today and it is important to both acknowledge and understand this because I believe it has and continues to fuel many aspects of both politics and culture today. The Age of Deference ended then and consequently although not overnight, respect for Politicians generally started to decline as did an automatic allegiance to one political party or another based upon the class you were born into. Obviously this turned to total disgust and loathing this past year with the MPs Expenses Scandal which however unfair to MPs was an event due to happen over one thing or another. In simple terms, whatever MPs personal illusions in the matter, they are not a “Ruling Elite” that knows better than ordinary citizens and Brown’s boasts as Chancellor have come to haunt him and rightly so because he clearly didn’t have a clue about the economy or anything that mattered with regard to his job as Chancellor, he just didn’t see it coming even though the IMF was warning him back in 2002/3.

At the same time we have found that our so called “Captains of Industry” barely qualify to be Cabin Boys, our Banks and Bankers didn’t have the slightest clue what they were doing either so all in all, the current British Elite in both Politics and Commerce, couldn’t punch themselves out of a wet paper bag and have totally failed these island peoples who are the ultimate “Shareholders” in Great Britain plc.

The reaction is to both dilute their existing powers, put in more ‘controls’ and gibber on about “greater transparency”. The aim being to prevent politicians and managers from going about their legitimate business and this is totally the wrong ‘solution’ and quite the opposite of what is needed because the key problem starts and ends with these people lacking the courage, fire in their bellies and vision to get on with the job, more regulation will not help, we need new people and probably a lot less legislation.

I will return to this theme in Part Two when I will speculate on the changes we must all go through to put these Island Nations back on track..