Happy 2017 from the Brian
2016/2017
The consensus among most of my friends seems to be that 2016 was a
terrible year, and the beginning of a long decline into something we
don’t even want to imagine.
2016 was indeed a pretty rough year, but I wonder if it’s the end - not
the beginning - of a long decline. Or at least the beginning of the
end….for I think we’ve been in decline for about 40 years, enduring a
slow process of de-civilisation, but not really quite noticing it until
now. I’m reminded of that thing about the frog placed in a pan of slowly
heating water…
This decline includes the transition from secure employment to
precarious employment, the destruction of unions and the shrinkage of
workers’ rights, zero hour contracts, the dismantling of local
government, a health service falling apart, an underfunded education
system ruled by meaningless exam results and league tables, the
increasingly acceptable stigmatisation of immigrants, knee-jerk
nationalism, and the concentration of prejudice enabled by social media
and the internet.
This process of decivilisation grew out of an ideology which sneered at
social generosity and championed a sort of righteous selfishness.
(Thatcher: “Poverty is a personality defect”. Ayn Rand: “Altruism is
evil”). The emphasis on unrestrained individualism has had two effects:
the creation of a huge amount of wealth, and the funnelling of it into
fewer and fewer hands. Right now the 62 richest people in the world are
as wealthy as the bottom half of its population combined. The
Thatcher/Reagan fantasy that all this wealth would ‘trickle down’ and
enrich everybody else simply hasn’t transpired. In fact the reverse has
happened: the real wages of most people have been in decline for at
least two decades, while at the same time their prospects - and the
prospects for their children - look dimmer and dimmer. No wonder people
are angry, and turning away from business-as-usual government for
solutions. When governments pay most attention to whoever has most
money, the huge wealth inequalities we now see make a mockery of the
idea of democracy. As George Monbiot said: “The pen may be mightier than
the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen”.
Last year people started waking up to this. A lot of them, in their
anger, grabbed the nearest Trump-like object and hit the Establishment
over the head with it. But those were just the most conspicuous,
media-tasty awakenings. Meanwhile there’s been a quieter but equally
powerful stirring: people are rethinking what democracy means, what
society means and what we need to do to make them work again. People are
thinking hard, and, most importantly, thinking out loud, together. I
think we underwent a mass disillusionment in 2016, and finally realised
it’s time to jump out of the saucepan.
This is the start of something big. It will involve engagement: not just
tweets and likes and swipes, but thoughtful and creative social and
political action too. It will involve realising that some things we’ve
taken for granted - some semblance of truth in reporting, for example -
can no longer be expected for free. If we want good reporting and good
analysis, we’ll have to pay for it. That means MONEY: direct financial
support for the publications and websites struggling to tell the
non-corporate, non-establishment side of the story. In the same way if
we want happy and creative children we need to take charge of education,
not leave it to ideologues and bottom-liners. If we want social
generosity, then we must pay our taxes and get rid of our tax havens.
And if we want thoughtful politicians, we should stop supporting merely
charismatic ones.
Inequality eats away at the heart of a society, breeding disdain,
resentment, envy, suspicion, bullying, arrogance and callousness. If we
want any decent kind of future we have to push away from that, and I
think we’re starting to.
There’s so much to do, so many possibilities. 2017 should be a
surprising year.