14th November 2014

Tendring Topics……..on line

Greed and Self-interest Rule – OK?

        When our two sons were children, my wife Heather and I never tried to indoctrinate them with our ideas and values.  On the other hand we did make our ideas known to them and made sure that they knew that there were values that were important to us.  Looking back over the half-century that has elapsed since then I am very pleased, as I know their mother would be were she still with us, that both of them have lived socially useful lives and that their outlook on matters of importance is much the same as my own.

                      Sons to be proud  of!  Left Andy, then aged 13; and Pete aged 15, on holiday in Cornwall 1968 

 Last week, for instance, I received an email from my older son Pete, who founded and runs a successful and expanding consultancy, about one his major concerns. He expressed thoughts that could well have been my own.  Here are a few paragraphs from it: 

            This week started with the most explicit and extreme warnings and recommendations from world scientists about climate change, clearly and unambiguously saying for the first time that we have got to stop burning fossil fuels by the end of the century and halve our output by 2050 and that means that much of the known resources of coal, oil and gas can never be burned.

 But the BBC, instead of making a feature of it, and trying to explain the gravity of the situation to the ignorant British public, gave it a five minute slot on the National News, with a weary tone, saying that we have heard all this before but politicians never deal with it and won't this time. That instead of reducing carbon emissions global emissions are actually increasing year on year.  And then there was the ‘feel-good’ information, Britain and Europe are doing their bit, but China and the USA are the biggest emitters. After that, we could move on to the next news item.

I just despair. The climate change debate really does seem to encapsulate the problem of human greed where we are actually prepared to sacrifice the quality of life of our grandchildren for the sake of short term financial gain for this generation. Also, that we measure quality of life by the Gross Domestic Product, not by the environment in which we bring up our children. From the big global issues to the small local ones you see the same mentality. In London doctors are saying that 4000 people every year die prematurely from breathing disorders directly caused by pollution from cars, which is far higher than agreed European levels in London's hot spots. Millions of children at school also have breathing problems and need to use inhalers. This seems shocking to me and surely demands swift and uncompromising solutions.

But - with general public support - Boris Johnson has dragged his feet, postponed and watered down measures to deal with this. Why? Because it might damage the London economy or the livelihood of Taxi drivers or the financial health of road hauliers or upset the motoring lobby to act too swiftly.  

While I can see the economic need for Delivery vans and Lorries to drive through central London, 50% of the traffic consists of private cars owned by people wealthy enough not to care about the Congestion Charge, who have a company car park to go to and "prefer to drive". How can that be justified or dealt with by a higher charge? It should just be banned!

My sentiments exactly – and I couldn’t have put it better or more forcefully. This is not just a British or just a European problem. I watched last week a tv programme about the Mekong river, one of the greatest waterways in south-east Asia, that flows through the countries of Cambodia and Vietnam.  Along its course is an enormous freshwater lake, the level of which is raised several feet during the rainy season. Communities with homes built on stilts exist round this lake and for generations they have lived by harvesting the fish with which the lake teemed.

            Recently though both Cambodia and Vietnam have been introduced to free-market competitive capitalism.  Local fishing methods were anything but cost-effective.  Big corporations are now using modern mass-market fishing methods – reaping, for a year or two, a rich harvest and enriching their share holders. They’re also depleting the fish.  Tough luck on the lake-side communities!  They clearly have no future in the world of the 21^st century.

One of the verses in Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam says

Ah Love, couldst thou and I with fate conspire

To take this sorry scheme of things entire.

Would we not shatter it to bits, and then

Remould it closer to the heart’s desire?

 In 1945 our world had been shattered to bits by world wars.   I believe that with the welfare state, the foundation of the United Nations and the beginnings of the foundation of a united Europe, there was a genuine attempt in many countries, including our own, to create a world of peace and justice, closer to the heart’s desire.  This vision of a better, fairer, co-operative rather than competitive society persisted, in this country at least, through the governments of Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Ted Heath (I look back on that time as a golden age!) until the 1980s and the advent of Thatcherism and, the other side of the same coin, Tony Blair’s New Labour.

It was during this period of privatisation, of the development of the idea of a world-wide market free of bureaucratic regulation, that greed and naked self-interest took over. I like to personalise it as the triumph of the false god Mammon with his unholy trinity of profitability, productivity and cost-effectiveness.  I wonder how many well-meaning Labour supporters realized that in erasing ‘Clause 4’ of Labour’s constitution, they weren’t just voting that not everything should be nationalised but opening the door to the privatisation of all public services.   I remember being quite shocked when the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper for the ‘responsible citizen’ if there ever was one, carried as a keynote feature an article entitled A Defence of Greed!

I have been proud of my country but now I am ashamed. It is a land in which the gap between the wealth of the richest of us and the poverty of the poorest is the widest in Europe, in which conspicuous and flaunted wealth exist while many hard-working people have to rely on charity and food banks to keep their families from starvation; where an army of lawyers and accountants earn a parasitic prosperity by making sure the very rich pay nothing like their fair share of taxation; a form of ‘immoral earnings’ that is risk-free and richly rewarded!

I can only hope that our fellow men and women will come to their senses and repudiate Mammon and all his evil works before the unbridled greed and selfishness of a minority drag, not me at 93, but a future generation to disaster.

A fateful Decade

Writing about the decade that I think of as the ‘avaricious eighties’ has brought to my  mind the fact that it was during those fateful ten years that  Home Office files, that are said to have implicated members of ‘the establishment’ in child abuse disappeared – were lost or destroyed.  No, I am not suggesting for a moment that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in any way responsible for their disappearance. It unlikely that she was even aware of their existence.

I do think it possible though that someone with authority in the Home Office who was a fervent supporter of the ‘iron lady’ did glance through them, saw some of the names mentioned, and recognised their potential ability to hinder – or even halt - Mrs Thatcher’s revolutionary crusade of privatisation and removal of every trace of what she considered to be the taint of socialism.  The last thing that she would want would be a major public scandal possibly involving some of the government’s most enthusiastic and generous supporters.  

So, those potentially damaging files ‘disappeared’.  Who would have imagined that anyone would remember their existence over thirty years later?

‘We’re better together!’

I had never expected to get very excited about the progress of space exploration.  Much of it is really beyond my comprehension.  However, the fact that the European Space Agency has succeeded in placing a man-made object on the surface of a comet millions of miles away and travelling at breathtaking speed, really does deserve heartfelt congratulation. 

I am particularly pleased because it was achieved by fellow Europeans, working together.  Some components were manufactured in an Essex factory.  It is an achievement that neither the Americans, the Russians nor the Chinese have managed to accomplish – and you can bet your life they all would have if they could have!  This European achievement in the field of space exploration could be repeated in the fields of politics and economics.  Europe could, once again, lead the world!

This is no time for the United Kingdom to think of leaving the European Union.  As the leaders of all Britain's main political parties proclaimed on the eve of the Scottish referendum:

                                       We’re better together!

Dear Blog Readers,

When, a few weeks ago, I wrote that I would no longer necessarily publish this blog on Mondays I had in mind that it would sometimes be later in the week.  However, this week 'next week's blog' was completed and it seemed to me that I should get it published as soon as possible because it has important messages.  So here it is - published on Friday 14th November instead of Monday 17th.  I've no idea when the next blog will be published.  It all depends on what happens in the world!