Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The violence, destruction and looting, in London mainly, but other cities too, is terrifying to the law abiding and the innocent. The government, having turned its back on the whole thing with a few unctuous comments about ‘keeping in touch by phone’ is now returned hot foot from holiday and working. It will need to take whatever steps are needed to protect life and property and restore order. That is its first duty to the country. Parliament is recalled and rightly so.

Beneath the immediate imperative of clearing the streets of anarchy, violence, looting and arson, a sorry list for any  country, lies a deep and predictable set of problems for too long ignored. We now know that the financial model we employed for so long is unsustainable. Steps are in hand to put this right, but the scale of debt and the cost of servicing it are likely to prove crippling to even the UK and the US, previously thought safe. The UK remains in this safe category for the moment, with borrowing costs at nearly the lowest in its history, but as the £50 billion per annum needed to pay the interest on this growing debt mountain begins to impact, that confidence will begin to falter.

It is not the cuts in themselves which are stalling growth. It is the cost of previous and continued borrowing, added to absurdly inflating energy costs (gas at 18%?!) through dysfunctional markets, and general inflation way ahead of ordinary people’s earnings. You cannot get growth out of falling incomes.

Unfortunately there are many at the top of the pile who have never had it so good. They have never had it so good because we have been running a me first system which lauds greed and selfishness and allows money to be hoovered up from the lowest elements of society and sprayed out over the top end, already overflowing. The notion that people have to be paid hundreds of thousands to carry out straightforward responsibilities in the public sector and the professions or have to be paid in millions to gamble with other people’s money, is not only immoral and unjust, but it is socially destructive.

This blog has previously raised  anxiety of the danger that the post WWII consensus, which provided social cohesion (even though there was ideological tension) will break down, through the unrestrained application of financial policies which are exploitative and unfair. This is now happening because the continuing financial crisis is exposing more clearly than ever, just how rotten the state of affairs has become. A recent example is the fact that whilst workers pensions are squeezed and shrinking, those of the directors of the very same companies are protected and growing. It is not possible to run any sort of society like that, whether you call it Big, Fair, Just or whatever. Thatcher said there was no such thing. Well, there is when it rises up and turns upon  itself.

Add to that one million young people without jobs, a good proportion of whom have insufficient education to even have a prospect of getting one, and you have trouble. This is where flawed policies, half baked theories and weak politicians, coupled with a collapse of conscience and a failure of parenting have brought us to. Sorting it out will take an uncharacteristic and heavy hand. That will form further resentments and leave lasting scars. In tandem and importantly, we have to re-think; we have to learn why it is that decent young people become mindless criminals overnight and why their frightened parents have no power to control them. The answers are obvious to those who bother. Bothering is now a universal responsibility.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.