The smaller the party, the bigger the manifesto. Labour, the Conservative, Green and UKIP all clock in at around 80 pages, but Nick Cleggs little monster, channeling a 70s wallpaper designer, is 158. The pages are a bit smaller, and a couple of them are taken up with an index (bravo!). As with Labour, and the Conservatives, here are a few things which stood out.
1. There is some genuinely radical stuff in here, which the Libdems have either been a bit coy about, or the mainstream media aren't interested in because they'd rather have arguments about maths. That's a shame, because the radical stuff is potentially the most significant.
2. At the same time, spot the consensus: more free childcare, more nhs funding, 0/7% on overseas aid, control immigration, devolve power both to the countries of the UK and to local governments and cities, reduce tax on the low paid, build more houses. All 3 main Westminster parties are saying the same thing in these areas. They all use the word 'plan' on their first page as well. Snore....
3. It may be that the other parties have put their detail elsewhere, or just left it out of public gaze entirely, but there is a lot of detailed thinking and policy here. This document has the only fully-fledged strategy on climate change and the environment, nearly a fully-fledged strategy on mental health (see below), and a lot more finesse in several areas than Labour or the Conservatives. Before you think I'm getting carried away, there are several things I'm completely opposed to....
4. Greenery: there are more nods from Labour towards this than the Tories, but the Libdems tackle climate change and the environment head on. It's one of their 5 'front page' priorities, along with education, balancing the budget, fair taxes and the nhs, and there are '5 Green Laws' which cover a whole raft of stuff, from conservation areas, to zero emission cars to renewable energy. 60% of energy from renewables by 2030, zero carbon economy by 2050 with zero carbon traffic, 70% recycling rate by 2020 and (I liked this) a commission to look at what resources we're using in an unsustainable way, with power to push us to cut consumption. At the same time there's the only proposals I've seen to build houses resilient to rising temperatures, and a lot more incentives towards insulation, energy efficiency etc. And every time a child is born, a tree will be planted. Not many of these will be popular, or cheap, or give a short-term gain, but the Libdems seem to be the only party who are thinking beyond the 8th of May in these areas. Well done.
5. The other one I really like, and you'd expect me to say this, is their policies on mental health - more money, better standards of care, clear waiting time targets. There's a target of getting 25% of of those suffering mental illness into appropriate counselling treatment - that seems a very low target, but perhaps its symptomatic of how poor the support currently is. Imagine of only 25% of people with a broken leg got a plaster cast.... But, for a party which has clearly done a lot of thinking, there wasn't enough on prevention. Yes there's a plan for a '5 a day' type public health campaign on mental health, more on reducing stigma etc. But a lot of mental illness is rooted in what happens when you're young: family breakdown, poor parenting, poor relationships with main carers. As with Labour, and the Tories, this seemed to be a no-go area. Nobody has the courage, or the ideas, to tackle the epidemic of fatherlessness and family breakdown, or to use the network of health visitors and new mums support to give input on parenting and relationships, as well as caring for the new baby. The Libdems are streets ahead of the rest on mental health, but there are still some streets that are no-go areas, and until we walk them, we'll always have a massive problem on our hands. To be fair, the Libdems say more than the Conservatives about promoting and expanding the Troubled Families programme, and want mediation for all separating couples, but wouldn't it be better to build stronger relationships to start with?
6. Cunning plans: everyone is offering more free childcare, the Libdems is are a bit more tailored - 20 hours per week from age 2, but if you're a working parent then it's available from 9 months in, which is when a lot of new mums go back to work part-time after having a child. Discount bus travel for students aged 16-21 is good, to get them into the habit, out of cars, and support the bus network. Getting landlords to insulate houses to an approved standard, putting RE back into the core curriculum alongside some key life skills like finance management. Oh yes, and giving local authorities more power to cut down on betting shops and the use of addictive betting terminals in their communities.
7. A few contentious ones: minimum unit pricing on alcohol (which has been suggested for a while but nobody has done it), legalising cannabis for medicinal use, and a looser drugs law put under the Health department rather than the Home Office. Decriminalising having drugs for personal use would raise a storm of protest at other times, but there hasn't been a peep about it (yet). Perhaps the Daily Mail is too busy looking for celebrities in badly-fitting bikinis.
8. Being liberals, there's quite a bit on civil liberties, control over what data people can hold about you, freedom to be rude about people and to swim where you like, more support and promotion of equality for people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and gay, bisexual and transgender people. The cuts to legal aid are going to be reviewed, and different forms of punishment trialled (badoom-tish) for crime. 'A large prison population is a sign of failure to rehabilitate, not a sign of success'. So they want more tagging, curfews, weekend prison etc., and if you go to prison there's a skills and education assesment in your first week. After the confiscation of books by the Tories, this is a welcome change of direction.
9. Fair play to Clegg, he hasn't given up on proportional representation, there it is again, alongside an elected Lords, more devolution, caps on donations to parties, and a formal process for working out who is in the leaders debates (tick).
10. One which elevated my eyebrows: 'liberalise rules about the location, timing and content of wedding ceremonies'. I guess it depends how liberal, but the gay marriage reforms raised question marks over whether the government even knew how to define marriage, and this takes it a step further. At what point does marriage stop being marriage, and start being something else? There's a difference between pledging 'all that I have I share with you...till death us do part' and singing each other something by Robbie Williams.
11. Housing - again, plenty of detail and evidence of a lot of thinking. Right to Buy is there, but left up to local authorities not enforced by central government. But again, it's frustrating that a party which has done so much work misses some obvious issues. One is housing density - new estates are crammed, with every home overlooked, miniature gardens, and short on facilities. Many new homes have more space for the plasma telly than for a meal table. Joined up thinking on mental health and wellbeing would ask for a maximum housing density and a minimum standard on social space within a home. The Libdems mention loneliness as a problem - well at least give people the space to invite friends round then!
12. There's some thinking on faith, discrimination etc., mostly around supporting interfaith work, protecting Jews and Muslims from hate crime, but also putting RE back in a more central role at schools and giving freedom for 'religious doctrines' to be explained.
13. British Sign Language will be recognised as an official language of the UK. Excellent. Now offer it at GCSE. Outside London and premiership football, most of us are more likely to come across a deaf person than a Frenchman.
And great news for anyone from the SW who likes the Brecon Beacons - once the debts on the Severn Bridge are paid off, the tolls will be scrapped.
Overall, I was quite impressed. Much more than either of the other two parties, the policies seem to be designed with people in mind, and the stress on the environment and mental health is the kind of long-term thinking we need from our politicians, but rarely get. There are some sensible policy reviews (e.g. the constitutional convention on devolution, rather than Camerons divisive populism, legal aid), and more of a sense that this is rooted in vision and values, rather than managerialism and presentation. It's the nearest thing to what the bishops were asking for a few weeks ago, and is mercifully free of the snide political bashing you find throughout the other manifestoes. I wonder if somewhere in a backroom there are Labour and Conservative strategists going 'why didn't we think of that?'
Because of course, that's the context. Clegg is pitching to 2 sets of people. One is us, the voter. The other is the two other main parties. The Libdems main shot at power is to be a more attractive coalition partner than either the SNP or UKIP. To do that he needs as many votes and MPs as possible, and as many policies as possible which the other parties think they can work with. Given all that's in the manifestoes, a coalition with Labour looks much the better fit: the Conservatives will spend 2 years taken up with an EU referendum and take their eye off the ball, and Labour is offering much less in terms of policy anyway, so there are plenty of gaps for the Libdems to fill. Libdems and Labour are both ok with borrowing to invest, and the Conservatives are riddled with people who simply don't get climate change and green energy, from Owen Paterson to Eric Pickles.
However, I still think that doing all this is a massive challenge if 300,000 new people are arriving in the UK every year; all the money and effort that goes into the nhs, housing and education will only enable us to stand still. Meanwhile there aren't any big ideas, from anyone, on how we integrate communities at a local level. Nobody is producing an evidence-based immigration policy (why do people come here, how many will stop coming if we do x or y) based on a sustainable level of immigration, and leaving the EU is a blunt instrument with too much collateral damage. So we still need UKIP to keep this debate on the table, but probably not UKIPs solution.
AND IT DOESN'T MENTION HARD WORKING FAMILIES ONCE! YIPPEEE! If you're as intermittently lazy as I am, at last, a party you can vote for.....
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Labour Manifesto - Working Hard for The Kingdom of Ed
I wonder if its ever struck politicians that if 'hard working families' are as hard working as they're cracked up to be, most won't have the time or the energy to read an 86 page manifesto, even if a lot of it is pictures. They/we are too busy working hard, getting on, doing the right thing, or whatever it is the Stakhanovs do most of the time.
Maybe Labour knew they wouldn't get beyond page 1, so they stuck this on the cover:
Britain only succeeds when working people succeed. this is a plan to reward hard work, share prosperity and build a better Britain
Odd that they pitch the manifesto to a minority of the British population, given that over half of us aren't working, being too young, too old, too ill, or too busy volunteering (of which more later)
It's a clear pitch to be the Labour party, the party of working people, but with a lot less socialism and toff-bashing than in the good old days. There's a brief swipe at the Conservatives, and no mention of the LibDems (keeping the door open for the coalition negotiations which are bound to begin on 8th May).
There's plenty of commentary elsewhere, but a few things really stuck out to me:
1. There are pledges to increase the number of GPs, nurses and midwives. Unless there's a big change to GP training in the pipeline, it takes longer than a single parliament to train a new GP. So, where do they come from? Will Labour be trying to get health professionals who have quit the NHS to return, or (as under Blair) will they be recruiting overseas? There is a massive moral question mark over this, we have one of the best health services in the world, most other countries need their doctors and nurses more than we do. The Labour manifesto makes much of the UK re-engaging with the world, promoting the Millenium Development Goals (good) but if we poach doctors from developing countries then white man speak with forked tongue.
2. Kids, wave goodbye to your parents. You'll see them again in 18 years. Labour wants an education system that starts with 25 hours free childcare at age 3 (provided by your renewed Sure Start centre), extends to 50 hours by the time you are 4 (yes, 50 hours. schools will have to provide access to 'wraparound' childcare from 8am - 6pm), and continues until you are 21. Out of work benefits won't begin until you turn 21, prior to that it's a Youth Allowance dependent on whether you're in training. Some of this will be welcome news to parents who need more flexibility so that they can work to bring in the pennies, some of this will simply mean families spending less time together. It's bizarre that in a document which declares Labour believes a decent society grows out of family life and relationships the main policy direction is one which will mean families seeing less of each other. Does Ed Miliband not get on with the rest of his family?
3. The wraparound school clubs are all going to be provided by volunteers. Really? How? It's a nice aspiration, but there's no suggestion of how it could be achieved. Worse, if it is achieved, where do those volunteers come from? There's no national strategy for encouraging volunteering, so they will have to come from the existing volunteer pool. That's the folk who look after the elderly, run playgroups, staff foodbanks, pop in on neighbours etc. Good luck on either score. We can't even find the handful of adults needed locally to keep a single council youth club up and running for one evening a week.
4. Also on family policy, there are warm words about 'strengthing the institutions that help individuals, families and communities to thrive' but nothing about strengthening families themselves. Sure Start will be resurrected, but mainly as a national childcare agency. 'Early years intervention' is fine, but there's no suggestion of tackling the reasons why this might be needed. Family breakdown remains the elephant in the room, responsible for vast levels of misery, mental illness, educational failure, substance abuse etc. Labour wants a constitutional convention to look at how the UK can hold together, but when did it (or any other party) ever give serious thought about how to hold families together?
5. One oddity: Labour want to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners, but set up an equivalent version in education, a local Director of School Standards who monitors performance, intervenes in underperforming schools and can commission new schools. Local authorities will continue to be players in the school system, so I'm not quite sure where that leaves LEAs. The roles of PCC and DSS are slightly different, but it seemed odd to be scrapping one and inventing the other!
6. 200k new houses a year won't go very far if 300k people are being added to the population each year. There are no targets for sensible immigration, just a few policies around benefits and controls. This is a real problem. Yes we need immigrants, but there is surely an optimum rate at which people can be assimilated, and infrastructure be put in place? We are adding a new county's worth of people every 3 years to the UK, but short of a specific cap, I haven't yet seen a policy that amounts to more than hoping the problem will go away if we look tough. That hasn't worked yet.
7. Foreign policy: Labour propose a 'global envoy for religious freedom'. Good. Gordon Browns next job perhaps? It would be good to see a specific role though: they also propose an envoy for LGBT rights whose goal will be to secure the decriminalisation of homosexuality worldwide. I'd be thrilled if the goal for the religious freedom envoy was to secure the decriminalisation of conversion to Christianity.
8. Labour seem to be taking climate change more seriously - there's a welcome goal of a zero-carbon electricity supply by 2030, and interest free loans for energy improvements will reboot the domestic solar energy market. Right noises, but I don't see enough on, for example, public transport (most of the policies are devolved to local level) to see a thorough response. There's a welcome commitment to keep the 0.7% aid target and refocus it on the poorest countries.
9. Mental health: will be 'given the same priority as physical health'. I wonder what that means in practice? The document says there'll be the same right to psychological therapies as to drugs. If true, that means free, lifelong access, rather than 8 weeks after a 5 month wait, as is the current (approximate) situation. Do they really mean that? Access to drugs doesn't stop after a set number of weeks, so if that's what's really being promised for talking therapies, then that's a very hefty commitment. And please, not just CBT, it doesn't fix everything. And if you do offer CBT, please lets have proper professional counsellors, not a nurse who's done a short course. Labour wants more access to counselling at schools (good) and there's a suggestion of putting mindfulness on the national curriculum. There's no extra money committed here, only a promise that a higher % of the mental health budget will be spent on children. That, of course, means a lower percentage on adults, so without a significant rise in the overall budget, there's the prospect of a cut to adult mental health funding. Surely not?
Overall Labour are trying not to frighten the horses, but I'm not sure whether the horses will be very inspired either. I guess a proper rationale for the policies (e.g. the 50 hour school week), or proper details of how they'll work (adult mental health) would have needed a longer document. Labour seem more aware of the vulnerable - disabled, users of food banks, low wages - than the current government, but I don't see much of a great vision here. It's a bit more of an engineers budget, how do we make this system work better, and produce more of what we want (houses, good healthcare, clean energy at affordable prices). I can't see it setting many pulses racing, and as the first page states, its a 'plan...for a better Britain'. The P-word again. The 2015 election is the Battle of the Plans.
Maybe Labour knew they wouldn't get beyond page 1, so they stuck this on the cover:
Britain only succeeds when working people succeed. this is a plan to reward hard work, share prosperity and build a better Britain
Odd that they pitch the manifesto to a minority of the British population, given that over half of us aren't working, being too young, too old, too ill, or too busy volunteering (of which more later)
It's a clear pitch to be the Labour party, the party of working people, but with a lot less socialism and toff-bashing than in the good old days. There's a brief swipe at the Conservatives, and no mention of the LibDems (keeping the door open for the coalition negotiations which are bound to begin on 8th May).
There's plenty of commentary elsewhere, but a few things really stuck out to me:
1. There are pledges to increase the number of GPs, nurses and midwives. Unless there's a big change to GP training in the pipeline, it takes longer than a single parliament to train a new GP. So, where do they come from? Will Labour be trying to get health professionals who have quit the NHS to return, or (as under Blair) will they be recruiting overseas? There is a massive moral question mark over this, we have one of the best health services in the world, most other countries need their doctors and nurses more than we do. The Labour manifesto makes much of the UK re-engaging with the world, promoting the Millenium Development Goals (good) but if we poach doctors from developing countries then white man speak with forked tongue.
2. Kids, wave goodbye to your parents. You'll see them again in 18 years. Labour wants an education system that starts with 25 hours free childcare at age 3 (provided by your renewed Sure Start centre), extends to 50 hours by the time you are 4 (yes, 50 hours. schools will have to provide access to 'wraparound' childcare from 8am - 6pm), and continues until you are 21. Out of work benefits won't begin until you turn 21, prior to that it's a Youth Allowance dependent on whether you're in training. Some of this will be welcome news to parents who need more flexibility so that they can work to bring in the pennies, some of this will simply mean families spending less time together. It's bizarre that in a document which declares Labour believes a decent society grows out of family life and relationships the main policy direction is one which will mean families seeing less of each other. Does Ed Miliband not get on with the rest of his family?
3. The wraparound school clubs are all going to be provided by volunteers. Really? How? It's a nice aspiration, but there's no suggestion of how it could be achieved. Worse, if it is achieved, where do those volunteers come from? There's no national strategy for encouraging volunteering, so they will have to come from the existing volunteer pool. That's the folk who look after the elderly, run playgroups, staff foodbanks, pop in on neighbours etc. Good luck on either score. We can't even find the handful of adults needed locally to keep a single council youth club up and running for one evening a week.
4. Also on family policy, there are warm words about 'strengthing the institutions that help individuals, families and communities to thrive' but nothing about strengthening families themselves. Sure Start will be resurrected, but mainly as a national childcare agency. 'Early years intervention' is fine, but there's no suggestion of tackling the reasons why this might be needed. Family breakdown remains the elephant in the room, responsible for vast levels of misery, mental illness, educational failure, substance abuse etc. Labour wants a constitutional convention to look at how the UK can hold together, but when did it (or any other party) ever give serious thought about how to hold families together?
5. One oddity: Labour want to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners, but set up an equivalent version in education, a local Director of School Standards who monitors performance, intervenes in underperforming schools and can commission new schools. Local authorities will continue to be players in the school system, so I'm not quite sure where that leaves LEAs. The roles of PCC and DSS are slightly different, but it seemed odd to be scrapping one and inventing the other!
6. 200k new houses a year won't go very far if 300k people are being added to the population each year. There are no targets for sensible immigration, just a few policies around benefits and controls. This is a real problem. Yes we need immigrants, but there is surely an optimum rate at which people can be assimilated, and infrastructure be put in place? We are adding a new county's worth of people every 3 years to the UK, but short of a specific cap, I haven't yet seen a policy that amounts to more than hoping the problem will go away if we look tough. That hasn't worked yet.
7. Foreign policy: Labour propose a 'global envoy for religious freedom'. Good. Gordon Browns next job perhaps? It would be good to see a specific role though: they also propose an envoy for LGBT rights whose goal will be to secure the decriminalisation of homosexuality worldwide. I'd be thrilled if the goal for the religious freedom envoy was to secure the decriminalisation of conversion to Christianity.
8. Labour seem to be taking climate change more seriously - there's a welcome goal of a zero-carbon electricity supply by 2030, and interest free loans for energy improvements will reboot the domestic solar energy market. Right noises, but I don't see enough on, for example, public transport (most of the policies are devolved to local level) to see a thorough response. There's a welcome commitment to keep the 0.7% aid target and refocus it on the poorest countries.
9. Mental health: will be 'given the same priority as physical health'. I wonder what that means in practice? The document says there'll be the same right to psychological therapies as to drugs. If true, that means free, lifelong access, rather than 8 weeks after a 5 month wait, as is the current (approximate) situation. Do they really mean that? Access to drugs doesn't stop after a set number of weeks, so if that's what's really being promised for talking therapies, then that's a very hefty commitment. And please, not just CBT, it doesn't fix everything. And if you do offer CBT, please lets have proper professional counsellors, not a nurse who's done a short course. Labour wants more access to counselling at schools (good) and there's a suggestion of putting mindfulness on the national curriculum. There's no extra money committed here, only a promise that a higher % of the mental health budget will be spent on children. That, of course, means a lower percentage on adults, so without a significant rise in the overall budget, there's the prospect of a cut to adult mental health funding. Surely not?
Overall Labour are trying not to frighten the horses, but I'm not sure whether the horses will be very inspired either. I guess a proper rationale for the policies (e.g. the 50 hour school week), or proper details of how they'll work (adult mental health) would have needed a longer document. Labour seem more aware of the vulnerable - disabled, users of food banks, low wages - than the current government, but I don't see much of a great vision here. It's a bit more of an engineers budget, how do we make this system work better, and produce more of what we want (houses, good healthcare, clean energy at affordable prices). I can't see it setting many pulses racing, and as the first page states, its a 'plan...for a better Britain'. The P-word again. The 2015 election is the Battle of the Plans.
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Simple Choices
Choose A or B
A: Wind turbine overlooking the land
B: No land as it's all underwater
A: Tidal power
B: Tidal surge
A: Jumping on a plane to get away from the bad weather
B: Having a home to come back to afterwards
A: Solar panels on the roof
B: Nothing on the roof as all the tiles have blown off
A: Get out of the car and walk
B: Get out of the car and wade
A: Change
B: Climate Change
A: Wind turbine overlooking the land
B: No land as it's all underwater
A: Tidal power
B: Tidal surge
A: Jumping on a plane to get away from the bad weather
B: Having a home to come back to afterwards
A: Solar panels on the roof
B: Nothing on the roof as all the tiles have blown off
A: Get out of the car and walk
B: Get out of the car and wade
A: Change
B: Climate Change
Saturday, January 09, 2010
History of Now: Do the Fat Shoppers have a Vision?
It's been a weird week, a combination of a nasty infection and snow has meant no evening engagements at all. Instead, BBC2's History of Now has been a good way to spend some of that time, giving a retrospective on the Noughties and even giving Andrew Marr the last word as a nod to his work on the 100 years before that.
Last nights was on globalisation, and featured the (not often heard) story of London as a multicultural success story, and recent record immigration levels not resulting in riots in the streets as a big achievement. There was also the irony of Britain hosting G8 at Gleneagles to try to make progress on climate change whilst half the population was jumping into planes for a cheap weekend break to Prague.
A couple of things have really jumped out at me.
1. The Noughties was the decade when restraint went out the window. Any sense of moderation when it came to consumption, travel, sex, alcohol or food consumption (the average weight of male and female rose significantly over the decade), borrowing, spending, emotion, language, behaviour, greed, self expression you name it, the idea of anything having a limit, being enough, seemed to have been thrown out entirely.
Which in turn reminded me of Proverbs 29:18 'where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint', or 'where there is no vision, the people perish' in other versions.
In the last couple of years, sheer economics, plus a few other factors, has reintroduced some sense of limits. Cut price air travel is down, partly due to the debt crunch, partly because we're more aware of the carbon footprint. Bad language on TV, and 'edgy' (Newspeak for 'offensive') material has been reeled in in the wake of the Brandon Ross affair. Consumption has, sort of, pulled back in the last 18 months, but not massively - we're still addicted to shopping.
And what's the vision?
2. If you were Karl Marx in 2010, identifying the opiate of the people, I doubt religion would be anywhere in your top 5 candidates. History of Now pointed out that social mobility had ground to a halt, and the gap between rich and poor had grown much wider. How had that happened without social unrest? Because of enough high-profile opiates to keep the masses always hopeful of breaking in: the Lottery, X Factor, Pop Idol, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It maybe wasn't a coincidence that Britains biggest export in the Noughties was game show formats. It's a classic bit of magical misdirection: keep everyones eyes on Cheryl Cole and Jimmy Choo, and they won't notice what's really happening.
I'd love for this next decade to be unrestrained, but in the right things. Love, service, compassion, generosity, humility, kindness, truth, wisdom. There's more to life than shopping, and there's more to fulfilment than singing to Simon Cowell. If the next decade is more of the same, then we'll accumulate a few more toys, put on a few more pounds, and the sound of the Emperors' fiddle will grow louder over a burning world.
Last nights was on globalisation, and featured the (not often heard) story of London as a multicultural success story, and recent record immigration levels not resulting in riots in the streets as a big achievement. There was also the irony of Britain hosting G8 at Gleneagles to try to make progress on climate change whilst half the population was jumping into planes for a cheap weekend break to Prague.
A couple of things have really jumped out at me.
1. The Noughties was the decade when restraint went out the window. Any sense of moderation when it came to consumption, travel, sex, alcohol or food consumption (the average weight of male and female rose significantly over the decade), borrowing, spending, emotion, language, behaviour, greed, self expression you name it, the idea of anything having a limit, being enough, seemed to have been thrown out entirely.
Which in turn reminded me of Proverbs 29:18 'where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint', or 'where there is no vision, the people perish' in other versions.
In the last couple of years, sheer economics, plus a few other factors, has reintroduced some sense of limits. Cut price air travel is down, partly due to the debt crunch, partly because we're more aware of the carbon footprint. Bad language on TV, and 'edgy' (Newspeak for 'offensive') material has been reeled in in the wake of the Brandon Ross affair. Consumption has, sort of, pulled back in the last 18 months, but not massively - we're still addicted to shopping.
And what's the vision?
2. If you were Karl Marx in 2010, identifying the opiate of the people, I doubt religion would be anywhere in your top 5 candidates. History of Now pointed out that social mobility had ground to a halt, and the gap between rich and poor had grown much wider. How had that happened without social unrest? Because of enough high-profile opiates to keep the masses always hopeful of breaking in: the Lottery, X Factor, Pop Idol, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It maybe wasn't a coincidence that Britains biggest export in the Noughties was game show formats. It's a classic bit of magical misdirection: keep everyones eyes on Cheryl Cole and Jimmy Choo, and they won't notice what's really happening.
I'd love for this next decade to be unrestrained, but in the right things. Love, service, compassion, generosity, humility, kindness, truth, wisdom. There's more to life than shopping, and there's more to fulfilment than singing to Simon Cowell. If the next decade is more of the same, then we'll accumulate a few more toys, put on a few more pounds, and the sound of the Emperors' fiddle will grow louder over a burning world.
Monday, September 07, 2009
10:10
Instead of wasting your time reading more of my burblings, head over to the 10:10 site, and sign up to the pledge to reduce your carbon footprint by 10% next year. Plenty of ideas on how to do it here. Climate change is real and it's already killing people.
If you're the creative sort, you could also join the Mass Visual Trespass (MVT) run by Christian Aid, who will be beaming our messages to world leaders at the Copenhagen Summit in December.
More links/info at Dave Walkers blog. Vid for anyone tempted to think they could do with more, rather than less, or for people who still have the attention span to read more than 3 short paragraphs on a blog, there's a cracking post/sermon at MadPriest, with facts and figures on poverty and wealth.
If you're the creative sort, you could also join the Mass Visual Trespass (MVT) run by Christian Aid, who will be beaming our messages to world leaders at the Copenhagen Summit in December.
More links/info at Dave Walkers blog. Vid for anyone tempted to think they could do with more, rather than less, or for people who still have the attention span to read more than 3 short paragraphs on a blog, there's a cracking post/sermon at MadPriest, with facts and figures on poverty and wealth.
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