Dare to be Different

Many Western societies including our own are becoming organisationally dysfunctional and failing to serve the people – apart from the very rich. First there is the aberrant version of capitalism with which we are afflicted and which functions for the benefit of speculators, bankers, other disloyal outfits and the top few percent of the population. It increasingly fails to serve he majority who seek to work, work hard and pay their taxes. It sees them as milch cows from which to extract as much profit as possible – witness the banks, fuel and power companies, insurance companies and rail companies to name but a few – and pays no regard to employment exporting more jobs than goods. More than ever distant from a social market economy operating for the common good it is one reason why the gap between rich and poor continues to widen.

Then there is the political system and the lamentable government that arises out of it. One absolutely vital ingredient of a democratic political system fit for purpose is having the right amount of policy difference between parties so that the options placed before the electorate represent real alternatives that would lead to different trajectories and outcomes for society. But these days in this country you can hardly get a tissue paper between the policies of the main parties. For example none will contradict cutting and austerity even though this plainly and demonstrably does not work. At least two of the main parties actually believe in austerity as an economic policy. The third believes that the idea of cutting has been sold to the public and they are too frit to gainsay this and come forward with genuine Keynesian policies. There is thus effectively an informal political cartel forever looking over their shoulders and using the same focus group approach equally devoid of principle, courage or even an awareness of economic history.

What does it matter who gets elected if the policy choices are austerity, austerity or austerity? And of course it will continue not to work. Cuts push the domestic economy down and as countries, being each other's export markets, pile on the misery it is no use looking abroad. That only works if the others have different, more sensible and effective policies on which we can take a free ride. That isn't going to happen, as they all want export led recoveries. Instead we have national and international economic prescriptions equivalent to the 18th century medical 'cures' of leaches and bleeding. If the patient isn't recovering - then bleed some more.

This accounts for the interest in the United States with its mild Keynesian policies doing so much better than Europe. But for our cousins there the political situation is rather different. Their political system has been rendered dysfunctional by the capture of the Republican Party and much of the media by elements holding extreme right wing views and fat wallets. Checks and balances built into the constitution produce policy deadlock when faced with idiotic policies and a relentless, irrational and doctrinaire, refusal to compromise. Their Founding Fathers did not like the idea of political parties - you can now see why - and did not foresee the blight of spiteful intransigence with which their system is now afflicted.

The big worry is that short of a catastrophic upheaval here and elsewhere there is no evident solution to all of this - not even in the medium term. Elections need to matter, the common good should be to the fore, a basic morality should prevail and loyalty to community and country should permeate our economic as well as our social life. That's the essential change that we need to see along with an unwinding of globalisation. And yes, this latter could be done if the will was there in major western economies. The mutation of economic and political processes has taken deep hold but both are human creations not laws of nature as Smith and Marx would have had us believe. The economic and social world is what we choose to make it. Let’s hope there will be some real choices before us in the future.