People and Political Class Are One:Neither Wants To Face The Future

[chlamor]

'The people and the political class are at one: neither wants to face the future'

by John Gray

Within a decade or so, maybe sooner, a combination of accelerating climate change and the peaking of global oil supplies will put great strain on our present energy-intensive way of life, but the political class has decided to postpone thinking about the environmental crisis. The war in Iraq grinds on with Britain a hapless accomplice in the Bush administration's bungling and barbarism, and yet none of the parties asked whether the so-called special relationship with the US continues to serve the British national interest. Despite recent signs of slowdown, the domestic economy goes on producing jobs and rising incomes for the majority, but this prosperity is heavily dependent on unsustainable household borrowing. Sooner or later the debt binge will be followed by a hangover - an uncomfortable prospect that no one cares to think about.

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Despite their efforts to manufacture divisions, all the main parties offered a continuation of the status quo - at a time when it is fast becoming unsustainable. This is nowhere clearer than in environmental policy. All the parties accepted the fact of climate change, and even Michael Howard said the Bush administration was wrong to deny the reality of humanly caused global warming. Yet no party grasped the scale and urgency of the environmental challenge. Mounting scientific evidence suggests climate change is happening faster than anticipated, and a large shift in the conditions under which we live is inescapable. This evidence does not come mainly from computer models, which some have dismissed as unreliable. It is based on observation of physical processes that are already under way, such as the melting of polar glaciers. Whatever so-called sceptical environmentalists may pretend, there is no serious scientific doubt about accelerating climate change.

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The denial of awkward facts is pervasive in British life, and is shown in the failure to address rising levels of debt. One of the paradoxes of Labour's embrace of neo-Thatcherite orthodoxy on the virtues of old-fashioned public finance is that it has gone hand in hand with the encouragement of a post-modern culture of reckless private borrowing. A considerable part of the general prosperity of the Blair era has been fuelled by credit-card debt and home-equity release, and a "live today, pay tomorrow" mentality has become deeply ingrained. For many people - including students paying their way through university - debt has become a necessity, but for many others it has become the means whereby a standard of living that cannot be justified in terms of earnings is kept going on the never-never.

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Whatever happens in the coming years, we can be sure Britain will be gloriously unprepared. It is fashionable to bemoan public estrangement from politics, but the election campaign showed that in one respect at least, the people and the political class are at one. Neither is ready to question the status quo and think how to face the future. As a result, crucial issues about Britain's future are likely to be determined by events that voters and politicians prefer not to think about.

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