As, according to our newspapers - right-of-centre publications make the same dire prognostication of doom, disaster, destruction and disintegration, although they provide different ‘evidence’ and, oddly, the ‘hell’ we are approaching in a handcart is not quite the same one as feared by the left - this has been going on since I was young (I was nine years old 60 years ago) I often either wonder why 1) we haven’t yet arrived but are still on our way to hell; or 2) if we are travelling downhill ever faster, surely too goodness after 60 years we are approaching the speed of light?
Actually, in truth whenever Fleet Street’s cassandras take to their typewriters - make that keyboards - what is actually at play is nothing more serious than the old newspaper practice of Scaring The Living Shit out of the readers. It helps to sustain circulation. The standard observation is that the headline ‘Boy Scout does good deed’ never helped sell a single edition, and nothing is truer. Folk want - they demand disaster - and they want it now, but crucially they want it elsewhere, not here at home, thank you very much.
Thus Britain has been regaled, possibly even amused, by the news that a single drone - you can pick up a decent one for as little as £34.99 at Dronesdirect although sinking your hand deeper in your pocket might buy you one less inclined to disintegrate before the end of the week in which case take a look at the range on offer at Currys/PC World where the DJI Mavic 2 Pro Drone with Controller is surely a snip at just £1,349 - shut down its second largest airport for more than 24 hours - although the laughter came far easier if you were not one of the several tens of thousands of passengers stranded at Gatwick.
Down here in deepest, darkest North Cornwall as, I’m sure in deepest, darkest Edinburgh, Norwich, Torbay and Blackpool as well as most British homes, grand and humble, we were sympathetic, of course we were, but we also relished the situation and the many opportunities it gave us to resort to platitudes. (My wife has a particularly interesting set: ‘They are paying the price for not banning these bloody drones long ago’ and ’See what happens when you don’t ban drones’. Then there’s the one I overheard in Asda two days ago: ‘You’d think that in this day and age with all their sophisticated military technology they could protect an airport, wouldn’t you? Obviously not.’ He didn’t actually add ‘makes you sick!’ but I’m sure that was the subtext.) As for parts of the world not painted pink on maps most recently there has been a tsunami in Indonesia and in South-East Australia’s Gold Coast Christmas has been cancelled after that neck of the woods was battered by a storm. In South America, Caracas is dying a slow death as ‘hyperinflation, crime and poverty’ are rampant.
Taking note of all this doom and disaster, and I could come up with many more examples from the past 48 hours if only I could be arsed to find them, I have again reminded myself of the danger we are all prone to as we pass 30, then 40, then 50 and as we approach 80: we no longer need to read a newspaper to be persuaded that the world is going to hell in a handcart, we are already convinced. I have to say - or rather I have to claim - that I might, though, be the exception that proves the rule. (NB to pedants: yes, I know how that phrase came about and that the ‘proves’ in it means ‘test’ rather than ‘giving proof’ but, dear pedant, join the modern world.)
I am by nature far more inclined to the wisdom of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, and although I believe that in many ways the world is a shitty place, I don’t believe it has become any shittier. If anything things have improved for a great many, although that is no reason to be complacent. Yet bearing my proviso in mind that the greyer we get and the less inclined we are to like change, the more pessimistic we are about the future, I must say that there are clouds gathering on the horizon which don’t look too welcoming.
. . .
A few years ago I came across a useful analogy outlining why it is often almost impossible to envisage that a bad situation could get any better – or that a good situation got get a lot worse. It was in an article in the Economist and it likened the predicament of those living in the Soviet Union or one of its satellite dictatorships to someone sitting at the bottom of a deep china bowl, sitting so deep in fact that they can’t see over the rim.
Their reality is simply all they can see, and they have sat there for so long they can’t even conceive of the world outside the bowl. It must, said the Economist, have been like that for Soviet citizens. More to the point if, at Christmas 1986 they had been assured that within five years the Soviet Union would have collapsed and they would be free, they would have laughed in your face. If in 1986 East Berliners had been assured that within five years they would be as free as a bird to cross into the western half of the city, they, too, would have laughed in your face.
Similarly, we in the Western Hemisphere all pretty much enjoy a reasonably tranquil life. Certainly, there can be individual tragedies and unhappiness, and yes there have been crises, not least the global financial crisis of 2008, but across Western Europe and in the United States life has been comparatively sweet for the past 73 years (since the end of World War II). Could it really all got tits up? Surely not? Well, what with this political development and that political development, I am beginning to wonder whether we are all sitting at the bottom of a very comfortable soup bowl and taking just a little too much for granted.
This entry is not about Brexit, but Brexit must be mentioned, or rather the possible economic consequences of a hard Brexit. And it would not just be the British economy which could take a very severe battering – companies in European countries who do a lot of business with Britain will also take a hit and that means the economies of those countries would also suffer. That, however, is actually a pretty commonplace observation.
This blog has mentioned Donald Trump before and what a grade A full-time idiot he is. What distinguishes him from the many other grade A full-time idiots knocking about is that his decisions count and can have grave consequences. His most recent is to announce – unilaterally – that the US will withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and Syria.
The decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, where they have been jointly fighting a still substantially large ISIS contingent with Kurdish forces is said to have come after Trump had a phone conversation with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president who might justifiably be described as a dictator in the making. Erdogan, it seems, is amassing his own troops on Turkey’s border with Syria with a view to attacking the Kurds once the Yanks are out of the way.
Other of Trump’s inane decisions are to engineer a partial shutdown of the US government, to hint that he might sack the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, causing a great deal of unrest in the markets, and to initiate a trade war with China. It is not surprising that the outgoing US Defence Secretary Jim Mathis (who is said to have persuaded Trump not to have North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un assassinated) was reported to have claimed Trump had the understanding of foreign affairs of a ten-year-old.
Things aren’t quite going to well for the EU quite apart from Brexit (the main EU issue for Britain, certainly, but just one important matter for the EU). Rather stupidly, it seems to have assumed that all of its member states were now enlightened liberals. Developments in Hungary, where the prime minister Viktor Orban is showing rather to much distain for democratic practice for the EU’s liking, are not making it easy for the touchy-feely liberals in Brussels. Things have taken a bit of a downturn for Orban after he won elections with a large majority in the spring.
What with several million young people taking off to work elsewhere in the EU for wages four times as high as they can earn at home, his government has raised the limit on overtime people can work to make up for the depleted workforce. The thing is working overtime is not exactly voluntary and under the new limit people could find themselves working the equivalent of 50 extra days a week in overtime. This is not going down well, and Orban has faced large demonstrations in Budapest and elsewhere.
Problems with a not-very-liberal-government-at-all in Poland which has just manoeuvred itself into being able to appoint all judges, thus rather putting paid to the notion of an ‘independent judiciary’, have shown that the ‘I love my EU’ assumption of all for one and one for all working towards the common good have been more than a little naïve. EU-wide parliamentary elections are due in exactly five months and it will be interesting to see whether the rise of the right/far-right across the EU was just a blip or not.
As for Italy, it is no joke when part of the government is run by a former clown, and its oddly formed government - half right-wingers (some with a tacit fondness for a ‘strong man’ like Mussolini, the other half vaguely disillusioned lefties - which wants both to cut taxes and raise public spending - good luck with that one - things might get interesting when - not if, but when - the euro comes under pressure around the time in 2019 when Brexit-induced economic uncertainty kicks in.
. . .
My point is that individually these and other crises could be managed, but they all seem to be coming together at once. Sitting at the bottom of our soup bowl, we might think that talk of bad times to come – far worse times than anything we have experienced in the past 70 years – is just stuff and nonsense. We would do well not to be quite as smug.
Update: It’s spreading. Thanks, Mr Trump.
“Stephen Innes, head of APAC trading at OANDA, said Trump’s spat with the Fed and Mnuchin’s call with the banks had ‘markets running for cover’. Investors ‘have no confidence in the administration. Markets are driven by perception and it is flat-out bad,’ he said.”
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