Trump obviously takes first prize for the ability to lie with a straight face. Indeed, he is so good at it that I’m pretty sure that sometimes he even believes what he says - at the time he is saying it. Before he contradicts himself whenever he feels that the next person he is speaking with would like to hear a different set of tall tales.
The best of his most recent efforts were his complaints that it was unfair and unreasonable for the courts to be looking at emails from friends of his relating to the scale of Russia’s support for his election campaign because those emails were private. The irony of such moans coming from someone who used Russian hackers to publish Clinton’s emails is clearly lost on him. He doesn’t do irony. Which is just as well as Russian support for his campaign is clearly illegal and I am sure Hillary would enjoy chanting “lock him up”.
Then there is Brexit which takes wishful thinking and self-deception to new levels. It is easy to see why anyone might be annoyed by finding their lives ruined by global economic forces and to wish to seize any little chance that comes their way to express frustration. Ten years of static wages and 4 million people on zero hours contracts or dodgy self-employment is pretty hard to take when it was a financial crisis that set off the problem. Especially when the financiers have been supplied with £400 billion of free money and are now right back to their old tricks. (As I write steel workers are having their pensions stolen from them by clever financial advisers).
What is much harder to understand is how anyone could be fooled by Farage, Rees-Mogg and Johnson posing as anti-establishment champions of the voice of the poor and the oppressed. Farage worked in financial services before he became a career politician. Rees-Mogg whines about the nanny state yet proudly told us that he had never changed a nappy for any of his six children because the nanny did that for him. Johnson was famously a core member of the ultra-arrogant Bullingdon Club, and acts like he has never left it.
Worse than any of these deceptions is the continuing pretence that our lifestyles are stable and secure and can continue without alteration. Millions watched the blue planet provide crystal clear evidence that we are dumping huge quantities of plastics into the seas – yet continue to allow supermarkets to sell vegetables wrapped in plastic, consumer goods decorated in mountains of un-necessary packaging and throwaway plastic drink bottles. Government ministers, like Gove, have told us of their sincere commitment to environmental causes. Then voted in favour of fracking the last drop of gas out of the ground at huge environmental costs. The air in our cities has become poisonous to breathe. Yet Volkswagen Chief Executives were allowed to walk away with nice retirement packages because, apparently, they didn’t know that almost every branch of their company was cheating on the emissions tests.
It would be easy to despair in the face of all this deceit and the number of people who have been taken in by it. Fortunately, reality has a way of fighting back and you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
We are living on the cusp of one of the most significant technological, economic and social changes in human history. It is now economically inevitable that fossil fuels will become uncompetitive and unwelcome in more and more spheres of the economy and that this change will happen rapidly. That change brings with it a huge cultural shift. Generating power from a central source requires a lot of activities from a central government that range from building power lines to capturing or securing land that has oil or gas beneath it. Generating power from solar sources, heat exchanges or wind and storing it is much more efficiently done in a decentralised way. That changes the dynamic between the governed and the powerful and it also changes the dynamics of war. There isn’t much point in fighting to control an oil field if the value of that oil is in long term decline and you don’t rely on it to run your economy.
We are also living in an increasingly global world where the old idea of a few rich countries living well whilst the Third World inevitably starved is disappearing rapidly. Many more countries have reached the technological, economic and educational levels needed to take full advantage of the next phase of technology. The places that are likely to be most successful are the ones that are able to draw on talent from around the world, to invest in the most modern facilities and technologies and which are comfortable with rapid change.
In other words the next phase of economic evolution hugely favours those with open minds as opposed to those with open wallets. The rich and the privileged in the UK and the US may have succeeded in convincing a significant body of people to wallow in nostalgia and to try to wall themselves off from change. That policy must inevitably fail and lead, at best, to a slow and graceful decline. The future belongs to those who understand how to produce, consume, and live in the world sustainably.
Let us therefore hope that 2017 was the last gasp of an exhausted establishment fighting a desperate rearguard action against changes that they don’t understand. And that in 2018 we’ll see these sad deluded arrogant reactionaries increasingly exposed, opposed and thwarted and a more open minded forward looking and sustainable economics and politics take their place.
Peace on earth and goodwill to all.