In recent years in the former First World countries reaction and fear have been the dominant emotions of all too many people. Now at last we are starting to see the signs of the reaction to the reaction and the emergence of some powerfully positive forces.
The reactionary movement has been very well documented. Trump. Brexit. Yellow jackets. Five Star. There are no shortage of people who have really struggled to cope with the fact that the once dominant First World Countries are now living through a long period of relative decline. If you want a crystal-clear example of a politician who thinks like that then look no further than the UK’s incredibly out of touch Defence Minister. The idea that he could influence world events by sending the UK’s Aircraft Carrier to the coast of China comes straight out of the days when if the UK sent a gun boat up the Yangtse it was enough to force China to buy opium. These days the power equation runs in the other direction. What a single British ship was meant to do in the face of the raw military power of modern China is hard to detect. What it did achieve was to make sure China wanted nothing to do with a visit from the UK Chancellor intended to provide propaganda about brave new trade deals in a post Brexit fantasy world. There are plenty of reasons to speak clearly and honestly to China about the way it is treating minorities but that wasn’t even remotely the intention of Gavin Williamson. He simply thought that China could still be intimidated by the UK and didn’t realise how minor the UK looks when you have the world’s second biggest economy, 30 years of spectacular growth and are busy working out which new technology investments you’ll successfully champion next.
Whilst people like Gavin Williamson have been fantasising about Britain’s past, some parts of the UK have seen prosperity sucked out of their communities. Britain has failed to champion future technology effectively enough and has left places like Stoke to the mercy of the marketplace. There will always be some technologies that decline and take jobs and no government can prevent that. That brings a massive threat to the communities that relied on those jobs. A far thinking government sees this as an opportunity to rethink the future of those communities and to support them to adapt. The UK government took the view that nothing much could be done to help out because it was necessary to accept the consequences of market forces.
Jobs and mines have gone from traditional working class communities and far too little has been done to help them. It is easy to see why anyone watches the jobs go and their communities decline would become angry about the whole direction of the modern world and the rise in economic power of South East Asia, Africa and South America. It is rarely possible or even desirable to protect a community against the forces of economic change. Yet surely the UK could have done a lot more to help threatened communities to change and to prosper. Providing communities with different kinds of jobs requires serious sustained investment and a coherent plan for regional and local development. That has been utterly absent in recent decades because of an ideological belief that the free market should determine where jobs go and where houses are built. An insecure financial services industry has been encouraged to prosper in London offering lifestyles that are unimaginably more affluent than anything available in the back streets of Bradford or the Black Country. Abandoned communities who experience nothing but neglect and the attention of legal loan sharks are easy prey for far-right fanatics who want to tell them that their problems are all the fault of those pesky foreigners. It is hard not to be cross if you walk past boarded up decaying homes past factories crumbling into the ground to visit your local pub only to find it too has closed.
There is, however, no return to the past. There are only decisions about how we construct a more successful and sustainable future.
That is why it is so positive to see two things that are happening at the moment. The first is the spontaneous emergence amongst the next generation of a realisation that their future has to be very different. Large number of young people are championing change. This is reflected not just in climate change strikes at schools but also in enthusiastic take up of plastic free alternatives and clean up campaigns. There are some remarkably articulate, very decent kids out there who seem very determined to push forward a different vision of the future. The chances of those kids persuading parents and of their attitudes rapidly beginning to win out over the current wave of negativity suddenly looks a lot more promising. That chimes very well with the second positive development. One that has gone largely unnoticed in the UK. In Germany the Green Party has been consistently polling in the mid twenty per cents. It is the second largest party in the polls and is a genuine contender to front the next coalition government there after the next elections.
Imagine the contrast. On one side of the Atlantic there could soon be a forward looking German government working collaboratively across political parties with the aim of building a more secure and sustainable economy that is ready for the future. On the other there will be a backward looking Donald Trump presiding over yet one more climate disaster and yet one more sterile squabble as he makes another horrible comment about women, black people, environmental campaigners or the last of his aides who left his employment in disgust. With every passing week Trump and his reactionary agenda are going to come under stronger and stronger challenge from Democrats pressing for a Green New Deal.
The whole political atmosphere could change very rapidly. We may have passed peak reaction.
In these circumstances Britain has a choice. It can wallow in nostalgia for past greatness as it spends another two years staring at its own navel and discussing Brexit. Or it can strengthen its capacity to prosper in a more complex future. It can listen to the fearful voices of those who are scared of change and want to turn the clock back. Or it can listen to its young people as they explore the extent of the new possibilities that are opening up. I know which I would prefer!