HM’s Gracious Speech
I seriously wonder if this silly Ruritanian flummery has now outlived its usefulness. Maybe it’s just my age. I used to get a bit of a thrill our of it, but not anymore. HM seemed rather bored too.
The new government’s programme is an encouraging wish list of mostly useful proposals, but those that cost money, that is most of them, are to be financed not by our current ability to pay for them, which we have “in spades” but out of further growth, a “something for nothing” device which , as far as I know, was first introduced by Harold Wilson in the run up to the 1964 general election.
Very shortly afterwards, in 1972 the “Club of Rome” published its report “ The Limits to Growth,” warning that the planet has not the resources for , nor could it remain habitable with, unlimited growth.
Since then there have been numerous attempts to hammer the point home. Tim Jackson’s “Prosperity without Growth (2009), and Kate Raworth’s ”Doughnut Economics” (2017) are two very readable more recent examples. My favourite expression of the concept is “The Politics of Arrival” by Trebeck and Williams (2019). It reminds me of a dialogue in an Oscar Wilde play where one dowager duchess says to another “We have no need for travel, we are already here.”
What is true for the duchesses is true for the economies of the UK and all of the developed world: economically we have arrived. We already have sufficient productive capacity and consequent earnings to provide everyone in our economies with a decent, comfortable, culture-rich lifestyle without making even further use of the earth’s scare resources and further polluting and poisoning environment, by sharing what we have more equitably. Economically we have arrived.
And if the weather, floods, fires and other natural catastrophes of the last few years aren’t enough to convince us that the matter is urgent, then it is hard to know what will.
Yet the message does not seem to have penetrated our political debate to any depth. Our new government believes that further “growth” and “wealth creation,” are fundamental to their programme, and it is hard to see any signs of a serious challenge to this. To be fair, several clauses after after the initial mention of growth in the Speech the the word “sustainable” is used, but without any sign that this would be the condition for all growth.
So maybe Ruritanian fantasy rather than awareness of the real world, is appropriate to our current level of thinking.
Of course it’s hard to know where to start with this nonsense, which is based on false premise after false premise. As if Limits to Growth hadn’t been rebutted a dozen times by reality.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for ‘Economically we have arrived’ — what rot! My parents considered themselves lucky to holiday in Europe a few times. I go to the United States. I want my children to go on holiday to space. ‘Arrived’? What a lack of imagination. We haven’t arrived. We’ve barely started. You sound like John Maynard Keynes declaring in the thirties that the standard of living then reached was clearly sufficient for everyone and no further improvements were necessary. There will be improvements in the standards of living in the next few generations that we can’t even conceive of, that will have our great-grandchildren looking back at us as we look back at those pre-antibiotic, pre-mass-transit, pre-broadcast communication days and wonder how people ever lived such dismal lives as we live now.
But of course it doesn’t even make sense of its own terms. Even if we had sufficient for everyone now, if it were evenly divided, the population of the United Kingdom is growing, by about 6% in the last decade. So if we were simply to share everything evenly and stop, we would all get poorer by that proportion as we had to share the same amount among more and more people. We have to grow just to stand still.
I hope the planet remains habitable so that there's somebody left alive to enjoy all these wonders.
ReplyDeleteI hope the planet remains habitable so that there's somebody left alive to enjoy all these wonders.
DeleteThere is really no danger that it won’t. The climate is changing but there is no plausible scenario in which it becomes uninhabitable by humans, especially given the development of adaptive technologies.
Such optimism that "technology" would solve the problems, or complacency that "something will turn up" was common ten to 15 yeas ago, but has been dissipated by "events." It is no longer responsible just to sit back and hope for the best. Yes, life will improve, new cures for diseases will be discovered, now sources of energy developed, but consumption of scarce resources and pollution must diminish or if possible eliminated if life on the planet is to continue.
ReplyDeleteif life on the planet is to continue
DeleteThere is no plausible scenario in which ‘life on the planet’ (or even just human life on the planet) does not continue and if anyone told you there was such a scenario they are lying and scaremongering.
Of course we should use resources more efficiently. We should always be looking for ways to do that (and we constantly are: we use resources much more efficiently now than we did even ten or fifteen years ago).
However efficiently we use resources the climate will continue to change, and change in part dues to our actions; but, and this in important, there is no danger of our planet becoming uninhabitable. None. Zero. Change, yes. Become uninhabitable, no.
(Some places that are currently habitable might become uninhabitable, of course; at the same time as some places which are currently uninhabitable because habitable. But there is no scenario in which the whole planet would become uninhabitable.)
Delete"technology" would solve the problems, or complacency that "something will turn up"
DeleteOf course we don’t need to wait for ‘something to turn up’; the technology already exists. See: https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/
We just need to stop wasting money on useless solar panels that don’t give us light at night, or windmills that doing give us heat when the air is still; and get on with building a few dozen of those around the country, which will supply all our energy needs and more while emitting no carbon dioxide whatsoever.