Most of us do not know until we are near the end, how long we will survive on this planet. In my case, there are so many things that I want to do and some things that I still want to see before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I am still excited by scientific progress and the improvements these will bring to our quality of life, yet mankind seems driven to aiming to promoting the trivial. Technological advances are welcome but sometimes the urge to change and update seems to become obsessive. The computer provides a wonderful means for self expression, for communication and for increasing one's knowledge, but surely it is for better things than role playing in worlds of extreme virtual violence. TVs are more sophisticated than ever but the proliferation of channels and the general availability of 24 hours broadcasting has diluted the quality of programmes. There is, as the man said, a lot of rubbish on television but it is better in wide-screen and colour. And surely mobile phones are 10% useful and 90% nuisance.
But some things never change. Alistair Darling as an orator is part Nigel Mansell and part talking your weight machine and there is little chance of him raising his game to the level of merely boring. After he delivered his budget speech last week, it was several days before people had woken up to what he had actually said and had set about deciding what he meant. The indications are not good. From the start, it seemed to me to be a very ordinary budget when we needed a very extraordinary one. The usual tinkering with the price of fags and beer and a token soak the rich gesture - a move that would be of more interest if he had produced some evidence to demonstrate that some of the money would actually be collected. But what about the spending? He announced a plan to borrow buckets of money to a level which could turn Britain into a sub-prime borrower. But how does he intend to get the books balanced again? It appears that he wants us to believe that all will be well when the economy recovers with a dramatic growth over the next three years. His prophecies do not have the ring of truth. To massively increase government income we will have to pay more taxes or export goods.
It has been calculated that the government will borrow nearly £700 billion over four years and some believe that the sum will exceed £800 billion. Who is going to give the government this much money? Or will they just print more? If the government spin demands that the economy grows substantially, it will grow by doing what? For more than 20 years the British economy has been dependent on financial and other services and more recently on debt backed by rapid increases in house prices. This model for our economy is, surely, dead. And so how will the new economy grow? The government waffles on about new technology without having the faintest idea what they are talking about. The country has again to start doing what it once did; that is making things for ourselves and making things which the world wants to buy. Fundamentally, we are good at doing such things; what we are bad at is efficient management. The government has given the go-ahead for the building of clean coal fired power stations. With this decision, the country is doing something we should have been doing 25 years ago; developing the means of utilising a fuel that lies in abundance under our own country. Mrs Thatcher shut down the coal mines because she hated Arthur Scargill. It was petty and wrong and now we are paying the price. Through 20 years we have wasted our own supplies of premium grade North Sea gas in order to generate electricity and wrecked the coal mines, which could have met [can meet] our electricity needs for at least another century. Now that new coal-fired power stations are being built, I hope the government will tackle the problem of re-opening the coal mines. Or will we carry on, ludicrously, importing most of our coal?
But the government has to stop spending. Suggest this and they tell us we will have fewer nurses and teachers. What we should have is less bureaucracy; less needless legislation. We do not need vast data bases; or ID cards; or constant changes to legislation that do little more than generate truck loads of paper; or massive spending on consultants; or enormously expensive aircraft carriers; or Trident submarine replacements; or grandiose projects like the ridiculous Olympic Games. The list of monster expenditures is long. The government has to get it under control and, at the same time set up a proper framework for the regulation of the banks and insurers.
The years ahead look bleak and at this moment we are sailing on a boat with no rudder.
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