Imagine this situation; an old lady lives who lives nearby is struggling to find the money to feed herself and heat her home. Rapidly increasing costs are making it increasingly difficult for her to make ends meet and you can see the effect that this is having on her. She used to be really cheerful but now, when you bump into her, she seems even more stooped and looks frail. She rarely smiles these days.
You decide that something has to be done but aren’t sure what is the best thing to do; she is a proud lady and, whilst you would be happy to give her the money to cover her bills, you know she is the sort of person who, even if she accepted the money, would be fretting about how she could pay you back.
So, you come up with an alternative idea and it’s a brilliant one. You will wait on the street by a set of traffic lights and, as soon as somebody pulls up in a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, you will rush over and force £1000 into the driver’s hand before the lights change and he pulls away. Its obvious that giving somebody who already has more money than they need a bit more is the best way to help people who can’t afford to eat properly or heat their homes.
Some months later, a few days after the old lady’s funeral (she died of hypothermia), the man in the Ferrari sees you and pulls over. He thanks you profusely for the money you gave him – the handbag his wife had wanted had gone up in price because of the weakness of Sterling but, thanks the to money you had given him, he had still been able to afford to get it imported from China.
As he pulls away, you look after him and it suddenly strikes you that, maybe your brilliant idea wasn’t quite as brilliant as you thought … on the other hand, somebody in China, who works in a factory that is pouring CO2 into the atmosphere, was probably very grateful and so you go on your way, feeling much, much better about yourself.
I am not a political person, nor am I an expert in economics but I don’t believe you have to be either to realize that we are living through a very, very strange time. I have said before that climate change is the biggest challenge we face but I believe that, close on its heels, the growing gap between rich and poor has a similar potential to fracture our society.
What I find particularly worrying now is that the ruling elite seem to be completely oblivious to this. Indeed, I would go further – there almost seems to be a contemptuous disregard for the people, as was evident when the Queen was lying in state following her death on 8th September. MPs were allowed into Westminster Hall to pay their respects without having to queue. Apparently, this was on security grounds, even though I would argue that well over 500 of our MPs would be completely unrecognized by the vast majority of people. However, the thing that really got to me was that they were each allowed to take four guests – what the f*** ? How on earth could they possibly justify this to themselves ?
And then, within days of the Queen being buried, the government launches a budget which, as far as I can tell, was based entirely on the economic principles that underpinned my little story above. In the build up, you could sense it was going to be something special – the Press were told not to refer to it as a fiscal event or mini-budget but rather a Growth Plan. This immediately reminded me of my experience in the corporate world where we would all be summoned to a big “strategy launch” meeting and spend two hours listening to our leaders telling us about the strategy – generally, by the end of the meeting, we would all know that the strategy was “the right one” (because that was what we told) and that it was super exciting (because that was the other thing we were told). The only thing we didn’t know by the end of the meeting was what the strategy actually is.
And so it was with the Growth Plan – it was the sort of thing that you could only deliver if either you were totally out of touch with the issues people are facing today or, more likely, you didn’t actually give a stuff.
I am great believer that history repeats itself and this feels to me as if we may be reaching a “Let them eat cake” moment. People often congratulate themselves on the fact that there has never been a revolution in Britain comparable to that in many of our neighbours, most notably France. I would contend that the reason for this is that our governments, or previously monarchs, have always given in just enough to ensure that the intellectual classes don’t start to think that revolution may be the only way forwards. However, given events of the past few weeks, we may not be as far away from this point as our rulers would like to think.
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