We moved
house recently, and under the stairs was a torn page from an old diary ….
Thursday 30th
May 1996
It was nice to see
Auntie Poppy, Uncle Jack and the Palmers Green cousins, but all
that cynical carping about New Labour and clause IV! Afterwards I went to sleep on the settee, and what a dream I had. It was 2006, and I was ten years older.
Labour had just won a third term! And no wonder. As the ice caps melted, Britain had
taken the lead, with 2 cents on the top rate of income tax to invest in
non-nuclear sustainable energy technology. Already
we were selling surplus power by cable to our Eurozone partners, themselves
less happily endowed with winds and tides. Shakespeare, with his “fortress built by
nature”, definitely had it the wrong way round.
Once people got the idea the government was serious, it seemed obvious that
extremes of inequality were unacceptable. Companies realized that what mattered was the enthusiasm of their
workers, not the value of executive stock options. Work, as the chancellor said in 1998, had to change. And it did change. The Management for Social Purpose Act meant
enterprises had to publish annual evidenced social impact statements, agreed by
unions, consumers and local authorities, as well as directors.
As
temporary contracts virtually disappeared, family poverty began to fall. Parents could plan for the longer term, and
magical solutions such as the lottery withered on the vine. Incomes didn’t rise overall, but debt sharply
declined. Teachers reported new
attitudes in schools. One from Ashby-de-la-Zouch
summed it up: “the kids can see the
future depends not on chance but on their intelligence and
thoughtfulness”. As the boom in new
energy technologies took hold, universities re-opened or expanded their physics
and engineering departments, and the spin-off industries – often located in the windswept
provinces – did wonders for depressed regions.
And those
local areas! OK, some town halls (Barnet
again!) bungled their new responsibilities for energy, schools and health
services, but countrywide the creative buzz in the proportionally elected council chambers
swept away most of the unproductive bipartisan posturing of the past.
Can one
have mixed feelings in a dream? Mindless
drinking and drug-fuelled violence declined. Had it ever truly been fun? Had
football ever really been more than one game of athletic skill among others?
When to
universal acclaim Tony Blair succeeded Nelson Mandela (the dream is fading a
bit) as UN Secretary General, the value of the example we had set seemed clear
to everyone. Helped
perhaps by Blair’s forthright repudiation of neoconservative aggression, President "Kyoto" Gore had defeated
George Bush in 2004. He rapidly agreed not only debt cancellation and big cuts in US farm subsidies but, at the
suggestion of Burmese prime minister Aung San Suu Kyi, annual Security Council
assessments of progress towards binding development goals. Member states were expected to contribute not
0.7 but 0.9% of GDP to development assistance and all (except I fancy it was Australia) had done so. An international community was emerging at last, one in which tyranny at home was as alien - and pointless - as imperialism abroad.
At Lord's China were 52 for 2 in reply to England’s first
innings 205 all out.
Dear diary,
as John Keats said when he was living up the road here in Enfield, "Do I wake or sleep?"
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