What we need is peace, love and a lot more understanding
The Birmingham Post
29th December 2008
I hope that after Christmas, we will reflect on these dying days of the global boom. For the past 15 years, economic growth has sped up across the world.
We have bought a lot of stuff and some poor people have improved their lives considerably – the biggest number in China.
But we have also bought lots of rubbish. We have polluted the world with our waste, yet one in every six of us still struggles to get the basics necessary for survival.
Most politicians are telling us that they will borrow and spend vast sums on our behalf so that they can get the boom going again, but the truth is it will not continue as it was before and I think we should pause and reflect on what we do want.
I don’t think most people want it to continue as it was before. Some people were paid millions. Others got very little. Society became more unequal, more selfish and rude. People shopped a lot, but many did not even know their neighbours, let alone love them as themselves.
We have seen more crime, mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction and obesity. Nobody has time for anyone else and a lot of people are unhappy. And, of course, we have more wars and killing and a growing sense of global injustice.
On top of all this, we have the mounting crisis of global warming. All the expansion of wealth we have seen since the Industrial Revolution has been based on power generated by burning fossil fuels.
If we carry on like this, we will run out of oil, which will bring our kind of society crashing to a halt. But even before this, we will cause the world to get so hot that it will be impossible for humans to live and the process of warming will cause terrible catastrophes that will make the world into a hellhole.
So, it is clear that we need a big change. We cannot go back to the boom years because the people of countries like the United States, Britain and Spain have borrowed so much that they cannot afford any more credit and the people of China, Japan and Germany, who are saving more than they consume no longer trust us to repay our debts.
Anyway, it was simply foolish to increase house prices threefold in 10 years. It may have made people feel rich, but it created no wealth, just more debt.
So, we need to think about what it would mean to live sustainably. This means that we must not destroy the environment. It means we must be less greedy and wasteful.
It also means that we must develop the world more evenly and make our societies less unequal. We must organise the world so that everyone has the basics that they need and we must co-operate to share the new technologies that create energy from wind, earth and sun.
To get this degree of international co-operation, we must end wars and settle our disputes by committing to justice for all. We would end up with less shopping, but more happiness in a better and more decent world.
Clare Short MP
