Our children's future is now compromised utterly. The New Labour government has debts so high that the last time public sector debt was comparable was in the 1950s:
'as Britain laboured under the burden of the borrowing that funded the Second World War effort.' (Telegraph)
Our parents' generation paid that debt, as determinedly as they had fought the War and, at home, faced the privations of the War effort. And the unemployment and depression before the War, and the rationing, the cold, the loss of empire (for the grander among them), after the War. Caught up as they were in the long after-effects of the First World War and the terrible struggles of the Second, they were not the happiest of generations. But they bequeathed to their children and grandchildren a decent run at prosperity and freedom.
We have betrayed them. And we have betrayed our children. Just as the country needs to use this counter-cyclical moment to invest in infrastructure and the post-industrial knowledge base to relaunch our economy, we have had to watch and accept our political 'leaders' taking on debt, and the concomitant powers associated with creditors, whom we cannot even identify.
For what? For the realisation and cementation of the power-crazed dreams of a defunct ideology's deluded faithful, for the roasting of our own flesh under the Iberian peninsula's August sun, and for the end of housework.
The time we wasted was our parents' time (as many of them remarked), but the time we borrowed belongs to our children.
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3 comments:
I've read that the introduction of the Welfare State at a time when we were already broke, slowed our economic growth in the long run relative to our competitors. You're better at economics than me, I think - is this so?
Nick Barr's the man on this isn't he? LSE? S.
If you mean after the second War, it's as much a political question I'd have thought. It was part of the deal. We have to pay and go and die for your property; when it's over you have to accept some redistribution (Brown's attempts to paint himself as Churchill and the current situation as a war are closer than he thinks).
And there are the myths of the re-foundation of the Labour party after it split in the 30s. You know, we built the welfare state, the NHS, universal education etc. No they didn't, it was all in place by 1943, and the great rehousing had started in the mid 30's and really got a boost under the Tories. And there wasn't going to be a peace without a redistribution that had already begun.
Oh well, don't want to go on and on.
I agree with you, HG.
We are such a let down. My generation and my parents' generation. I almost forgive the feral youth - it was we that created them by abbrogation of duty.
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