Author Alasdair White
I wonder if anyone else has noticed!
Listening to the news and reading the various media reports from the UK, Europe, and the USA, the politicians’ proposed solution to the world’s economic crisis is to encourage the banks and the public to revert to exactly the same behaviour that led, with a horrible inevitability, to the crisis in the first place. The politicians want the public to go out and spend, they want the banks to go out and lend, and they want the world to go back to what it was doing before. Clearly, they are bereft of ideas and policies to address the underlying problem.
Strangely, the rather peculiarly cheerful British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is at the forefront of this charge towards oblivion. All he can see is that the crisis has provided a glorious distraction from his own abysmal performance as the leader of the UK government and has allowed him to take centre stage and proclaim himself the saviour of the world economy. Such deluded self-proclamations are hubris of the grandest order. And, frankly, none of the other world leaders are doing much better!
If this is the best the politicians can do, then the world is in a sad condition. But is it surprising? Is anyone surprised by this lack of vision, this lack of leadership?
Unfortunately, there is a willing blindness to reality that has settled over the populations of developed economies – it is almost as though they are saying: ‘let’s all pretend that this nasty problem doesn’t exist and then perhaps it will go away’. They are certainly NOT saying: ‘we’ve over spent in pursuit of material wealth, we’ve been greedy in the extreme, we’ve spent far more than we can possibly earn or repay, and we are to blame for the current mess.’
What we need to see from our political leaders is some LEADERSHIP. Instead of knee-jerk reactions, self-promotional and frankly ludicrous sound-bites for prime-time television, and the appearance of being headless chickens, we need them to do something that they are grossly ill-equipped to do: to think, to come up with genuine, thoughtful and useful policies for getting us to change the way we have behaved. Gordon Gekko was wrong: greed is not good. Insular self-centred behaviour is not good, either. What is needed is for a change in the way we think and act – we need to be far more collaborative and far more willing to share.
The greed-driven self-centred obsessions of the last twenty years were the direct result of the policies and philosophy of the ‘me first’ behaviour encouraged by the economic theories espoused by the likes of Thatcher, Reagan and their ilk. Obama, as the self-proclaimed ‘change’ leader now has a chance to prove that he is different and can bring about change – unfortunately, he has not got off to a particularly good start.
Time will tell – but let’s all remember, we get the politicians we deserve – and, frankly, the current lot have shown themselves unworthy of our respect or consideration.
Posted in Crisis! What crisis?