Conclusion

Three people in a room all with different life experiences, education and brain wiring. All have gaps and yet with open discussion mixed with the humility and grace of listening attentively, we add more dots to the collective board to create a different picture with more detail and nuance than if we remained alone.

Lived experience, the recent past and future hopes are what maybe the collective result of a ‘wake up with a cold bucket of water’ that we need to get us to reevaluate, stand afar and look at what we have created. No more comfortable snoozy pillow boosterism, just the cold hard water of the wake up to reality.

Or as Thomas Piketty (Piketty 2014) has said on many occasions, it’s War, Pandemic or Bloody Revolution to really challenge with definitive and radical action to the present accepted norm ie;

1)1914-45, inc 1917 Russia and 1929 Crash as well as the Spanish flu 1918-20,
2) 1970’s OPEC a reaction to exploitation of the 1940’s-70’s of the region, with a new found wealth and most importantly, a monopoly of cheap desirable oil, plus the humiliation of the Arab Coalition in 1967 (6 day war in Israel), which culturally is taken as a ‘loss of face’ and is hugely important in Arab tribal/family culture not to lose face. Note; a dependency on a single resource.
3) 2008 the Financial crash, via hidden complex bad debt that saw the light of day and was found let us say, ‘wanting’

2020’s?

We have of yet to realise an alternative, as the present Labour policy is a neoliberal based party with the economic madness that is applying gold standard rules to a fiat issuing currency, based on the Thatcherite myth that government is ‘like a household’ (it’s not) and Theresa May’s assertion that there is ‘no magic money tree’ (there is).
When I look back at Corbyn’s Green Manifesto (yes, I have a copy), it was cheap compared to the money wasted on PPE, Serco Track and Trace and many other under the table deals that this utterly corrupt Neoliberal government have passed.and we would’ve got something of benefit as well as growth and real employment (not zero hour contracts) for the the bottom and middle.

As much as I voted for Starmer as a pragmatist I’m hoping that policy will evolve nearer the Corbyn/McDonnell model than they are admitting at present, which I understand from a Blairite mondeo man philosophy, that it’s far better to be in power with some compromise than to hold the moral high ground in opposition, think Michael Foot.

So alas no real radical option for the foreseeable future, as I learnt at an ICE series of lectures at Cambridge, it has to get a whole lot worse before 2.0 Beveridge report can be written and taken seriously.

But I live in hope.

Reference list

Ferragina, E. and Arrigoni, A. (2016). The Rise and Fall of Social Capital: Requiem for a Theory? Political Studies Review, 15(3), pp.355–367. doi:10.1177/1478929915623968.

Henrich, J. (2021). WEIRDEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD : how the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly… prosperous. S.L.: Penguin Books, pp.24–31.

Hilson, M. (2008). The Nordic model : Scandinavia since 1945. London: Reaktion.

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. London, England: The Belknap Press Of Harvard University Press, pp.396–398.