Tuesday 28 December 2010

There's no money left...

We’re moving rapidly towards the end of the Old Year – and my favourite year-end poem is ‘Sixty-Six”, written in Lancashire dialect by Sam Laycock at the end of 1866 (read it, or, indeed, listen to it, here). In any case this hiatus between Christmas and the New Year always finds me taking stock and thinking what the future may hold.

Seems to me that much – perhaps most – of what happens to us happens by chance. We are carried by currents that move beneath us, although we often don’t notice them. Only when we look back do we realise that we have been swept onwards.

The Guardian’ reported on May 17th that Liam Byrne, Labour’s former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, left a note for his successor that said “there’s no money left”. Ah – how far currents carried Labour from 1997 when it preached, and briefly practiced, ‘prudence’ to this moment in 2010! Bill Bonner wrote on 21st December:

“Expenses grew during the boom years. We all know why. Politicians prefer to spend than to save. They buy votes with other people’s money. That’s why they like programmes for poor people. They come cheap. But the votes they buy on credit are even cheaper. Give a job... a handout... free drugs... housing subsidies – and send the bill to the next generation. With declining interest rates and an expanding economy, governments could get away with it. Low interest rates made deficits easy to finance and reduced the cost of refinancing existing debt too.”

The title of Bonner’s article was ‘The Day of Reckoning’. Are his observations right? Will the currents take us toward declining living standards, and will our children look back on these times and lament the easy promises of politicians made with money that was not theirs, and with credit it would not fall to them to repay?

Monday 27 December 2010

Furry Friends and Mother Nature

It's nice to see the Disney/Dreamworks animations on tele over Christmas - wonderfully done and always leaving you with a lump in the throat and a tear considering if it ought to well in the eye. But then I check the bird table and see the blackbirds chasing each other off, and the greenfinches competing for a perch on the sunflower feeders as they try to deal with all the snow and ice we have at the moment. Goodness, we even had a squirrel on the bird-table - hunched there like a giant. I gave it a few minutes to have breakfast, and then chased it off and moved the bird-table away from the fence! That's me, playing God!

Why do we have to bring our kidz up to think that 'nature' comprises little furry friends pitted against Big Bad creatures (including humans)? It's all, of course, a metaphor for Life (or could it be just a metaphor for Politics?), and perhaps we should nurture childhood innocence.

But even as I put those words down I feel that I've not quite got it right. Do country-reared children have any less of a romantic imagination than those who live in towns or cities? They know that Mother Nature can be both harsh and beautiful. They know that if you want to have good things in life you must work for them and that there is no Bountiful One who will wave a magic wand and produce a Happy Ending.

Friday 24 December 2010

It's that time of year...

Christmas is upon us - and there's that surreal feeling of the doldrums at the end of the year. As a humanist I find myself thinking about the religious and pseudo-religious aspects of this time. Did the church take over pagan festivals to erase them, and, if so, did pagans just occupy the time of the winter solstice in a celebration of having 'turned the corner' between the old year, survived, and the hope of a new one to come?

Should we call it 'Christmas'? Everyone else does, and I can't really think of anything that sounds more appropriate. Chill, let it go. Happy Christmas everyone, and let's look forward to the New Year and those lengthening days leading towards the hope of spring.