What started this train of thought, was the BBC programme, The Politics Show, unusually a complete waste of time, because all the politicians were ducking and weaving. Alistair Darling, at one point, stated that all the major countries were borrowing large quantities of money to plough into the world economy, thus justifying the fact that we were doing the same. What he didn’t tell us was where this large amount of borrowed money which nobody else seemed to have, was in fact coming from, unless it was the Arabs, or was it those offshore banks that all that money had disappeared into?
Practically all of you who are reading this will not have known the 30s and the 40s. The latter part of the 30s was a period of contentment for a high proportion of the population, because at last we had come out of those depressing years post WW1. Then we had WW2 breaking up this idyllic condition, and were promised our jobs back if we survived. The problem was not enough of us were killed, and our jobs had been filled in the meantime, and we came back to unemployment, war damaged houses, and a very low standard of living. In other words something like what is going on today, only much worse. Then we had the extended family, which so few have today, and in consequence people who recently had thought they were secure, discover that they are now dependent on the nanny state. The recovery took until the 50s, during which time little changed in most respects. In the 50s, there was considerable expansion, people started buying cars, albeit second-hand ones, and jobs became more plentiful as the manufacturing industries expanded as a result of new designs, new inventions and the more buoyant economy.
Have we something to learn from this? We have airfields paved with new cars, and the car industry falling apart and attempting to bring out new versions, when they have not sold the old. We are paying farmers for fields on which nothing is being grown, while at the same time importing items that are not fresh, but chemically engineered so that the ripening process is delayed until they are on the shop shelves, and starting to rot. A lot of our more tedious labours have been transferred abroad, such as telephone enquiries, garment manufacture, and worse still, a lot of the manufacture of electronic equipment. We were told that everything in the garden was lovely, and the fact of not having manufacturing didn’t matter because our main income came from the financial industry. Practically everything we buy seems to have a foreign label, so the question I would ask is, ‘have we enough skilled people to start manufacturing again?’ If the educational system for training tradesmen and engineers has been downgraded in the way that so much of our education has in recent years, will we ever be able to start up again and supply our own needs?