Peter Oborne tells us today in his Day That Britain Changed Forever piece in The Daily Mail that the Government’s COBRA emergency committee has as its doctrine that ‘the UK is only five meals away from chaos’. Having studied just how centralised and lacking in sudden-shock resilience our energy and food supply system is these days I am sure they are right. It reminds me of the brilliant The Road by Cormack McCarthy which describes just how bad things could get and how ‘every man for himself’ could grip the ‘civilised’ world almost overnight.
No doubt some people are already panic buying and hoarding – maybe they are right. Maybe I will go and buy that deepfreeze – Oh but then again it would all defrost within a few days… I guess the point is though this economic meltdown is showing just how lacking our current system was not only in common sense but in resilience. We explore the risks of energy famine in Chapter One of Citizen Renaissance and I have written elsewhere about how Transition Towns and some canny companies are now undertaking energy famine resilience studies.
What I found most interesting about Obourne’s piece is that he can move so swiftly from describing how the current model (we call it ‘corporate-consumer-capitalism’ in Citizen Renaissance) is falling down around our ears and then into a diatribe against what seems to all (bankers etc) the only possible solution which is a rapid reverse-gear state-funded bail out of failing liberal-capitalism’s poster-child banks.
So let me get this right – the current model is shown to be fundamentally broken – not just a bit, but fundamentally broken – and we are supposed to run hell for leather in the same direction we have been going? I guess that is why Mr Obourne is a ‘journalist’ in a ‘newspaper’ like the Mail and not (thank God)actually running the country.
Well OK to all intents and purposes our journalists and commentariat do have huge power. And yes its scary how much ‘brainprint’ billionaire, extreme right-wing, neoliberal, middle-aged, white men, media moguls have. But perhaps now the Citizen will see through the bluster and the fog of rhetoric to the truth. The system we have been sold is broken – its time for a new one. Roll on a progressive coalition of business leaders, citizens and politicians willing to pull their heads out of the sand (or somewhere darker) and debate a radical overhaul of the current operating system. We call it Wellbeing Economics in Citizen Renaissance – and we would love to hear you thoughts.
