I usually start the day with a check of email followed by a look at the BBC news website. I found this article about soldiers returning from Helmand very moving, so sad. And other even more devastating stories could be told. And they are so young. Just why do we (as a species) do this?
A bit of an internet trawl to see how people are feeling about the austerity measures we are being made to undertake produced this result with which I find I am in deep agreement. The UK government economic policy is not about sensible solutions it's ideology.
There is a link between fighting wars and neoliberalism. I am not referring to the whole grubby business of making money out of arms trading, no, the link is far more basic; a belief that we are separate beings in competition with each other. And this is my fundamental objection to right wing politics and the awful neoliberal experiment of the past thirty years; it ruins communities. And as the failure of the Western economic system has shown, it also ruins economies. The big problem now as I see it is how to generate stable communities, finances, work, environments and services to enable people to live reasonably peaceful and meaningful lives. Clearly any sustainable solution can't rely on continued growth; we live on a finite planet and can't keep digging stuff out of holes in the ground to make things to throw away into other holes in the ground. Nor can we throw huge numbers of people into unemployment and expect society to thrive. We have to move away from this failed experiment and make the financial sector the servant of nations, not the master. And George Monbiot is right; it's about power not economics. There is yet an other war going on here; the one between the ultra-rich and the majority of people on the planet.
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