> And as we're seeing, even the best democratic tradition doesn't stand a chance against economic misfortune.
This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.
As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.
Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.
This fact is why I think regardless of governing ideology, it's in the interests of any government to not write off wide-spread destitution and inequality as merely the cost of participating in a global economy. Even the Romans two thousand years before us understood all regimes require their bread and circuses, and the first one is the more important of the two.
As a Briton it's a particularly frustrating time to live here. We have wasted the 'peace dividend' on luxury policies like giving incumbent homeowners massive regulatory power to constrain the housing supply with lots of harmful knock-on effects, putting economic stupidity like Brexit to a constitution-breaking and divisive referendum, and harmfully constraining the energy supply by letting every self-interested QUANGO and NIMBY block renewable/nuclear power and the associated infrastructure. We spent more on the paperwork before a single shovel entered the ground on a tunnel under the Thames than Norway did building the longest road tunnel in the world. We cannot continue enacting nonsense policies like this and expecting everyone to muddle through as things get bleaker and bleaker, it'll come to a head one day and when it does it'll be destabilising.
Economic prosperity, or at the very least not having lost decade after lost decade, is necessary to avoid more authoritarian forms of politics coming to power.