Is a new society coming?

BBC Radio 4 'Start the Week' - March 30th - was one of a number of podcasts, articles, speeches and essays that are trying to work out what will life be like after the Corona virus is vaccinated away. Amol Rajan, an astute BBC commentator, led the discussion between Danny Darling, a political geographer who was promoting his book called 'Slow Down' and Nick Timothy, Chief of Staff for ex PM Teresa May, who has had plenty of time since 2017 to write his book called 'Conservatives in an Age of Crisis.'

Timothy is obviously having a hard life as his tome was a heartfelt plea for the Tory Party to stop basing itself on the banner of 'individual freedom' alone.  Instead the Party should look more like Disraeli and Harold MacMillan's approaches. Timothy believes that the Conservatives should use a medium size state to promote other good stuff besides freedom, like better wages and the proper support for the health services. He is scared by the California led hyper liberalisation and the end of corporate tax. Sadly (for Timothy) he has pushed his book exactly at the time when (a) Tory PM Boris won a large majority on a right wing program and then (b) went on to tell us that there was a society after all (dumping Thatcher) and has then spent £billions defending health and working class wages. Timothy, just as in 2017, has in 2020 fallen off his horse before the race started.

It was therefore not surprising that Timothy's contributions to the Start the Week discussion proved to be defensive and even a little desperate.

The ideas offered by Darling were, however, highly significant. Rajan had to pull the the points made by Darling into the program's shape, just as he had with Timothy, but, unlike Timothy, he was able to create a better background for what Darling was saying.

'History's great acceleration' was the mantra that Rajan used to define the popular view that the last 20 or 30 years was a tremendous advance, first technologically and then socially and then globally. However, Darling said that in the last decade virtually all the indices, polls, empirical studies and scientific evidence showed a great slowing down and even an even more, a substantial stopping, of global history. Rather breathlessly (as the program was closing) he added that even IQs had stopped!

'Slowing down' as a theme is also becoming common among various thinkers as they try to work out how the world, and particularly the west, will be - post corona. (See blog 27.03.20.) But Darling's studies pre-date the corona virus. And some of the 'post corona' thinking has suggested that the effect of the virus will only accelerate a big shift in society that was already emerging.

The paradox of 'slowing down' is that it will happen, if it happens, very fast.

For example, one part of any 'new society', at least in the UK, will be the fate of the Boris led Tory government, apparently deeply secure with a huge majority and facing a scattered Labour Party opposition. Already social media and the traditional press are beginning to attack the failings of the Tory plan to defeat corona. (See The Daily Mail, 1 April, '20.) But what is most significant is the fundamental fate of the Tory government in the next four and a half years. The British economy will not 'bounce back' as Boris and his Chancellor constantly repeat. Its decline and its decay will be the key factor for the Tory government for years.  Boris's government will be marked by a deep recession and probably a slump. Austerity, even rationing, are now on the medium term horizon.

This is the reality that governments, like the Hungarian dictatorship, are beginning to prepare for. Because social upheaval is inevitable.

Gathering a new political force across the West in general and in Britain is the key to what sort of change we get. And the change we want to kick start society again needs to be the conscious actions of millions who organise resources, technology and genuine democratic decisions for the sake of humanity. Twitter and the selfie, the billionaires and millionaires, poisoning the climate and violent competing does not do it anymore.