I'M ONLY A COCK-EYED OPTIMIST

I believe it’s too easy to take a malignant view of the world. Surprisingly UK has not been the worst off in terms of strikes over the past three years with industrial unrest right across Europe and the rest of the world. 

Thus a good friend of mine, whose wisdom I rate, recently said lugubriously 

“There something terribly wrong underlying all this which we haven’t identified yet.”

But hasn’t it always been like this? Isn’t it the fate of humanity to lurch from crisis to crisis and hasn’t it just got too complex for a quick fix? But there’s more to it than that for sure.

I responded to my friend’s comment with this:

“(Maybe) we can no longer afford the world (we thought) we lived in”

Over my lifetime we have graduated from widespread, relative poverty to the opposite. Many of us feel we are owed expensive meals out, astonishingly dear trainers and exotic foreign holidays. 

There’s a sense that the good life is more widely available than ever and we’re entitled to enjoy it. But the development of work ethic has not grown at the same rate as this sense of entitlement.

What is commonplace too is the kind of poverty that was uncomplainingly normal back in the 1950s. There’s a starker division now between the “have nots” and the “haves.” The concept of “levelling up” won’t solve the scale of this problem.

My friend is right. “Something is rotten in the State of Denmark” as Marcellus says in Hamlet. Liz Truss was also curiously right. Without growth the show collapses. But growth alone perpetuates the whole ghastly charade. It’s human nature to want more but it also makes us sick if we consume what we don’t really need.

We can’t and shouldn’t sustain our current level of prosperity because we are living beyond our means and have been for some time now. But telling people to prepare for the poverty they deserve and the country needs by vastly increased taxes is not a vote winner.

Last week I had a moment of revelation. I went to the O2 for the first time. Originally known as the Millennium Dome it was built to house the Millennium Experience, a government-backed exhibition celebrating the start of the 21st century.

Governments don’t understand how to mount shows and it was an embarrassing disaster for the Blair government. Today it has been repurposed and transformed to be one of the world’s leading entertainment venues and the ninth-largest building in the world by volume.

I was there for a performance of Young Voices, an annual jamboree of primary school children – some 8,000 of them singing to us and making an extraordinary amount of happy noise.

The sheer scale of the place and the lucrative confidence it exhibited was staggering. The repurposed and relaunched Dome is a triumph. Meanwhile the infrastructure of the UK like the Millennium Dome belongs to a previous century. The O2 is of today.

If we could have a strategy to repurpose old UK systems like the NHS or our railways – like they’ve done with London Bridge station and not like HS2 which feels like a vanity project, a kind of transport version of the original Dome, then we might start creating a better world and feel less rotten.

We need to be ambitious for change; to do a national makeover, pay the ill-paid people properly, get busy and plan to use some of the unentitled wealth that exists to make Britain a place of which to be proud. More O2 and less “Oh No.”