Looking Forward

Today one traditionally looks forward, so I thought I would take the opportunity to look at some of the bigger themes that are likely to shape political debate.

Threats to Democracy: Decay of Debate
Thanks to the CIA, the quote generally attributed to Thomas Jefferson "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" is well known.  Yet it would be in a more Jeffersonian spirit to apply it not to foreign invasion but to internal corruption of democracy.

This seems to me to be a growing problem.  Access to information appears to be exploding, but critical thinking about it appears to be diminishing.  over and over again, I have been struck that there are basic misunderstandings of how things work, twisted use of data and sometimes a simple refusal to consider unpalatable facts.  This is no doubt linked to the way in which the Internet and the proliferating media encourage everyone to consult information sources that echo their own views rather than give a true account.  I am sure it is also linked to the decay of scrutiny by the media for cost reasons, but it is also a decision by the people absorbing the (mis)information that potentially undermines good decision making and could lead to enormous harm.

More Threats to Democracy
A second kind of threat to our democracy is a growing tendency to consumerism.  Relations are seen as more transactional, rather than based around group loyalty.  People are less likely to see public bodies as delivering an overall good and more interested in what it gives them personally.

This makes the traditional models of service delivery more and more difficult as small numbers of people have traditionally been granted disproportionate resources.  For instance a child with severe special needs could consume as much as £100k per year.  A child in a mainstream school without special needs might be educated for several thousand pounds a year.

This also impacts on the public spending cuts.  The statutory services such as adult social services use a vast resource for a relatively small number of people.  Universal services such as parks or pavements are used by almost everyone, but have a relatively low level of resource.  As adult social services suck up a greater and greater proportion of budgets, people will will increasingly question why the universal services that they actually use seem so underresourced, and whether they are getting their money's worth.  The kind of social compact that Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to when he said "Taxation is the price we pay for living in a civilised society" is becoming less accepted.

There is a related problem in that many people simply do not understand how public services are paid for.  Brent's recent budget consultation, many of the consultees were surprised to find that Council Tax paid for only a small proportion of Council services.  That is line with my experience over many years.

Demographic Change
We have an aging population, which is driving changing demands on all areas of public life.  The growing needs of health and adult social services are well known and underlie much of the "graph of doom" argument.

There is an interesting take here.   The writer argues it is a global trend that cannot be solved by a higher birth rate or by immigration.  There is simply no precedent for the proportion of older people that will be around by 2050.

Growth in Computing Power
Moore's Law says that computing power doubles roughly every eighteen months/two years.  This has held true since the observation was first made in the 1960s.  It presumably means that electronic devices will become ever more common and cheap, which would have implications for their use in libraries for example.

As well as an increase in "brute force" calculating power, computers are beginning to be capable of doing intelligent work better than human beings, for instance driving cars,writing legal documents and so on.

This could make people economically obsolete.  Simply sticking to a model where peoples' labour earns money in this context would be impossible as the people would earn less than the machines.  Not paying people anything would destroy consumption levels and cause economic collapse.  Some people think the answer to this query is a basic income as proposed in Switzerland.  It would not solve the lack of purpose that Keynes foresaw in his famous essay.

Climate Change
One of the biggest changes over future years will come through climate change.  I have compared this to the end of the last Ice Age.   That sounds like hyperbole, but it is literally the closest comparison I can think of.  We will have to cope with rising sea levels, huge changes in the natural world  and enormous social disruption.