Sunday 12th February

Very few people saw it coming, but we should have looked to History as our guide.  In 1924 there was a huge Financial Crash; there were reports of ruined stockbrokers jumping out of skyscraper windows on Wall Street.  A few years later and we had Mussolini in charge of Italy and Hitler in a resurgent Germany (let’s make Germany great again), and Stalin firmly installed in Russia.  In America we actually had FDR and The New Deal, a Keynesian response to the crisis which saved America.

We had a Financial Crash in 2008; not of shares but an old-fashioned Banking Crisis.  (Banks work on the principal of lending money they do not actually have, in effect depositor’s money, in the hope that not everyone will want to withdraw all of their money at once – because it simply doesn’t exist, it is just numbers on paper).

And roughly eight years later it is all change on the political map.  Governments around the world propped up the banks and cut taxes for the wealthy (scared they would take their businesses and wealth elsewhere) at the expense of ordinary working people.  For the first time in seventy years, people were facing the prospect of slowly diminishing (in real terms) incomes and poorer services and the probability that their children would inherit a far bleaker future than they looked forward to in their youth.  The result has been a rise in Populism, or those who present themselves as anti-politicians, different, new, not the establishment, and invariably right-wing.  The dumbed down population, shunning the news channels and turning to Celebrity instead are flocking to these new Messiahs; Farage, Johnson, Vlad the Impaler, Trump and possibly Marine Le Pen.  They probably know deep down that these charismatic figure may indeed be charlatans, but they are fed up with politics as usual; promises which can never be fulfilled, increasing Globalisation, the rich getting richer at an exponential rate…..and they want change.

What will happen when they realise that this New Order is just like the Who sang “New boss, same as the old boss) is anyone’s guess.  We can only hope that as has happened throughout History, ‘cometh the hour, cometh the man’ (or woman); and new serious competent leaders emerge to rescue us….

Meanwhile in offices and design studios all over the World they are beavering away, designing Artificial Intelligence and smarter and smarter robots which will do all the work for us, a veritable Brave New World.  It is just the transition which may be slightly uncomfortable. Welcome to the New World Order….hahaha.