The evidence in front of our eyes
Knowing ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’ defined cynicism for Oscar Wilde. Now, climate change and mass extinction define everything we do. We must not allow the cynics to continue digging the hole that our children’s children will be unable to dig themselves out of.
Always it’s the money. It’s good that we have people whose job is to make sure that the books balance, that every budget is properly accounted for, and not a penny is lost. But where are the women and men of vision?
It’s always been a right-wing meme that we should run the government as a business, that we should elect only successful business people, and that the purpose of government is wealth and growth. Tell that to the teachers, the nurses, and everyone else struggling to find their rent or mortgage payments.
Part of managing an economy is about studying the figures, but that is the small part, the small-minded part, the dull, dead detail. The big picture is about knowing where we are, where we’re going, and where we stand.
It is important that we do not let the bean-counters take control. They always try to. I have worked in places where you would think that all the money actually belonged to the accountant personally, where the finance director or the treasurer thought that they were the final arbiter of everything the board could and couldn’t do.
There are some famous stories in our culture where finally the man or woman of vision appears and everybody else realises how small and inadequate their carping has previously been. It happens in the 1951 black-and-white film The Man in the White Suit. It happens again in 2011 movie, Margin Call. It happened in real life during World War Two when people broke the enemy codes and planned D-Day, and again in the Cold War when spymasters, agents and double-agents successfully kept all the nuclear buttons un-pressed in the most tense of times.
Here in Jersey, I think the last moment of vision was back in the 1960s, when Senator Cyril Le Marquand and his colleagues decided to ditch agriculture and tourism and turn Jersey into an offshore finance centre. Since then, billions of pounds of tax revenue, rightly due in jurisdictions around the world, have been avoided and have remained deep in the pockets of the planet’s most wealthy. This is not much of a legacy.
Now, the planet is dying.
The clamour of the scientists could not be louder and the evidence is in front of our eyes, both outside the door and in the daily news. If ever there was a time for big-picture thinking, this is it.
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 20 June 2019
