1. A few years ago, people like me were widely attacked in the media for “declinism”. How could we fail to see that we were heading into a capitalist utopia, in which everything would keep getting better? This is a thread about what we could see that our critics could not. 🧵 2. It was pretty astonishing that the attacks on us “declinists” peaked in 2012, with the BBC series by David Aaronovitch whose mocking title was “Things Ain't What They Used To Be”. By then, four years after the 2008 crash, things were getting tangibly worse for many in the UK. 3. A crash caused by capitalist exuberance had been blamed on state spending, and the government was merrily ripping down protections for the poor, trashing or shuttering public services and tearing up essential regulations. 4. But the issues some of us had been documenting went much further back. Even when I started work in 1985, I could see how governments were failing to rise to the environmental challenge, and that this issue was going to become only more urgent, until it dominated our lives. 5. In 2012, it had long been clear that other things were going badly wrong too. Back in 1994, for example, I had started covering the rise of anti-protest laws, and seeing how fundamental rights and freedoms – the lifeblood of democracy - were being shut down. 6. Around the same time, I began documenting the rise of corporate power, and how lobbyists were usurping voters, hollowing out democracy, and pushing governments to make major decisions (such as rail privatisation and the Private Finance Initiative) against the public interest. 7. In 2003, after months of fruitless campaigning, I watched aghast as the government pushed aside public opinion to wage war on Iraq, and realised several things at once. That: a. Politics had become almost entirely detached from the people. 8. b. Crucial decisions had been completely offshored: the UK had reduced itself to a mere puppet of US power. c. Multilateralism and international law were being fatally wounded. David, on the other hand, accused opponents of the Iraq War of “indulging … in a cosmic whinge”. 9. Now we see all the stuff we warned about becoming so salient that even the most blinkered panglossians can hardly fail to notice them. Environmental crises are hammering Earth systems and human life. 10. Inequality, unrestrained by government action, has soared to astonishing levels. As economic power translates into political power, multi-billionaires have gained extraordinary sway over our lives. They use this power to grab even more and attack the common good. 11. Deregulation, demanded by corporate lobbying, has caused a wide range of horrible disasters, from Grenfell Tower, to poisoned rivers, to the near-absence of affordable housing. 12. As democracies have been hollowed out, many people have given up on established parties, and the far right is loving it. Fascism is resurgent. Multilateralism and international law are going down like dominoes. 13. Is this what the capitalist utopia looks like? For billionaires, perhaps (though even they cannot indefinitely escape the environmental crisis). For the rest of us it looks like a path to hell. 14. I dearly wish we had been wrong. It's horrifying to witness the trends we spotted way back progressing so fast and so far. But I also wonder why our warnings were so widely ignored. And why it was so hard for otherwise-intelligent people to see these things coming. The thread on one page: skywriter.blue
skywriter.blue