About 14 years ago, at about the time I retired and began to withdraw from some of my commitments, I wrote down a list of some of the things I would like to see happen during the remainder of my life.
Recently, I found the notes I had written. Here they are, verbatim.
I hoped for:
1. Students attending well-staffed Universities and leaving with a deep understanding of their chosen subjects rather than an achievement in factual learning.
2. Young adults starting out in life without a burden of debt.
3. To live in a country that is part of Europe and respects Europe. A country that acknowledges the imperfections of Europe and is in the forefront of attempts at reform.
4. A country with a healthy two-way relationship with the United States of America.
5. A country which seeks to strengthen the United Nations and a UN which is more effective at peacekeeping.
6. To live under a government of people of integrity, honesty and conscientiousness. A government that delegates clearly and does not try to over-regulate.
What Went Wrong?
At the time I wrote this, I thought that we might be getting closer to the ideal. How wrong I was. What has happened? Why has it happened? It is going to take more than one government cycle, even more than a generation to get things better again.
1. Universities struggle on. They are about to be hit by the termination of their European collaborative research projects and loss of European and foreign students.
2. Student debt has got worse as university fees have gone up. Student nurses have had their grants cut recently.
3. Brexit means that we are doing exactly the opposite of what I was hoping for in (3) above.
4. We can still strive for a relationship with the people United States but their new President’s ‘America First’ policy will make it difficult. It is not going to be a healthy relationship.
5. The UN has found itself impotent to do anything about Syria and the Middle East problems just as it was in Bosnia. Currently the UK seems to tolerate the UN rather than seek to strengthen it.
6. I remain to be convinced that the current politicians are less venal than those of 14 years ago. Fortunately, one can still identify some good, honest, well-educated, well-intentioned and informed people just as one could all those years ago. Has any one of them got the leadership qualities to make a difference?
Mike,
Your observations are most interesting.
As a “Brexit” voter myself, my reasons for wishing to leave the most corrupt and devisive organisation in the World, is to get away from us in this Country being told how to live our lives by “Johnny Foreigner”! We will never get the reforms we, as a nation, broadly want, the corrupt “EU” regime will ensure that.
I was against us going into Europe in the 1970’s, and as “The Common Market” became more and more a “Nation State”, my urge became the greater.
People in ordinary levels of society feel increasingly left out of decision making Mike! “The Elite” are taking over it seems to many, and the “Brexit” vote was a way of registering ones dis-satisfaction.
I agree with you about Student Debt.
However, in my humble opinion, too many people are directed towards an unsuited (to them) academic career via university, and the consequential imbalance in society is the result.
In my (& I humbly suggest, your) younger days, only the really deserving & “brainy” young people made it there. The rest of us took our lesser stations in life, and based our aspirations from there.
While it was great in days gone, for students to be government funded in effect, through their university studies, that is clearly no longer an option in these times.
The Tony Blair Government opened the flood gates of “University for all”, and now students are carrying the cost of that.
Regarding this country’s relationship with the US – Well, we like to think that we have a “Special Relationship”, but in many instances, it was an illusionary one, mainly based on doing what the current US administration felt was best for them, not us!
We all want a peaceful and balanced world, but the imbalance between rich and poor in many aspects of this current world, only fuel the very symptoms you are troubled by.
I certainly do not know what the answer is Mike, nor, I think does anyone else!
Mike,
Thanks for sharing these thoughts. I am a Remain voter myself and I was looking at the European project as a beacon of hope for the rest of the world. In my very simplistic world view, if there is only one country, one tribe (human) then perhaps the world would be a better place.
Gopi
The EU is certainly not the most corrupt and divisive organisation in the world. There are criteria by which corruption can be measured and those who do so put the EU nearer the virtuous end than the venal end. I agree it is not perfect but it had to absorb rather dodgy regimes from Greece, Spain, Italy and former communist regimes from East Europe. Things are slowly improving in the EU but could do better.
Mike,
The EU was sold to us as “The Common Market” – the deception & wrong doing started there, for it seems, the end result was always intended to be a mega-state. Ted Heath and others ‘sold us a pup’!
The corruption is easily described – the EU accounts have not been given the “all clear” for many years, the finances do not ‘stack up’, and they never will, it seems.
The mega-sum being mentioned as this country’s fee to leave this awful ‘club’ is an indication of the level of financial corruption involved, for there should not be any such fee, large or small.
When one resigns from an organisation, one no longer has any liabilities.
This ‘fee’ is an attempt by the EU to grab as much money as thry can, in one last greedy grasp!
We are surely better off out, methinks !
‘When one resigns from an organisation, one no longer has any liabilities.’ Quite right but you can’t have any of the privileges either.
Exactly how will we benefit by leaving? Lower taxes? Will abandoning the Erasmus scheme, the Gallileo Satellite Navigation project, the Euospace agency, the Innovative Medicines initiative, the reciprocal health arrangements, Integrated transport policies, Electricity interconnection arrangements, Pan european research initiatives and others be an advantage or not?
How will you and I benefit from losing our European Citizenship? How will we be better off if we cannot travel in Europe without visas and a burden of bureaucracy?