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25 years is but a drop in time!
If I was a Roman, I would be sitting in my comfortable triclinium eating sweet grapes and dictating my thoughts to a scribe. It was the Roman custom of celebrating a double-faced god that started European celebrations for a new year. It was meant to be a time of reflection, contemplation and future resolutions. It is under these sentiments that I shall be looking back over the year to make my final calculations. Luckily, I am not Roman, but I am mindful that over 2025 years have passed and many people, have tried to look back. Since I am not any of these people, I am going to look into the future instead.
In 25 years from now we shall be heading to the middle of the 21st century. A century that comes with great challenges. Since the start of the century there has been talk of economic bust. The banking crisis slowed down the economy and decreased real income for people. Then the expectation was that crime will rise as it did before; whilst the juries may still be out. the consensus is that this crime spree did not come…at least not as expected. People became angry and their anger was translated in changes on the political map, as many countries moved to the right.
Prediction 1: This political shift to the right in the next 25 years will intensify and increase the polarisation. As politics thrives in opposition, a new left will emerge to challenge the populist right. Their perspective will bring another focus on previous divisions such as class. Only on this occasion class could take a different perspective. The importance of this clash will define the second half of the 21st century when people will try to recalibrate human rights across the planet. Globalisation has brought unspeakable wealth to few people. The globalisation of citizenship will challenge this wealth and make demands on future gains.
As I write these notes my laptop is trying to predict what I will say and put a couple of words ahead of me. Unfortunately, most times I do not go with its suggestions. As I humanise my device, I feel sorry for its inability to offer me the right words and sometimes I use the word as to acknowledge its help but afterwards I delete it. My relationship with technology is arguably limited but I do wonder what will happen in 25 years from now. We have been talking about using AI for medical research, vaccines, space industry and even the environment. However currently the biggest concern is not AI research, but AI generated indecent images!
Prediction 2: Ai is becoming a platform that we hope will expand human knowledge at levels that we could have not previously anticipated. One of its limitations comes from us. Our biology cannot receive the volume of information created and there is no current interface that can sustain it. This ultimately will lead to a divide between people. Those who will be in favour of incorporating more technology into their lives and those who will ultimately reject it. The polarisation of politics could contribute to this divide as well. As AI will become more personal and intrusive the more the calls will be made to regulate. Under the current framework to fully regulate it seems rather impossible so it will lead to an outright rejection or a complete embrace. We have seen similar divides in the past during modernity; so, this is not a novel divide. What will make it more challenging now is the control it can hold into everyday life. It is difficult to predict what will be the long-term effects of this.
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries drug abuse and trafficking seemed to continue to scandalise the public and maintain attention as much as it did back in the 1970s and 80s. Drugs have been demonised and became the topic of media representation of countless moral panics. Its reach in the public is wide and its emotional effect rivals only that of child abuse. Is drugs abuse an issue we shall be considering in 25 years from now?
Prediction 3: People used substances as far back as we can record history. Therefore, there will be drugs in the future to the joy of all these people who like to get high! It is most likely that the focus will be on synthetic drugs that will be more focused on their effects and how they impact people. The production is likely to change with printers being able to develop new substances on a massive scale. These will create a new supply line among those who own technology to develop new synthetic forms and those who own the networks of supply. In previous times a takeover did happen so it is likely to happen again, unless these new drugs emerge under formal monopolies, like drug companies who will legalise their recreative use.
One of the biggest tensions in recent years is the possibility of another war. Several European politicians have already raised it pretending to be making predictions. Their statements however are clear signs of war preparation. The language is reminiscent of previous eras and the way society is responding to these seems that there is some fertile ground. Nationalism is the shelter of every failed politician who promises the world and delivers nothing. Whether a citizen in Europe (EU/UK) the US or elsewhere, they have likely to have been subjected to promises of gaining things, better days coming, making things great…. only to discover all these were empty vacant words. Nothing has been offered and, in most cases, working people have found that their real incomes have shrunk. This is when a charlatan will use nationalism to push people into hating other people as the solution to their problems.
Prediction 4: Unfortunately, wars seem to happen regularly in human history despite their destructive nature. We also forget that war has never stopped and elusive peace happens only in parts of the world when different interests converge. There is a combination of patriotism, national pride and rhetoric that makes people overlook how damaging war is. It is awfully blindsided not to recognise the harm war can do to them and to their own families. War is awful and destroys working people the most. In the 20th century nuclear armament led to peace hanging by a thread. This fear stupidly is being played down by fraudsters pretending to be politicians. Currently the talk about hybrid war or proxy war are used to sanitise current conflicts. The use of drones seems to have altered the methodology of war, and the big question for the next 25 years is, will there be someone who will press THAT button? I am not sure if that will be necessary because irrespective of the method, war leaves deep wounds behind.
In recent years the discussion about the weather have brought a more prevailing question. What about the environment? There is a recognised crisis that globally we seem unable to tackle, and many make already quite bleak predictions about it. Decades ago, Habermas was exploring the idea of “colonization of the lifeworld” purporting that systemic industrial agriculture will lead to environmental degradation. Now it seems that this form of farming, the greenhouse gasses and deforestation are becoming the contributing factors of global warming. The inaction or the lack of international coordination has led calls for immediate action. Groups that have been formed to pressure political indecision have been met with resistance and suspicion, but ultimately the problem remains.
Prediction 5: The world acts when confronted with something eminent. In the future some catastrophic events are likely to shape views and change attitudes. Unfortunately, the planet runs on celestial and not human time. When a prospective major event happens, no one can predict its extent or its impact. The approach by some super-rich to travel to another planet or develop something in space is merely laughable but it is also a clear demonstration why wealth cannot be in the hands of few oligarchs. Life existed before them and hopefully it will continue well beyond them. On the environment I am hopeful that people’s views will change so by the end of this century we will look at the practices of people like me and despair.
These are mere predictions of someone who sits in a chair having read the news of the day. They carry no weight and hold no substantive strength. There is a recognition that things will change at some level and we shall be asked to adapt to whatever new conditions we are faced with. In 25 years from now we will still be asking similar questions people asked 100 years ago. Whatever happens, however it happens, life always finds a way to continue.
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‘A de-construction of the term ‘Cost of Living Crisis’ in recognition of globalism’
The term ‘Cost of Living Crisis’ gets thrown around a lot within everyday discussion, often with little reference to what it means to live under a Cost-of-Living Crisis and how such a crisis is constituted and compares with crises globally. In this blog, I will unpack these questions.
The 2008 Global Financial Crash served as a moment of rupture caused and exacerbated by a series of mini events that unfolded on the world stage…. This partly led to the rise in an annual deficit impacting national growth and debt recovery. Then we entered 2010 when the Coalition Government led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties implemented a Big Society Agenda, underpinned by an anti-statist ideology and Austerity politics. The legacies of austerity have extensively been highlighted in my own research as communities faced severed cutbacks to social infrastructure and resources, many of whom utilised these resources as a lifeline. Moving forward to the present day in 2024, austerity continues to be alive and well and the national debt has continued to rise…. Events including the Corona Virus Pandemic that started in 2019, Brexit and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have amongst other events served as precipitators to an already existing economic downturn. The rise of interest rates and inflation have been partly led by disruptions to global supply chains, particularly essential and often taken for granted food resources such as wheat and grains. So too has political instability hindering opportunities to invest and grow the local economy contributed towards this economic downturn.
As inflation and interest rates rose, so too did the average cost of living in terms of expenditure and disposable income for both the Working and Middle-Classes. At this point, one can begin to see the emergence of the cost-of-living crisis as being constituted as an issue affecting social class.
The cost-of-living crisis is inherently a term deployed by the Middle Classes as some faced an increase of interest rates on their mortgages in addition to rising costs in the supermarkets. These are valid concerns and the reality and hardship produced under these conditions is not being contested. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that economic downturn and the reality of poverty is nothing new for many working-class communities, who have suffered from disinvestment and austerity, long before the term Cost of Living Crisis came into being.
Equally, we can understand the Cost-of-Living Crisis as being a construction led by Western states, as part of a wider Global North. The separation between the Global North and Global South is bound by geography, but economic growth and its globally recognised position as an emerged or emerging economy. Note that such constructions within themselves are applied by the Global North. Similarly, the Cost-of-Living Crisis is nothing new for these states. The reality of living below a breadline is faced by many of these countries in the Global South and should be understood as a wider systemic and global issue that members of the International Community have a moral obligation to address.
So, when applying terms such as the Cost-of-Living Crisis under every-day discussion, it is necessary to contemplate the historicisms behind such an experience and how life under poverty and hardship is experienced globally and indeed across our own communities. This will enable us to think more critically about this term Cost of Living Crisis, which as it is widely used, faces threat of oversight as to the prevalence and effects of global and local inequalities.
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‘Now is the winter of our discontent’
As I write this blog, we await the detail of what on earth government are going to do to prevent millions of our nations’ populations plummeting headlong into poverty. It is our nations in the plural because as it stands, we are a union of nations under the banner Great Britain; except that it doesn’t feel that great, does it?
As autumn begins and we move into winter we are seeing momentum gaining for mass strikes across various sectors somewhat reminiscent of the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979. A few of us are old enough to remember the seventies with electricity blackouts and constant strikes and soaring inflation. Enter Margaret Thatcher with a landslide election victory in 1979. People had had enough of strikes, believing the rhetoric that the unions had brought the downfall of the nation. Few could have foreseen the misery and social discord the Thatcher government and subsequent governments were about to sow. Those governments sought to ensure that the unions would never be strong again, to ensure that working class people couldn’t rise up against their business masters and demand better working conditions and better pay. And so, in some bizarre ironic twist, we have a new prime minister who styles herself on Thatcher just as we enter a period of huge inflationary pressures on families many of whom are already on the breadline. It is no surprise that workers are voting to go on strike across a significant number of sectors, the wages just don’t pay the bills. Perhaps most surprising is the strike by barristers, those we wouldn’t consider working class. Jock Young was right, the middle classes are staring into the abyss. Not only that but their fears are now rapidly being realised.
I listened to a young Conservative member on the radio the other day extolling the virtues of Liz Truss and agreeing with the view that tax cuts were the way forward. Trickle down economics will make us all better off. It seems though that no matter what government is in power, I have yet to see very much trickle down to the poorer sectors of society or for that matter, anyone. The blame for the current economic state and the forthcoming recession it seems rests fairly on the shoulders of Vladimir Putin. Now I have no doubt that the invasion of Ukraine has unbalanced the world economic order but let’s be honest here, social care, the NHS, housing, and the criminal justice system, to name but a few, were all failing and in crisis long before any Russian set foot in the Ukraine.
That young Conservative also spoke about liberal values, the need for government to step back and to interfere in peoples lives as little as possible. Well previous governments have certainly done that. They’ve created or at least allowed for the creation of the mess we are now in by supporting, through act or omission, unscrupulous businesses to take advantage of people through scurrilous working practices and inadequate wages whilst lining the pockets of the wealthy. Except of course government have been quick to threaten action when people attempt to stand up for their rights through strike action. Maybe being a libertarian allows you to pick and choose which values you favour at any given time, a bit of this and a bit of that. It’s a bit like this country’s adherence to ideals around human rights.
I wondered as I started writing this whether we were heading back to a winter of discontent. I fear that in reality that this is not a seasonal thing, it is a constant. Our nations have been bedevilled with inadequate government that have lacked the wherewithal to see what has been developing before their very eyes. Either that or they were too busy feathering their own nests in the cesspit they call politics. Either way government has failed us, and I don’t think the new incumbent, judging on her past record, is likely to do anything different. I suppose there is a light at the end of the tunnel, we have pork markets somewhere or other.
Thoughts from the criminology team 