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John Rentoul is the chief political commentator for the Independent.
*****
I’m pessimistic.
I’m not naturally a pessimistic person, but I’m pessimistic. Maybe I’m getting older, maybe I’m entering the ‘the whole world is going to hell’ phase of my life, maybe I’m right to be pessimistic, maybe I’m not paying attention to the right things, but I’m pessimistic.
In the US, I think that Trump has almost no chance of becoming the next president, but the chance of a new Trump is very real. Actually it’s worse. It could be a demagogue who has learnt from Trump, from his successes but also from his failures, and someone who also has no regard for democracy. The economic inequality in the US is staggering, and it is destabilising. Research indicates that 40% of Americans couldn’t take the economic hit of an unexpected $400 expense. Think about that. A family relying on an insecure job done from home are one dropped laptop from spiralling down into poverty. That, or something like it, is 40 per cent of the country.
But what’s crazier is that a huge proportion of that 40 per cent will end up voting for Trump or whichever billionaire, or billionaire’s creature his protégé turns out to be.
And for sure they won’t do what is needed on climate change. The road we are headed down is leading us straight over a cliff, and the fact that a few of us might go over that cliff in an electric car, drinking from a reusable cup, I don’t really find that very reassuring.
There’s the whole hell in Ukraine. I could be optimistic that Ukraine will win, they could well, but they could well lose, but even if we get the best case scenario, what is that? I just can’t see a scenario where Ukraine and Russia both go back to being relatively peaceful countries where people can live something that looks vaguely like freedom.
If the Ukrainians manage to liberate their country, and that’s a big if, then it’s very difficult to see how Russia avoids doesn’t either violently fall apart, or get held by an autocrat far more vicious in stamping out opposition than Putin. Come to think of it, both of those could happen, ferocious autocracy, and violent disintegration.
If Russia wins, and they largely, or totally subjugate Ukraine by force, that’s hell for the Ukrainians, but don’t dream it will stop there. Remember the slogan painted on the Russian tanks and aircraft – на Берлин, to Berlin! The ideology of the ruling elite in Russia is clear for anyone who wants to read it, they are determined to rule over at least the whole of the former Soviet block, throw in Finland and Mongolia and a few more, and undermine democracy worldwide to weaken any potential challengers.
In China, the moderation that came from the unofficial rule since Mao in the 1960s, that leaders rule for only 10 years, that has been thrown out, and the cliché is that they think in much longer cycles than westerns, but there is no doubt that they see taking over Taiwan on a very short timescale, and intend to dominate the rest of south-east Asia, not to mention Africa, and democracy simply isn’t on their agenda.
And much closer to us, Brexit is unrepairable. Labour is miles ahead in the polls over there, but part of the reason for that is that they aren’t dealing with that disaster, and when they get into power they will have no mandate to fix it; and outside London, Britain looks more and more like a failed state. We can laugh, there’s not much else to do, but our nearest neighbour burning down their house isn’t good for us.
Countries don’t benefit like companies from the failure of their competitors, it’s not like Burger King getting a bump in their business because someone found a rat in their Big Mac. It’s like your next-door neighbour burning down their house. Do you really want to live near a burnt-out site, and all that it brings? You’ll hear more about how difficult that is in the interview.
And then there’s Ireland. As some old Fianna Fáiler said in an interview once, ‘I’m hopeful, Marian, but I’m not optimistic’. I know that a lot of countries would love to have our problems, but the housing situation is simply outrageous, and it’s even more worrying that international investors are pumping in money in a way that indicates they believe it won’t get better. That amount of money is almost always smart money.
We could get a government that is some combination of the old in a year or two, and just suffer on, or we could get a radical new Sinn Féin administration… that might be the kick in the pants that the establishment needs, but my confidence in them standing up to vested interests isn’t high. They talk the talk on climate change, for example, but they refuse to say what their carbon reduction targets would be, because there exists no figure that is high enough to be realistic, and low enough not to upset their rural vote.
My worry is that they would bottle it on the hard decisions and descend into a spiral of populism. Ireland took 20 years, 20 lost years, to recover from the populism of the 1977 Fianna Fáil government.
I’m sorry, I’m pessimistic. That’s just it.
