Reflections on life in a democracy

Reflections of life in a democracy

80 years of change- for better or for worse?

I was born in 1942 with very loving and supportive parents who were ”dirt poor” and never owned a car or a home, but they lived good honest lives. I have lived through many governments, some good, some bad. I have noticed changes in the way politicians conduct themselves, regardless of party. They used to be people convinced of their cause, their plans to improve lives and defend the people of Britain. Now, very few politicians have that conviction and that devotion to the nation we call Britain, and those who have this conviction do not get made leaders of their party. Why? We now have professional politicians, many have very limited actual hands-on experience of how the majority live, even those claiming to represent socialism have never spent 20 years living in rented homes struggling day to day to balance income and expenditure. Many left-wing political activists claim the masses want to overthrow the monarchy, take all the money from the rich,  break down social barriers, while the truth is the poor just want to stop being poor, they do not want to destroy what others have, they want to move up with them.

I have noticed that socialist governments always make claims (of success) that are exaggerated or based on only selected facts and they always leave the economy in a worse state than they found it, and the poor always suffer because of this. The intellectual socialists despise the idea of “trickle down” wealth saying the rich get richer disproportionally, but at least the poor get some improvement while socialist governments always leave the poor in a worse, relative, position.

Now internationalism has changed from being mutual defense treaties and trade agreements to, in the case of Europe, a destruction of nationalities. Global industrial conglomerates have grown in power and influence causing national identities and differences to lessen. As populations have increased the relevance of the individual has reduced. The growth of information technology and (in the developed nations) the huge increase in material wealth of the majority has changed life. In 2026 the poor have way more “labour saving” gadgets and entertainment time and availability of both, than the upper middle classes had in 1950. But it is doubtful they are any happier. As life has become less labour intensive, as leisure time has increased, so dissatisfaction with life has increased. It could be said, with some justification, that in 1946 we (the poor and working classes) had very little knowledge of the realities of how we were governed. World War 2 had demanded total dedication to the cause, first to survive, then to fight back against Nazi dictatorship. Rationing did not mean the poor were the same as the aristocracy, but it did mean the middle classes and the poor shared deprivations. Every family lost relatives to the cause, a shared intention to survive and overcome, developed regardless of material wealth.

As universal education increased and as the introduction of mass information distributed through television, radio and later social media; we went from partial ignorance to drowning in information overload. Unfortunately, much of this information is unreliable, a deliberate exaggeration or just plain lies. When the media consisted of a valve radio and a printed newspaper, they were sources of information and entertainment only, they were not marketing tools and that is the key to the difference in the media then and now. Media is a marketing tool first and foremost with efforts to be an information provider way down the order of importance. This may be one cause of dissatisfaction in people’s lives, we are now aware that others have more, better, than we have.

Technology is now part of everyday life in a way that would have been called science fiction during my childhood. In 1950 television channels were few and far between and transmitted very few hours a day  but now we have total saturation with so many channels operating twenty-four hours a day, every day. We have mobile technology that gives unlimited ability to communicate with anyone we choose. This may be good news to many but there are areas of concern. We may be able to communicate but do we get meaningful responses? This new reliance on such technology has created “technology poverty” and “technology exclusion”. The reliance on apps etc. for connection with health care and support service, through the latest technology has excluded the venerable, the poor and many of the elderly, from services they need more than others. The pursuit of technical advancement for its own sake is in danger of disregarding the human need altogether.