Happy New Year in September? Yes,indeed. The UK's mass return to work on Monday 6th September, was for many the first day of fully manned offices since the summer wind down started with Ascot, Wimbledon and Henley. This week the tanned and refreshed bounded back into their offices full of the ideas,visions,enthusiasms for things new and energetic determination to tackle the old intractables. Long may this state of mind continue against the inevitable ambush of vested interests,finance departments, status and barrier/barricade protectors and naysayers.Our TV sets were filled with the healthy bonzed faces of the top tier of editors and journalists.Even our politicians term started early. Terms are what the New Year is all about. We are all conditioned at an early age to the academic year rather than its calendar cousin which wearily occupies midnight of 31st December/1st January as the last gasp of a binge which started for many as far back as mid December. Forget all the Christmas cracker type good resolutions hastily thought up and pronounced on those two days. The reality of calendar New Year is an adrenaline fuelled fight against near exhaustion through weeks of over eating and over drinking and shock and awe as the reality of the resultant credit card bills, merrily racked up in December heaves into sight.
Accepting then that the first full week of September is the real New Year, what can we expect from all this new energy and excitement? A roller coaster of a year filled with new vision and opportunity arising from a slimming down of state spending and activity or one, as the media would seem to prefer it,full of fear and difficulty? Will "the cuts" be designed around a new structure for doing things better, faster and more efficiently or will be they be a dreary collection of "the pain must be shared" piecemeal moves with no overall purpose other than to reduce the horrendous short term overspending habits of the recent political era? There is a big difference between the two things. The former would lay the basis of a new lower cost, faster moving Britain with burocracy cut away, pointless jobs binned and common sense as the yardstick for a new, slimmer approach to government. The latter would leave the fundamental structural problems of too much government, over regulation and the stifling of initiative in place. The cuts , far from being the menace painted by the rearward facing amongst the unions and others , could be the springboard to new things, new jobs and a much more competitive future for UK Plc.(Health Warning,- The EU doesn't like the idea of one member state being more efficient than its bretheren. Competition amongst members is some kind of taboo).In a few weeks we will know.
Non socialist Britain has long eschewed anything that looked like a national vision or plan as something essentially too centralist and controlling. For that the Harold Wilson/George Brown National Plan of the mid 1960s has much to answer. They were on track in seeing the need for a plan which would fix clear common goals and prevent the actions of one department or group making those required by another totally impossible,- sometimes for ever. The mistake they, being socialists, made was to see the plan as a device for detailed cebntralised control rather than as a broad umbrella freeing up the deployment of initiative, energy and inspiration. It was a dead hand pushing down rather than an open one setting the birds free to fly. Which do we as a country want? Which are we going to get? There is a huge opportunity, -unseen by the unions and quite likely by many in the political parties,- to radically and beneficially restructure the way we do things rather than to simply stop doing them on the one hand or just sail on spending as we are regardless of the unsustainable cost for future generations on the other. Let's hope the opportunity is taken. The alternative looks like a smouldering ruin.
Whatever the outcome,Twigaview and its aviation and transport related cousin Airnthere (http://airnthere.blogspot.com ) will cast a light on some of the realities, possibilities, nonsenses and even lighter moments.
Again, Happy New Year!
