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Politicians Just Don't Get It About Change
Why do politicians keep banging on about change when it is clear people do not want change. Talk of change will not win the election for Labour or Conservative, the electorate are sick of change, they want security.

When Will PoliticiansGet It About Change
by Ian R Thorpe.
2010-01-12
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: change, economy, society, politics, political, politicians, electors, communities, people

As the Labour Party tries to get itself back together after the latest leadership debacle many MPs from all factions of the party are offering Gordon Brown advice on how he might still win the next election. They may as well advise a snowball on how it may survive in Hell but MPs are never slow to offer advice. Ask them to actually do something and they disappear over the horizon as if their arse is on fire. This is particularly true of Labour MPs.

One single theme runs through all the advice Gordon is being offered, not "Fuck off now Brown and give us a chance," but the repeated assertion that people want change and the party must offer change if it is to sand any chance of survival after the election. The only change people really want is for Gordon to go and take is gang of expenses fiddling bastards with him.

The Conservatives like to talk of change too, quite why is not clear. Even the name of the Party suggests they are against change unless, perhaps, the change they are talking about is a return to feudalism and the Droit de Seignior. Talk of change coming from Conservative leaders is particularly ironic as the party's last wild adventure in engineering social and economic change was a disaster that still reverberates in the ghost towns and depleted industrial areas of the midlands and north.

All this talk of change does not inspire confidence any more than talk of old fashioned values. People do not want old fashioned values, they want old fashioned jobs with old fashioned security, old fashioned house prices. Chance seldom equates o improvement for the mass of people. A box like home with a country mansion sized mortgage is not an improvement on a spacious and affordable terrace house. A temporary job through an agency and the worry every Friday you are not going to be needed on Monday is for most not an improvement on a job for life in the local grime factory.

After almost half a century of change being forced at a pace far more rapid than human society and communities can adapt to the political establishment is still pushing "need for change" to divert us from the fact that they have no idea how to deal with the problems that have led to our "broken society." Such a deception demands change at an ever increasing pace.

The people, the ordinary punter like you and me however would welcome some respite from change, a chance to get our breath back, to regroup and take stock of where we are, to work out where we want to be and how to get there. Most people would be glad of a few years to get on with the business of earning a decent living while having enough job security to free them from worrying about the ruin a period of unemployment can wreak upon their lives, a period in which they can pay down some of the debt years of government driven, debt funded growth have saddled them with. People want a chance to connect with one another again, to rebuild the communities and social groupings that are so important to our psychological wellbeing. We need to feel we belong. One friend at the pub or a social or sports club is worth a thousand virtual friends on Facebook or MySpace.

When politicians talk of change what they mean is economic growth, increased turnover with reduced overheads and production costs one side and bigger markets in which individuals constantly spend more on the other. The kind of business global capitalism requires is an economic perpetual motion engine. Not only that, the engine must be capable of running at a constantly accelerating rate.

Any engineer worth his salt will tell you a perpetual motion engine is an impossibility and no engine can keep accelerating for ever. At some point either the friction on the moving parts will burn away and the engine overheat and seize or at a certain rate of revolutions per minute the centrifugal force will tear it apart. (This is not theory, it is why diesel engines are fitted with a governor to regulate their speed.

If we look at the laws of physics then and apply a similar rule to human society, how can the economic engine keep getting bigger and bigger when there are finite resources to feed it or running faster and faster when we know fragile components must eventually break. The constant meddling by governments with the mechanisms of society and bureaucratic attempts to micromanage individual to make us all into compliant serfs in thrall to the needs of big government and the supra-national corporate hegemony are the things preventing society repairing itself.

So long as politicians remain intent on forcing change, societies will become more dysfunctional. And that will be the case no matter who wins the election. At least if we have a hung parliament the two main parties will castrate each other.

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