And so…2024 teaches where 2025 can lead us
Posted on January 3, 2025 in Economics, Philosophy and Rights, Politics by Peter Ellis
In Claire Keegan’s book, Small Things Like These, Bill Furlong, a merchant delivering coal in an Irish Town during a winter in the 1980s, having been on a journey of self-reflection, protects a woman suffering abuse in a mother and baby home, run by the church.
Bill asks himself about responsibility, self and change. Two years after Bill walked on that cold, winter’s night, Michael Jackson sang about change beginning with self. Michael, like Bill, turns up the collar of his winter coat. Michael, the ‘man in the mirror’, sees “the kids in the street, with not enough to eat”, and admonishes himself. “Who am l to be blind, pretending not to see their needs?”. Unambiguously, he takes responsibility. You can’t close your mind, he sings. Because, “if you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, then make the change”.
Bill asks himself a similar question, “was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there…and face yourself in the mirror”?
2024 – Our economy and politics lead in the same directions as ever
There is a lot to learn from 2024. As we approach the end of the year, so much, troubles so many. We allow ourselves to be polarised. Social need remains unmet. Politics and economics fail too many of us, too much of the time, in too many ways. But there is hope.
Populists use the issues which divide opinion, to widen fissures which can fracture society, based on an incomplete narrative. Orwell, in Burmese Days, calls these “lies” which justify power, exploitation and a loss of true freedom, in which the striving for personal gain comes at the expense of others. But, people are not fools and know that their well-being is a bi-product of a system which does not operate inherently, as it should, for their personal and our collective self and best-interest in the first place.
The state cannot deliver the levels of equality, outcome and affordability populations seek and demand, whilst allowing the market economy to exist as a purely capitalist one. The governing Labour Party in the UK are discovering this. Their targets for housing struggle, because private developers need demand-led assistance, to make unaffordable homes affordable. Otherwise there are insufficient able buyers to justify their new-build. This is madness. When, we can societise the housing market by introducing and incentivising new forms of affordable tenure, applicable to the private sector, the social sector and targeting existing under-utilised properties, including owner-occupied ones.
Energy is expensive. Then, why not establish a regime of social market-tariffs, giving consumers the best deal on energy. And affordable energy for in-need households. Through a purpose-driven enterprise, operating outside the ethics of self-interest on which capitalism is founded. The values imbued in society are distorted by this capitalist perspective of humanity, the root of colonialism, environmental and societal degradation. Whilst creating wealth we depend on, but we share unequally beyond reason.
The past year has also shown how governments fail their societies in the search for the basic human right to live free from harm and the fear of it. People have always been forced to flee, to protect themselves and their families from tyranny. Unable to do so, people have little response but to bear their suffering, whilst trying to avoid its worst consequences. We have witnessed the flight from Syria over many years and the plight of those trapped in Gaza. Ukraine too.
But even, as we recognise that suffering, the drumbeat of conflict, echoing from days gone by, becomes louder. It is a familiar refrain, threat and counter threat, instigated by those with power, sowing the seeds for future conflict. Often, related to economic power and self-interest. Human rights become vulnerable. Atomised consumers have secondary economic rights, not primary ones. Atomised human beings have secondary or for too many, too few human rights, determinable by those with governing power over them. And we are atomised by the polarising force of social media. There is a link.
2025 and beyond – Systemic ‘conspiracy’ is not a conspiracy theory but lived reality
Liberalists and reformers, allow themselves to be condemned too easily, as a disconnected ‘elite’. Yet the liberal elite, often work with the best intention of helping people who are themselves disconnected from economic power, often with an elective mandate. Those most connected to the status quo, form a capitalist elite. The much-vaunted status quo, which populists say they are challenging, is in fact an economic one, which connects their own capitalist values directly to the market economy. No system attaches liberal and reformist values, and the best-interests of those they seek to represent, directly to the market economy in the same way. No wonder, elitist capitalism thrives and elitist liberalism struggles. Leaving populations denied basic economic, political and human rights and fair society.
Elites are often self-serving, through the interconnected self-interest of those who govern and those who have economic power. Witness Trump and Musk, and their relationship with the anti-reformist, Reform Party in the UK. Liberal elites, institutions and political parties, too readily analyse systemic points of difference to insignificance. Relying on policy which can never properly serve their general populations. Technological advance, including AI, attached to the power of pre-existing wealth may change lives irrevocably, embedding an unreasonable level of inequality and concentration of power. This makes the cause of economic democracy, immediate and of epochal significance. One of civilisation.
This is not conspiracy theory. The fact that individuals do not conspire at this systemic level, gives cause for the greatest concern. We suffer a systemic ‘conspiracy’ and conspire through our silence. We allow, a ‘conspiratorial’ dialogue, policy formation and economic structure to persist, without looking beyond it.
The 2024 documentary film, The Battle for Lakipia, shows how ancient rights of societal custom, those of nomadic cattle herders seeking grass for their animals during drought, had no authority when confronted by property-owning ranchers of European, settler heritage. At the British Museum, Hew Locke presents images, exploring questions and narratives of British imperialism in Africa, in his exhibition, what have we here? Hew’s sculptural Watchers observe those visiting the exhibition.
We return to Claire Keegan’s Bill. Do we remain watchers, perhaps passive, maybe angry ones, or do we find the bravery to question the legacies we live by and demand change. Or if we have the power of governance, do we actively seek a new way of crafting policy? Do we even have the imagination, which John Lennon and Yoko Ono, asked of us, to conceive of a world not torn apart by the pursuit of possessions and wealth? I believe we do.
Capitalism is not designed to cohere society, nor to meet social need. The State cannot fill the void between that need and the monopoly the private sector enjoys, the wealth it creates and the self-interested purpose for which it operates. What then is to be done?
Politicians promise that the state can deliver what it cannot. Faith leaders pray for the powerful to become humble and caring which they will not. Philanthropists and the social sector do their best to help their communities, but it is not enough. Capitalism, in its exclusivity does not meet our collective needs. Marxism and socialism are no longer relevant to the modern economic state. And the state is incapable, despite the best efforts of many who govern, to deliver a fair society, respecting our individuality and plural life choices.
An inflection point for humanity
So, we end, where we begin, in a battle for the version of humanity that matters to us most. We start with the mirror, and the personal and institutional reflection that admits truths and leads to change. Reform is simple once we connect dots and abandon legacy-thinking. If you do seek change in 2025, and over the years to come, be comforted by the knowledge, that you are not alone.
I think this point was always inevitable, an inflection point, in our societal development. When the dynamic of capitalist self-interest was strong enough to challenge the legitimacy of the state, to intervene and protect wider society.
Together, we must be brave enough to go against what we are told and what is here, in favour of something better.
As we enter 2025, l remain more convinced than ever, that only society can bear the weight of our social need, through economic and political rights, as yet unrecognised. That reform is simple and achievable, once we develop a societal framework. We cannot nationalise, which lacks permanence and purpose, and suffers the weaknesses of command economics. Capitalism and redistribution alone fail us. If this version of the mixed economy could deliver what we are told it could, it would have done so by now, over the last two hundred years since the industrial revolution in particular. It has not. But we can societise markets, develop a purposeful, well-being economy and societal political agenda to build a better, fairer future.
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