COVER -> DAY ONE
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The Head of the British Medical Association, more in sorrow than in anger, regretted that our latest budget has frozen taxes on alcohol, only raised taxes on tobacco by the annual rate of price inflation; and, he might have added, has abolished the betting tax.
He then went on to draw the statistically illiterate conclusion that failure to raise taxes on alcohol would cost 1300 lives.
In the first place, as a medical man, he should know that the one thing we share is mortality, refraining from booze might, just might, lengthen our lives; secondly, however, he made the error of thinking of Britain as a walled fortress where the Government can control our consumption.
The reason that our Chancellor did not raise booze taxes was simply because they are already so much higher than those in mainland Europe that we are drinking more than ever without the Government gaining any benefit from it. We have become a nation of smugglers.
These little transactions in respect of the price we pay for doubtful pleasures illustrate graphically the micro consequences of globalisation. The betting taxes were abolished, for instance, because all the major companies had parked themselves in tax havens and launched Internet betting operations and had also taken advantage of ever lower telephone charges which meant that making an international call worked out cheaper than paying the local betting tax.
America, wedged between empty Canada and indigent Mexico, has little to fear from mass booze and tobacco smuggling in the short term but it is only a matter of time before the free traders will suddenly wake up to the international threat to their moral position.
As Paul Kennedy has never tired of reminding us, a nation is only really in favour of free trade when it is the world leader and so, when the Chinese dragon roars untidily, when the Japanese finally free themselves of their economic rigidities, when Europe, refreshed with new entrants from the South and East, attains critical population and productivity mass, the intellectual heirs of President Bush will call "Foul!" and "A plague on free trade!".
I am not sure that by then it will matter what anybody shouts. The self-appointed moralists who think that free trade is as devout a cause as sectarian religion will have to accept that the public sector stopper will not be put back into the gaping, jagged maws of private sector bottles.
Those who have unwisely pitched their savings into .coms, those who think that speculation is a better guarantee of well being than blue chip saving, will ultimately combine greed with gambling until the roller-coaster takes them to the very top before pitching them to the depths.
No. No matter how nice and antithetical that statement may be it will not be realised; the poor always lose in periods of turmoil much more than the rich. The Tsar might have been shot but the Nomenklatura prospered. The industrial barons may have assuaged their consciences by building libraries but when the crash came at the end of the 1920s Buddy might have been looking for a dime but Rockerfeller wasn't.
I watched vox pop reaction to the Budget. It would not have mattered what the Chancellor had done, how many hospitals he had proposed, how many reductions in tax, how many special concessions to how many special interest groups, he would not have been able to do enough. Every last one of us is a victim.
The simplest, but not the easiest, answer of all is that what society requires of its citizens is self discipline. Who needs laws and controls if he can limit his daily intake to a glass of beer or wine? Who needs moralising if he can bet on a horse twice a year or buy a weekly lottery ticket? The trouble is that those who call for such desirable restraint are the very people who cannot, and are never seen to, exercise that restraint themselves. I would not have thought that Donald Trump was a fine example of self-denial.
Such ubiquitous frothiness in the state of things leads me to search for the opposite of the traditional metaphor of leaven;
I want something to calm us all down, to make us just that little bit more solid.
Last week I heard Brian Eno describe his project to build a clock which will run, unassisted, for ten thousand years which will tick once per decade, strike once per century and send a mechanical bird out to greet us at the completion of each millennium. The point of the enterprise is to remind us that the things we do now have consequences way beyond our own calculation. But we already know what happens when the powerful are subject to no checks, so it is no matter of speculation to contemplate how it will be when global economic entities are unchecked.
In the world of the perpetual frontier it made sense to believe that one person's gain need not be made at the expense of another; but as populations rise and renewable resources become ever scarcer that metaphor of the frontier no longer holds, nor the calculations of advantage and disadvantage that go with it. It is almost certain that scientific developments will save us from complete catastrophe, that our consumption of fossil fuels will give way to other sources of energy, that we will develop much more sophisticated de-salination technology to give us potable water, that agribusiness will continue to turn inedible garbage into edible garbage but those things which we consider to be the good things of life - solitude, space, choice, the minutest detail which makes us unique - will become so scarce that they will feel like black market goods even if they are on the open market.
And so, for as long as it lasts, I will continue to care about the provenance and vintage of my wines, the exact region of the cow from which my meat is butchered, the variety of potato to be cooked; but before long the meat and potatoes will be smuggled across nation-state borders with the same degree of elaborateness and profiteering as wine smuggling commands today.
