Detailed proposition

The Teamwork Nation - Detailed proposition

Things are pretty good for most people in this country, aren’t they? 

Probably better than they’ve ever been, until recently. We have and take for granted the basic privileges that our ancestors couldn’t even envisage and that many people in the Third World can still only dream of: we have abundant food, warmth, clean water and free, advanced healthcare. 

On top of that we have peace, prosperity and free education. We have leisure time, some lovely countryside in which to enjoy it and a prolific array of entertainment opportunities. For relatively little money, we can fly away to some beautiful and interesting places. It’s amazing, and wonderful. 

Virtually no-one here in the UK experiences the grinding, absolute poverty of the Third World. Nor are we caught up in the violent conflict that besets so many other countries. 

We enjoy a national inheritance which was worked for and (literally) fought for by our ancestors. 
But we are at some considerable risk of losing our privileges. 

It may not really feel this way now, but it’s like we’re dancing on the decks of the Titanic: you don’t know about the weakness in the design of the ship and you don’t really care that much. Everything is just lovely until, very suddenly, it’s not. 

Nationally, we have enjoyed a blessedly long period of peacetime but this has made us very complacent, and quite insensitive to the risks of losing our hard-won privileges. It’s like we’ve become the spoilt rich kid who’s had everything easy and can’t now contemplate the possibility that our lifestyle could degrade. But that’s an illusion and the fortunes of nations can deteriorate very rapidly indeed. 

Complacency and hubris is causing us to neglect the ongoing health of our society. But healthy societies are just like houses: if they’re not maintained, they fall apart. You might look around the world at all the bad stuff going on but when did you last think ‘could that happen here?’ When did you hear anyone in government talk about the risks that we face? You didn’t. They didn’t. We aren’t sensitive to risks, but they are real.
We’re at risk for several reasons:

1. We’ve come too far away from national self-sufficiency
  • We have become overpopulated and in consequence highly, vulnerably dependent on imported energy, food and raw materials to sustain our lifestyle - imports which could so easily dry up with any major disruptive event (wars, heatwaves, volcanic eruptions, electro-magnetic disruption, more pandemics, another financial crisis etc).
  • We import over 40% of our food. We import around 40% of our energy. Producing food is itself highly consumptive of energy, so without it we couldn’t even produce and distribute that 40%. 
  • We had droughts of water as recently as 2010-2012 but demand is increasing along with our rapidly-increasing population.
Ref. Imports statistics.

Yes, the risk of disruption through international conflict is mitigated somewhat by the increased degree of interdependency between nations, but that doesn’t mitigate the other risks.

2. We’re enjoying a lifestyle we really cannot afford

State expenditure at over £1.2tn p.a. is 46% of GDP - the highest level since WW2. 
To fund that, the State imposes taxes at the highest level in 70 years. 
But the tax take is massively skewed: 
  • 54% of adults - some 36m people - pay either no tax or less tax than the cost of providing State benefits and 'benefits in kind' to them. 
  • Of the tax-paying minority, the top 10% pay over 60% of the total. 
  • It means the top fifth of households paid on average £35,399 more in taxes than they received in benefits, while the bottom fifth received £17,648 more in benefits than they paid in tax. (source ONS).
And those high taxes are still not enough to cover State expenditure.
So successive Governments borrowed and printed hundreds of £billions to make up the shortfall, rather than live within our means. This trend was well entrenched even before Covid. 

The result is that National Debt has gone up to a peacetime high of £2.6 trillion in 2024; that’s over 100% of Gross Domestic Production (GDP); that’s £2,600,000,000,000, or a pile of £50 notes 2600 kilometres high. It is, literally, an inconceivable amount of money. 

Interest on that debt at the lowest ever rates amounts to £115bn per annum - that’s much more than the cost of either the Armed Forces or the Police, and more than half the cost of the NHS. This debt will be an enormous burden for our children and grandchildren but no-one seems to care; we just want more of everything, and we want it now. And so that debt continues to increase. 
In July 2018, the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast that, without intervention, national debt will rise to 100% of GDP by the early 2030’s (which has happened already) and to 283% of GDP by 2067-8. That’s £6 trillion, or £90,000 for every member of the population. Ref. UK National debt

Personal debt including mortgages has also gone up, to around £1.8tn.  Ref. UK Personal debt trends.

Maybe you think debt is just funny money, not real, nothing to worry about? No. Debt isn’t just figures on paper; it’s a real liability; it represents work carried out by someone else that you owe them money for, or money advanced for work that you have promised to do.

We are now also a heavily overcrowded country, foolishly and avoidably dependent on expensive and insecure imports of energy, food and raw materials.

3. So we don’t have the reserves to tolerate shocks
  • Covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has recently proven that. 
  • When a person or a country loses a grip on debt, the consequences are severe. 
  • Countries that print money and run up debts are fine as long as they remain reasonably stable. But countries (like individuals) who run up big debts have nothing in the bank for a rainy day. 
  • If bad stuff happens to you personally - like you lose your income or have a big new expense to meet - then not only will your creditors lend you no more but they will try to get their money back by repossessing your assets, or they will at least raise the interest on your debt to very high levels. 
  • As an over-indebted country, your currency will lose value and essential imports will cost much more (remember the UK is a net importer). 
  • It’s a potential downward spiral of debt, impoverishment, chaos and violence, and many countries have fallen into that trap in the past. Check out Venezuela, Argentina, Zimbabwe, and Germany before WW2. 

How did we get this way?


Globalisation, technology and complacency changed us
Technology and globalisation have moved production of goods to the East (mainly China) and consumption to the West. Western countries are printing and borrowing more money to buy stuff made abroad; they are also becoming artificially overpopulated through mass immigration and less and less self-sufficient in all the resources needed to sustain life: food, energy, raw materials and fresh water. 
  • Factories moved out.
    • China’s resurgence as a manufacturing powerhouse made it much easier for UK employers to switch manufacturing there at much lower cost. Rich Brits got richer; some of them became fat cats. They didn’t care if their own countrymen lost their jobs and were consigned to State dependency.
  • The government encouraged mass immigration.
    • In pursuit of an ideological commitment to multiculturalism, the Labour government facilitated an entirely anti-democratic programme of mass immigration, which successive Labour, Coalition and Conservative governments did nothing to change. Opponents of this imposition were vilified unjustly as xenophobes, racists and bigots. 
  • Foreign labour moved in. 
    • So, for manual jobs which couldn’t be exported, in industries like building, hotels and agriculture, it became so much easier for employers to use willing, available and cheap immigrant labour (many of whom were highly-skilled) than to bother training our own sometimes reluctant people. 
    • The Government turned a blind eye to the poor working pay and conditions of immigrant workers doing the jobs that British people wouldn’t.
    • In 2016, some 80% of 414,000 new jobs were taken by foreign-born workers. 
  • The population increased massively, and artificially, through mass immigration. 
    • And so, in the last 20 years or so, the UK’s population rose artificially by about 8.5m net. That's about 100 Qatar-size giant football stadiums-worth.
    • There are some 10m+ foreign-born people living in the UK now, plus a large but unquantifiable number of their children. According to an ONS report in July 2018, 28.4% of the 680,000 live births in 2016/17 were to foreign-born mothers, up from 11.6% in 1990.
    • There are now also around 1m illegal immigrants, by prudent estimates. This is just ignored
    • The population of London is now 40% foreign-born. Only 50 years ago, it was 10%
  • Population density increased accordingly, from an already high level
    • This country is already one of the most densely-populated larger countries in the world.
    • Intensified by recent mass immigration, population in  the geographical corner comprising Greater London, the South-east  and the East is now 24m people / 605 per square kilometre (ppsk). England as a whole is 440 ppsk, which is nearly four times that of France at about 120 ppsk. 
The effects on UK society have been profound:
  • Wealthier UK residents enjoyed a great new boost in the availability and quality of tradespeople and leisure services. The skills and reliability of  'the Polish builder' became legendary. 
  • Entrepreneurial employers earned enhanced profits by using cheap labour at home and cheap manufacturing abroad and by selling into newly-accessible global markets. Some of them became 'fat cats'. In the 2022/23 tax year, the top 10% of taxpayers paid over 60% of all income tax (HMRC), which is absurd when you consider also that less than half of UK adults pay Income Tax.  
  • British-born people (of all origins) found themselves competing heavily with new immigrants for employment, housing, education, healthcare and welfare. Employers reaped the benefits and taxpayers bore the costs.
  • Income and security of employment for the settled, indigenous working class decreased. They couldn't or didn't want to compete with foreign labour. Zero hours contracts emerged: great for employers; bad for workers. 
  • Houses became much more expensive due to the imbalance of supply and demand. 
    • Even though the total GB dwelling stock increased from 18.5m to about 28m in the last 50 years, the national cost of an average house grew from 3.6 times workers’ annual gross full-time earnings in 1997 to 9.1 times by 2021.[Source ONS]. 
    • Ref. Housing supply in the UK 
  • Adult dependency on the State increased enormously: 
    • Rather than restrict cheap foreign labour or compel British workers to compete, Labour professed their empathy and increased welfare payments - 'benefits'. But this was a hollow, immoral empathy: it gave many British people the toxic gifts of State dependency, a grossly enhanced sense of entitlement and an insensitivity to the greater good. It also turned a blind eye to the poor working pay and conditions of immigrant workers doing the jobs that British people wouldn’t.
    • Welfare in all its forms (housing, income support, education) was also made freely available to immigrants through a widely-adopted ‘needs-based’ assessment of eligibility. Resident British people found themselves behind a long queue of new immigrants for social housing. In London, 50% of social housing is occupied by foreign-born people. 
    • I don’t believe it’s a ‘benefit’ to be continually State dependent; it’s undignified.
  • Total Welfare costs increased substantially, paid for by the minority
    • Of a total £240bn welfare costs in 2023, some £100bn is spent on housing benefits, family benefits, income support and tax credits. That's more than half as much as the entire cost of the NHS, more than our entire cost of defence and more than the cost of education.  State pensions cost about £125bn.
    • The proportion receiving more in benefits and 'benefits in kind' (NHS, education etc) than they pay in tax has risen significantly, to 54% in 2021, up from 51.5 per cent in 2015, 45.9 per cent in 1997 and 41% in 1977. [Source ONS Jan 2023].
    • And so a welfare system designed originally as a safety net for occasional misfortune was transformed into a lifestyle subsidy. State dependency - once a social stigma - became socially acceptable. A whole generation now believe that simply by living here in the UK, one can expect a standard of living quite divorced from one’s own contribution.
    • Ref government expenditure
  • Our national debt has grown to around £2.6tn, more than twice annual total government expenditure of £1200bn for 2023/24 and around 100% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In 1992, it was only around £200bn or 25% of GDP. Interest on that debt - at the lowest rates ever recorded - is around £115bn and can only increase. Government spending accounts for some 46% of total GDP - that's £46 in every £100 spent by anyone, for anything. (Source OBR) 
  • Increased population numbers have contributed to huge increases in vehicles on our roads. 
    • The Local Government Association reported 32.15m vehicles on England’s roads in 2017 - a 7.7% rise from 26.7m in 2013. Over the same period, road space increased by just 0.6%. Regular drivers will be all too familiar with the resultant congestion. For the whole UK, there are now 41m licenced vehicles [source ONS]. Like housing, this is a demand management problem. 
    • Ref. Road usage in the UK.
  • We now have some large and distinctly separate foreign communities in the UK. The high volume and rapid rate of immigration was way beyond that which allowed integration. That's unhealthy, and socially divisive. 
Amazingly, no-one was invited to vote for these radical changes to our society. 

We have given too many rights and privileges to foreign immigrants
Who can blame foreign migrants for wanting to come here? We just give too much away, and we actually borrow the money to do it. Housing, welfare, education, all virtually free, regardless of contribution. Civilised laws on Human Rights have been twisted by a detached liberal elite, with Legal Aid assistance, into paper-thin reasons for British citizenship. Illegal immigrants are just ignored - there are now around 1m by prudent estimates. The interests and ‘rights’ of foreign individuals became more important than those of British society as a whole, which is quite wrong. 

We have also developed a gross over-reliance on Government.
The issues I describe above are never discussed by politicians. There is a wilful blindness to the risks of our own heavy dependency on imported food, energy and raw materials. We have overcrowding, congestion, pollution and stressed public services. But all debate among politicians is about meeting demand, not controlling it, which is futile because demand, fuelled by continued mass immigration, is insatiable. 
  • So many expect central government to solve their problems and to provide everything. It cannot. Centralised economies so often morph into dictatorships, kleptocracies or bureaucracies, or a combination of those. Soviet and Chinese experiments with centralised economies have failed dismally, impoverishing their populations and killing many millions. In China, Mao Tse-Tungs’s Great Leap Forward killed some 45m according to the historian professor Franz Dikotter. In the former Soviet Union, roughly 20m people died prematurely during Stalin’s reign (estimates vary widely). Ref. Failures of centralised economies
  • Governments can’t make money; they can only (at best) provide an environment in which citizens can work productively, by coordinating the delivery of shared infrastructure and through laws and regulations to protect us against our own worst behaviours. 
  • They can also mess things up through incompetence or dishonesty. And they do: huge national debt; wastefulness and incompetence in spending public money; hubristic blindness to easily-anticipated crises like the banking crash, etc.  Ref. Examples of incompetent government spending.
  • But that’s mainly our fault. 
    • Politicians aren’t dumb, but they know we have little appetite for hard truth. Instead we have a much stronger appetite for the bribes and false promises necessary to win votes. Any Government proposals to cut national costs are met habitually with fierce resistance and savage condemnation by the public and by much of the liberal left. We’re addicted to debt and we don’t want to suffer the ‘cold turkey’ of withdrawal. 
    • Collectively, we have become the corrupt form of democracy envisaged by Aristotle - one whose members vote privileges for themselves rather than their society as a whole.
We have lost sight of national self-interest
  • Patriotism isn’t bad. 
    • It’s about being for ourselves, not against everyone else. Your countrymen are your family. And it’s right for family members to help each other, above any consideration of race, religion, class or political ideology. 
  • It's our national culture that made us successful.
    • If you agree that all nations comprise people of similar ranges of latent intellect and talent, then the main human factor that makes a nation successful is its collective culture; its members' ability to collaborate for mutual benefit, based on their inherent principles and values, their creativity, their work ethic and their sense of mutual regard and team spirit. It takes time, hard work and sacrifice to build such cultures, and they are fragile and they need continued effort to sustain them.
  • Lots of nations are unsuccessful, even with the benefit of good natural resources.
    • That's because (natural disasters and external hostilities aside) their cultures are deficient; they are places typified by despotism, extremism, oppression, ignorance, selfishness and violence, such as some countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Their people didn’t work together for peace and prosperity.
  • Every country has the obligation to develop a good social culture.
    • God knows we are all born into different circumstances through no choice of our own, but it’s incumbent on all of us, no matter our origins, to sustain and improve the societies we are born into, and to help others less fortunate to achieve that. 
    • Mass migration has quite corrupted the idea of patriotic responsibility; it’s made it easy for the most talented or wealthy people in impoverished countries to just leave them behind, and so leave their host countries further impoverished, and it’s condemned the less talented workers in developed countries to job losses, lower income and State dependency.
  • It’s right as an individual and as a team to enjoy the products of your own honest labour, to harvest the crop that you planted and nurtured. Likewise it is right, as a nation, to enjoy the privileges that your ancestors worked and fought for, and which you too have worked to sustain. Consider:
    • You wouldn’t labour hard with your family to build a house only to allow some other people to occupy it for free. That would only teach people that they don’t need to work for their privileges; that they can just take other people’s, which is tantamount to theft. 
    • You don’t get to join a successful commercial company simply by gaining access to their premises. Companies are also tightly-integrated teams of people and the successful ones hire only the people they need, both in number and talent. Countries have to manage immigration in the same way. 
  • It’s not xenophobic, racist or fascist to care for one’s own countrymen, one’s own team (whatever their racial origins). 
    • Like it or not, the only way discrete human societies really work is as cohesive teams. 
    • Yes, history proves that there is danger in extreme nationalism: like any potent force, nationalism can be and has been abused but so can federalism - on an even bigger scale. The USA intervention in WWII was seen as good and right but there are many critics of USA and USSR interventions in countries such as in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, South America, Vietnam. 
  • Good nationalism and patriotism are principles utterly essential to sustaining a healthy national society. 
    • It’s about looking after each other; it’s about working together to produce and enjoy privileges that are way beyond our ability as individuals. 
    • Good nationalism is not about xenophobia, hatred or racism, and association with such extremes must be strongly rejected.
We seem to have adopted ‘universalism’ by default, and it will fail.
  • Universalists are those who believe that whatever economic policies do the most people the most good globally is just fine, regardless of nationality. And globalisation has indeed provided material benefit for many previously dirt-poor people in the world. They may be working in conditions that a Westerner would still find unpalatable but it’s better than their alternatives. 
  • But this universalist ideology  is as doomed to failure as Communism, because universalism completely ignores the fact that people living side-by-side in a given nation are heavily dependent on each other socially and economically and that polarisation amongst them (even if it’s only relative) causes resentment, friction and - ultimately - chaos, violence and poverty. 
  • And we cannot just adopt universalism by ourselves. 
    • If one nation abandons its sense of nationhood, then others with stronger national identities and solidarity (whether consensual or imposed) will have greater strength and will take advantage of it, especially if they have malice of intent. 
  • Nationalism is necessary because collaboration between humans just doesn’t work at a higher, global scale (other than at the highest strategic levels). We’re too disparate in so many ways. 
In a nutshell, we in the UK have become a very weak team:
  • We have become an increasingly disjointed, self-entitled ‘grab what you can’ society and - collectively - we are horribly confused:
    • We want cheap goods from cheap labour but we don’t want to work for less money.
    • We don’t want mass immigration (the working class), but we do (the employers).
    • We don’t want more tax and debt but we want the Government to spend more on everything.
    • We want more houses but we don’t want to lose our green spaces.
    • We want more roads and vehicles but we don’t want more pollution and congestion.
    • We don’t want more personal debt but we can’t stop borrowing.
    • We want to be strong but we have cut our defences substantially.
    • We are obsessed with minority rights but neglect the interests of the silent majority. 
    • We have become a disunited, 'grab what you can/ dog eat dog' society.
We're headed for another, deeper crisis unless we change. 

Only strong teams can handle adversity; bad teams fall apart.
  • National societies are, essentially, very large teams of people. Strong teams are powerful; they can achieve things together that no loose collection of individuals can. 
  • Strong teams have a common understanding of their shared objectives, their respective roles and responsibilities and of rules governing their conduct; their members care about the fortunes of the whole team and not just their own; they have mutual loyalty, support and trust.
  • Strong teams have great leaders. Strong teams are sustained by their members’ conscious efforts to keep them that way, and membership is stable enough to sustain team spirit. Strong teams are invigorated by some new members but they cannot survive constant changes of membership. 
  • The opposite is also true: good teams degrade through neglect, high turnover and poor leadership into bad teams. Bad teams fall apart and fail. 
  • Check out the wisdom of General Sir Peter Wall, Chief of the British Army 2010-14: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/united-you-will-beat-your-rivals-whatever-they-throw-at-you-nhbds8mld

And the possibility of adversity is getting stronger

The risk of Global overpopulation

Global population has tripled in a very short time: from 2.5bn in 1950 to over 8.0bn now. 
We humans did this based on medical advances and on our technical ability to find and exploit huge, ancient reserves of fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas) to power machinery for agriculture and manufacturing and distribution. But those reserves are finite and - as yet - there is no clean, safe substitute. 
All the developed countries mark their progress by continued economic growth but - as we grow in number - so contention grows for finite resources like habitable land, food, energy, fresh water and raw materials. 

It’s true that earlier predictors of crisis through overpopulation have been proven wrong. 
In 1798, Malthus predicted imminent catastrophe, at a time when global population was around 1bn. But he was right in principle; he was just way too early.  Global resources are finite and exhaustible.
Our world is of a finite size, as is its fertile land and oceans, and its stock of minerals. Without intervention by ourselves or by fate, we will outgrow it. 
Think about how we would manage our number if we were living on a small island with no access to any other resources. Would we just continue to reproduce until we could no longer grow enough to eat, or find enough fuel for power and warmth, or enough space to live comfortably? That’s just blind conformity with nature’s violent ‘survival of the fittest’ rules, and the road to starvation, chaos, conflict and poverty. (Read the book ‘Collapse’ by Jared Diamond). 

Maybe you think we should just follow 'survival of the fittest' rules? Well, there are two big problems with that:
  • Nature is too brutal. 
    • In nature, the weak are either denied the right to breed, denied access to shelter and nourishment or culled by predators. Some carnivores kill competing adults of their own kind, and their offspring, so that their own genes will dominate. The fittest survive. In contrast, it’s the poorest in human societies that produce the most children, as the only form of social insurance they have. In wealthier countries, we just watch them do that, fret over their awful plight and provide them with £billions in emergency aid during the inevitable crises. That’s actually inhumane because it allows the crises to develop in the first place, it allows more innocent children to be born into misery and because misdirected aid has been proven to prolong conflicts.
  • It's too dangerous.
    • Unlike all other species, we humans have developed terrifying weapons, capable of destroying all life on earth. Brutal competition for survival of the fittest amongst humans could lead to the survival of no-one. We just can’t afford to take that risk.
So how could we collaborate to produce less children? 
No-one wants to volunteer. China tried it and it didn’t work. It’s a taboo subject because it’s too close to eugenics. But the alternative - as described above - is stark. It’s like we’re living with no more sophistication than bacteria. Aren't we smarter than that? Or is there an unstated acceptance that nature or fate will decide? That could be very messy. 
The answer is obvious: adults should give birth only to children that they and their immediate families can personally support. Producing children that are doomed to suffer is avoidable and immoral. The most developed nations must help the least developed nations achieve the prosperous self-reliance that would help them control their birthrate, and not just throw aid money at them when they fail. 
Ref https://www.populationmatters.org

The risk of Environmental degradation
Our ability to control our environment is impressive but dangerous: we are using finite supplies of energy and natural resources and polluting our environment in the process. Just read the headlines:
  • Oceans polluted by plastic; sea creatures ingesting toxins.
  • Increasingly extreme weather, perhaps with historical precedent but considered extreme now because humans have occupied land previously considered too inhospitable. 
  • Air pollution in the most heavily-populated cities and a gradually-increasing global level. 
  • Shortages of clean water.
  • Huge areas of rainforest denuded.
  • Loss of wildlife habitat and diversity.
  • The decline through cruel poaching of elephants, rhinos, big cats, sharks etc.
We are committed to continual economic growth but that is simply not possible; there will come a tipping point when the sheer, ever-increasing weight of human demand cannot be met by our environment. 
Ref. https://www.populationmatters.org/about/campaigns-and-projects/welcome-to-the-anthropocene/

The risk of Climate change
Even though we are finding and extracting more previously unobtainable reserves of fossil fuel (e.g fracking for shale gas), burning it will further increase the risk of severe climate change. 
There is no absolute consensus on climate change, and plenty of sceptics, but the risk is real enough that we have to take some precautions. But although efforts by the developed nations seem praiseworthy, there are two major problems: one is that they are simply exporting manufacturing pollution, mostly to China; the second is that continual increases in population increases pollution at a greater rate than measures to limit it. 
The climate is going to change, and we are not doing enough to prepare for that. 

Renewables are not enough
The increased use of renewable sources of power like solar and wind power is good but it’s not good enough: it will generate nowhere near the power we derive from fossil fuels like coal and oil and gas. Scientists continue to search for the holy grail of nuclear fusion power (the power of the Sun) but it remains frustratingly elusive. 

The most pessimistic climate change forecasters talk of a tipping point beyond which climate change will be dramatic and very damaging for humans and all other forms of life.

“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it” - Robert Swan

The risk of Financial meltdown
The whole of the Western world is printing and borrowing money at a prodigious rate. The US government in 2024 has $36 trillion of debt; the UK has £2.6tn, and just about all other European countries have proportionately the same. It defies all common sense to believe that this can continue without breaking the financial system again. There are plenty of precedents in history (Germany, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Argentina etc). 

The grave potential consequences
So, laden with an ever-increasing debt and unable to fully support or defend ourselves, we are vulnerable to any shocks which would cause interruption in the supply of essential resources. It could be caused by another financial meltdown, another pandemic, war, natural events precipitated by climate change such as famines, floods and storms or even (remember Iceland) volcanic eruption. 
Unless we do something different, we will be at risk of starvation, chaos, violence and poverty. 

No insurance 
And if it does end badly, there are no effective global or supra-national governments to take the blame and make it right. Look at what’s happened in the European ‘Union’: a single currency - the Euro - that has helped promote German exports but impoverish the Mediterranean countries; a unilateral declaration by Germany that they will accommodate over 1.5m refugees into ‘our’ Europe; the ‘Freedom of Movement’ principles that strip poorer countries of their productive workforce and condemn lower-skilled British people to either low wages or unemployment and permanent dependency on the State. 
Ask the Greeks how they feel about the support they had from Europe. 

Do you care about all this?
Maybe you haven’t thought about it? You need to. If not for your own sake, then for your children and grandchildren.

What can we do? What are the options?

What you don't change, you accept. 
As a single nation, we have either have to let fate decide our future, or become very much more self-sufficient, or compete aggressively with other countries in a dangerous, global ‘survival of the fittest’ competition. I dismiss that third option because of the terrible potential consequences. 

Option 1 - Let fate decide.
  • Maybe it will all just work out OK without intervention. 
    • Maybe governments will realise that we face common threats and will unite in peaceful collaboration to solve our problems: they will disarm, introduce population controls and share out the world’s resources equitably. It will all be lovely. Want to put some money on that? 
  • Or it could go horribly wrong
    • I suggest there are stronger odds on chaos and conflict. If our ever-increasing close contact with each other and with animals doesn’t provide the breeding ground for a killer virus (Spanish flu killed up to 100m globally, far more people than WWII) then contention for finite resources could easily lead to armed conflict, and we are now equipped with such terrifying weapons that any new global war could be the end of all of us.
    • If you think this is a good choice, you can stop reading now. 
Option 2 - Change our behaviour.
  • Limit our own numbers
  • Control our consumption and pollution
  • Look after each other and focus on the common good
This can’t happen without a radical change in our personal attitude and behaviour. We each have to stop being so selfish, complacent, careless and short-termist. We have to switch our focus away from personal advantage and the immediate future and back to the long term and the common good. 
I call that being a member of the ‘Teamwork Nation’. See next section

What you can do is become a 'Teamwork' citizen

1. Become a Teamwork citizen by changing your own behaviour. Make it known that you do.

2. Vote only for politicians who subscribe to the Teamwork Nation. There are none at present but they will emerge if demand is strong.

3. Work for, buy from and trade only with companies that subscribe to the Teamwork Nation. 

What does it mean to be a Teamwork Citizen? 
It means building on the established foundations of our modern society, for example freedom, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, education, safety, free trade, social security, property rights, etc., and complementing them with a new moral code:

1. We each live by a new 'Teamwork Nation' moral code:
  • We each take primary responsibility for ourselves and our dependents.
  • We are each as productive as we can be and we live within our means.
  • We care about and help each other:
    • We do not unfairly exploit others just because we’re smarter.
    • We do not lean on others just because they’re smarter or more industrious.
    • We support colleagues who suffer misfortune but we do not tolerate wilful idleness.
    • We employ fellow national citizens in preference to others. 
    • We buy nationally-produced goods and services by first preference. 
    • We don’t discriminate based on race, sex, religion, class etc.
  • We willingly pay tax but we demand high efficiency in its expenditure. 
  • We build and conserve social and economic prosperity for our descendants.
  • We protect and conserve the environment.
  • We help our international neighbours to achieve prosperity and avoid disaster.
  • We guard against external threats to our wellbeing and prosperity. 
  • We are willing to criticise anti-social behaviour, and willing to accept such criticism.
  • We produce only the children that we personally can afford to raise. It’s not a human right to produce children that others have to raise and nurture. **
2. We demand corporate support for the Teamwork Nation
More than ever before, international commercial corporations influence and control societies, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google etc. 
If you’re going to be an Teamwork Citizen, you need much better information about them: you need to know that the companies you work for or buy things from are equally committed to your ideals; that they are not exploitive people who abuse workers, disrupt society, dodge taxes, pollute our environment and care only for their own fortunes. 

3. We demand government support for the Teamwork Nation
You will need to know that the taxes you pay are spent efficiently on things that you agree with: like regulation of pollution, provision of infrastructure, policing, a judiciary and a defence force. You will need to know that the very powerful and costly machinery of government isn’t being abused in pursuit of dangerous political ideologies, or simply wasted on fools’ errands.

Government should implement policies to match Teamwork principles, for example:
  • An immediate end to mass immigration and the expulsion of illegal intruders.
  • Housing priority for settled UK nationals. 
  • Society’s rights to take priority over individuals’ rights. [to elaborate]
  • No permanent welfare subsidies to able people with fair opportunities to work. 
  • A Decency Rating for corporations, considering environmental care, payment of tax, treatment of workers and proportionate rewards for senior management. 
  • Preservation of agricultural and recreational land, not unlimited development.
  • Elimination of annual spending deficit in the near future.
  • Reduction or elimination of national debt within 10 years. 
  • An Efficiency Rating for Government departments, considering over-budget and failed project costs, investments which fail to deliver benefits, operational costs vs output etc.
  • A Democracy Rating for Government, considering consultation and public support for policies (or lack thereof) with substantial social and economic effects (e.g. mass immigration, HS2, foreign wars). 
Yes, this is a nationalistic outlook, but in a positive, benign sense. 
Nationalism isn’t bad. It’s about being for ourselves, not against everyone else. We can’t just abandon nationalism unless every other nation did likewise. When one nation abandons its sense of nationhood, then others with stronger national identities and solidarity (whether consensual or imposed) will have greater strength and will take advantage of it, especially if they have malice of intent. 
The Nation State is, in a practical sense, the largest social unit in which democracy can work. 

Changing the world from the top down isn’t going to happen. 
Change has to start with individuals and the national societies they live in, and spread out from there, because standards tend to emerge rather than to be pre-defined. Many of the 195 separate countries in the world are at grossly different stages in their evolution, and the chances of persuading large, poor, emerging countries to give up their developing privileges are scant. 

In due course, if enough countries adopt and practice the same philosophy, then nationalism can be dropped. Maybe that would take 100 years, who knows?

In the meantime, we have to look after ourselves first. Charity begins at home. 

**
People in poor countries have more children than in the developed world because it’s the only form of social security they have. So, as a society, we would have to pledge to support in their old age those who choose to have few or no children. 


Can this really be achieved from the bottom up?


I see four possibilities from this point:


1. We do nothing.

Our society will continue to degrade until it’s busted, like Argentina. Only then will the people realise what they lost and strive to make it better (also like Argentina).

Regrettably, this outcome seems the most likely; it's human nature. Crowds are inert and react mostly to either crises or compelling opportunities. While the State keeps papering over the cracks with funny money, they continue to suspend the inevitable crisis.


2. A great new leader emerges, one who will sober us all up and steer us away from disaster.

We're unlikely to find one amongst the current political cadre. The mucky world of politics repels people of the intelligence, vision, strength, competence and integrity we need - people unafraid to say that we’re borrowing our way into penury, and who won't make foolish, expensive promises to win votes. Maybe 'cometh the hour, cometh the man/woman'? 


3. Taxpayers revolt, and force a crisis. 

They force the State to stop overtaxing them, indebting them with irresponsible borrowing and debasing their money by printing ever more of it.

Taxpayers don't (yet) have the means to coordinate a revolution. And Parliament isn't going to help them anytime soon. As George Bernard Shaw said: 'A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul'. But, as history proves, a few determined individuals can trigger revolt.  


4. We change of our own volition, through a collective realisation that we need to.

This would be the best option. Internal motivation is so much better than external imposition. I hope that there are enough people who wish to avoid crisis and who are willing to take action. Remember, what you don't change you accept. 


So it's up to you now: 


Our advanced, modern society was built over hundreds of years at great cost, effort and sacrifice. You were lucky enough to inherit it. But what you don't look after you lose. 


Team Up To Win. Team Up Or Lose


Why this emphasis on changing personal behaviour ?


The smallest things - atoms - determine the structure of the largest things.
The structure of the whole of our infinite universe is determined by the behaviour of its smallest components - atoms. The way atoms react with each other (bonding, repelling, reacting) forms everything from planets to galaxies (OK, there is dark energy and matter too but let’s not get too technical..)

And the behaviour of individuals shapes advanced human societies. 
As the behaviour of individual atoms governs the behaviour of materials and objects, so the good personal conduct of the great majority in a society can determine whether it succeeds or fails. 

Historically, the main reason that human societies have developed as they have is rooted in our unique ability to specialise in skills and to collaborate for mutual benefit, i.e teamwork.

We work with and trade with each other to earn privileges as a virtual team that are far beyond our ability to realise as individuals. No normal person could build their own house or their own car or TV or washing machine, or produce the great variety of food we enjoy; all those things are produced through specialisation, collaboration and industrialisation. For societies to work successfully, the great majority has to be productive and collaborative.

Advanced societies only work when their members are productive and collaborative
When an individual person behaves responsibly, then they are an asset to their families and no burden to them. And that effect is magnified upwards: responsible families are an asset to their communities, and responsible communities an asset to their towns, and so on through counties and nations and to the world. 
As long as the great majority are as productive as they can be and willing to trade fairly then peace and prosperity follows. Poverty and crime would be minimal.

But the opposite is also true - Societies break down when productivity and collaboration fails.
  • Where people are unproductive they become a burden to others; where they are not only unproductive but hostile, they are even more of a burden. 
  • And when the amount of unproductive behaviour in a society exceeds a low percentage then there is a general debilitating effect: not only do the unproductive people not contribute, but the effort required to support or contain them substantially diminishes the productivity of others, in a vicious downward spiral. Resentment, chaos, violence and poverty can follow. 
  • 100% good behaviour is unachievable, of course: human nature is imperfect and destructive behaviour has always been around. That’s why we have legislation and deterrence.
We all need a framework to guide us into productivity and collaboration
Ideally, we would all know exactly how a successful society is structured and how it operates, such that we could find our ideal role in it. There would be a model for it, like an architect’s model of a house serves as a pattern for construction of the real thing. Otherwise we risk working hard with good intent to produce things that aren’t really needed by others. But there is no model. Instead, there are three main drivers of activity: social norms, markets and government. 
  • Social norms are the unwritten rules for interaction between people in a society; what’s permissible and impermissible; what’s good and what’s bad; what’s needed and not needed. These factors can be highly variable between areas, classes and social sub-cultures.
  • Markets make demand for goods and services evident and so serve to stimulate supply by whomsoever has the resources and talent. When there is demand in a free market, there will be supply, and vice versa. But markets cannot supply everything.
  • Governments assimilate our collective requirement for large-scale public infrastructure and services like roads, electricity distribution, schools etc, and organise it on our behalf. Governments also function as the referee for fair play; they articulate and enshrine our shared values and principles in law, law enforcement and in policies for taxation, distribution and regulation. 
But that framework is failing us
Markets are failing because they are serving to destroy social cohesion within western countries. 
Markets don’t care about the social and economic effects of exporting manufacturing or mass immigration of cheap labour, and they (with either the collusion or passivity of government) have generated relative but toxic inequality in Western countries. Karl Marx himself predicted that income inequality would undo capitalism. 

Government is failing because it can neither contain the markets or compensate for their effects, despite a common misplaced faith in their ability to do that. 
It’s also failing because it cannot achieve popular consensus for social ‘fair play’: the extreme Left want a form of Communism where we all work primarily for other people; the extreme Right want untrammelled free markets in which everyone fends for themselves. It’s our fault, really: we have very divided views and a government without the talent or vision to unify us. That won’t change. Correction has to start with us as individuals. 

And because markets and governments are failing, social norms are being disrupted: we’re losing our shared vision of what’s right and wrong, what’s productive and what's destructive, and what social fair play feels like. 

Correction has to start with us as individuals. But we may need the shock of revolt to trigger it..

List of appendices
Click each appendix name to to straight to the appendix

Energy imports
Ref https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/631146/UK_Energy_in_Brief_2017.pdf

Essentially, the UK imported 36% of all energy used in 2016.
  • 63m tons of oil was consumed, of which 34% was imported.
  • 43m tons of gas (in oil equivalent), 47% of which was imported.
  • Low carbon sources formed 17% of consumption, of which 8% was nuclear and 6% bioenergy (wood, waste etc)
Just 1.7% of energy consumed came from wind power. 

This isn’t new; before North Sea Oil, the UK had a higher reliance on imported energy. Neither are we alone in our reliance - most EU countries are worse. But historical precedent doesn’t legitimise current practice. Global population has increased substantially since then - from 2.5bn in 1950 to 7.5bn now - and so we contend with many billions of people in emerging countries for those finite resources.

Food imports
Ref https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-statistics-pocketbook-2017/food-statistics-in-your-pocket-2017-global-and-uk-supply

In 2016, the UK imported 51% of its food.
  • 30% from the EU
  • Around 4% each from N America, S America, Africa and Asia. 
The UK also exports food, but imports exceed exports for every type (e.g. meat, veg, fruit)

Raw materials
[Data to be provided..]

Analysis of public expenditure in 2017 by category, in £billions

Pensions and welfare (various forms) expenditure in 2017. 

Total £264bn, of which:
  • Pensions £111bn 42%
  • Incapacity, disability & injury benefits £44bn 16%
  • Unemployment benefits £2bn 1%
  • Housing benefits £25bn 10%
  • Family benefits, income support & tax credits £46bn 18%
  • Personal social services and other benefits £35bn 13%

Total social welfare costs have increased. Of a total of £264bn in 2017, some £70bn is spent on housing benefits, family benefits, income support and tax credits. That’s about half as much as the entire cost of Healthcare, way more than our entire cost of defence and more than the cost of education. Police Services cost a total of only £3.8bn.

Working class dependency on the State has increased enormously: the proportion receiving more in benefits than they pay in tax has risen significantly, to 51.5 per cent in 2015 from 45.9 per cent in 1997 and 41% in 1977. Source ONS.

Appendix 3  - UK National Debt

Source https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/download_multi_year_2010_2017UKb_17c1li111mcn_G0t
Percentages of expenditure relative to GDP are comfortably exceeded by those of Japan, the USA, France, Italy and Spain. But those countries' predicaments do make ours more comfortable or less risky. 
   
Quantitative easing

See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15198789 for an explanation of what this is. 

From 2008 - 2016, the Bank of England printed £435bn
From 2016 onwards, after the Brexit vote, another £70bn was printed. 

Appendix 4  - 
UK personal debt trends


Source: https://www.moneyexpert.com/debt/uk-personal-debt-levels-continue-rise/

“According to the latest figures published by the Money Charity, the total value of outstanding personal debt in the UK has reached £1.576 trillion.

Households in the UK owed an average of £57,943 in January. This means that the average UK resident currently owes £30,455 (including mortgages), which is 114% of the typical annual earnings for the UK. The amount of interest paid of on debts in the 12 months’ prior sits at £50.8 billion, or £139 million per day.

Debt is expected to continue to climb in the next few years, with the Office for Budget Responsibility predicting that total household debt will reach £2.296 trillion by the first quarter of 2022 in their March 2018 forecast. This would break down to £84,412 per household, though this is based on the assumption that the number of households in the UK does not change”

According to the ONS in July 2018, households are spending more than they earn for the first time in 30 years, and that the typical household’s outgoings were £900 higher than their incomings in 2017. The poorest 10 percent of households had a disposable income of £5000 but spent nearly £13000. 
The national shortfall was £25bn.
Households took out £80bn in loans in 2017 and they deposited just £37bn in bank accounts.

Appendix 5 - 
UK immigration & population stats

Source: MigrationWatch and ONS https://www.migrationwatchuk.org

“The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimate that in 2017, just under 9.4 million people living in the UK were born abroad, (14.3% of the total population of the UK). Of these, 3.7 million were from countries now in the European Union and just under 5.7 million were from non-EU countries.”

  • From 1991 to 2001 net international migration accounted directly for 44 percent of the increase in the population of the UK and by 2001-2013 for 56 percent. 
  • From 1996 to 2014, 65% of UK household growth was the direct consequence of international migration to the UK. MigrationWatch ex ONS
  • Between 2010 and 2014, households headed by persons born outside the UK increased by 115,000 or 78%. MigrationWatch ex ONS.
  • By 2015, foreign-born workers made up around 7m of the workforce, or around 17%.
  • If children born to immigrants are counted, immigration has been responsible for 80% of population growth since 2001 (Source Migrationwatch). According to an ONS report in July 2018, 28.4% of the 680,000 live births in 2016/17 were to foreign-born mothers, up from 11.6% in 1990.
  • Net migration has been the dominant component of population growth since about 1997 and the natural increase of the UK- born population of England and Wales has contributed the least. MigrationWatch ex ONS.
  • The population of London is now nearly 40% foreign-born. 
  • There are also now around 1m illegal immigrants by prudent estimates. This is just ignored.




Appendix 6 - 
Net economic effects of immigration


  • Between 1997 and 2010, more than half of the rise in employment in the UK was accounted for by foreign nationals. 
  • In 2016, some 80% of 414,000 new jobs were taken by foreign-born workers. 
  • By 2015, Foreign-born workers made up around 7m of the workforce, or around 17%.

Despite many claims of benefit for the UK economy, several reports have indicated neutral or only marginal gain:
The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee, reporting in April 2008, concluded that:
“We have found no evidence for the argument, made by the government, business and many others, that net immigration generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population.”

In January 2012 the Migration Advisory Committee said that even GDP per head exaggerated the benefit of immigration because:
“It is the immigrants themselves rather than the extant residents who are the main gainers.”
They suggested that the GDP of residents should be the main focus. They recognised that the resident population would gain via any “dynamic effects” of skilled immigration on productivity and innovation, remarking that “these exist and may be large, but they are elusive to measure”.

In their annual Fiscal Sustainability Report, the Office for Budgetary Responsibility concluded in August 2013:
“In our attempt to summarise the vast literature on the impact of immigration on the labour market and productivity we have not found definitive evidence on the impact of immigrants on productivity and GDP. Most of the literature seems to indicate that immigrants have a positive, although not significant, impact on productivity and GDP.”

Appendix 7 - 
Housing supply in the UK

Total dwelling stock, Great Britain (not all UK)

1969     18.5m
1977     20.4m
1997     24.1m
2016     27.7m

In the last 50 years, the total GB dwelling stock has increased by about one third, or 9.2m. 
England is the second most densely populated country in the EU with 417 people per square kilometre, after the Netherlands (with 500 people per square kilometre) and excluding islands such as Malta. 
Source Migrationwatch. 

So it’s no surprise, as housing, industry, leisure and agriculture compete for a finite amount of land, that houses became much more expensive due to the imbalance of supply and demand. Politicians and commentators regularly assert for political gain that annual housebuilding rates are so much lower than in the past but they completely ignore the fact that our land mass is finite, and already overcrowded **. 

The national cost of an average house has gone from 3.6 times workers’ annual gross full-time earnings in 1997 to 7.6 times in 2017. Source ONS. 

** Many commentators observe that ‘only’ 6% (contentious) of our landmass is built on (buildings, roads, airports, quarries etc.) but that is wilfully naive; I would suggest that any landmass is overcrowded when it cannot supply enough food, energy, water and raw materials to sustain its population and when trying to do so creates pollution and significant loss of biodiversity. By those measures, the UK is already heavily overcrowded. 

Appendix 8 - 
Road usage in the UK

Source: licencebureau.co.uk
https://www.licencebureau.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/road-use-statistics.pdf

There are some 246,000 miles of roads in the UK. In 1951, there were 186,000 miles of roads.

In 2014, 311 billion miles were travelled by 35.6m vehicles of all types. 

In 1951, 37 billion miles were travelled by 4.2m vehicles of all types. 

Appendix 9 - Air quality/ pollution

Global air pollution is rising, according to this Word Health Organisation report from 2016:
http://www.who.int/en/news-room/detail/12-05-2016-air-pollution-levels-rising-in-many-of-the-world-s-poorest-cities.

From 2008-2013, it increased globally by 8%. It’s no surprise really, since there are some 5bn more people on the planet since 1950. The worst air pollution is in low- and middle-income countries, with the lowest pollution in high-income countries like the UK. 

This WHO report from 2018 says that 90% of the world’s population breathes air containing high levels of pollutants. 
http://www.who.int/news-room/detail/02-05-2018-9-out-of-10-people-worldwide-breathe-polluted-air-but-more-countries-are-taking-action
Air pollutants in the UK - declining
This March 2018 report from UK National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI) Programme shows an encouraging trend in reduction of emissions of air pollutants. 
https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/assets/documents/reports/cat07/1803161032_GB_IIR_2018_v1.2.pdf
It covers the following pollutants:


Ammonia is the only pollutant showing a recent increase, in the last 5 years, from agriculture. 

So, despite massive increases in the number of vehicles on our roads, air pollution has either decreased or improved, thanks largely to improvement in motor vehicle engine technology and reduction of emissions from coal-fired electricity generation stations. 
See https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/air-quality-statistics

However, in 2017, research by the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change and the Royal College of Physicians revealed that air pollution levels in 44 cities in the UK are above the recommended World Health Organization guidelines. 
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/air-pollution-uk-worst-places-towns-cities-london-too-dangerous-to-breath-un-who-report-a8028566.html

Work is ongoing to assess the effects of other pollution from vehicles, i.e. the fine dust from disc brakes and tyres as they wear down. With over 35m vehicles on the roads, this is likely to be a significant factor in air and surface pollution.

Particulates in the UK. 

The WHO guideline values for particulate matter are 20 μg/m3 for PM10, and 10 μg/m3 for PM2.5, respectively. According to WHO statistics at http://www.who.int/phe/health_topics/outdoorair/databases/cities/en/

PM10 average UK    18 
PM10 London           22
PM10 worst              25 Port Talbot
PM10 best                 09 Aberdeen

PM2.5 average UK   12
PM2.5 London          15
PM2.5 worst             15 London
PM2.5 best                09 Aberdeen

Although London exceeds WHO guidelines, it’s nothing like cities in China, which are around 90+ for PM10 (some well over 100) and 50+ for PM2.5. It’s good that air pollution in the UK has not increased in line with massive increases in the number of homes and motor vehicles; this was due to the development of much cleaner combustion technologies and in some part, I assume, to the shift of much of our manufacturing industry to China. 

But while local pollution controls are a good thing, air moves freely around the globe, so background pollution is increasing. 

Appendix 10 - Agriculture in the UK

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_Kingdom#1945_to_present

Agriculture uses some 69% of total land area.
The total area of agricultural holdings is about 171,000 km2 (43 million acres), or 183,000 km2 including rough grazing land. 
Arable land is 25% of land area, compared to 30% in the 1960’s. 

The UK produces less than 60% of the food it eats (although some is exported). This dependency on imports isn’t new: it was just as high before WWII, but those imports of food supplies were specifically targeted by our enemies,forcing the post-war government to decrease that reliance via the Agricultural Act of 1947. 

Accordingly, since then, yields have increased fourfold, due to increases in size of fields (removal of hedgerows), a huge increase in mechanisation and greater use of fertilisers and pesticides/ herbicides. This degree of mechanisation produces some 9% of the UK’s emission of greenhouse gases and has had significant effects on biodiversity and soil health (see below). It also reinforces our dependence on imported energy, to power agricultural machines. 

Modern high-yield agricultural methods have had a very negative effect on wildlife. 
Read the separate section Wildlife Decline

The intensive use of fertilisers also degrades rivers. 
See reference to the Environmental Agency report in the separate section Water Quality.

For more statistics:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/arable-land-hectares-wb-data.html
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2664.2002.00695.x
https://www.populationmatters.org/documents/britain_feeds.pdf

Appendix 11 - 
examples of abuse of Human Rights laws


An internet trawl will reveal many cases in which foreign migrants have abused EU Human Rights laws to stay in the UK. This is a report by Dominic Raab MP in 2013 regarding abuse of Article 8 of the ECHR by foreign criminals in order to avoid deportation from there UK. 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10037825/Dominic-Raab-Time-for-us-to-reset-skewed-human-rights.html

And another from 2015:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11381944/Human-Rights-Act-has-helped-28-terrorists-to-stay-in-UK.html

Appendix 12 - 
failures of centralised economies

China

China as a whole is very obviously doing very well economically these days, after embracing a sort of centrally controlled high-production private enterprise model. But the path to this state has been littered with death and tragedy.

Read Franz Dikotter’s book ‘Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (Peoples Trilogy 1). This synopsis copied from amazon.co.uk:

“Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. 
Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.”

The 3rd book in Franz Dikotter’s trilogy is “The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962―1976 (Peoples Trilogy 3)” . This synopsis is also copied from amazon.co.uk:

“After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.
Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.”

Appendix 13 - failures of societies through overpopulation


Read the book ‘Collapse - How Societies Choose To Fail Or Survive’ by Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, and a well-respected author. 
This synopsis is extracted from Wikipedia:

“Diamond identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbours, collapse of essential trading partners, environmental problems, and the society's response to the forgoing four factors.

The root problem in all but one of Diamond's factors leading to collapse is overpopulation relative to the practicable (as opposed to the ideal theoretical) carrying capacity of the environment. One environmental problem not related to overpopulation is the harmful effect of accidental or intentional introduction of non-native species to a region.

Diamond also writes about cultural factors (values), such as the apparent reluctance of the Greenland Norse to eat fish. Diamond also states that "it would be absurd to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapses: the collapse of the Soviet Union is a modern counter-example, and the destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 BC is an ancient one. It's obviously true that military or economic factors alone may suffice.”

This longer synopsis is more thorough: http://www.supersummary.com/collapse/summary/

Appendix 14 - Failures of societies through economic mismanagement


Venezuela is perhaps the most topical of numerous countries that have failed through political and economic mismanagement. 

In 1970, Venezuela was one of the richest countries in Latin America. It had oil reserves twice those of Iraq and seven times those of the USA, and lots of natural gas, iron ore and bauxite (the world's main source of aluminium) and gold.

But corruption, political and economic mismanagement have destroyed it. Staples and basic commodities are unaffordable and inflation rages; economists are predicting that it could reach 1,000,000% this year. 

This summary by Kim Iskyan, of Stansberry Churchouse Research, is informative:
https://www.quora.com/What-caused-Venezuela-to-become-a-failed-state

Appendix 15 - 
Environmental degradation

Wildlife Decline in the UK

The State of Nature 2016 report painted a bleak picture:

“Between 1970 and 2013, 56 per cent of species declined, with 40 per cent showing strong or moderate declines,” it said.

“Of the nearly 8,000 species assessed using modern Red List criteria, 15 per cent are threatened with extinction from Great Britain.

“A new measure that assesses how intact a country’s biodiversity is, suggests that the UK has lost significantly more nature over the long-term than the global average. The index suggests that we are among the most nature-depleted countries in the world.”

Read also Mark Cocker’s book 'Our Place - Can we save Britain’s wildlife before it’s too late’
This is an excerpt from Christopher Hart’s review in The Sunday Times:

“In a field near Peterborough stands an iron column, hammered into the peaty fenland soil in 1851 to mark the ground level. “Today it stands 13ft above it.” Thanks to “improvement” and drainage, some of the richest soil on Earth is being lost at the rate of more than half an inch a year, blown away into dust.

Mark Cocker is an eminent ornithologist and prizewinning nature writer, whose Birds & People is one of the great naturalist books of our time. In Our Place, he has written a fierce polemic, as he admits, about how the British people regard themselves as lovers of nature, yet live in one of the most denatured and wildlife-impoverished countries on Earth.

He has no time for the rational optimists who blithely insist that such observations are mere ecopanic. They must be walking around with their eyes closed. The most detailed and rigorous science tells us that our native wildlife is in free fall. As with the planet’s general health, best documented by the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report, the ecological crisis is not something potentially approaching us from afar. We are living through it. We have lost 44m pairs of breeding birds in the past 50 years.”

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/our-place-can-we-save-britain-s-wildlife-mark-cocker-review-90lz0dswl

Appendix 16 - 
Water quality in the UK

People consume water and produce waste, as does the agricultural industry that feeds us. Obviously, the more people in a given landmass, the more consumption and waste. 
In a report (Flushed Away) released in October 2017, the World Wildlife Fund observed that 
“55% of our failing rivers are polluted with sewage. That’s about 40% of all our rivers in England and Wales”. 
https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/40-rivers-england-and-wales-polluted-sewage

Against a background of generally improving water cleanliness, The Environment Agency issued a report in Feb 2018 which asserts that are still ‘far too many serious pollution incidents’ from agriculture. And that “Agriculture is now the largest sector responsible for water pollution, while the number of serious incidents by water companies has remained at around 60 per year for the past decade – more than one a week.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/far-too-many-serious-pollution-incidents-says-environment-agency-water-quality-report

Key findings of the EA report:
  • In 2016, 86% of river water bodies had not reached good ecological status. The main reasons for this are agriculture and rural land management, the water industry, and urban and transport pressures.
  • Water quality issues were the cause of 38% of all fish test failures, and 61% of invertebrate test failures in rivers in 2015.
  • Pollutant loads to rivers from water industry discharges have declined in recent years, with reductions of up to 70% since 1995.
  • Over the last decade the number of serious water pollution incidents from water companies has remained broadly the same, with about 60 incidents each year. That is more than one a week.
  • For assessed river water bodies in England, 55% were at less than good status for phosphorus in 2016.
  • Nearly half of groundwater bodies will not reach good chemical status by 2021. For groundwaters protected for drinking water, nitrate levels were responsible for 65% of failures to achieve good chemical status.
  • Bathing water quality has improved over the last 30 years with 98% passing minimum standards and 65% at excellent status in 2017.
  • Population growth, climate change, emerging chemicals, plastic pollution, nano-particles and fracking all present potential future threats to water quality.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/709493/State_of_the_environment_water_quality_report.pdf

Appendix 17 - energy consumption

I highly recommend the book ‘Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air’ written in 2009 by Professor David JC MacKay, FRS, Professor of natural Philosophy, University Of Cambridge and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It is still highly relevant. 

This book, completely devoid of bias, cant and hypocrisy, attempts to measure our total consumption of energy, identify its various sources (gas, coal, oil, wind etc) and visualise both where we might obtain our future energy supplies and how we might reduce our consumption of them. 

Prof MacKay converts all various forms of energy into kilowatt-hours (kWh) for ease of comparison and reveals some stark differences in consumption levels between countries. In the UK (at the time of study) consumption per person was 125kWh per day, per person. In the US it was about twice that level and in Africa around 20kWh or less. Consumption statistics are for the total of all its forms, e.g. for heating, transport, lighting, manufacturing etc., divided by the population. 

Essentially, Prof MacKay says that there simply aren’t enough conventional energy sources to provide Western levels of consumption to the developing nations and that, in attempting to do so by burning the remaining fossil fuels, we risk catastrophic climate change. 

The book is available online free at https://www.withouthotair.com
This summary is useful: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8014484.stm

Appendix 18 - examples of incompetent government spending

The government has a Major Projects Portfolio of more than 140 projects, to a value of at least £450bn. That’s a lot of taxpayers’ money, and it’s morally and practically mandatory for the government to spend it responsibly and efficiently. But there are too many examples of it failing to do that. 

https://www.softwareadvisoryservice.com/blog/biggest-uk-government-project-failures/

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/18/onequarter_of_gov_it_projects_at_high_risk_of_failure_ipa/

Here are some of the more stand-out problems:

HS2.
A leaked assessment by the Government’s Infrastructure and Projects Authority in 2016 describes the HS2 rail scheme as ‘fundamentally flawed’ and ‘in a precarious position’. The project, with an original costing of £56bn is ‘highly likely to significantly overspend’, with the likely cost increasing to £80bn. It’s notable that there was no popular mandate for this project, and credible analyses of its supposed benefits are hard to find.

Private Finance Initiative (PFI)
The Private Finance Initiative was a means of securing private funding for national infrastructure and services, where private investors’ rewards come from long-dated capital repayments, finance costs, maintenance and operation. It was introduced as a means of keeping capital expenditure off the government’s books, but heavy financial obligations remain. 

As of Jan 2018, the National Audit Office reported that “There are currently over 700 operational PFI and PF2 deals, with a capital value of around £60 billion. Annual charges for these deals amounted to £10.3 billion in 2016-17. Even if no new deals are entered into, future charges which continue until the 2040s amount to £199 billion”. 

It also reported that “The government reduced its use of PFI after the 2008 financial crisis, as the cost of private finance increased. Parliament also became increasingly critical of the model”.
Many of the PFI contracts were awarded to Carillon, whose dramatic failure indicates poor procurement and contractor management skills by government. Other large PFI contractors are also thought to be at risk of failure. 
The NAO’s full report is here: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/PFI-and-PF2.pdf

Automation of medical records
The National Programme for IT (NPfIT) in the NHS was implemented in 2002 to make the NHS more technologically advanced, but after 10 years and almost £10bn the project was scrapped and labelled as the biggest IT failure ever seen. 

2012 Olympics
This admittedly enjoyable event was widely lauded in political circles as a great success, but it was conveniently forgotten that the final cost of some £12bn was way in excess of the initial estimate of £2bn, the figure which was used to obtain parliamentary approval. 

The following website is also informative: 
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/Infrastructure%20report%20%28final%29r.pdf

Appendix 19 - 
anti-social corporate behaviour

“Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked? (And by God, it ought to have both!)”.
First Baron Thurlow (1731-1806) Lord Chancellor of England

Modern corporations are the powerful bodies through which most of us are organised into useful productivity, and suppliers of most of the goods and services we value. Most of them are of noble intent but all powerful forces can be either used or misused, and there are some corporations who behave badly. There are almost too many to list, but here are a few examples:

Financial Services - Wells Fargo bank in the USA - this text from fortune.com:
“After losing the trust of consumers in 2016 for creating millions of fake accounts, Wells Fargo struggled mightily to win back its customer base with promises of transparency and reform.
But Wells Fargo’s woes only deepened in 2017, when the company admitted that it had charged as many as 570,000 consumers for auto insurance that they did not need. Additionally, some 20,000 of those borrowers may have had their cars repossessed as a result. Wells Fargo said it would pay $80 million in remediation. Wells Fargo’s head of consumer banking and some 70 senior managers in the bank’s retail banking segment were also cut as a result.
In the same year, Wells Fargo also revealed that it had uncovered an additional 1.4 million fake accounts on top of the 2.1 million the bank previously disclosed had been created without consumer permission.

Financial services - JP Morgan bank
Before the sub-prime mortgage collapse in 2006, banks and mortgage lenders could see that a bubble was about to burst. They misled their investors about the state of the market and they were even selling mortgage products they knew to be risky. This behaviour exacerbated the subsequent crash. Afterwards, JP Morgan paid a $13 billion settlement to stop investigations. Other banks including Citigroup and RBS were also fined.

Tobacco companies
As depicted in the movie The Insider, American ‘big tobacco’ firms were subjected in 1998 by the US government to the biggest civil settlement in US history. Using statistics showing that the tobacco industry were putting an immense strain on the US healthcare system, the US government took them to court where they were penalised $200 billion in compensation. The tobacco companies also agreed to change the way they marketed their products.

Pharmaceutical companies
In 2009, US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer agreed to pay £45 million in an out-of-court settlement over the deaths of 11 Nigerian children during drug trials. The country's northern Kano state had accused the company of causing the deaths of the children, and injuring 181 more, during tests of an antibiotic during a meningitis outbreak in 1996.
Pfizer was also hit with the biggest criminal fine in US history as part of a $2.3bn settlement with federal prosecutors for mis-promoting medicines and for paying kickbacks to compliant doctors.
The company pleaded guilty to misbranding the painkiller Bextra, withdrawn from the market in 2004, by promoting the drug for uses that were not approved by medical regulators.

Motor manufacturers
The VW Group were found to have installed software in engine management systems that detected when they were being tested, and temporarily modified engine behaviour to reduce emissions. Some 11m cars were so equipped. US authorities have extracted $25 billion in fines, penalties and restitution from VW for the 580,000 tainted diesels it sold in the US. German prosecutors fined VW Euros 1bn.

Appendix 20 - 
Misuse of international aid

Some £100bn is spent annually on development assistance by members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). 

It’s very difficult to find out which development assistance provides lasting material benefit and which is wasted. Perhaps the absence of such data is revealing in itself. 

Bu there are many authors critical of misplaced foreign aid. 
Most failed expenditure is that which doesn’t address the fundamental problems of social and political disorder in the receiving countries. Sometimes, the money ends up in the hands of despots and prolongs conflict. 

An internet search will reveal many examples. Here is one based upon their book ‘Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty’ by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/01/why-aid-fails/

And a report via the National Audit Office on UK foreign aid expenditure:
https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/new_report_confirms_that_aid_money_is_wasted_we_told_you_so

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