Grand Designs

The disparity between grand plans & their promotion; and their actualization in the real world is often a gulf, verging on the abyssal, of ambition and hubris let loose by the forces of media and money. The triumph of front over substance, feeding back on itself until the inevitable line is crossed into instability and chaos, leaving naught but noise in its wake. The current government is but the tip of this very dangerous iceberg.

I was minded of this sad fact of life by a conversation I had this lunchtime with an old workmate I bumped into outside the local Tesco Express. I'd kind of naively imagined that in the two-and-a-half years since my retirement, things might have moved on and [BT/Openreach] would finally have made some great strides in putting into place some of their grand plans and operational improvements at last.

But no, I hear from my mate that, far from the grand 'switch-off' of dial tone that would herald the coming Jerusalem of fibre and data everywhere and for everything; the policy is simply to cancel all further investment in the remaining copper in the network and let it wither and die naturally. All well and good, you might think, but we've been down this route so many times over the last quarter of a century, with this advance and that; and it almost always results in a very poor customer - sorry, end-user - experience to say the least.

The thread that runs through all of our current economic and social problems seems to me, ironically, to be a lack of any kind of a thread at all. Everything in this version of the 'modern' world is reactive. The concept of 'planning' or long-term structure seems to have been completely binned in favour of the expedient: viz, our only aircraft carrier not actually having any aircraft to speak of. The prevailing mentality is that whatever makes the fastest buck or quietens dissent the quickest is virtuous. Whatever argues for structural integrity and stable organization is anti-progress and probably in some way communist, and therefore to be abjured strenuously.

We used to have stability. We used to have security. We actually used to have reasonable prosperity and guaranteed lifetime healthcare in the UK. Nothing is now certain. Nothing is predictable. Nothing can any more be deemed safe or free. This is no longer the nurturing and inclusive society I was born into in the 1950s. It is a venal, self-promoting and cynical environment we must - at least those of us without wealth - navigate under our own steam. Again, it's a question of price trumping value: the moral dilemma for our age.