Ago show why we’re doomed to repeat
This helped nourish the pub wisdom that Labour governments are useless with money, although this required overlooking the way Edward Heath’s Tory government ignored a noisy minority advocating ideas of monetarism and embraced Keynesian policies like, er, the Labour governments. Before long they were all out of office. Before long it was the 1980s and they were all embracing monetarism and creating a fresh set of problems, both for genius Conservative governments and financially useless Labour ones.
1973 was a good year for movies. The Godfather gave us brutal, amoral people living to a twisted code of honour.
We love our bad guys: Goodfellas, The Sopranos, Fat Tony in The Simpsons, this year’s The Irishman.
A review of the years 1519 to 2019 shows a great many people in positions of power and high office who would be best described as bad guys, testing just how much they could get away with.
You might argue their way of doing things is right back in style. Concrete is solid and durable. Democracy, not so much.
1973 was Watergate from one end to the other, and the growing feeling the president might not be a good person.
As we know, the eventual outcome was resignation. ‘‘To leave office before my term is completed,’’ Nixon declared, ‘‘is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put the interest of America first.’’
Try, if you can, to imagine the current president using those words, in any order.
His ‘‘I never understood wind’’ speech this week was, as ever, oratory as a second language. The argument he was trying to make, using fragments and sneers, was that the manufacture of wind turbines can involve dirty emissions, thus invalidating any claim to carbon cleanliness.
He hates turbines because they once got in the way of a golf course he was ‘‘developing’’.
Little he does or says is not borne of some hate or petty fury. The climate crisis is someone else’s problem.
A story this week brought the news that shifting the entire world to 100 per cent renewable energy by 2050 would cost $73 trillion, but pay for itself in less than seven years.
In 1973, a story about the possibility of rescuing humanity from climate crisis would have been very big.
But in this post-truth fake-news, online world, things don’t go that way, so much.
Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google, was born in 1973.
England has always been like this. It is the cat that wants to go outside and immediately wants to come back in.