Back to the future

THERE has been much complaint over the last decade or so about austerity.

Well, in the words of President Reagan, ‘you ain’t seen nothin’ yet’.

Plans to accelerate the transition to public transport will involve building housing developments and business parks with little or no car parking space.

The ‘20-minute neighbourhood’ will mean the facilities one needs will be available in a small surrounding area. The circular economy will mean recycling, reusing, making do and mending.

It is what I remember of life in my childhood after the war.

Younger siblings wore hand-medown clothes. Shopping was done on foot daily at small outlets in one’s own district. Girls were to taught to darn socks and to patch and mend.

We knitted to acquire otherwise expensive pullovers, and made rugs from kits at home. At least we had a coal fire to keep us warm, even if power cuts kept us in the dark.

This is what reducing demand on resources means: going without, making do and mending.

Reduced to our 20-minute neighbourhoods, our horizons will shrink, cultural life will stagnate, choices will be circumscribed. This is austerity.

It is very much the Greens’ prospectus, and appears to be that being embraced also by the SNP.

What the young, whose demand for new clothes and gadgets is limitless, will make of it remains to be seen.

I suspect that, after demonstrating in favour of climate change measures, when faced with austerity in reality they will say, in shocked tones, ‘We didn’t mean it to be like this’.

JILL STEPHENSON, Edinburgh.