‘Never give up. People will always discount you, and you'll always get rejected. But set your sights high. Be boldly ambitious. Be relentless and never give up.’
Reshma Saujani
The failure to see the big picture and to build strategies designed to address long-term challenges such as climate change, economic instability, and the issues which give rise to conflict is a chronic feature for our age. The intensity of everyday action and the deluge of opinions on virtually every subject obscures the focus required for considered thought and, as a result, we seem to bounce from one crisis to the next
The BBC's Question Time last week came from Loughborough, and I was struck by the comment from one young man who despaired of the vacuum in strategic thinking from the centre ground of politics: to the extent that he found both Reform and the Green Party agendas of interest, and it didn't matter which.
The challenges are plain enough for all to see: the remorseless rise of global warming and climate change, the intense over-indebtedness of western democracies, the disconnect between generations, not just in economic terms but also as a result of familial fragmentation — to which we should add the failure of global faiths to establish the groundwork for moral decision-taking, and for the means to reach for common understanding.
We cannot afford to ignore long-term challenges as if they were not the result of our own incompetence. We must learn to love our neighbour of the future, not just our neighbour of today.
Short-term issues are invariably domestic and focused on national issues; long-term challenges are generally global in character. However, national governments call the shots in all respects; global governance has seen virtually no progress since the United Nations was formed in 1945.
But modern life is thrusting global interaction upon us in almost every walk of life: in business and consumer interaction, with migration and ethnic integration. At the same time, technology is enabling and forcing globalisation at an ever-increasing rate.
This is why the calls we have been making over recent years for improved global governance are so important and, as today’s quote author Reshma Saujani says, we will not give up. We need direct democracy within global governance; we need a global assembly for faith; and we need significantly more respect for bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and their calls for economists and politicians to wake up and smell the coffee — with particular reference to themes of geopolitical fragmentation and economic integration.
One of the most alarming charts I saw last week showed government gross debt as a percentage of GDP across Europe. The United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Greece and Belgium were all set at 100% or more; In contrast, Russia is at less than 25%.
Meanwhile, The Times Business section on Saturday had the headline, ‘High debt is here to stay, whatever the Chancellor decides’.
But high debt cannot be here to stay — we must find ways to bring it under control before it results in chaos in the financial markets and continued damage to the prospects for future generations.
Inflated debt levels are causing a real differential between democratic and autocratic nations. It's not the fault of electorates, it's the fault of short-sighted politicians who have effectively treated excess public spending as an electoral bribe when they should be demonstrating a responsible attitude for long-term stability. The solution would be to establish long-term democratic oversight of short-term executive administrations, but there is continual push-back for this proposal, as we have seen with attempts to reform the UK's parliamentary second chamber (currently the House of Lords).
Meanwhile, COP30 has demonstrated yet again the real struggle to establish proper oversight for limiting climate change. The failure of the United States to be represented in Brazil showed a real disdain for the long-term challenge of global warming, and once again we are left with a mixed bag of compromises insufficient to tackle rising temperatures across the world.
Many of these problems are directly linked to the human life cycle, and the fact is that most politicians only reach the zenith of their power and influence when they are too old to experience more than the following 2-3 decades. There are a few encouraging signs of younger people coming into leadership and a gradually improving gender balance to raise the prospects for more focus on younger generations — but we have a long way to go.
It was Nicolas Stern who publicised the phrase, ‘discounting the future’; the time is fast approaching when we need to apply a premium, not a discount, for the sake of future generations.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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