This article in yesterdays Guardian indulges in futurology. The introduction is reprinted here just follow the link to read the whole article. It's an excellent summary of where we are now and what the future may hold.
Cut to Britain 2015
What will the UK look like by the next general election? Mass unemployment, disaffected students, decaying buildings and a vast north-south divide? Or a proud nation where green industries and libertarian values flourish?
Cameron visits Tyneside David Cameron on a visit to Tyneside. What will the UK look like by 2015 when his coalition government has cut the deficit?
Twenty-seven years ago, a cocky, combative man called Roger Douglas became finance minister of New Zealand. The country had a large deficit, slow economic growth, and a state many considered too profligate. Douglas responded boldly: privatising, abolishing state subsidies, and introducing fees for university students.
"Define your objectives clearly, and move towards them in quantum leaps, otherwise the interest groups will have time to mobilise," he wrote later. His attempt to transform a previously sedate country in little more than a parliamentary term fascinated political anoraks across the globe.
In 1988, as this revolution was reaching its climax, I spent some of a gap year in New Zealand. People I met, whether politically minded or not, were quick to bring up "Rogernomics", as the Douglas experiment was known. Some told me with satisfaction that he had toughened up a country where, they said, young benefit claimants used to look for good surf rather than work. Other people were unsettled: an elderly relation shook her head at all the change Douglas was unleashing. But the person I remember best was a nurse I met in Christchurch, then a tree-lined, comfortable-looking place, like a kind of southern hemisphere Cheltenham. As Rogernomics had taken effect and unemployment had risen, she had developed a sideline dealing heroin. From what I saw, business was really taking off.
Yet in rightwing circles around the world, Douglas has remained a name to conjure with, or invite to conferences, whenever the time seems ripe again for innovative government. Since the coalition took power, Rogernomics has become a fashionable topic again for British free-market thinktanks.
So will Britain in May 2015, when the next general election is due, resemble the New Zealand of the late 80s? Both coalition critics and supporters agree the next four and a bit years will certainly be dramatic. "For the first time since Margaret Thatcher handbagged the world in 1979, Britain looks like the west's test tube," commented an excited Economist editorial last August.
Other observers, even on the right, are less sanguine. "I call it the breakneck coalition," says the Conservative blogger Tim Montgomerie. "The government has so many plates in the air. Some will come crashing down."
Read on, the complete article is at
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