Bernard Ingham: A nation soft, selfish and in love with luxury

If Glubb Pasha were alive – that is General Sir John Glubb, legendary British commander of the old TransJordan Arab Legion – he would say we are in a terminal state of imperial decadence. In a 1976 essay on “The Fate of Empires”, he put decadence down to too long a period of wealth and power, selfishness, love of money and loss of a sense of duty.

Who can argue with him? We had never had it so good on tick up to 2007. Selfishness and love of money had corrupted our society.

Events have also shown that a sense of duty has all but disappeared whether you care to name bankers, who are partly responsible for the financial mess, MPs fiddling their expenses, public sector unions demanding their interest be served regardless of our ability to sustain the cost, or kids sent by Job Centres to a Devon farmer who says they turn up late, hung over or more interested in Facebook than earning their keep.

Nowhere do I see humble and contrite hearts – not in the City, at Westminster, in Congress House or among the younger generation who get an appalling write up from employers partly because discipline and pride have gone out of the parental and school windows.

We would do well to recognise this as the world teeters on the edge of the economic abyss. Whatever the failings of our leaders, they, as politicians, have to face the fact that their nations are all the more difficult to handle because of their expectations.

The problem is no longer “How do you keep them down on the farm when they’ve seen Paree.” It is: “How do you make them tighten their belts when they have come to expect the earth?”

Yet tighten our belts we must – Ed Balls please note – if we are not unnecessarily to prolong our living on the edge of a financial volcano.

Of course, some people are being made to economise – those who are thrown out of work, those on fixed incomes and those whose investments have delivered next to nothing for nearly four years because of low interest rates.

But the longer Lib-Lab politicians try to kid us that there is a painless way out of UK debt induced by Gordon Brown and Balls and our global liabilities the more they lengthen the lean years ahead.

Politicians, the international institutions, stock exchanges and economies are not in turmoil because nations are trying to balance their books too fast; it is because they are doing it far too slowly and unconvincingly. Leaders landed with the problem have so far exhibited altogether inadequate answers as to how to make austerity stick.

It could be argued that stock markets across the globe are making things worse with their panicking. But nothing communicates unease and foreboding better than people trying to protect their brass after years of artificially-stoked wealth

So, where do we go from here? First, at risk of encouraging you to believe I have lost my marbles, let us give thanks to Gordon Brown for keeping us out of the euro. Let us recognise that, however badly and stupidly they might otherwise behave, the Lib Dems are more or less solidly behind their coalition’s financial recovery plan which continues to impress the debt markets.

Let us give credit to Chancellor George Osborne for his constancy of purpose. At least he has his head screwed on the right way and seems able to keep it while others around him are losing theirs.

Let us also thank the Lord we defeated the first move towards proportional representation (PR) in May by ditching the Lib Dems’ Alternative Vote.

Might it not be that Europe, saddled with the idiocies of a single currency, is further handicapped by the inherent weakness of governments elected by PR? We can perhaps get some inkling of its problems from our own coalition’s travail over such things as 50p, mansion and property taxes and the Human Rights Act.

But let us never forget the basic problem both at home and abroad. People have lived indulgently on credit for too long and become soft, selfish, in love with luxury and forgetful of their duties to society.

We spoilt brats are a large part of the problem.