BANKRUPTCY

It has been three weeks since I wrote a column (and I apologise that I was unable to do a column last week as intended), and what a torrid three weeks they have been. The spotlight has been on the near financial collapse of certain European nations and the euro, the raising of the U.S. national debt ceiling to over $14 trillion, and the U.K. riots. And all this followed on from News of the World scandal of late July! The theme that runs through all these chaotic events is one of bankruptcy, financial and moral; we have been hitting some devastating “lows”. The problems will quickly move from the News Headlines, but they won’t move so quickly from our society.


The lasting legacy from the 2008 financial crash is the awful spectre of bankruptcy that now stalks the nations of the western world. For some ten years those western nations, and their people, lived on seemingly never-ending debt in a huge bubble of spending. The bankers played with the debt and made huge profits. Now the bubble has burst, the accumulated debt simply hangs like a great crippling ball on the feet of people everywhere and particularly on those sovereign nations who have had to step in and take on the debts accumulated by banks and financial houses through their appalling malpractices. Consequently national debt in all western nations stands at an appalling and unprecedented level. It simply has to be contained; we can’t live with national deficits and growing debt any more. At last the penny has dropped. This stands in sharp contrast to China and Middle Eastern countries which have gained massive savings through financing our debt. Debt means poverty, and we are poor.


This debt problem is not helped by the fact that the 2008 crash slowed down the economy, making large holes in national tax revenue when increases are desperately needed. No one quite knows how to get the economy going again – we can’t spend our way out of it – that means more debt. And while people generally recognise the need for cuts in national expense, they naturally don’t respond kindly to the cuts which touch them personally. It’s a politician’s nightmare! Obama has been badly wounded by the political quarrels surrounding the raising of the U.S. debt ceiling, Sarkosy of France and Merkel of Germany have yet to fully resolve the very difficult euro crisis, and George Osborne, the U.K. Chancellor, can only keep his head down and hope the massive dangers abroad don’t reach him. The ball of debt is firmly chained to all these nations, however, and when one falls (or the euro falls!) we are all likely to fall together.


The riots across the U.K. have revealed another kind of bankruptcy; a bankruptcy of moral and social conscience amongst a violent underclass at the bottom of our society for whom life offers little hope or purpose; an underclass bereft of disciplined family role models and locked into violent acquisitive role models. This has always been a recurring problem of city life and impersonal economic systems, and has a multiplicity of roots. The young teenage aspect is very distressing. Clearly, putting down riots, and forcibly if necessary, is expected from government. But we all know that, though necessary, it only puts a temporary lid on a very difficult issue. Much will be written and said – and that’s good!


Fortunately the rioting has also thrown up a rich vein of real social and moral consciousness among many, even among the victims. There was nothing to match the stature of the older Muslim gentleman in Birmingham who, having heard of the wanton killing of his favourite son, deliberately turned his back on anything of vengeance and pleaded with his neighbours and others from different cultures not to escalate the violence but to act for the quiet restoration of peace. As I thought about him I seemed to hear the loving words of Jesus, “Son, you are not far from the Kingdom of Heaven”. That man was anything but bankrupt. The same could be said of those who were spotlighted because they work among the underclass with incredible patience, sacrifice and compassion to try to reform. It is with these kind of people that future hope rests, when press and politicians have moved on.

What those people are doing propmpts me to say:
“Let your light so shine among men that they may see your good works and glorify your father in heaven”.
That is Jesus' word to every individual living in dark times.



Bob




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Please note that the next "Column" will be posted on Tuesday, 9th August.


Bob

LETHAL FALL OUT

We’ve all learned only too well about the disastrous secondary effects of explosions, volcanic or otherwise. Radiation from cracked nuclear reactors made things horribly worse after the Tsunami in North Japan, and the leaking oil from the BP undersea explosion didn’t just waste vast quantities of oil but, far worse, polluted vast areas of ocean, destroying its marine life.

The explosion of scandal which has destroyed the News of the World is already, in less than a week, following this pattern and reverberating in other critically important public areas of the nation. It is clearly set to cause massive pollution and destruction beyond itself. As with the escape of the BP oil this it is incredibly difficult to contain, even if there are many involved in frantic efforts to head it off and save their skin.


The fall out has already gone well beyond the demise of just one newspaper and has invaded the News International media empire; Rupert Murdoch has already lost his ambitious dream of owning BskyB, and there is a shaking of even his American corporate fortress. To change the metaphor, he has a massive personal bush fire to put out, if he can!


But others, on a much wider and more important front, have been caught up in the fall out, most spectacularly the Metropolitan Police, which stands accused of failing to get a grip on the phone hacking. This is not simply because it has shown incompetence, but because its senior officers have been involved in hugely damaging relationships with some of those senior staff of the News of the World who clearly were operating in a culture of corruption. So both the Commissioner of the Met. and his Assistant have resigned within 24 hrs of each other and with critical policing tasks (including the Olympics) on their desks. This Newspaper “Tsunami” really is running a long, long way up the beach!

How far will it go? There are those who are hoping and plotting that it will actually overrun David Cameron, the Prime Minister, and leave him beached like the Police Chiefs. He, too, was over-familiar with the corrupt News of the World leadership and has mud sticking to him that can be exploited. This sadistic scenario can be justified as a “political opportunity for the Opposition” and fair game. David Cameron comes back from Africa to build his breakwater even as I write. It will be his biggest test yet.

The fact is we don’t know quite how far it will all go, but what we do know is that there is a massive “shaking” going on of national leadership. It has been happening for some time now and has already engulfed the financial world. Now it’s the world of political leaders and the forces of law and order. I wonder who will be next. All this comes at a time when what we desperately need is firm, clear and unimpeded national statesmanship, both at home and abroad. It is all too reminiscent of the chaotic historical state of affairs in Israel in the years following Amos’ prophetic word of national judgement.

There’s a good side to all this: it is an opportunity to clean out some very dank areas of corruption in our national life. I pray God may be in this process, and that it will be done. There is a dark side to all this: the growing confusion and dislocation of proper government is exposing more than ever the appalling fall in the nation’s moral standards, for all of this comes out, not of wrong policies, but of corrupt individual behaviour. That is not something God will overlook.


Bob




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