John Monro

Hello Kete and all. I am a 76 year old retired GP living in Martinborough, NZ (a small wine town about 80 kms north east of Wellington). I have a wife and we have four daughters and a new grandson who live in the UK presently. The last forty years of my life have been in a sense seriously blighted by the stupidity of the neoliberal economic ascendancy and the abandonment of the value of the commons, Thatcherism, Reaganism. It never made any sense to me - it is a cruel Darwinian way to run society and that economics has become the ideology of nearly everything running our society is madness. Economics is like studying our existence through a telescope, you can only see one small part at at time, magnifying the detail to an importance is never deserves, whereas everything truly important in our human existence lies outside the telescope's field of view and is never examined or accounted for. 

Economics is not a science, at the best it is a social study, and subject to all the randomness and unpredictability of human behaviour, as individuals, as groups. I go on to suggest with appropriate cynicism that economics is most like criminology, the only difference being that criminology is the study of greed and corruption in those tried and found guilty, whereas economics is the study of greed and corruption in those yet to be arrested. 

Neoliberal capitalism died in 2008 only to be resuscitated in Frankenstein fashion by the infusions of trillions of dollars of public money, without of course any permission from the citizenry, to use their assets this way,  only to die again just 12 years later in the face of Covid. What use an economic system of such systemic weakness and moral and physical decay? I have written diatribes, rants, letters to papers , spoken at political meetings etc against this capitalist supremacy takeing our societies and our planet to ruin. 

In the early 2000s I suggested the world needs a "New Ecological Enlightenment". To summarise, I wrote  how likely is it that the ideologies of even the most brilliant minds of the original Enlightenment would be still appropriate 250 years later, when these ideas developed in a world with a population ten times smaller, and vast land masses still to be conquered and tamed, both people and resources.? It makes no sense to me to think these ideas are any longer relevant in our present situation, which is slipping into serious peril. . 

And as for growth?? PM Liz Truss: "We need growth, growth, growth", echoing precisely Starmer's "Growth, growth, growth". I think these two people, and anyone else who thinks the same thing is literally "insane, insane, insane".  Prof. Albert Bartlett is a hero of mine.