In our response to and involvement in the election campaign, as in our actual voting, we should be prepared to look at these global realities as much as our domestic troubles \u2013 simply because there is no middle or long term security for us that is not also a secure future for the entire global neighbourhood. And so we need to recognise that planning has to be long-term and patient: the assurances of decisive, transforming action overnight are fantasies \u2013 though they are fantasies very much in tune with our feverishly short-term culture and all those pressures that make politics more and more a matter of advertising and entertainment.<\/p>\n
Grown-up planning and negotiating take time. We have good reason to be sceptical of reckless promises. Churchill famously promised his electorate \u2018blood, toil, tears and sweat\u2019 \u2013 confident that the public he was addressing were strong and adult enough to see that a comprehensive victory would take time and would cost a great deal.<\/p>\n
Who are the politicians who take the electorate that seriously? Who genuinely think that there is in this country a capacity for shared heroism in pursuing victory over what seems a massive, sluggish but inexorable destructiveness at work in the world economy, and victory over the deeply ingrained habits that still drive our ludicrous levels of resource consumption in the developed world?<\/p>\n
Well, they don\u2019t seem in abundant supply. But the national community is surely still capable of vision.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a> (subscription).<\/p>\n \u2018Grasp that the only real prosperity is sustainable prosperity, that the only realistic development plan is one that involves peacemaking and ecological balance.\u2019 Our Chair Rowan Williams calls us all to see the bigger picture for #GE2019<\/a> in @thetimes<\/a> https:\/\/t.co\/HTSenb0ezS<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Christian Aid (@christian_aid) December 4, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n