Max Hastings article on the Daily Mail website on Saturday 25th June 2011 was entitled “La-La Land Britain faces permanent economic decline unless we face threat from the East“. In his article Max Hastings draws our attention to the fact that while “the latest Merrill Lynch World Wealth report shows that, while 300,000 new Asia-Pacific investors with at least a million dollars of investable assets were created last year — a 9.7 per cent increase — Britain’s percentage increased by only 1.4 per cent.

This country exports more to Ireland’s 4.5 million people than to Brazil, India and China’s combined 2.8 billion population — this, despite a 20 per cent recent devaluation of the pound.

I often disagree with the brilliant but sensationalist historian Niall Ferguson. But he seems absolutely right to argue in his latest book, Civilization: The West And The Rest, that our societies have suffered a disastrous decline of the Protestant work ethic.

“Europeans today,” he says, “are the idlers of the world.” We work shorter hours than our Asian counterparts, take more holidays and are readier to strike. Workers in the United States take fewer holidays than us, but the average South Korean puts in 39 per cent more hours than the average American a week.

Neither President Obama nor anybody else has yet produced a credible solution to the problem that Detroit’s car workers — for instance — cost almost ten times as much as their Chinese counterparts to produce the same vehicles.”

I totally agree with Max Hastings when he summarizes “we are witnessing the end of the age of abundance, the first phase of a savage contest for energy, natural resources including water, and technological dominance. We shall need to work harder to have less, both as individuals and as a country. The divide between the rewards for the skilled and unskilled will continue to widen.

Unless we shed our British obsession with protecting losers as the foremost social priority; unless we breed instead a generation of school pupils and university students committed to winning, our prospects are bleak.

It is the nature of politicians to focus on getting through tomorrow, leaving the next decade to take care of itself. But in this scary new world, our leaders need to rise above this, to embrace a vision for Britain far beyond the next general election. Many of the things that need doing will be unpopular and even nasty. They represent the antithesis of nice-guy politics — of Cleggery, if you like.

But unless Britain raises its game dramatically, we face not Mervyn King’s seven lean years, but 70 of them. We must work harder, teach our children more, and sell far more goods which the world wants, not at a price determined by the lifestyle expectation of our workers, but instead by global competition.”

The warning signs are there, and if both the UK and Europe don’t heed them and take drastic action now to reverse these trends, then sadly I am afraid an Asian dawn will soon eclipse the United Kingdom, the European Union and potentially the entire West.
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In 2000, the Democratic Presidential Candidate, Vice-President Al Gore actually got 48.38% of the votes, compared to George Bush’s 47.87% share of the vote. However, President George Bush crawled over the finish line with 271 electoral college votes to Al Gore’s 266 by controversially “winning” Florida’s 25 electoral college votes by only 537 actual votes, with the Supreme Court denying the Democrats a recount.

The American system is not unlike our first past the post system, where it is not unusual for a UK goverment to be elected with a minority of all votes cast, with 324 MP’s needed for a Commons majority of the 646 MP’s. Having said that both system’s seem to work, as proportional representation is likely not to give a majority mandate to govern. Nevertheless, for a Conservative country, the U.S.A. have swung dramatically in historical terms to the left, with the Democrats also winning majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives. The great thing about Obama, was he was first past the post with the most, so has a genuine mandate to implement his policies, lets hope he does and the “change” he and his administration bring about is for the better and not just for change’s sake.

The great thing is that the American People have voted in an African American for the first time in their history, which is terrifically refreshing and exciting. His energetic 21 month campaign certainly merits his big win, so lets hope he can unite what is clearly a divided America, with well over 50 million of the American Electorate voting for John McCain. Will they accept the result? If they don’t embrace change, Barack Obama’s base could almost guarantee him a 2nd term now, given the sweeping endorsement that winning over twice as many Electoral College votes over Senator John has given him. Congratulations President Obama!

The election tomorrow can not then come soon enough for Obama and the Democratic Party, who still could lose it when Americans get in the voting booth and have the choice between a black man and a white man. I sincerely hope that this is not the case and that the American people vote for the best man for the job. Many of the Republicans interviewed on TV seem convinced Barack Obama is a Muslim and a socialist, expressing their views with such hatred and aggression I do fear for both the future of the U.S.A. and Barack Obama who has cleverly maximized the window of opportunity the Global financial circumstances has presented him. I therefore await the verdict of the American People tomorrow with interest.