The John Griff Column: Stoking the fires of imagination – or damping them down?
In a world where the global obsession seems now to be to search for and exploit every last scintilla of negativity that can be found, what can we do to change the narrative and perform a non-governmental U-turn towards something more cheerful?
Have we become so conditioned by outside events that we have lost the will to always look on the bright side of life?
It would perhaps be easy to answer the questions posed in the paragraph above with a pithy one-word answer in the affirmative. It would be easy – but wrong. It’s true that we’re going through tough, if not downright dangerous times. I don’t mean solely events in Ukraine and Palestine, albeit that they are perhaps the most worrying ones. Climate change has become a very real issue and the ramifications of it are becoming all too clear with the Met Office having declared that extreme weather should now be considered the norm, rather than the exception. Closer to home the Chancellor may well have reached for the tissues with a climb in inflation last week and a steeper climb in the cost of government borrowing which itself has now risen this week. Successive gatherings of national diplomats and international leaders always do their best to spin a story of collaboration and progressive steps – but have we become so downcast that we cannot now see the positives in our haste to anticipate the negatives?
It would appear that there is indeed a new world order. Last week the somewhat domestically embattled German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz stated after an Oval Office meeting with DJT that Europe had been free-riding on the back of US funding. Whether he truly believes it to be the case or not is perhaps irrelevant – he certainly didn’t want to be on the receiving end of the kind of bully-boy verbal roughing-up which was handed out by Trump and Valance to Ukraine’s Volodymir Zelenskyy in front of the Oval’s gold be-decked mantelpiece and a global media. Some are crediting his performance for Trump’s current attitude towards Vladimir Putin – and towards steadying the NATO ship. But it is very much a current, rather than a reliably permanent one. Mr Merz has been building and backing his own ‘Made For Germany’ campaign, which has seen German companies pledge 631 billion euros in development capital over the next three years. But these days world leaders need to be seen to have an answer to absolutely everything, all the time. And that is more than hard to achieve, if indeed it can be achieved at all.
For all that though, they are positive looking steps. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch shuffled her shadow cabinet on Tuesday after eight months in office. Daventry MP Stuart Andrew has moved from culture to health in a shake-up which was broader than perhaps first anticipated. Another positive step? For a shadow cabinet the practical effect is perhaps marginal – but it is a statement of intent from a leader of whom a lot is expected by way of rebuilding the party’s credibility at grassroots level. In a sense she has done what any corporate organisation needs to do from time to time if it is not performing to expectation – shake up and ship out the elements who are seen as being dispensable for whatever reason. But shakeups have to be seen to be delivered – quickly. There cannot be shake-ups for the sake of mere optics – they have to have traction.
Shake-ups need to be products of realism, introspection and potential. They also need to have a healthy dose of imagination built into them. Last weekend, Lois and I went to a lecture at the Open University about the exploration of the planet Mars by a multitude of vehicles on its surface – and in its skies. In the next few years, further hardware will leave Earth as part of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin mission, bound for the red planet where it will drill down, sample and analyse the planet’s crust at a depth of up to two metres. The science is pure and becoming increasingly practical – but it is a very long way indeed from the colonization that Elon Musk is already hurling ever-larger rockets into the sky to cater for.
One of the lecturer's many slides had referenced gypsum – a major constituent in building here on earth - as being a significant ingredient of the planet’s surface. I queried this during the Q&A session which followed and asked the European Space Agency’s presenter if Mr Musk’s stated expectations aren’t hopelessly out of line with anyone’s ability to make them a reality. Although his was a very polite answer that right now, we’re nowhere near ready to take on the physical hostilities that astronauts would face there, he by no means ruled it out. It was not an answer of ‘No, never’, but instead ‘No, not yet.’
A great example of not letting negativity get in the way of realism, introspection and potential. Or of the imagination needed to make positive change. It would perhaps be easy to answer the questions posed in the paragraph above with a pithy one-word answer in the affirmative. It would be easy – but wrong. It’s true that we’re going through tough, if not downright dangerous times. I don’t mean solely events in Ukraine and Palestine, albeit that they are perhaps the most worrying ones. Climate change has become a very real issue and the ramifications of it are becoming all too clear with the Met Office having declared that extreme weather should now be considered the norm, rather than the exception. Closer to home the Chancellor may well have reached for the tissues with a climb in inflation last week and a steeper climb in the cost of government borrowing which itself has now risen this week. Successive gatherings of national diplomats and international leaders always do their best to spin a story of collaboration and progressive steps – but have we become so downcast that we cannot now see the positives in our haste to anticipate the negatives?