Naive Melody

I get rained off work - I write something on the blog. Hence its intermittent nature.

I've been thinking a bit about Housing. It was on the You and Yours phone-in today. I'm not a property owner myself. I briefly had a mortgage with my first wife about twenty years ago - on a tiny ancient place in Lewes, East Sussex, up against the old town walls (2 Castle Rise in case you know the place). It was literally two up two down with a tiny sunless back yard which I filled with plants. There was me and her and her teenage daughter. Her teenage daughter had the only proper bedroom and my wife and I slept in the lounge. I know - it sounds like a perfect disaster waiting to happen doesn't it, especially with such a tumultuous relationship. It was one of those things where everyone, but everyone, could see what was going to happen but didn't like to interfere. Would I have listened? I don't know. I loved Lewes and wanted to live in an old place. Anyway, suffice it to say it got nasty and I moved out. In retrospect it would have made sense to keep tabs on that mortgage instead of just leaving her to it but I felt guilty and she was terrifying and we had her daughter to think of so I just left. Then she moved in with a mate of mine (who also owned an old place in Lewes) and they bought a small holding in France, last I heard. Anyway, the interesting point is that she was a nurse working in an old folk's home, and I was working in a garden centre - and they gave us a 90% mortgage on an old cottage in Lewes!
Just take a moment to process that. This was about twenty years ago. A couple with probably well below average incomes, getting a mortgage for a cottage in central Lewes of all places. And we were shown larger places, and just off the High Street too, but we didn't want the hassle of doing them up!
How things have changed.

I used to go walking in the country a lot when I was a young man - up on the Coombes Road and around Fulking (We lived in Southwick on the coast about half way between Brighton and Worthing) and I always sort of assumed I'd one day be able to live out there or somewhere like it - not necessarily in a very picturesque cottage - just a bungalow perhaps, or even just a hut, with a bit of ground to have a garden, some trees, a few ducks. Now I know that, short of winning the lottery, that's just never going to happen. It simply isn't possible any more. Nowadays, most of southern England is simply out of reach to most ordinary people. My wife and her ex own this place where I am now in a new estate in the Sussex town of Henfield but it's an interest-only mortgage and once the kids leave home (they're 14 and 16, so quite soon) that'll be us - back at the bottom of the property ladder. And neither of us is getting any younger (I was 50 last December, and she's... erm... a bit younger). No wonder she wants to emigrate to Canada, but that's a whole other pot of eels.

I'm not looking for sympathy. There's a lot worse going on in the world.
Does it matter? Or am I just upset at my own silly plight?
I think it does.
In the Radio 4 discussion someone said, as they inevitably do, sooner or later, "Well it's supply and demand innit?" There aren't enough houses so everyone's a bit desperate and the prices go up.
And nobody challenged that logic. They all just accepted it. It's the way of the world. Building more houses would be the only option.
I understand Supply and Demand. In a capitalist economy prices have only a tenuous relationship to how much things actually cost to make or how much real life-and-death value they have, but they have a very direct relationship with how much people are prepared to pay. So something like gold, which has little practical value is expensive because it's rare. Bread though, which is very useful, is cheap because it's easy to make. So far so egg-suckingly obvious. The question arises when something is both rare and useful, nay, essential. What then? And what if something is artificially rare? What if it's only rare because someone has bought it all up? If someone buys up all the posh shoes it doesn't mean everyone else has to go without shoes. They just make more ordinary shoes and those with the money can indulge their whim for overpriced footwear without affecting the rest of us, but that's not how it is with housing. Somewhere (decent) to live is an essential, not a luxury, but it's in short supply. What there is, is disproportionately bought up by those who already have more than they need and... what? The rest of us go without? Or we just impose on the hospitality of those who bought their property before the market went nuts (for which read The Parents) or we claim benefits whereby the government (by which I mean Us) pays the landlords the inflated price their 'supply and demand' has created.

Part of the problem has to be that at some point, I think, in the 80s (the dreaded T word again) housing became more 'an investment' than a home. People bought their properties with a view to selling them for a profit, rather than just, you know, living in them. This view of houses as just a place to stop for a while has been helped along by some very modern lively young things who like to feel they can live anywhere, in a sort of quasi-Buddhist New Age way, not getting attached to mere 'things'. Some of them, understandably, have moved around all their lives and have no real sense of home anyway, but not all of us. Since Tebbitt's 'On Your Bike' speech it has been assumed by the movers and shakers that one shouldn't care where one lives. You just go wherever the work is and if the work moves abroad, well that's just supply and demand again. Start your own business. Be an entrepreneur! What's wrong with you? The Soviets also thought the workforce should be prepared to move wherever the work needed doing. Refugees and asylum seekers have to move wherever they can.

The trouble is I suspect most of us just aren't like that, or would rather not be. I'd be interested to know the figures, but I've come to believe (in flagrant disregard for my parents' thinking) that what I think probably isn't that unusual. I suspect that many of us do care where we live very much, and that for many of us this has a strong connection to the place we were born, where we grew up, and where most of our family and friends are. It's unfashionable to say so, but there you are.
The media don't help. They're used to relocating whenever necessary to pursue their careers so I feel that I'm in a kind of despised minority for being rather attached to where I come from, which is this area around Brighton and the Downs and the countryside beyond. It almost sounds like I might be some sort of Conservative in this respect. Maybe I am. Critics call it Sentimental, which I take to mean 'caring deeply about something I happen not to give a toss about'.

There are all sorts of problems with this view. Generally I have a woolly liberal attitude to immigration but I do understand how people must feel seeing their high street changed completely in just a few years - full of foreign voices and unreadable shop fronts. We don't have a lot of immigrants around here but I'd probably feel something similar if I saw my high street taken over by retail giants or simply cleared away to make a mall but UKIP and the BNP don't seem so bothered about that. I'd feel the same way hanging out with ex pats who can't be bothered to talk to the natives or try the local food, let alone learn the language. But obviously things change, and people are free to move about the world in a way they never were before and all in all I think that's a good thing, but I also think there's something missing - something about history and belonging. Something about home. I don't believe it's a right-wing thing to say that heritage is important, and not just as something to sell to tourists, but as a lived reality. Knowing where you come from - for good or ill gives you context. It doesn't stop you appreciating other people's heritages, in fact, I'd say, without one of your own it's all pretty much channel hopping. Maybe most of you don't agree. Ok, but can I plead then for those of us who do, to be allowed to be this way? Not just have our spiritual homes bought up by Russian oligarchs and media moguls? Please? At the very least it should be possible to rent a place without being forbidden to paint the walls and put up some pictures, and without feeling that you might be kicked out in a years time if the landlord thinks he might make a quick buck by doing so. And there should be some sort of regulations about people buying up property in such a way as to exclude ordinary people from getting a place of their own at a reasonable price. Actually (heretic that I am) I think the countryside could stand a little more building. I wonder how many derelict farm yards and other disused lots there are about the country that the farmers would love to sell but can't because the locals don't like the idea of a lot of working class oiks moving in? I can think of quite a few just in this area. I'd want to put some restrictions on the quality and design of the houses built - make them in keeping with local styles, and environmentally sound, and have some sort of restrictions on resale so that they can't immediately be sold off to someone who wants to turn them into a holiday resort. But that would be interfering with the Freedom of the Market wouldn't it? And we can't have that.

I feel like I was on reasonably solid ground arguing that the Free Market cannot be trusted with housing (unlike many other consumer goods) because everyone needs somewhere decent to live but there isn't enough to go round. On the other hand, arguing that a person should have the option of living where they feel they belong (however you define that) is a shakier line to take I know, but I think there's something in it.
Either way it does seem to me that any developer or local authority simply throwing their hands up and saying "Sorry guv. Supply and demand. End of" is massively negligent. There are quite a few reasons why I think The Free Market Economy can't be trusted to run simply everything but this does seem like a particularly obvious one.

10:80:10

Human Nature... Hmmm. Dare I?
I was intrigued with something Vincent said in a comment following my last post -
"She (Margaret Thatcher) assumed that if people had more freedom (were no longer stifled by the State, or repressive trade unions) they would naturally work for good."
This is actually a kind of an Anarchist/ Libertarian assumption isn't it? I'm not saying that's a bad thing but to many it will seem almost unbelievably naive.

I'm a little sorry that Libertarianism has become a synonym for US far right politics, and of course Anarchy is synonymous for chaos and terror - a throw-back to a time when the Anarchists were the Al Quaeda of their day and before the Communists took over as the main purveyors of bombings and assassinations around the world. This of course was well over 100 years ago, but the connotation has stuck. My experience of anarchists is that they are among the most peaceable (if not Pacifist) people I ever met. They dressed in black, wore big boots and did odd things to their hair, sure, but they were nothing if not polite. This was in the 80s. I never found their politics especially convincing but their conviction that, to put it simply, people would be better off without government or judiciary was based on a profound conviction that, left to their own devices, given the chance, people are basically good. Likewise, the Libertarians I've come across believe, more or less, that people are better off without an imposed moral code, that 'Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law', and 'If it feels good, do it'. But the Libertarians I've met have been among the most humane, insightful and generous of people, and their proposal has mostly been to be free to take drugs and have sex with anyone, and in whatever manner (as long as it is among consenting adults) as they see fit, because after all, it does no harm to anyone else and is no one else's business. Their assumption was that, genuinely free, people would not feel the need to abuse their freedom, and humanity would be a more fulfilled and harmonious thing.

The objections are too obvious and numerous to go into in detail here, but the most basic is that of course people just aren't like that. Given those freedoms, free from government and law, custom and convention, it'll be a battle of all against all - dog eat dog - survival of the fittest. Not a pretty sight. I think this view of humanity is there underneath maybe the majority's ideas about their fellow men. Scrape away at the surface they say, and there it is, the beast within. Every man has his price. This thin veneer of civilisation masks a human nature, red in tooth and claw, and a life nasty, brutish and short. The noble savage is a myth. And so we impose law from above, with force if necessary, for the common good.

It's a very polarised debate, as these things tend to be. The human brain it seems does not deal easily in nuance.
The former view seems hopelessly idealistic - a dream of children and drug-addled hippies and hardly worthy of serious comment.
The latter seems almost too obvious to be worth demonstrating, because look at us - every chance we get - ripping each other off and taking the piss, looking out for number one, always out for some small advantage - some way of getting just that little bit further ahead.

Well speak for yourself Sunshine. I look around me at the people I know, and the people I've met here and abroad (yes, even in Paris) and I just don't recognise that description. Sure I remember some crappy moments, but actually, not many. Mostly people were friendly and helpful, and no, not because I was going to give them some money or because a policeman was watching them. There are of course people doing all sorts of hideous things in the world, but most of the time, in normal every-day life? Is it just that thin veneer holding us all back from throttling each other? Or is it some sort of confused Kin Selection, as the evolutionary psychologists would have us believe? Do I live in some rarefied middle class rural bubble where nobody is ever mean to anyone? Is it just me? Have I somehow passed through life oblivious and immune?

I've thought about this a lot. I'm not some starry-eyed do-gooder who just luvs everyone. I'm actually not the most trusting of people. I don't want to talk about it right now but I actually have a lot of trouble with people. I'm not particularly comfortable with social situations and I'm easily put off spending time with some people. I'm easily upset. Often, it's just too difficult. And yet... I still have a lot of hope for humanity. Although I personally have trouble with people for whatever reason, I don't think that's because people are bad. I don't dislike them. It's just a problem for me.

What I'm left with is this: Clearly people sometimes behave appallingly to each other (but see my posting here on whether everything is getting worse these days) but usually they don't and sometimes they are downright heroic.
So which is it to be? Are we basically Good or Bad, or is it just the wrong question?
Actually I think it's a bit of both, which sounds like an anti-climax, and a mealy-mouthed cop-out at that but actually it's not.
I came up with this 10:80:10 rule a while back. Basically what it says is that real evil is actually quite rare. A small percentage of us do it a lot and probably all of us do it sometimes - say 10%. Likewise real saintly good is pretty uncommon too - really going out of ones way to make things better. Probably most of us do it occasionally and a few of us make a life-style of it. Again, say 10%.
Most of us though, most of the time (the remaining 80%), and here's the point, just live our lives, doing what's normal, going along with what everyone else is doing, anything for a quiet life. Sometimes we're a bit mean and not entirely honest but there are limits. We may not really approve of you or want to spend a lot of time with you, but we won't give you a hard time unless we feel very provoked, and often, if you're in difficulties, we'll give you a hand if it's not too much trouble. That's the kind of people we are. I think this is pretty much true of most people the world over. Obviously if we are very provoked we might get very aggressive indeed - if we fear violence or starvation or having our livelihoods taken away from us for example but I have the perhaps perverse opinion that people should not be judged by what they do when they are desperate. Likewise, we might be tempted to do questionable things by extraordinary rewards, but if anything this is an argument against extraordinary temptations (eg huge bonuses) rather than for the inherent corruption of the human spirit. (I'm very aware of the need here for a deeper discussion on the meaning of Evil but I want to save that for another time. For the time being I'm going to take it that we know it when we see it.)

The glaring trouble here is how Evil can become normal in some societies, such as in late 1930s Germany, or Rwanda in 1994, or perhaps Syria at the moment and I think the answer is in that phrase "doing what's normal, going along with what everyone else is doing", and the fact that Evil is often so much easier than Good. Think how much easier it is to knock something down that it is to build something up and you can see that even nature (in the form of entropy) is on the side of Evil. That 10% has a hugely disproportionate effect on the outcome. What is a wonder is that it doesn't dominate everything most of the time. Just one person in a community who favours violence over peaceful coexistence, collecting a few sociopathic henchmen along the way, can very quickly force the community to take sides and start making decisions about who to blame and before you know it our peaceful hypothetical community is polarised and suspicious. Oppression can quickly become normal. This, in a sense is what is 'Evil' about human nature - not that it is inherent and pervasive in all of us except on very rare occasions, but that a small amount seems to be able to take hold of so much power so easily.

So I think this is the problem with the Libertarian and Anarchist views we started out with - that even if most of us could live reasonably amicably without laws and norms being imposed on us from above (and wouldn't that be great?) it only takes a few individuals who are prepared to take advantage of the situation to impose their own norms and laws and society is taken over by them. And this is also true of a genuinely free market economy, which is not the spirit of free enterprise Utopia some economists and politicians seem to imagine, but instead a Dystopia where everything people can have or do - not just the fripperies, but their health care, education, work and leisure, is determined by what money they can make, which is in turn determined by a very few very powerful business interests.
I think it is up to all of us to do our 10%, but as those Business Interests get fewer and bigger (as they inevitably will, the Free Market being what it is), the only thing big enough to stand up to them, I believe, will be our old friends Democratic Government and The Rule of Law.

Interestingly, one of the main platforms of the Libertarian Right in the USA is always 'Small Government' - a demand I find completely uncontroversial.Government should always be as small as possible.
Is anyone seriously demanding more government than necessary?
The only real question is - How much government is necessary?

Anti-competitive practices

How many times do I hear it said that competition has just got to be a good thing? We need to be more competitive and raise standards they say. Competition must be introduced in the health service and education. Doing things just because they need doing is anti-competitive. How long before doing your own housework or giving to Oxfam is outlawed as anti-competitive – denying other people the opportunity to make money cleaning your house and feeding the poor? In business, competition is how you ensure that you get the best.


I can’t think of any other area of life where this would be considered a sensible way to get the best out of people, except maybe sports. In an art class or at a party or even in an office you wouldn’t expect the best results from the most aggressive, controlling, ruthless person there – quite the opposite. (If materials were scarce they might be the only one to produce anything at all, but materials are not scarce – no matter what they tell you. It’s just that some people – the most aggressive, controlling, ruthless ones, hog it all and force the rest of us to squabble over what’s left.)


It’s always assumed that the winners must, ipso facto, be the best. It’s an equation that seldom gets questioned and one of the basic tenets of Free Market Fundamentalism. But it can’t be true. People have different talents. There are all sorts of expertise out there – in my field there are plant propagators, plant breeders, garden designers, gardeners, pest and disease experts, various technologists, writers and so on and so forth. Each has various areas of specialist knowledge – some scientific, some artistic, some commercial, some practical. There are also character traits and outlooks appropriate to their roles – patience, attention to detail, creativity, physical fitness, love of nature and so on, and yet to compete successfully in the market the gardener must be preoccupied chiefly with management, money and publicity. Materials will need to be as cheap as possible. Labour must be as unskilled and low paid as possible. The ‘Products’ ideally should be as gaudy and short-lived as possible so that the customer comes back for more.
In my experience the modern commercial horticultural business is often run by rich retired business people who think they know about plants. (Sometimes they employ actual gardeners but play down their role and pay them very little.) Highly competitive people typically believe they are more knowledgeable than anyone else on their staff but have no real idea of what it means to be an expert in anything (except making money). It's almost impossible to convince them otherwise. Their self-belief is unassailable.
The characteristics that go to make up an expert nurseryman are not the same as those that go to make up a commercially successful nursery owner. In my experience there is very little overlap. People who really care about plants are generally not ruthless careerists. And yet it will be the latter that ends up running the garden centre and putting the real gardeners out of business. In the free market you can be the very best gardener in the world with a generous mix of the qualities mentioned above, but unless you are a good competitor you will get nowhere. On the other hand you can be a good competitor and a mediocre gardener and do very well indeed. (The same applies in almost any area of commerce. I just happen to know a bit about horticulture.)
Being the winner, in practice, is not at all to do with being the best man, but with making the other man the loser.
How then does competition lead to higher standards?


There was an episode of Grey’s Anatomy some while back where Christina Yang (who is proud to tell everyone that she is highly competitive) says that limiting the length of doctors’ shifts is wrong because it favours the weak. It doesn’t. It allows doctors who are in every other way excellent (or possibly better) to work. The requirement to be able to work twenty hours straight is an artificial criterion caused by bad management (like the artificial scarcity mentioned above) that trumps all other qualities. It doesn't matter how good you are - if you can't stay awake you are out. Who knows, perhaps Christina Yang is not the best doctor. Perhaps she is only the best of those that can function without sleep.


Sport is held up as the paradigm of healthy competition. Sport is all about winning after all. Here it is truer than anywhere else that the one who wins is the best. The winner of the gold medal for the one hundred metres sprint at the Olympics really is the best sprinter in the world, isn’t he? Well no. For a start he’s only the best of those who could afford to take the time off to go through the training regime – not a trivial consideration in very poor countries. So in fact he’s only the fastest of the rich kids, which doesn’t sound quite so impressive.
But even beyond that, sheer physical prowess is not the only thing. There’s a lot of psychology involved. A weaker athlete might win by intimidation or bluffing. This may be more of an issue in other sports and games. A weaker chess player can make a stronger one concede defeat by manipulation. Ok, it’s just a game. Sports are entered into voluntarily, unlike the market, which is most emphatically not ‘just a game’. Everyone must take part or starve – a fact many businessmen seem to forget.
In business almost all the success is down to bluffing and manipulation, marketing, pricing and power, and only tangentially about the sheer quality of the goods and services - assuming the customer is well-informed enough to know the difference (more about that another time.)
Competition therefore favours entirely spurious qualities and ignores the real – it’s the Law of Unintended Consequences again.


A highly developed competitive spirit is supposed to be a sign of strength. Women are attracted to it in men apparently. I just wonder though why those men seem to have so much to prove. You see them sometimes when you’re out driving. You’re doing the speed limit (or if you’re honest, somewhat more) and yet this guy’s still got his nose up your arse, trying to get you to go faster. Or you can watch him tailgating the guy in front – his brake lights flashing on and off. What’s he trying to prove? Does he think he looks cool? Does he think we’re all going ‘Wow! Now there’s a Real Man.’ Maybe he’s just mad. Maybe (giving him the benefit of the doubt) it’s an emergency. Then you see him overtake on a bend and you know, if it wasn’t an emergency before, it very soon will be. To me a highly developed competitive spirit is a sign of inadequacy. (There are also those city gents who drive their Jags everywhere at forty mph – presumably to let the rest of us know they’ve arrived. Either way they seem overly preoccupied with impressing the rest of us. Or maybe they're just very old.)
The free market is like a road system without speed limits or traffic lights or roundabouts.
Most people consider themselves to be above average drivers.


Of course I'm not proclaiming that henceforth there must be no competition. I understand that quite a few people rather enjoy the odd kickabout of a weekend and I myself am quite partial to the occasional game of scrabble. Nor am I saying that competition cannot improve services and keep prices down. Some people seem to respond to that sort of motivation. But it can't be trusted. It has a logic all it's own that has nothing to do with what people actually need or want. Like natural selection, to which it is obviously related, it has no forethought and no conscience. It just does whatever works and doesn't care what it extinguishes along the way (including itself). And yet we have elevated competition to the level of a universal panacea for human shortcomings. 'Make them fight' we say. 'Let's see who's the better man.' But instead we only find out who's the most devious, the most amoral, the most venal. And once they have taken what they can, what can the rest of us do but squabble over what's left?
I like the analogy of the football crowd. Once one person stands up everyone behind him has to stand up in order to see. In the end no one can see much more than they could before but everyone's more uncomfortable.


So if you’re planning a garden you don’t just accept that the whole place is going to be taken over by brambles and bindweed. No, if you’re a keen gardener, chances are that a lot of the plants you want will require special treatment and protection. Your veg will need extra nutrients and protection from pests and diseases. Those prize alpines will fail if they get shaded out or overcrowded. No gardener thinks that the best thing is simply to let the biggest most aggressive weeds take over on the grounds that it ‘maximises growth’. The word ‘weedy’ is usually applied to weak and needy people but in the garden it’s the invasive and the opportunistic we need to weed out...

The Free Market Fundamentalist

There was Nigel Lawson on Start The Week on Monday - telling us essentially not to worry about climate change because it'll all blow over probably. The important thing is to keep making money. After all,he said, it's making money that causes climate change and er... Where was I?

Nigel I suppose is one of them there Free Market Fundamentalists. I don't know all the details of what his own personal views are and frankly  I don't care, but I've got a fair idea what he thinks - heck, I grew up with these people. He's a type. He'll do for my purposes.
They were debating Protectionism (the restricting of free trade between nations to protect local jobs and/or prices.) Dambisa Moyo was arguing that some protectionism might be necessary if certain developing nations are ever to get their local economies off the ground. Nigel was against, basically because it's not Free Trade, and anything other than totally Free trade is anathema. No restrictions, no regulations, just Free. Anything less would be the start of 'The Slippery Slope'.
Slippery Slope arguments are almost always bogus. In almost every area of life we have to accept that there are shades of grey and we have to make judgement calls, but not for Nigel. People like Nigel like things to be all or nothing, black or white. Simple yes/no answers. Are you with us or are you against us? The ability to make quick uncompromising decisions and stick to them no matter what is taken as a sign of strong leadership and sound judgement. (Look at his old boss for example.)
No doubt Nigel likes to think he's being Realistic - that it's just Human Nature - 'Common Sense'. People like Nigel like to tell the rest of us what we're like (and not just some or part of us, but all of us, deep down, even if we can't admit it) - that we're ruthless, competitive and obsessed with power and material wealth. We might coo over our own children but otherwise it's dog-eat-dog out there. It's the Law of the Jungle - survival of the fittest. And therefore it's Natural. And what is Natural is right isn't it? We all know what is Natural - the Sociobiologists and Evolutionary Psychologists have looked at our closest relatives - the apes and monkeys (and any other species that seem instructive) and confirmed what we always knew about ourselves - ruthless self interest, xenophobia, racism, sexism, internecine warfare...
The Conservatives see themselves as the Natural Party of Government. The reason Thatcher achieved so much is because she took away the restrictions on what would happen 'naturally'. People again mistook this for sound political sense and strong leadership, when what she actually did was squash the resistance, who never had that much power in the first place (unless you count not collecting the rubbish and letting the lights go out, which I agree is a nuisance) and let the powerful become even more so.
The idea that what is natural is good is a very popular philosophy among everyone from hedonistic New Age Hippies ('If it feels good do it') to libertarian Social Darwinists ('Sod you Jack, I'm alright'), but Ethics 1.0.1. when I was at university (Ok, Brighton Poly) told us that 'Is' does not imply 'Ought.' In other words you cannot logically derive what ought to be the case from what is the case. Even if human nature is ruthless, competitive, and obsessed with power and material wealth (and that's a big 'if'), that does not make it right. There is this other thing - ethics, or morality, that tells us how things should be.

Of course, our Nigel would tell us that what he advocates is how things should be as well - because the Free Market is the only guarantor of improved living standards for all, which has got to be good, right? Climate change, mass migration and the odd genocide in Africa is just a temporary glitch.
And he's sort of right in a way. I will argue elsewhere that life for unprecedented numbers of us is safer, healthier and longer than it's ever been at any other time in human history, and a lot of that is due to medical, technological and social advances made possible by capitalism. (Ok, I don't entirely buy that but give them the benefit of the doubt.)
But even if that has been true in the past, is it possible or even likely that it will continue to be true in the future?
Again the 'strong leadership'/'uncompromising decision making' school of political thinking would counsel us not to be pessimistic. Doubt is a sign of weakness.

But doubt is reasonable. Already we're coming to the end of the resources and space we have available to an exponentially increasing human population. Already, we talk about places like China and India - home to vast fractions of that population aspiring to Western standards of living and we already know that for everybody to live to US standards would require, I don't remember the exact figure (probably it's not an exact figure) but it's something like five or six Earths' worth of space and resources. And if climate change takes hold in even the more modest ways predicted there will be less space, not more, to house and feed the world's population, never mind all the other species we share the place with. (That the problems are not certain is no excuse to assume that there will be no problems, as Nigel appears to.)
And yet Nigel simply believes that there won't be a problem because growth in the economy and advances in technology will make everything fine.

As a burgeoning Leftie back in my teens I was routinely accused of being naive and unrealistic. Left wingers also tend to be the ones accused of living by dogma and ideology instead of in 'The Real World'. And yet our Nigel looks at the future described above and says 'Growth and Technology will solve everything.'
Technology is going to have to make us the equivalent of five or six earth's worth of energy and resources in the next  fifty years. And the only way to make this happen apparently is to free up the economy. As his old boss would have said 'There is no alternative'.
Now who's the naive dreamer? Now who's living by dogma?

But what's the alternative? Anything less than unrestrained (wild) Western style growth and development is holding back progress, and the pursuit of happiness. Aspirational is the key word here, and who can deny it? Who does not want to aspire to greatness? It's the one thing the previous government and this agree on - the right to aspire - to want more than the previous generation - to do more - to have more. Who can argue with that?
Well I can. Most of us in The West are already pretty comfortably off materially (People in Ulster telling us their problems with the water supply recently made it 'like living in the Third World' not withstanding.) The fact that we don't seem to be any happier is another thing I'll come back to in another post.
But why are we framing our ideas of Aspiration only in material terms? Surely there's more to life. We've been sold the idea that any pass-time that doesn't involve buying the latest this or the most advanced that is just a bit 'Sad', but is spending so much time at work doing something you don't really care about for someone you don't respect, just to earn the money to pay someone else to do things for you that you could do for yourself if only you had more time, really all that liberating (or aspirational)? And can we really afford to have half as many people again as there are now expecting to live that way?
GMOs are a good example. Normally they are, at least partly, promoted as solving the problem of malnourishment in the developing world. And yet there is already enough food in the world to feed everybody (and well - not just on gruel). The reasons we don't feed everyone are economic and political. GMOs won't change that. Like most new technology, GMOs will mostly be used to provide more choice (aspirations) for those who already have more than they know what to do with.
There is an alternative to growth then, and it's the 'R' word - redistribution. But who wants that? How anti-aspirational is that?

Well Nigel doesn't want it, that's for sure, because the truth is that all this stuff about Capitalism improving life for everyone is Bullshit. (Technically, the difference between Bullshit and Lies is that the bullshitter doesn't care whether what he says is true or not, as long as it serves his purposes.) There is no moral agenda in the Free Market. Nigel Lawson advocates the expansion and deregulation of the Free Market because he wants to make money. Deep down he may even know that there's very little chance of Growth and Technology bringing the benefits to the world he predicts, but he doesn't care. He simply calculates that he will be on the right side of the razor wire when the day comes.