People seem awfully gloomy this new year – if it's not the VAT rise, it's the cuts, and if it's not those, then it's the mad, plutocratic government with its whirlwind "reforms". But there's no need for pessimism. Britain's going to be OK. Or that's what HSBC thinks anyway.
The bank has published a report, The World in 2050, which contains glad tidings. The global economy may well be engaged in a vast eastward-moving structural adjustment. But apparently this will barely affect the UK's standing at all. In 39 years' time, Britain will be the sixth largest economy in the world, behind only China, the US, India, Japan and Germany, in that order.
Our high birthrate (oh, yes) will keep us – and the US – competitive. Well, as long as little, teeny things such as the "eco-deficit" can be fixed, HSBC coyly suggests. Hurrah! It must be amazing, really amazing, to have such faith in the gentle wonders of neo-liberal globalisation, and such belief in the benign efficacy of economic growth.
Yet these hard-to-believe predictions are comforting in their way, because they suggest that the Anglo-Saxon world will keep turning, budging up on the sofa just a bit to accommodate the economies whose huge expansion will presumably have secured our own continued wealth. Globalisation may remain a dirty world to some, but the concept has its advantages, not least among them the belief that western enlightenment ideas about progress can remain broadly unchallenged, and the lot of even the luckiest of human populations can continue to improve forever. There, after all, is Gordon Brown's philosophy in a nutshell.
Oddly, the left, at present, appears to have even greater faith in global-isation than the right, even though they are shy of admitting it in so many words. The left, after all, retains a seeming belief that a "return to strong growth" in this country is so inevitable that the progressive project can continue almost unabated, even if it has to be financed on tick for a while. Boom and bust turned out not to have been banished, but nor, happily, was bust and boom.
The idea of progressive globalisation is tremendously New Labour (although all three main parties cleave to this near-oxymoron in some form), so it seems weird that it has gained such currency on the left at this particular point. Yet no matter how much people profess to hate Labour's cosying-up to the wealthy, the new rich of the emerging economies must be wooed if Britain is going to grab a share of the eastern boom and achieve the growth that finances the continuing expansion of the state that is desired so greatly.
Sure, growth will be in part achieved through an increase in manufacturing exports – which look to be picking up, though without having a positive impact on employment. But the Conservatives, so often accused of not having a Plan B, expect also to attract the new rich as they pursue such things as prestigious educations and agreeable private healthcare, in the more "fluid" markets for such commodities that are being sledge-hammered into place right now in various government ministries. Here, surely, lies the mysterious private-sector growth that the Conservatives say so cagily yet so confidently will be coming very soon to soak up those public-sector job losses.
This is the reality of what quickly renewed growth is going to look like. Perhaps the Conservatives are right. Perhaps people will be so grateful for jobs and growth that they will vote them in again, because at least there will be work, if you get on your bike. It has happened before, after all, and not so long ago. As with the last time, Labour might be only too grateful to wash its hands of some of what David Cameron calls "the heavy lifting" for a while.
It was clear, under the last Labour administration, that attracting wealth to Britain was a lot easier than redistributing it once it had arrived, even via growth in employment. Labour may have denied that Britain was "broken", but the cuts have revealed that a large proportion of the population is highly vulnerable, if such a thing had not been perfectly obvious anyway.
Its cheerleaders may deny it (even as they argue passionately against such horrors as a living wage), but globalisation tends to close the poverty gap between countries, and promote such a gap among the populations within countries. Mainstream progressives tend to see globalisation as a way of lifting nations out of poverty, but understand that a strong welfare state is also needed to stop such societies from becoming unstable and morally unpalatable in their lack of social cohesion. Conservatives reckon that there is no downside to globalisation, apart from the pesky progressives and their insistence on building the welfare states that allow people to make some small resistance against the servitude that perpetual growth demands of many.
Weirdly, however, the alternative to growth sounds much more conservative than anything the Tories would dream of straightforwardly suggesting. It involves a revolution so much greater than taking to the street and proclaiming free higher education as "a fundamental human right", or boycotting Topshop until Philip Green pays more tax. It involves the adoption of serious, sober, studious, self-improving and circumscribed lives that are quiet and careful, disciplined and thrifty, packed with work, mostly unpaid, highly reliant on "simple pleasures" for satisfaction and self- fulfilment, and held together by a small but tremendously reliable and highly decentralised state.
It's what the Conservatives have in mind for those who are locked out of the next boom, and the funny thing is that the only really radical alternative is to accept the same medicine, but without bothering simultaneously to chase globalised growth and inter- national standing. In other words, voting Green. There was a brief vogue for discussion about the adoption of such Quaker-like existences just as the crash came, but people very quickly realised that they didn't actually fancy it all that much, really. Instead, the hope is still to have it all, for ever, and in this the only real difference between the mainstream left and the mainstream right is how the fantasy gets dressed up. Happy 2050.