Better That We Tighten Our Safety Jackets Now ...

Dear Reader,

Our financial wizard, our chancellor George Osborne, has been to Shanghai to represent his country at the G20 summit. He has been reported to be so concerned about the state of the world's economy that his first inclination is to apply more cuts in next month's budget.

The question I find difficult to find an answer for is that a layman like me could see the world's economy was stumbling many months ago - and there were those far more qualified than me who said the same. What did Osborne do in his November statement? He claimed that he could borrow on this country's growth in 2016 to cover shortfalls due to the opposition he faced on (particularly) Tax Credits.

Three months later his first inclination is to go back onto the right foot to apply cuts. 

This much lauded Chancellor has perpetually got his sums wrong since 2010 and also applied a policy that was far too stringent. Now he wants the general public to suffer more.

The latest set of damning inequality statistics produced by Oxfam in January (referred to in my article last week) stated that today 62 people own the same as half of the world. The number in 2010 was 388. In other words, in six years half the world's wealth has become concentrated in six times less people. It is envisaged that by 2020, less than half those 62 will own the same amount of wealth.

This fact speaks volumes in terms of the dangers the world faces. Not only our young people are being taught more and more to think mechanically (as examination fodder) and put in a straight-jacket on student fees' repayments, but the concentration of so much wealth in so few hands will surely mean that our children will be more and more controllable by those wealthy magnates. I do not exaggerate when I say the threat of mind control is almost of deadly proportions.

Money seems to stand for more than humanity and care. Some will say that has always been the case and always will, but there have been many messengers that have said quite clearly that the reverse is true: they preached a very different paradigm.

Perhaps George Osborne does not dare tax the rich rather than the ordinary people: the big financial friends of the rich further up the scale might be asked to put the boot in, or at least suppress such ideas of equality by paying people to do the dirty work.

We are in a time of great trial, though we may not see it like that. Many see it as just another economic cycle, but the events in the world demonstrate otherwise.

Between now and 2018 I believe there will be enormous challenges to face, the least of which will be George Osborne's policies. But this enormous world conflict (I also believe) will - at some future point, perhaps in the next decade - have a bright outcome in the form of a very different set of values. But it will be better for us all if we adjust now for that to happen - not just wait.