Letters - 10 May 2013
From the economy to the first world war
The ‘Good Economy’
I much appreciated David Cadman’s article in the Friends Quarterly (May 2013), in which he writes about what he terms the ‘good economy’. He is expecting this to replace the ‘old and false economy’ which he feels belongs to a previous age. The suggestion brought to my mind several quotations from the writings of early Friends, especially the word false, which featured repeatedly in those Quaker apocalyptic texts. I wondered if our Friends’ seventeenth-century prophecy, with a little revised spelling, might be a warning again to us today. Both these quotations are dated 1658:
The Lord never sent them and therefore they do not profit the people at all, …, and the blessings of such hath the Lord cursed, yea even already saith the Lord, and dung doth he spread upon their faces, and Christ saith, by their fruits the false Profits are known. (Thomas Robertson)
…but this was the way and practise of the false Profits (as it is your way and practise now). (Robert Turner)
Perhaps the change and repentance that our Quaker forebears wrote about with such urgency is applicable just as much to our generation. Does it need to hear the message of David Cadman’s new, good economy (which we have not yet seen) and to reject the old, false economy that we are sadly familiar with?
Judith Roads
It tolls for thee
Of course Margaret Thatcher was neither a monster nor a witch, but a human being and a child of God – like all of us, no matter what we’ve done.
But I’m not as large-spirited as Michael Bartlet (3 May) or John Donne. I’m not singing ‘Ding Dong’, but neither can I say that her death has saddened or diminished me. What does diminish me is her living legacy. The reason why the feelings are still so ‘fresh and raw’ is that we are still living in the world she created – a world in which the words ‘public service’ are poison, in which the only measure of people’s worth is how much they own, in which greed and selfishness are good and the dice are loaded in favour of the rich.
In some ways I am a Thatcher beneficiary, thanks partly to the housing bubble and the high interest rates of a mismanaged economy. But in other ways I am poorer. A lot of things that used to belong to me have been sold off without my consent, including the utilities, the railways, council housing – and, any day now, what’s left of the Post Office and the NHS. Not to mention the spiritual cost of a worldview so lacking in cultural and social vision. To rephrase Donne, every human life blighted by Thatcherist values diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Therefore I ‘send not to know’ who is the profiteer and who is destitute and despised. They’re both me.
Stevie Krayer
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