Things can get worse...

“Things can’t get much worse in this country” a friend said to me recently. They were speaking from a socialist perspective, and lamenting the spending cuts and the fact that the coalition is not quite as spendthrift as its predecessor. The validity of these justifications are not my main concern today – I think anyone who reads this blog regularly will know where I stand on such issues – but the notion that things can’t get much worse in this country is not unique to the left. It can be seen in some in the right. It can be seen in statist and in libertarians. And it is, of course, bollocks.

While things ain’t grand at the moment, it could get much, much worse in this country. You can look elsewhere in the world, to countries like North Korea, to see just how bad things can get with ever increasing state intervention. Likewise, you can look to various war-torn African nations to see what happens when the state collapses in on itself and effectively disappears. Yeah, you might be paying more tax than you would like (I know I certainly am) and you might be sick of paternalistic types tutting at you when you enjoy a drink or a cigarette, but you aren’t dodging bullets in a civil war or avoiding the secret police in an authoritarian regime. Things could be worse.

Because one of the things we still have in this country despite the continued erosion of our civil liberties by successive statist government is the right to bellyache about it all. You can protest – in writing, verbally or in person. Sure, you might not like the fact that the state attempts to control your protest (and again I don't) but you can still do it. And you can protest about anything you like – it doesn’t even have to make sense. So you can have a pop at the government about spending cuts, even though they have precious little choice but to decrease the rate at which government spending rises. You can also have a go at nonsense conspiracy theories like the currently fashionable idea of the domination of “cultural Marxism” (a spurious concept that seems to be an attempt to add an ersatz veneer of respectability to the old claim of “it’s political correctness gone mad!”) While we have the right to protest, things can get much worse. And history has shown us just how bad things can get. The worst case scenario isn’t social shunning of the non-comformist or even legislating against them; it is the death camp for that non-conformist.

And the wonderful yet terrifying truth about our current situation is that what happens next remains, to a large extent, in our hands. It’s wonderful because we can potentially shape a version of tomorrow where we are freer. It is terrifying because we might not take that opportunity or fuck that opportunity up. But we should always remember, no matter what our frustrations are in the here and now, that things can get much worse. And that can be a motivator; to make sure that they don’t.