Transcript of Thought For the World's thought for the day

Claire Rayner

12th February 2009

Most people born before 1960 or so will remember that as children their parents and teachers, and indeed any adults with whom they had dealings, regarded being greedy as one of the worst things a person could be. I was told always to leave a little of my dinner at the side of the plate ‘for Mr Manners’ --- and it had to be the food I liked best. Only greedy people left spinach or the fat on bacon instead of lovely hot buttery toast or mashed potatoes.

Greed, I was told, was as bad as being a liar or a thief or not being polite or not putting other people’s needs first. The only thing that was worse was not doing as you were told. If all children learned this, said my parents, they’d grow up to be really nice adults and we’d all be as happy as Larry. I never did find out who Larry was, but I got the clear impression he was just about the happiest person who ever existed

So here we are, properly grown up and I can’t forget that early teaching. It’s part of the fabric of my life, together with the importance of kindness, loyalty and treating others as you’d like them to treat you. I taught my children what I had been taught, of course, though I left out Mr Manners because he had been the first casualty of World War Two, when rationing started. He was dead said the grownups. From then on you had to eat every scrap you were given and leaving so much as a spoonful was now the major crime. And large numbers of people reared then grew up to teach their children what they had learned, and so on ad infinitum.

That being so, why is it that in this first decade of the twenty first century we are in such a dreadful state? We are sliding into an appalling greed-created depression, possibly worse than the 1929 debacle when millions lost their jobs and the country nearly went bankrupt. It took a world war to get people to remember the childhood virtues of hard work, loyalty, duty and above all not being greedy. Rationing meant fair shares.

This new Extra Large Twenty First Century Style Worst-Ever-Depression-There-Has-Ever-Been is happening for the same reason it happened in 1929 (and a few occasions before it, such as the South Sea Bubble and the Dutch Tulip extravaganza) and for the same single reason.

People forgot what they had been taught about greed. One Head of Modern State, the Prime Minister of the UK, however, forgot before everyone else. She was possibly the greediest of all with the US President Ronald Reagan doing his best to match her.

In the late Seventies and early Eighties she set about dismantling the systems used by City of London stockbrokers and bankers and financiers to control those who were, like Mrs T, amnesiac about the rules regarding greed and caring about other people in general. The old system existed to protect the nation’s money from grabbers who might pull fancy tricks to increase their private incomes. But she saw no sense in that. She opened the Market, got rid of the regulations, and the result was inevitable. Greed ruled everything, both in the UK and the USA.

Which is why, two or three decades later we face the misery of a full blown depression. More jobless. More poor. More hungry. More broken families as breadwinners have to leave their homes to get a job --- any job.

It is high time that Mr Manners and all the disapproval of greed that his existence implied was revived. And that we also get rid of lotteries, and TV Bingo and Poker games promising big wins and every other part of the gimmee, gimmee, gimmee ethos that spawned them in the Thatcherism mode were chucked back in the waste bin where they belong. The greed they exemplify damages us all.

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