The Archbishop of Canterbury has issued a report suggesting that the UK economic model is "broken", that since the financial crisis what economic growth there has been has gone into profits rather than earnings resulting in "the longest period of earnings stagnation for 150 years".
If we think of this in Buddhist psychology terms, we know that common delusion generally has either a "greed" or a "hate" valency. The financial crash was brought about by a long "greed" period which people had started to think would go on forever. The Archbishop's report talks of the "promise" of ever increasing living standards that had been the foundation of social policy from 1945 onwards. Believing in the trend going on and on, people increasingly lived on plastic card credit and other loans and many of these were unsound resulting in the "toxic debt" phenomenon and subsequent crash. Thus the pendulum swung. Now the UK is in a "hate" period manifesting in xenophobia, Brexit, the punishment of all parties in the last general election and a general sense of looming crisis. The theory also tells us that while "greed" periods can go on for quite a long time, "hate" periods tend to be more short and sharp, often with a cruel crescendo.
On this basis it seems very likely that a major political and/or economic crisis is highly likely within a year or two. How this will play vis-a-vis Brexit and developments in the US where political crisis is also deepening is difficult to predict, but 2018/19 could well turn out to be a rather rough ride.
The Archbishop is calling for a social reform of a scale equivalent to those brought in by Attlee and then Thatcher and evidently hoping that it may result in a return to the "promise" as before. However, it is not apparent that anybody at present knows how this could be achieved, so things may well continue to get worse for some time yet, and politics will continue to maintain its current sense of unreality and "fake news" until a real crunch arrives.
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