Creation groaning (2)

I saw yesterday that a massive contract has now been awarded for the decommissioning of the Sellafield (formerly Windscale) nuclear power plant in the UK, which has not produced any electricity for some time now. The cost of the decommissioning is going to be a staggering number of billions of pounds. This is an iconic moment for us Brits, though the cost implications are iconic for all the wrong reasons.

Once commentator from the nuclear industry commented that we are witnessing the dawn of a new era of nuclear power generation. For me, this is the beginning of the end of a long and disastrous fliration with a life-threatening technology.

But it's also a signal of deeper change. We are indeed standing on the brink of change, but it isn't going to be a market-led future - in fact, it can't be. It has to be a future led by governments, not multinationals, and we have to incentivise our governments to think and plan for the longer term.

Look at what we have seen in recent years in the neo-liberal economies that the English-speaking western nations have adopted under Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton, Bush and Blair. The massive failure of junk bonds in the 80s. The Enron scandal. The Lloyds insurance crisis in the UK, where the long deceit over asbestos caused such a financial meltdown.

And this year we've seen the virtual nationalisation of the Western multinational finance houses - Citigroup, AIG, Northern Rock and RBS in the UK, the failure of a top 5 merchant back, Lehmann Brothers (one amongst dozens in the US), and no doubt there are further shocks to come.

The UK and the US are bogged down in unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the US is carrying out cross-border raids into Pakistan and Syria, probably to keep its spirits up rather than to achieve anything real. The so-called war on terror belongs to George W Bush entirely, and we will see it quietly wither on the vine under the next US administration. We are witnessing the end of the Project for the New American Century, the American neo-con policy document that gave birth to 9/11 and all the tragedy that flowed from it. Perhaps when the US and UK get out of Iraq, Iraq's literacy levels will be able to return to the 89% level they had before we invaded (way higher than those for the US).

The Chicago School of economic theory is dead. No smart leader or population will ever again trust a capitalism that has been left so unshackled and allowed to determine public policy according to the requirements of its own shareholders and executives. John Maynard Keynes seems to have been broadly right over the longer term, and countries where Keynesian economic policies have been at least partly maintained have self-evidently not suffered as much in the recent financial upheavals.

The world is reconstituting itself, and the model it's going to have to use is the one the neo-liberals hate most: a mixed economy with the state playing a central role. Don't forget, in the past, commercial companies have only ever been nationalised in the West when they have failed, or occasionally where national security interests outweighed anything other consideration.

So President-elect Obama has his hands full. His is a mission for which he will get no thanks whatever, because he is doomed to fail, at least as far as the economy is concerned. He is the man appointed to manage the crisis and the beginning of the decline of neo-liberal economic policy. He has to respond to creation's groans. He has to both teach and learn that we all have to live a little more off-grid, a little greener, a little more as part of a global community, a little more ethically, a little less like children of Darwin and a little more like children of God. Remembering that we are all mixed race may help a little.