ISN'T it time we did some thinking for ourselves?

It seems to me that the continuing popular political and media debate on the increasingly parlous state of the Western economies has become limited to immediate concerns about ensuring that we can all, as quickly as possible, return to living as if there is no tomorrow.

The concepts banded about are 'austerity' and 'growth'. The underlying thread of the argument, with differing emphases from the various silos of the political and economic guru elite, seems to be that we need to take some hits, not as individual consumers but insofar as we need to be users of communally funded and wealth redistributing public services (by definition those who need public services the most actually feel the pain) in order that the level of national debt that needs to be serviced is significantly reduced.

In the process far fewer folk are to be employed in the public services and re-employed in, we must assume, well remunerated and challenging work in a burgeoning private sector?

Concurrently it seems to be argued that lasting economic solutions reside in growth which will significantly depend upon sustained and perpetually increasing domestic spending? This implies that folk will indefinitely enjoy higher incomes and disposable wealth ... or that they will service even higher than the present astronomically elevated levels of private personal debt? Even in the context of this limited debate, the contradictions are blatantly exposed.

Am I right in assuming that this mantra of growth depends upon increased consumption amid an environment of unprecedented private debt, insidious unemployment, a cultural celebration of consumption and excess, and a damnable populism leading to a short-termism that either stupidly or wilfully refuses to face the facts of global warming, the exhaustion of natural resources, the critical over-population of the planet, the decline of Western economies, and a deskilled and disconnected populace alienated from communal problem-solving, reciprocity and self-reliance (consumers rather than citizens?). This leaves me quaking at the prospects confronting my children, grandchildren and their successors.

So I ask myself – and you:

• Is it plausible to expect economies to grow indefinitely?

• Would not an honest and realistic interpretation of austerity be the promotion of a society that lives within its means and in harmony with nature?

• Is our aggressively rapacious and consumerist civilisation even more susceptible to a catastrophic decline and fall than the major civilisations that preceded us in history?

• Are national politicians, even if they had the guts to acknowledge the underlying issues, capable of grappling with the 'Mep­histopheles' of global capitalism?

And is it perhaps time to start looking towards our own solutions, challenging the 'bread and circuses' entertainment and celebrity 'grooming' that is our daily experience, and to be actors rather than punters?

An ironic friend frequently asks this question – "What is the legacy I want to leave? How can I make no difference at all?"

What do you think?

– Bob Rhodes West Gloucestershire Green Party.