[Music]
i think certainly crises release
or reveal the latent capacity but
there's a really interesting question
which is if that's the case
why don't we look for it anyway why
don't we look before
crisis why don't we keep thinking about
life
as i would say entrepreneurs think about
life
to say well what is here that you know
is changing
where is their capacity for something
better
the main thing about normality is people
want to go back to work they want to be
earning they want to be you know seeing
their colleagues families want to be
able to
have their normal lives the problem is
that on the economic side
the normal was a very problematic way of
growing i mean what caused the financial
crisis for example was not a lack of
growth
but the direction of that growth what is
causing the climate crisis is not a lack
of growth
but the direction if we look
upstream at so many of the challenges
facing the world whether it's the
climate emergency environmental
breakdown
rising levels of loneliness inequality
poverty all those challenges
when you start going upstream and ask
what are their root causes
you so often find yourself facing the
economic system
we have a systemic crisis you know the
first law of ecology
everything is connected to everything
else
and we simply can't say there's a
climate crisis
and there's an inequality crisis and it
is
all bound together
we're going to be spending trillions
around the world to rebuild after this
we're going to have to find a way to put
our society back to work
and we have long had an urgent need to
update and modernize our infrastructure
social and physical
we have every reason i think right now
to have not just a new deal
but a green new deal that does it in a
way that's ecologically responsible
and sustainable i would dearly and
dearly love to think that this crisis
will
provoke experimentation and openness to
new ideas in a way that will enhance our
democracy
but there will always be a question in
my mind which was
what on earth made us think that for 70
years we could just
leave democracy and let it become as
sultified
and archaic as in fact it became
saving liberal democracy has a few
meanings
do we want to save liberal democracy for
the classes
and the groups that have benefited from
liberal democracy over the past
few years or do we want to save liberal
democracy in the sense that we want it
to work for everyone in that sense we're
not saving it we're recreating it
because it never worked for everyone
i think the point about democracy
especially deliberative democracy as a
system
of coming up with a global and just
consensus for climate change
is that it's a mechanism that allows us
to correct
our mistakes
the idea that our age wanting a statute
to be removed or to be contextualized
is not us saying that our morals are
right
and i've written and thought a lot about
what about this
age will future generations find
outrageous about us i mean i read
documents by people in the 18th century
and you
you look at their their double think
about slavery
good decent christian incredibly moral
people in lots of ways who are slave
traders
i think our age will have the same
contradictions i think our relationship
with the natural world
our failure to seize this moment
to stop the climate crisis we'll be
condemned by future generations who will
live with the consequences and will rage
against our refusal
to give up on some of the luxuries that
we have when the
science was telling us that we had to
i think most people care about the
legacies they leave keeping
a part of themselves alive after they've
gone and we've inherited extraordinary
legacies from the past from those who
made the great
scientific discoveries we still benefit
from um who built the cities we still
live in who planted the first seed
but we're also the inheritors of these
more negative legacies we've got bad
ancestors as well as good ones
so the real challenge for us is to
embrace an intergenerational form of the
golden rule
what do we wish we had inherited and
then therefore
what would we like to pass on to our
descendants
when i talk about a better future of
health and social care
the dream is what i and all the dreamers
want
we all want to live in a place we call
home
with people and things we love in
communities where we look out for one
another
doing the things that matter to us
that's the social care future
we seek let's think about actually the
future is something we are all engaged
in we are all involved in and that we
can all influence
so let's start thinking proactively
instead of defensively
about the future and let us do that
together because it's a better way to
think
if we're going to achieve a new balance
a kind of post-war settlement a
post-covic settlement
we need to understand who we are and
seek
more explicitly to build policies and
institutions designed
to bring out the best in us and to
enable us to solve our problems together
i do think that there's so much to learn
around the world of what works what
doesn't and using this opportunity to
really
structure and bring back strategy
intention imagination but dreaming a
better society
but doing it in the now you know what
better moment and we can't fail we have
to try