Ten years from now, I will almost certainly be dead.

But, if I were to live that long, I would be constantly challenged with the question, “Why did you not warn us about what was surely already apparent – that the globe was heating at an ever-increasing rate, and that – unless we changed our behaviours very drastically – it would rapidly become uninhabitable.”

I would have no satisfactory answer to that question, other than to plead that “I tried. I argued till I was blue in the face, but people wouldn’t listen. They preferred to follow the advice of those who assured them that there was nothing to worry about.”

“They preferred that advice because it offered them the easy way out. And by the time they realised that they had been misled, it was too late.”

“So, they followed the advice of those who said that we could safely put in place special dispensations that would allow us to do what we liked – that we could “fast-track” to a trouble-free future. All that we needed to do was to find three idiots who would bear the responsibility of ignoring the scientific evidence.”

“That trio would take responsibility for decisions that flew in the face of the best scientific evidence we could assemble. The only qualities they needed were unshakeable ignorance, contempt for public opinion and confidence in their own judgment.”

“Our only sin was being too gullible and allowing them to do it.”

I had occasion yesterday to visit our health centre. My doctor had said that I needed a blood test.

The first thing I noticed was that the phlebotomist was acting as her own receptionist. She was handing a number to prospective patients in the order in which they presented themselves. After she had done this for a time, she skipped next door to her little surgery and delivered the required treatment to her patients

I asked her if she was happy, fulfilling this dual role. “There’s no choice,” she said. “There’s no one else. If I don’t do it, it won’t get done.”

When it came to my turn, she expertly delivered the blood test. By this time, the other end of the big room was also a scene of confusion, with those attempting to provide treatments of various kinds becoming hopelessly confused with those trying to organise the process, and none knowing quite what was going on.

“What on earth is going on,” I enquired. I was answered with shrugged shoulders.

After a time, the shruggers elaborated a little.

“It’s the budget cuts” the shruggers said.

I was aghast. If the cuts could disrupt a relatively simple process like the one I had been involved in, what impact would they have on some of the more complex parts of the health service.

Our health service is in more trouble than we might imagine.

Our government is in the course – before our very eyes – of declaring that it has lost confidence in, and is accordingly abandoning, the founding concept of New Zealand. It apparently prefers the path trodden by others.

The world is not short of countries in which an invading population of – usually white – people takes over the government and subjects another group – usually black or brown – to an inferior status. If I had wanted to live in such a country, I would not have returned from the UK to my native New Zealand, but I would instead have sought citizenship of Australia, or the United States, or perhaps even South Africa.

Instead, however, I embraced a country which had, quite deliberately, opted for a quite different model. It is a model in which one civilisation does not assert its superiority over another but where they each agree to live together and to learn from each other. They each understand that they are better off, and lead fuller and richer lives, if they can draw upon their different histories and world views.

We have run New Zealand on this basis for long enough, and with enough success, to prove to ourselves that it is a superior model – that it provides us, not only with a country that avoids the tensions and conflicts that beset other countries, but also with a secure basis from which we can make further progress.

Sadly, however, our current government is acting as though it has lost confidence in what has been the very foundation of our success so far. They seem determined to emphasise what divides us, not what unites us, to ignore the lessons that history has taught us. They look elsewhere for models as to the best way to build a country that owes its foundation to two or more races rather than one.

For the first time in our short history, we are invited to see division and difference, to act on what separates us, not what brings us together. So, the beauty of the Maori language and dance, the subtlety of the Maori world view, are declared to be of no value. The issue of what we can learn from each other is, we are told, a matter of one-way traffic.

I, as a pakeha New Zealander, am left with a sense of abandonment. I am no longer different, because I am a New Zealander. I no longer have something that is different – something that makes me part of the South Pacific. I am just another colonist, bringing my civilisation with me from foreign climes, not learning from where I was born.

We must hope that this attempt to close off our options is given short shrift and that we return to what has served us so well so far.

“I first became aware of Cafca, improbably enough, you may well think, while I was a visiting Fellow for a term at Nuffield College, Oxford in 2005. I had set myself the task, while away, of writing a book about the global economy, which seemed to me at the time to be a rapidly developing and not entirely welcome phenomenon – and I set myself the task of evaluating its impact on two markedly different economies, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.

The first problem I encountered was that the Bodleian Library, despite its great resources, was somewhat short of up-to-date statistics about the New Zealand economy, so I then gravitated (by what route, I’m not quite sure) to Cafca and Murray Horton, as a reliable source of facts and figures about the New Zealand economy and its place in the global economy.

The book that eventually emerged in 2006 was entitled “The Democracy Sham – How Globalisation Devalues Your Vote”. In the introduction to the book, I defined the global economy as ‘a world economic order in which capital, trade, production, information and technology flow to and from the destinations determined by market forces without having regard to the barriers erected by national or regional governments, policies and jurisdictions.” I went on to say that “ Even this, however, fails to capture the essential element of the contemporary global economy – the freedom it confers on international capital to roam the world, seeking the conditions most favourable to its interests and recognising little obligation to pay regard to the requirements of elected governments and the populations whose interests they represent… International capital has, in other words, fundamentally altered the balance of power between itself and other interests…It is the ability of capital to move freely that has transformed the world economy, so that it is now dominated by a single view of what economic policy should be about.”

I look back in this way because it is easy, in contemporary New Zealand, to focus on individual instances of unwelcome or inappropriate “investments” by foreign interests, and to see only “the trees” and not “the forest”. The “foreign control of Aotearoa” of Cafca’s title is not, in other words, brought about and constituted only by individual purchases or investments, but is – rather – a process, constant and cumulative, by which capital has learnt how to circumvent and bypass the safeguards erected in the public interest by democratic governments, not least our own.

The warnings I issued in 2006 about the impact this would have on our economy and society have – sadly – been more than amply borne out by our subsequent experience. The price we pay for becoming part of a “global economy” run in the interests of international capital is a heavy one and is currently being paid by the dispossessed, the unemployed, the sick, and those who are members of minorities, however defined.

And, our freedom to choose our own way forward (and, hopefully, towards a better and more just society), has been greatly constrained as the nostrums and dictums of international capital have taken hold in our domestic political discourse and now seem to shape that discourse and to define for many of our citizens what is and is not acceptable and supportable.

We need look no further for an illustration of that unwelcome truth than the glee with which Shane Jones has introduced what he describes as a “Fast-Track process” for serving the interests of international capital at the expense of those that would ordinarily be thought of as worthy of protection by our own democratically elected government.

It is not just Karl Marx – even the most enthusiastic supporters of the market economy (not least Adam Smith) will concede that its normal operation inevitably leads to a concentration of wealth in relatively few hands. Some, at least, of these enthusiasts will accept that such a concentration is unacceptable and must be countered by a political system in which those who lose out can use the power of government to redress the balance, at least in part. That political system is usually described as democracy.

It is becoming apparent, however, in today’s world, that democracy – as the supposed remedy for, and counter to, the unacceptable concentration of wealth – has failed miserably. Not only has it failed in its immediate supposed purpose, but – worse than that – it has become an instrument in the hands of those who are opposed to any change in the usual pattern of wealth distribution in a modern economy.

How has this perverse outcome been engineered? It is brought about because the wealthy are able to use their wealth to influence the voters to support them and to place political as well as economic power in their hands.

The wealthy in our society have learned how to use their wealth to manipulate the democratic process so that it produces outcomes that are entirely congenial to them. They are then able to claim that their unjustifiable share of the wealth produced in a modern society is not only endorsed by the democratic process but is actually demanded by it.

They are able to exert that influence because they largely control the major economic institutions in our society – they own much of the land and own and control most of the country’s productive capacity and financial institutions. And, above all else, they are the employers, deciding whether or not their fellow-citizens have should paid employment and how much they should be paid. Even more tellingly, they own and control most of the country’s media and sources of news; they are therefore able to portray themselves as benefactors and as worthy of admiration and respect because of the success, at least in material terms, that they have achieved. And, not least, they can use their financial resources to buy advertising and propaganda on a scale that dwarfs that available to their opponents.

The outcome of all this is all too obvious. In virtually all of what were once called the “Western” democracies, the right is entrenched and has little difficulty in dismissing the would-be challenge from the left. At the same time, the right and – all too often – the “far” right, are emboldened.

And, as an inevitable corollary, the left’s increasing failure to achieve even a small and occasional dent in the wealthy’s domination of public affairs means that the very concept of democracy loses much of its appeal, and is seen increasingly – in a growing number of countries – as not worth defending.

So, in the United States, the voters seem neither to recognise nor care about the threat to the democratic process that is posed by Trump’s campaign to return to the White House. And, as the rest of the world looks on in disbelief, this lack of the people’s faith in the world’s leading democracy means that the very concept of democracy is dealt a mortal blow.

In India, the oft-proclaimed world’s “largest” democracy, Modi keeps the form but denies the substance of democracy. In European countries like Hungary and Belarus, “strong men” leaders like Viktor Urban and Aleksandr Lukashenko have come to power and seem unlikely to relinquish it. Erdogan is virtually unchallenged in Turkey. South America, too, has seen several instances of the revival of the extreme right. And Trump and Putin and China’s Chairman Xi provide the model that is increasingly seen as the norm.

The corollary of this endorsement of the right across the globe is the enfeeblement of the left. In countries at opposite ends of the globe, like New Zealand and the United Kingdom, left politicians have approached general elections in a state of funk, not daring to propose any form of restriction on the power of the wealthy – such as new or increased taxes on wealth, or forms of public ownership to replace private ownership. Not surprisingly, this timidity on the part of the left has failed to impress the disadvantaged who sense that even their proponents lack any confidence in the measures they might be expected to propose.

The pity of it is that it is the left in democratic politics who bear the responsibility of demonstrating that democracy can deliver the goods to the permanently disadvantaged. But, in country after country, the left has demonstrated the reverse – they they are fearful that they will lose support if they propose measures that will bring about a real redistribution of power and influence. The left is as easily bluffed and bullied by the right as are those who suffer as a consequence.

What has been the point of the left’s long struggle to bring about democracy, if – now that it has been achieved – they lack the courage to use the opportunities it provides? In New Zealand’s recent general election, the Labour Party made great play of its decision to rule out a wealth tax (which would have provided the resources to allow a reduction in tax rates for ordinary workers), presumably for fear that those same ordinary voters would be alienated by any such measure. But why? Why struggle to bring about democracy if there is so little will to demonstrate the advantages it can bring? If even the proponents of redistributive measures lack the courage to argue for them, let alone implement them, why would the voters take a different view?

And, in the run-up to the next UK general election, Labour’s Keir Starmer seems similarly unmanned.

The conclusion is inevitable – the proponents of democracy have betrayed it because their courage has failed them. It is time to start again and to make clear that the purpose of democracy is to ensure that the advantages and opportunities of a modern economy are not monopolised by those who already have more than their fair share.

The left must demonstrate more analysis, more conviction, and – above all – more courage; otherwise, democracy will have lost its purpose and raison d’etre.