It's not about luck, stupid.

We were walking towards the exit at Morrisons last week when Little Petal asked me if I wanted to get a lottery ticket. "No," I answered, "I'm tired of hoping."

She said that was sad, and I suppose it is, because in today's world it would seem that we have nothing left but to hope that we get lucky. The old Victorian ethos of hard work and self-improvement leading to a better life was thrown away, first by Thatcher as she persuaded the country to scrap all the dirty manufacturing processes and switch to nice clean services funded by a growth in home ownership, and then by Blair and Brown as they pushed their Globalisation baby along in their shiny new labour pram and tried to be better than Thatcher.

Globalisation, as many saw it in this country, meant the jobs done by call-centres in places like Newcastle going overseas to places like India, or computing jobs being taken away from UK residents and given to people brought in from overseas on fast-track visas to work at a third of the rate.

But globalisation for the Indians has recently taken a nasty turn. Textile workers in Mumbai have been queuing in the streets outside the factories, hoping that one of them will open its doors and hire workers for a day. The problem? The countries which had "Globalised" their textile industries out to cheaper places were now in recession and no longer buying so much. If only Labour had written under their adverts "your fortunes can go down as well as up under our policies". But then who reads the small-print?

Mr Brown recently asked that the world continue to stay with globalisation through "this difficult stage" rather than switch to protectionism. He doesn't want to see his pet project left drowning in the seas as we all swim frantically for the lifeboats. The thing is, Mr Brown, we're all desperate to be lucky, that's the brave new world that has emerged from the results of Thatcher and Blair, and globalisation doesn't promise so much to the people at the bottom, does it? But then the world has always been targeting those in search of profits. Blame the church for that, the Old Testament parable of the talents has been used to justify a lot of religious and political taxation, even though it was only an analogy. If you look at that analogy, it isn't about making a profit, or of being lucky, it's about self-improvement.

Zen, over on his blog Yeah Whatever (Free), asks "should the rich be rich?" Likewise, I suppose I ought to say "should the lucky be lucky?" Except that I know the answer. You could only stop the rich from being rich or the lucky from being lucky by killing them. Aspiration is something that humans universally, um, aspire to. The same greed which drives some people to become rich appears in others as a jealous need to confiscate and "re-distribute". (Did the French, American and Russian revolutions lead to those countries becoming universally-loved models for the world?)

I can only hope that History does not repeat itself yet again by following a great depression with a great war.

Oh, I'm not doing the hope thing, am I?

Shit.