Mal Fletcher comments

Mal Fletcher

Has Britain become a nation of wimps?

The question was put to me in a radio interview this week. It is one that I think may resonate with many people beyond these shores, in other affluent and industrialised nations.

Are we less robust than our parents were? Are we more prone to buckle or complain under pressure, or to look for someone to blame when we're faced with out-of-the-blue challenges?

Much of Europe is enduring an unusually cold and threatening winter. Britain is in the midst of its worst cold spell for thirty years, with overnight temperatures in some places hitting a Siberian -15C.

Snow and clear blue skies provide a brilliant change from grey and drizzle, but the unexpected freeze has closed thousands of schools and left drivers struggling to keep control on icy roads.

This weekend, local authorities are facing renewed questions about the lack of grit on main roads and residential streets, with major salt stores running low.

In Britain's case, the weather freeze has come on the back of an even colder financial one.

Alone among its big European partners, Britain remains in recession - again, coincidentally, cited as being the worst in thirty years. The government warns of the biggest spending cuts in two decades as it struggles to reduce the £176 billion budget deficit.

So if you're looking to have a winter's gripe, there's plenty to gripe about.

Before Christmas, when snowfall was much lower than that of the past week, long-suffering commuters were already asking why 'adverse weather' is so consistently trotted out as an excuse for late-running trains and dangerous roads.

After all, in these northern climes winter has often thrown up the unexpected. Surely, with computers that can generate models of climate-change for decades to come, somebody should have been able to spot a bad winter looming?

Governments and local authorities should be held accountable for mistakes. Yet I wonder whether there's another question we might also be asking, one that cuts a little closer to home.

Have we become too comfortable, too used to being 'looked after' by a nanny state that we've lost confidence in our ability to work our own way through certain problems? Have we allowed a sense of learned helplessness, or a feeling that life is more about rights than responsibilities, to chip away at our inventiveness?

Do we spend so little time working in creative teams, face-to-face and up close with other people, that we lack collective resolve when things go wrong?