By Laveen Ladharam

I’m going to go slightly off the grim dreary blog entries that you will see on these pages and try and look at things in a more positive light.

There’s not a lot to be happy about these days, anyone can admit that – people being laid off work, the government seems to be falling apart into a 1970s bout of disaster, taxes are rising and most depressing of all, Tony Blair may well be our overlord once again those are things that would depress every man jack of us. But we as a country should not remain so negative.

I myself am an immigrant – moved here from Hong Kong in 2001 – and whilst I love the British stiff upper lip (with the exception of the reaction of Princess Diana’s death) as it is often a sign of people buggering on with life and it works well and I admire the British love being told how bad things are with the ability to stare reality in the face. But there is one problem that I notice with our society in Britain (that I too am guilty of) and it is that we are very negative as people and it evolves into a bout of negativity which can play on peoples’ minds and hamper individual success.

One of the most telling things of this is the standard British response of ‘not bad,’ which according to James Clavell in King Rat is the best British compliment. Exaggeration this may be, but it is a very telling point. Look out for it. When someone is asked how something is how many times have you heard, or said, ‘not bad.’ Often the response to that is ‘not bad at all.’ Now just think how many times that has been a standard snippet of conversation either meeting an acquaintance when you have been out and about, in Leamington or at university and I guarantee that this has is very much the case. What we need is a good dose of Yankee optimism.

I mean I myself do love a good Hefferite rant and I am a religious reader of his columns, or a complaint from Bryony Gordon, but we need to start feeling good about ourselves. No hard luck story is going to change your situation and creation of pathos about yourself will turn you into another Roman Abramovic, only you can because ‘the gods help those that help themselves.’ Actually one of Mr Heffer’s columns a few years ago was about helping what he terms the ‘underclass’ to help themselves. With that, what we need to overcome is self-pity as it gets you nowhere.

One of my favourite leaders in history is Ronald Reagan, partially because of Reaganomics but more importantly it was his charisma and his encouragement of individual enterprise and improvement but in a positive light (not the ‘get on your bike’ of Lord Tebbit or the flawed belief in the benevolent state of Tony Blair or Barack Obama) with his unfortunate personal background and hard work to become President of the United States. There is one story that is sometimes attributed (it may be misattributed, but it is a great story to get my point across!) to him about the optimistic boy:

There was a boy whose outlook on life was incredibly optimistic and his parents felt that his attitude was too optimistic for anyone to have. To see how optimistic he was, they took him to a stable filled with horse manure and locked the door. An hour or so later, they returned to the stable, to check up on their son and when they returned, they saw him on his hands and knees digging through the muck. The parents were utterly dismayed and asked him ‘what are you doing son?’ The boy simply said ‘with this much manure, there’s got to be a pony here somewhere.’

We may laugh at the delusion of the boy, but if we take that attitude with us and keep digging, we will find that pony somewhere and have shown the world that our independent and individual efforts really have freed us from the problems that we see today. And, to paraphrase Reagan, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are British.

Tags: Optimism, Ronald Reagan