Never Never Land or the Never-Never is said to have originated in the Australian Outback, unspecific parts of which were so named because they were a place which, depending on your outlook, you would never want to go to, or never want to leave. Apparently the phrase is still in such use in parts of Queensland and the Northern Territory.
It was J M Barrie who introduced the phrase into popular English usage. In Peter Pan Never Land was where the babies went who fell out their prams and were not rescued, and where they joined the lost boys (presumably little girls did not fall out of their prams in Edwardian times). So it was a place to which 'normal' people could never go, and from which it's inhabitants could normally never escape, and where they could never progress through mortality like the rest of us. (The Edwardian fear of mortality and its varying expression in the grandiloquent and the fey is a theme for other reflections.)
Yet 'never never' gained its strongest and most characteristic place in the popular English imagination when 'the never never' became the common term for hire-purchase, an early form of credit that enabled one to acquire goods and pay for them in regular stages. Of course it was not 'never' that one actually finished paying for them, but, so strong was then the residual popular sense that actually enjoying or using something before one had paid for it was the road to ruin, that it acquired a strongly morally disapproving overtone.
How far have we travelled from there, and to what place has it brought us, when credit is now so universal and interwoven into all our economies, personal, national and international? The acerbic commentator might say that even the prudent amongst us usually have little idea of exactly when the funds for their purchases actually leave their possession, and the feckless neither know nor care whether they ever were or ever will be in it - but in that they have been shown, quite literally, to be no different from those who have charge of our largest and most venerable banks, whose pretence to the ownership of funds is so large and so false that no-one dare challenge it.
'Never, never, never!' was the famously obdurate declaration of Ian Paisley senior that Ulster would never accept the Republic of Ireland's having a role in the constitutional affairs of Northern Ireland, something that was shortly to come about and which many would have regarded as historically inevitable. Indeed, so historically inevitable was it that the lion and the lamb were shortly to lie down together when he and Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness were elected First Minister and deputy First Minister respectively to the Northern Irish Assembly, created by the Belfast Agreement, on 8 May 2007. They apparently got on so well that they became known as 'the chuckle brothers'. Of course Sinn Féin and Martin McGuinness did not actually represent the interests of the Irish Republic, but in earlier days Paisley would not have made such nice distinctions.
I do not wish to suggest Paisley has been without his merits and abilities or that he did not mellow with age; he was created a life peer in Gordon Brown's dissolution honours list in June 2010 (someone else whom we may expect to mellow with age, unlike Tony Blair - 'age shall not weary him'); in February this year Paisley was admitted to hospital with a serious heart condition from which he was later reported to be recovering.
Paisley no doubt intended a bastardised echo of Winston Churchill's celebrated 'We shall never surrender.' How masterly, or how natural, is Churchill's falling cadence with the word 'never', making it not something to be asserted but quietly acknowledged; how contrasting with Paisley's stridency; and how wide a gulf does it reveal between the culture of Churchill and that of Paisley.
So for us now, in our present polical-economic woes, is it never-never land, or never, never, never? Perhaps both.
We are indeed in never-never land in every sense. Our debts can never be repaid. Our economy is in a state of perpetual immaturity. Our past elysium, that brief post world-war-two interlude when there seemed to be a miraculous combination of steady material improvement and a recognition by those in power that there was a debt to be repaid to the ordinary citizens of the nation who had saved Europe from catastrophe, is well and truly lost.
There is no way forward except through reform, not the kind of 'reform' that Tony Blair and David Cameron like to talk about - masking their partisan political preferences in the language of historical inevitability and public benefaction in a false echo of the great Victorian Reform Acts - but something in the full, literal meaning of the word.
Yet for those who effectively control political, economic and financial power it is 'We say never, never, never!' and they say it with less grace, if less street-volume, than Ian Paisley. Never is there to be the necessary rebalancing of the financial obligations in the economy; never are financial pretences to be acknowledged; and never is the tide of the increasing accummulation of wealth amongst an extremely small minority of the population to be reversed or even halted. Yet theirs is the 'never' of Paisley as they increasingly lay waste the economy on which they depend both for the aquisition of their wealth and for some form in which it can be expressed and have value. And ours is the 'never' of J M Barrie, a land of the lost.
'Nothing shall come of Nothing. Think again.'
