The Sharm el Sheikh problem

History works in at least two ways. It helps us see ourselves differently in the light of the past. And it makes us reflect on how we will appear in the future when we have become the past.

And that is always a useful exercise for students: what do you imagine the students of the future will write their essays on when they come to write about us.  What will puzzle the future about us? Over the past few years I have think I have already touched on some of those future essay topics.

 My money is certainly on the twentieth and twenty-first century prison system as the launch pad of many a future essay and post-graduate dissertation. I can more or less write the essay question now. ���How do you explain the fact that successive British governments between 1945 and  imprisoned increasing numbers of non-violent and non-dangerous offenders despite the huge cost and the statistics on re-offending?���

The same will go I suspect for our care of the elderly. How on earth will our deplorable record on care homes look in a couple of centuries. I suspect that our descendants will be talking about them much as we talk about the workhouses.

But, reflecting on the last week's events in Egypt, I think there is another rather different topic too.

That is: tourism to sunny climes. How is it that in the UK (and elsewhere) we all came to think that a safe holiday somewhere foreign IN THE SUN was part of almost everyone���s entitlement, no matter the local geo-political dangers? And how is it that so many countries who just happened to have wall to wall sunshine came to invest their whole economic futures in tourism (which can be disrupted, even finished, for years with a single (suspected) bomb), instead of in actually making or growing things ��� or even, much as I hate them, call-centres.

There will be some students who will rightly discuss the class changes here. Of course the privileges of summer sun, long enjoyed by the toffs in the UK, were in due course properly claimed by the less wealthy too. Could people really have imagined that it should continue to be the rich only who swapped rainy Britain for a Mediterranean beach when they wanted and deserved a break?  

No, absolutely not. But the gap between that and the moral outrage of the press at the ���plight��� of ���holiday makers��� is hard to take. I feel sorry for them too but they have gone to Egypt for heaven���s sake. Haven't they read a newspaper? Haven't they spotted, or has noone told them, that Sharm El Sheikh is a tiny enclave in a sea FCO 'dont go' areas? Too much money for the tour companies is at stake for anything like that.

And on the other side of the picture, there will be plenty of those future students who will rightly talk of late capitalism, and of the exploitation of poorer countries by richer ones, when they point to an economic prosperity based on a ���industry��� (that is ���tourism���) that can simply disappear overnight.

Does any of this make good sense? Come back Skegness?