"I have a vision of the future, chum..."

Although they will enjoy increased prosperity over the next decade, the people of the United Kingdom will pay the price of greater levels of stress, longer working hours (despite already having the longest in Europe), and impoverished family life. Such are the gloomy prognostications of The Paradox of Prosperity, a report commissioned by the Salvation Army from the Henley Centre.

In addition there will be more people living alone and greater numbers of self-employed. The necessity of working to support elderly relatives and to pay into private pension schemes will add to the pressure. As a consequence of this and the near impossibility of escaping from the cycle, there will be greater abuse of alcohol and illegal drugs as people look for a way of coping. The report says that 4.7 per cent of adults are dependent on alcohol and 2.2 per cent on illegal drugs. It estimates one in 28 men and one in 12 women are on anti-depressants. The inevitable result of this, says the report, will be an even higher rate of divorce and family breakdown than there is at present. Increased isolation will lead to the greater use of counselling services, over which there is little regulation at the moment, as well as dependence on drugs and alcohol. The Salvation Army has an honourable history of tackling these problems and clearly sees this continuing on a greater scale as time moves on. The understandable assumption is made that stress leads automatically to alcohol abuse. Many studies do show that there is a link, but others cast doubt on the connexion. The relationship is complex and too simple a view of the situation helps neither diagnosis nor cure. Among social drinkers quite the opposite may be the case since the onset of stress, if this is taken to imply elements of depression, can lead to a cessation of social activity and a consequent lowering of alcohol intake. Among established alcoholics there is a stronger causal association of stress and drinking, although it must be remembered that alcohol is itself a physiological stressor, and, for alcoholics in recovery, stress can be a cause of relapse.

The report tells us that there will be a 35 per cent increase in wealth, but that the top 10 per cent will be 10 times richer than the bottom 10 per cent. The prediction is that the gap will be exacerbated by the advances in information technology. There will be more people in what has become known as a "care sandwich", looking after children on the one hand and their parents on the other. One of the reasons for this is that couples are having children at a later age. Another is that, with the withering away of the state pension, parents are more likely to be financially dependent as well as suffering increased longevity.

Further dire warnings are that there will be a 55 per cent increase in one-person households by 2011 and therefore even less support from the family unit. There will be a third more one-parent households. We are told that almost a quarter of women will still be childless at the age of 45, compared with 16 per cent in 1997.

"Society will have become a collection of individuals mixing and matching their own set of values and this will have an additional, negative, knock-on effect on community life," the report concludes. One possible implication of this may be that people will look to religious organisations, such as the 130-year-old Army, to find meaning in life.

The "general loss of meaning in our lives" will lead to a "search for spiritual meaning" which in in recent years has been manifested in the growth of fringe cults rather than in the mainstream religions. The traditional denominations have failed "to inspire sufficient trust and confidence" partly, it might be said, by attempting to accommodate themselves too closely to the spirit of age. The Salvation Army and the other denominations are therefore presented with both a challenge and an opportunity. In the mean time there will be more work for the alcohol and drug agencies.