Author: zenpolitics

Landscape and history, places and people, home and friends and family – the world out there rather than on screen is my focus. I’m interested in where we’ve been, and how it might help us make some sense of where we are now and where we're headed.

Taking a break from politics

I am going to take a break from this blog for a while.  It will be hard to do. Blogging can be compulsive. (Two posts already today.) That’s why I must take a break. But before I do, I thought I’d sign off with a ‘where we are now’, ‘where I stand’ statement. With so many distractions, so much delay and prevarication, so many assertions, so much absurdity, it’s not a bad idea to put down a few thoughts.

How different this list from one I might have written ten years ago, when the outlook, recent financial crash notwithstanding, was somehow more rosy. You could, back then, at least trust the integrity of the protagonists.

In no particular order (apologies to Strictly contestants), though the first two or three are fundamental:

# pride in nation, as a citizen of Britain, of Europe, of the world, the best way, the only effective way, to exercise influence – linked to the awareness, and self-awareness, I mentioned in a recent post on the Tory leadership contest

# the dangers of referenda, trying to tie down that which will not be tied, as opposed to the sovereignty of parliament, which allows flexibility – the right to change your mind as a core feature of democracy

# recognising a free trade agenda as a chimera – your closest neighbours are always your best partners, and the benefits of the EU will only be appreciated when withdrawn, when too late – you get ‘owt for nowt’ (no benefits if no contributions)

# you negotiate better as part of a trading bloc – the importance of being part of, and a key player in, one of the three big economic groupings of the planet, the benefits from membership over more than forty years (delusional to think we would have reached better agreements negotiating on our own)

# global capitalism, how best to influence, to rein it in, while retaining its benefits – hard enough anyway, impossible to have any significant impact if we are a ‘free-trading’, Singapore-style economy

# the importance of collective action on climate change and conservation, on migration – working with the EU, not out on our own, likewise, on automation, and changes in the workplace

# opposing false notions of sovereignty, rebutting claims that we have sacrificed too much power either to the European Commission or European courts – what we gain in influence far outweighs what we lose – remembering also that we in the UK are pioneers of human rights – our influence across Europe has been profound

# working within the power structures that now prevail – opposing any reversion to old ideas of British and latter-day imperial clout, not least notions of an ‘Anglosphere’

# misrepresentations (Boris Johnson-style) of EU practice and policy

# Brexit impeding the EU reform agenda – the EU needs reform, in some areas radical reform, and we could and should be driving that process

# too easy to forget, it seems, how the EU has guaranteed the peace since 1945, and how remarkable that is

# the alternative to the EU – throwing in our lot with Donald Trump, over whom we will have no influence, and signing up to trade deals on US terms

# the simple necessity of bringing our media back home, and making owners and editors publicly accountable, the importance of debate and the pursuit of truth – too many newspapers have become house journals of parties or factions

# the dangers of populism, fake news, alternative truths, post-truth, opinion masquerading as fact

# the delusional appeal of personality politics, where personality trumps policy, where the shouters drown out argument – Farage-style conspiracy theorists

# the dangers of authoritarian, illiberal capitalism – the downgrading of democracy whether it’s China, or Turkey, or Hungary

# Brexit as a knowingly false agenda – 1) claiming a no-risk, no-danger, all-benefit scenario against all evidence, 2) bringing in a free trade agenda, never a priority of the wider population, under the cover of anxiety over immigration

# the sidelining of social welfare, the removal of safeguards and regulations advocated by Dominic Raab and others – the irony that there are Labour supporters of a Brexit driven through by hard-line libertarians

# the real risk of a possible break-up of the UK – think yourself into the shoes of a Scottish nationalist or a Northern Irish Catholic, soon to be the majority religion

# and finally, the omnipresent danger of unintended consequences – as Daniel Hannan, said of the Brexit saga to date, ‘it hasn’t quite worked out as he expected’

 

Apology gets political

Apologia: ‘a formal written defence of one’s opinions or conduct.’

Apology: ‘a regretful acknowledgement of an offence or failure.’

The focus these days is on regret. It’s easier it seems to regret than defend.

‘Democrats are a sorry bunch,’ always expressing regrets, ‘for racial, gay or women’s rights, failing to call out sexism and harassment, dubiously claiming ethnic heritage and for being white and privileged.’ (David Charter writing in The Times last Saturday)

Their ‘apology tour’, Charter continues, ‘contrasts with the man they all hope to beat next year. President Trump has tweeted that it is the media that owes the nation an apology after the Mueller report…’

Charter’s is an odd piece. It almost reads as if he’s on Trump’s side. But he makes a powerful point. If you not only dictate the agenda, if you set the agenda, as Trump has done to a remarkable degree, you’re in the driving seat. If you’re always looking over your shoulder you won’t win the race.

On the same day there was a good piece in The Guardian on this subject. But a very different context. Entitled ‘Battle lines’, it’s well-summed up by the intro: ‘It’s given us Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and many spellbinding stories. But now the world of Young Adult fiction is at war with itself. There have been accusations and public apologies, novels have been boycotted and withdrawn. There have even been death threats against authors. What is going on?’

The vehicle for all this is of course social media. I’m not a regular user. But if I was an author wanting to get to the widest audience, I would be.

Put a racist character in a book, and they might assume your racist. Write outside your own colour, or indeed gender, and you run a risk. Your perception might not be another’s, and they may be vociferous on the subject.

My answer, for what it’s worth… Avoid correction and apology. (And avoid apologias as well.) For publishers as much as authors. If criticism is legitimate, acknowledge it. Otherwise hold out. Easy to say, I admit.  But as the author of the Guardian article (and it is, unlike Charter’s, a very good piece), Leo Benedictus, says, ‘It may not be realistic to hope for restraint from social media, but it is clearly what’s required.’

One consequence is that supporters of gender and racial equality damage their own cause by this relentless and sometimes vicious self-examination. Supposed supporters of Democratic candidates for the presidency likewise. Give authors, give candidates space to breathe. Recognise they make mistakes, leave them be, save for the most egregious offences. It doesn’t mean you don’t criticise. But you don’t harangue. Avoid instant reactions, that immediate resort to social media when something offends.

Go beyond that, and the wider public you’re looking to influence, or looking to for support, will turn to the likes of Trump instead, and say they prefer the simple, the unvarnished, the non-truth, to all this argument and introspection. Gender and racial issues are inconvenient for many. They don’t wish to face up to them. Don’t give them a let-out – an easy, Trumpian let-out.

Tory debate debacle

We will shortly have a new leader of the Tory party, and they will be our new prime minister.

I watched part of the Tory leadership contenders’ debate last night. I was expecting little and got less. Their answers to the climate change question were abysmal. The question the 15-year-old girl asked was about zero emissions by 2025, not 2050. They didn’t get close to answering it. They never mentioned 2025. They were obsessed with parading what they’d already done. The only urgency was Brexit. At all costs.

Rory Stewart said the format didn’t suit him. He to my mind fared better than the others. But he too got drawn in to the squabblers’ den. Appealing to 160,000 Tory members (they are rushing to join, apparently, so they can vote), all more or less ancient and affluent, when the winner will have a country of 67 million to govern.

(For more on the party membership, see below.  They have lost all reason, and so maybe it’s not surprising that their aspiring leaders have too.)

The five contenders showed no signs of appreciating the simple absurdity of their position. What is lacking is, in one word, awareness – and, closely related, self-awareness. A simple awareness that ego, the obsession with getting across your own views, your own somehow superior identity, is the pathway of fools. The awareness that seeking after something permanent, beyond challenge, a one-time panacea for all our ills, is a blind alley. Blind alleys are not safe places.

To invite chaos, as Brexit does, or simply fail to recognise the urgencies of our times, in the case of climate change and the natural environment, is unforgivable.

Buddhists, for whom non-self, or non-ego, and impermanence are simply part of life (in no way are they beliefs, they are the way life is), also focus on dukkha, often translated as ‘unsatisfactoriness’ (also as ‘suffering’, but that has overly negative connotations) – not getting what we want, and too often getting what we don’t want. There is much talk out there of a post-Brexit disruption giving the country opportunities to set off in a new direction. The one guarantee is that the direction the country takes will not be that which they would wish upon it.

Before we slag them all off… The politician’s job is a tough one. The toughest, if they really want to get it right.  Many do have that self-awareness. Making enterprise and compassion their watchwords, and their perspective the whole wide world  looking out and not in. Getting that right isn’t so damned difficult, is it?

Policy will always be a challenge, and a nightmare. But get your head and your heart in the right place, and you’re in the right place to start. Yes, that’s stating the obvious. But it’s the obvious that so lacking among the Tory leadership candidates – and indeed the whole charabanc on board behind them.

* From today’s Independent (Tom Peck):

The latest day of fun in the Tory psychodrama was coloured by a poll on Tuesday morning, that showed that more than 50 per cent of the Conservative party’s membership do not care if Brexit destroys the Conservative party. More than  60 per cent don’t care if it hammers the UK economy and breaks up the union with Scotland or Northern Ireland. 

 

Trumpification

Or, the normalisation of Donald Trump.

I ran today up into the local hills, through a village which hardly exists, though it does have a small school for small people. It clings to the hillside. Steep places, almost too steep. It’s called Thrupp.

We had Donald Trump on a state visit earlier this week. Thrupp. Trump. Four letters in common. Nothing else. Thrupp is on the edge of Stroud, a town with a remarkable sense of community. Trump is transactional, cooperation and community an unfortunate necessity.

Thoughts from my diary, from last Tuesday:

‘Trump is on a state visit, and he’s now almost an accepted part of the scenery, and we’ve adjusted, and the abnormal,  for some amongst us, is almost normal, and we’ve adjusted, and we don’t mind, maybe someone so much in the public eye can’t be so bad, maybe we’ve misjudged a little, and he likes Boris, and Boris will be PM, and we’re being promised an amazing trade deal, and we will be absorbed into more than an alliance, a kind of happy subjugation, but we won’t realise it, it will happen by osmosis, we will be absorbed, and we will have the independence of California if we’re lucky, but a right-wing government more suited to a Texas or South Carolina, and we’ll look across to Europe, just a few miles away, and it will seem further away than the USA three thousand miles away, and we won’t mind, Europe has after all been the source of all our problems, and now tucked under a welcoming American arm, we will be safe and sheltered, and sovereign in special subjugated sort of way, and what’s special, again, is that we won’t notice, we will just slide, with a rictus smile on our faces, and the press, the big media owners, will tutor us into a state of contentment, we will conclude we never knew things any other way, and that will be that. Oh happy days!’

Remember, back in 2016, how Ted Cruz called Trump, ‘a pathological liar’, Mario Rubio called him a ‘con artist’, with ‘a dangerous style of leadership’. Paul Ryan characterised comments by Trump, as ‘the textbook definition of a racist’. He turned, in Rubio’s words, the 2016 election ‘into a freak show’. And where are we now – where are the Republicans now? All lined up, Trump their greatest, their only asset.

We have our shouters. Johnson, Farage. We know them well.

Few among the Tories have stood up to be counted, as Michael Heseltine did at the Peoples’ March a few weeks back. Where is he now? Expelled.

I find the feebleness of mind of Tory MPs, their pusillanimity, their willingness to put party and self before country, extraordinary. Yes, with constituents who were Brexit voters – yes, they have a problem. For the diehards, of course, no problem. But for the wiser majority (am I being too kind?), they should be back in their constituencies, arguing with their voters. Winning them over, if they can. Losing their seats next time, if they must. And, yes, they will have to take on the Telegraph and the Mail.

It isn’t an easy life. The stakes are high.

Will they roll over – and accept the Trumpification of their country?

 

The beech and the oak – and the ash

So much going on out there… and a nature diary?

Yes indeed – time to walk, or if you’re so inclined, as I am, to run, out into the hills, through the woods, and the farmland. Seek out another perspective on the world.

Six weeks ago the first pale green leaves showed on the beech, now the wood is dark, and the light seeks out chinks, or clearings where the foliage is less intense. Many climb tall, planted close together. In time, many years hence, they will be harvested, fuel for our wood burners.

But, given the chance, beeches spread their trunks wide. On one, pollarded long ago, I counted ten trunks. It and its fellows mark the edge of the woodland, where it meets the big hedge-less field, where the barley now four-feet tall is growing abundantly.

Oaks are fewer where I run, but they are there. I know of none of the old, the 500-or-600-year-old, oaks. But across the Severn estuary, into the Forest of Dean, they are abundant. Felled for shipbuilding – and replanted (at Nelson’s instigation, so I read) for the same purpose. But by the time the trees had matured iron had become the main building material.

Can you mention the oak, without mentioning the ash? I often wondered about the old saw, ‘when the ash’s before the oak, there’s bound to be a soak’. When in my experience was the ash in leaf before the oak? Never. (I read that, back in the 18th century, the ash did sometimes beat the oak. But our climate has changed.)

The ash. … the ash is in crisis. They always gave a lighter cover, with their compound leaves. But now leaves are fewer, twigs and branches bare.

I used to sing the old Welsh folk song, The Ash Grove, at school.

The ash grove, how graceful, how plainly ’tis speaking;/The harp through it playing has language for me…/I lift up my eyes to the broad leafy dome…/The ash grove, the ash grove again is my home.

The lover found solace beneath the ash. And now it seems it is the ash itself we must weep for. Our only solace – there are resistant strains, we can replant.

The ash is woven not only into song but into our history – and Norse mythology. What off Yggdrasil, the great ash if Norse mythology? Must the tree of the gods also suffer dieback? (There is a symbol for our times!)

‘The ash is of all trees the biggest and the best. Its branches spread out over the world and extend across the sky. Three of the tree’s roots support it and extend very, very far. …The third … root of the ash extends to heaven, and beneath that root … [there] the gods have their court.’ (Extract from the Prose Edda, see also below.)

Tree recognition hasn’t been a strong point of mine.  How might ash differ from sycamore or oak, or lime or white poplar? I knew the shapes, sort of, but I guessed. Now I know the ash. They are in groves, and near me, lining hedges, and especially, they’re where local farmland rises to a gentle summit, prominent, lording over the land. They are thinner now, you can see through them. When they go, so will our landmarks.

(Ash and sycamore – I puzzled a day or two ago over two trees apparently growing together, their trunks conjoined – it’s called inosculation.)

At a more mundane level, we were wondering over lunch – is there a plan, a national plan, to replant? Or at least recommendations? Or guidance? None as far as we can tell. A recent report in Current Biology estimated a total cost to the nation of the loss of trees (no mention as far as I am aware of replanting – of ultimately restoring the landscape) at £15 billion.

And the ash trees that line our lanes? Are they the farmer’s responsibility? The local council? Primarily the latter, according to the report. I’m told when they’re felled in the diseased state, weakened by fungus, they shatter, and there is a mighty mess.

I’ve recently returned from the Hay Book Festival. Robert Macfarlane was there, talking about his new book, ‘Underland’. There’s a marvelous chapter that focuses on the ‘understorey’ in woodland, where fungi spread their hyphae, a network which not only consumes dying matter but also supports the living.

‘The relationship between plant and fungi is all about exchange, swapping chlorophyll for nutrients, but far more than this, ‘the fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources between one another … sugars, nitrogen and phosphorus can be shared between trees in a forest:  a dying tree might divest its resources into the network for the benefit of the community, for example, or a struggling tree might be supported with extra resources by its neighbours.’ (Underland, p98)

But the dieback fungus is at another level, a fungus which feeds only to destroy. A dead-end fungus.

So I despair to see the ash die back. And I wonder what lies ahead. But I also wonder at what lies beneath. My eyes have been opened to something extraordinary. But as town-dwellers, most of us, we take it all for granted.

We take the ash for granted.

**

(Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, 15) “The ash is of all trees the biggest and the best. Its branches spread out over the world and extend across the sky. Three of the tree’s roots support it and extend very, very far. One is among the Æsir, the second among the frost-giants, where Ginnungagap once was. The third extends over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Nidhogg gnaws the bottom of the root. But under the root that reaches towards the the frost-giants, there is where Mimir’s well is, which has wisdom and intelligence contained in it, and the master of the well is called Mimir. …The third root of the ash extends to heaven, and beneath that root is a well which is very holy, called Weird’s well (Urd’s well). There the gods have their court.

Making the case for rebellion

My last blog made the case for silence. I argued that silence needs to be more active, more pro-active. Can I now make the case for rebellion? I’m thinking of Extinction Rebellion. Yesterday at the Hay Book Festival I listened to Mike Berners-Lee discussing his new book, ‘There is No Planet B’, and to a panel discussion involving three Extinction Rebellion activists. There’s optimism in the Rebellion ranks, much greater caution from Berners-Lee.

Berners-Lee advises businesses. He’s well aware of the abject failure of the fossil fuel industry to invest more than paltry sums in renewables. But what of the consumer? As the recent Committee on Climate Change Report made clear in its recommendations, changing public behaviour is key to meeting its ‘net zero’ emissions target by 2050.

Individual targets (for example, setting your thermostat in winter at 19 degrees) catch the eye. But far more important is the national mindset. By that I mean the extent to which the public accepts the need for a fundamental and wide-ranging change of attitude, in the way that attitudes to gender and to smoking have changed radically over the last forty years. There is a point where the consensus tips the other way.

Extinction Rebellion I love for its enthusiasm, and self-belief. The Economist sees problems with its ‘inchoate enthusiasm’. It matches another, opposite problem, cynicism. A false opposition in this case, they have this wrong – but they highlight a danger.

I’m on-side, and accept its methods are eyecatching and have helped change the mood and generate debate. But there is, and I’m speaking in the most general of terms, a faith in human goodness, almost a sense of a new age dawning, which takes me back to the 1960s and the Age of Aquarius, Hair and Woodstock. That degenerated into disillusion, cynicism and at worst violence in the 1970s. It took on an overly political ‘them vs us’ aspect and fostered an anti-capitalist agenda. It has been agitating out on the sidelines ever since. Never getting close to the mainstream.

My concern, my interest, has always been how we how we work within existing systems. To effect change, and it could be radical change. But you have to build and maintain consensus if change is to embedded. Obamacare is an example of a battle between an old and new consensus, now being fought through the US courts.

We may sense that opinion on climate is changing, that the consensus is moving toward radical action. But how confident can we be in the age of Trump and Bolsonaro, carbon champions both, that high-minded sentiment will win out over national governments in alliance with big business?

Trump has undermined the Environmental Protection Agency, and is busy signing new executive orders to facilitate the building of pipelines.  Brazil’s new president Jair Bolsonaro aims (I quote the New York Times) ‘to open up the rain forest — which has already lost 20 percent of its cover — to new development.  …. Satellite data shows that deforestation has grown steadily since his victory in October. In the first month after his election, deforestation increased more than 400 percent, compared to the previous year.’

The news from Australia has been equally depressing. The right-wings Liberals were hit hard in the cities but (quoting The Economist) ‘in the end the election was won in Queensland, a state full of marginal constituencies. Global warming is exacerbating its frequent floods and droughts…. But the state’s economy is dependent on exploiting natural resources, notably coal, and many of its voters are wary of environmental regulation.’

Climate is indeed up there as an issue as never before, but the battle lines of old are simply being built higher. The battle is – to win and hold the public consensus.

And that is where Extinction Rebellion might just be different from the old Aquarians. But they should hold to the issue, and avoid adding anti-global or anti-capitalist agendas to the mix. Which won’t be easy. Too wide an anti-establishment agenda and all agendas could be swept aside, climate change among them.

Maybe not surprisingly one of the objections of old-guard journalism, supposedly echoing the views of ordinary people, is that we, we Brits, have nothing to gain by going alone – we will simply be disadvantaged compared to other countries. The argument may be false but it strikes a chord. We also have to deal with market enthusiasts, who may accept that the market needs to be primed a little, or nudged – we can be nudged to insulate our homes, or use less plastic, but that should be the limits of our interventions, The market, it’s argued, is ultimately the best guarantee of effecting environmental change. The fact that it may be far too laggardly doesn’t get mentioned.

Trump and Bolsonaro notwithstanding, climate change now has a wide acceptance as a stark reality. But don’t we have other priorities, more pressing? The effects on us as individuals are minimal… and what, in any event, can we really do? The planet will go its own way.  And we won’t, we older folk, be around anyway.

Indifference, ideology, entrenched interests – there is much to rebel against.

Making the case for silence

Zen is about silence. No soap box required.

I want to call out for silence – to call, not shout. Nothing comes of shouting, rabble rousing, name-calling – only further division, and the defeat of reason. We have too much shouting out there. Endless Brexit arguments and silence aren’t easy companions.

Silence is something we can all share, all people and all persuasions, all races and religions … silence makes no demands, it is there if you wish to find it …. silence leaves he or she who shouts loud out in the cold … it gives space to think and consider, has little time for short cuts and easy solutions.

I remember my son being disciplined by the school librarian for telling the librarian to shut up because her continued calls of silence were breaking his concentration.

You can’t command silence.

But silence is unexciting. Why not follow the pied piper? Or he or she who shouts loudest?

Shouting divides. With the European elections around the corner we find ourselves more polarised than ever.  ‘We are the people.’ The 52%. But what did we vote for? Brexit at any price? Remain also has its ranters. Shouting embeds ideas, good, on occasion, usually bad.

Reasoned argument is beyond ideology, beyond ‘big’ ideas, beyond assumptions. Reasoned argument requires silence. A prayer before we start. OK, unfashionable. It doesn’t have to be a prayer. But silence. Time to reflect. And, maybe, he who is most eager to speak should go last. Or speak not at all.

But that’s as maybe…

We’re faced with big subjects, big themes – with globalisation (which is ironically the natural and only outcome of a ‘free trade’ position), on the one hand, and the sense, and the reality, of being left behind by elites, by the big cities, the bankers, even by the younger generation, on the other. Pay is pegged back, annual increments a rarity, austerity has for many been brutal.

‘There is a real question about whether democratic capitalism is working, when it’s only working for part of the population.’ The words of Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton. Could the country be at a tipping point?

More than ever, we need to step back. We need silence. An end to shouting. Instead we need engagement, close engagement, with all the areas I mention above – engagement across Europe and not just in this country. That’s been our role in the past, and I see no reason to give up on that now.

In the recent past many of us have been too cautious, too reasonable – too slow. Silence has been a negative state. A place we retreat to. A place to hide. (We treat elites as somehow inevitable. We shrug and get on with life.)

I’ve found the last three years one hell of a challenge. (I am not alone of course.) The sense that there’s a continuity between my private world and the wider political world out there has been broken. Extremes and wild ideas have become common currency. If I acquiesced in a too-slow change of pace before, I can no longer do so now.

Silence has to be more positive, more active, more pro-active. More political.

But it must still be silence. Paring back the rush of ideas, allowing quiet space in between, that space which anger and emotion too easily fill. Don’t be fooled by the loudest voice. Or a half-truth in a headline.

There’s wisdom, a real wisdom, in silence. If wisdom isn’t too unfashionable a term these days.

Climate change – just another news story?

‘At what point will we realise that the world we see on our TVs is actually our world – and that it is time to act?’

I was on London’s South Bank last Thursday, and realised something extraordinary was happening on Waterloo Bridge. I’d chanced on the Extinction Rebellion protest. As an infrequent visitor to London these days, I was taken by surprise – unlike most people in central London, who’d found not only Waterloo Bridge blocked, but also Parliament Square and, famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view), with a pink boat, Oxford Circus.

I climbed over the crash barrier – wanting to enquire rather than directly participate. To find out more.  Warm weather helped. Trees and greenery had been brought in, a band was playing quietly (yes, quietly) and under an awning one of the organisers proffered advice on dealing with journalists and possible arrest to younger questioners.

For they were young, the protestors. Theirs is indeed the future. They have a claim on it, which we – we older folk – do not. It’s the point which the Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, has been making so eloquently. And we can’t, surely, just brush it off as another example of youthful high spirits and idealism.

The key aims of Extinction Rebellion? ‘The Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, … and act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.’

The upside: shaking us out of our lethargy regarding the consequences of climate change, and highlighting the action that must be taken to arrest it. (Whether or not a 2025 target is realistic, the aim is to shock.) The downside: commuter traffic has been seriously disrupted, and businesses and shops have suffered as a consequence.

Which side am I on? Are we on?

Section of the press would have it that the protestors are all middle-class hippies. The Daily Mail has printed pictures of the organisers’ homes in Stroud. Billionaire media owners are the beneficiaries of the status quo: yes, climate change may (just about) be real but responsibility is down to us as individuals. Plastic bags and the like. Governments, where lies the power to push through radical change, are off the hook.  

Readers of the Mail and Express and Telegraph, redoubtable papers all, are protected species in all this – protected from the imperatives of climate change. Given that reality, what choice do the protestors have but to put themselves out there?

So back to that question. What about us?

Are we prepared, as over a thousand were, to be arrested? Or is our support at second hand – we’ll argue their case (‘their’ case, not ours) and their corner, but we won’t join the front line. Or we’ll aver our support for action, but decry radical means to achieve it. (And thereby play into the hands of climate change deniers?)

There’s a rather dubious statistic doing the rounds. 3.5% of the population (only 3.5% …) committed to your cause and the momentum for radical change will be irreversible. I don’t buy this. But there is another tipping-point – beyond which we can’t avoid taking sides.

I’d like to think that could be now. I’m not going to rush to be arrested. But I know which side I’m on.

That same Thursday, 18th April, at 8pm, David Attenborough silenced any who question his commitment to action with his BBC TV programme, Climate Change: The Facts. No-one watching could be in any doubt about the terrible consequences of global warming. The facts as he described are brutal.

To repeat my opening line:

At what point will we realise that the world we see on TV is actually our world – and that it is time to act?

A sense of humour

Thinking back to my last post, on the subject of language….

NVC, Nonviolent Communication, is an organisation founded by Marshall Rosenberg several decades ago. (Check out the book.) The name speaks for itself. It sets the benchmark high.

Humour, surely, is non-violent. And yet …

A weeks ago (23rd March) in Central London  more than a million marchers kept their sense of humour. Below are a few placards:

We know about cliff edges in Cornwall….Brutalists against Brexit….Even Tesco has better deals….Without free movement we can’t get rid of Nigel and Boris….I’m British. I’ve taken to the streets I protest. Things must be jolly bad….I wasn’t old enough to vote. I am now….I’d rather run through a field of wheat….I’m so angry I could make a placard…On second thoughts…

The Sun newspaper absolutely failed to bring any humour to the party. ‘Snarky little placards’ is how The Sun describes the placards. Who I wonder came up with that joyful phrase? (Likewise, ‘No sane person is impressed, even by 5.6 million Remainers signing a petition.’)

Humour can breed hostility. I don’t think most marchers set out to goad. Their humour was simply a way of handling what they saw as a disaster. But it riled the other side…

George Orwell in his pamphlet ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) is concerned about the language of debate, at a rather more elevated level than The Sun. But his message is clear.

‘All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.’

When the atmosphere is bad, even humour is drawn in.

We are treading on egg-shells.

Bad language …

Bad political language, that is.

Political debate is typically black and white. Secondary arguments are subsumed under big headings. The Brexit morass is in theory black and white, in practice we have multiple agendas with no clear majority for any of them. Language has been one of the first casualties.

‘The first casualty of war is truth,’ is the famous quotation. How about ‘the first casualty of intemperate discourse is truth’. We are not at war… but our discourse is intemperate.

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To take one high level example. Mrs May sought last week in an address to the nation to take the high ground, and was pilloried for it. She wound up animosities (and, some have argued, stoked death threats) even further.

Mrs May: ‘You’re tired of infighting, you’re tired of arcane procedural rows, tired of MPs talking about nothing else but Brexit when you have concerns about our children’s schools. Our National Health Service, knife crime…’

Many would argue that Mrs May’s refusal to compromise has been a direct cause of the infighting, and the distraction. Indeed that Brexit itself is the distraction – a secondary issue catapulted by internal Tory politics into the defining issue of our time.

It’s too late for Mrs May to capture the high ground, two years too late. She is so deeply  embedded that she is beyond any understanding of cause and effect. Or of the impact of the language she uses.

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An article on the website Brave New Europe, by an LSE law professor: ‘…. Britain’s right to leave is … contested by a British ruling class …The EU’s liberal empire is a type of government improvised by national governing elites that are reluctant … to rely on the political authority provided democratic politics. These elites look outwards to supranational arrangements for their authority.’

It was the use of the word ‘empire’ that caught by eye. German economic dominance is considered a kind of empire. ‘Empire’ is a loaded word weighed down with pejoratives. By implication the ‘elites’ are aspiring to empire. They look outwards to ‘supranational governmental arrangements’.

There is a simple heuristic at work here, using ’empire’ as a loaded word to dictate the terms of the argument. I’d put a counter-argument, that governing elites are an inevitable part of government and in the modern globalised world countries have to operate at a supranational level, and structures have to be invented to facilitate this.

It may sound complacent, and it certainly doesn’t sound exciting. But it is closer to reality. The argument must be how we strike the balance between supranational and local, and accommodate all the levels inbetween. Without measured language and measured debate we will never find answers.

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Spurious statistics … John Kay highlights in an article in Prospect the difficulties associated with cost-benefit analysis (‘cost-benefit analysis today offers a bogus rationale for bad decisions’) and how the debate over HS2 (the high-speed London to Birmingham rail link) has been conducted without any convincing analysis of the outcomes.

So too Brexit. The debate revolves around a single market and a customs union, a free trade area and WTO rules, Norway and Canada options. ‘But insofar as we heard any economic argument during the referendum it consisted of the exchange of unfounded numerical assertions. It was only after the result that any of the substantive choices entered public discourse.’

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I read, at second-hand, a report of a radio phone-in when a Brexit supporter had no fear of a hard Brexit because we still have ‘our rabbits and vegetable gardens’. I paraphrase, I can’t recall the exact words. But we are it seems at war, under siege. The enemy as in 1940 is only a few miles over the water.

How have we so quickly reached this point – that the EU is our enemy?

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Conspiracy … A recent study of conspiracy theories reported in the Economist found that 60% of British people believe in conspiracies, Leavers more than Remainers. 31% of Leavers believe that Muslim immigration is part of a wider plot to make Muslims the majority in Britain, compared to 6% of Remainers.

Jeremy Corbin: ‘They’ve stitched up our political system to protect the powerful. They’ve rigged the … rules to line the pockets of their friends. ’

The system works to the benefit of the powerful. And people have – we have , I have – a right to be angry. So I’d go part way with Corbin. But ‘stitched up’, as if there’s a plot or conspiracy involved. It would be simpler if there was.

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Emotive language and easy assumptions, shouting loudest, attempts to dictate the terms of a debate, assertion at the expense of debate, appeal to prejudice. The best counters to alternative versions of truth in this post-truth world is the careful and considered use of language. I wondered whether to add ’emotive’, and thought not. Emotion, anger – yes – but don’t let them dictate our use of language.