I am not given to slinging insults on this blog, unless at myself, so forgive the title.

I was thinking about how, in the face of global emergencies, we easily get side-lined on to thinking about one small part of the whole.

Consider the tree planting thing. Trees sequester carbon, so what we need to do is… plant more trees. Any trees, anywhere, even if this creates ecological disaster. Or consider the way that we seek to manage our consumer guilt by buying expensive ‘green’ products that we don’t need.

Aren’t we stupid?

.

Stupid

.

It’s not about the carbon, stupid

It’s about communion

It’s how we take our place, not at top

But in the mess of the middle, for

If forest is lung and sea is blood,

If river is vein, perhaps we

Would be brain, if not so

Stupid

.

It’s not about the buying, stupid

The best costs nothing, but

Is never free, for

We cannot spend our way

Out of forest, out of fire

Out of home, out of

Our own bones

Stupid

.

It’s not about the saving, stupid

It about the great love

For fur, for feather

For fine sand and smooth boulder

For a silver thing in stream and crispest ice

For the whole sky of it

And the sigh in everything,

Stupid

I loved this film.

This post follows on from some earlier posts in the wake of my withdrawal from the Labour party, in response to Kier Starmer’s apparent abandonment of principles that the party was formed upon and his subsequent purge of the left wing of the party. I found myself longing for passion and principles to be at the centre of our politics again rather than the expedient pursuit of power. I also fear that without an ideological anchor, anything goes. In these posts, I have tried to describe what this might look like, if I ruled the world. (Which would be a very bad idea.)

Our world desperately needs leaders. This is an obvious statement, but at a time when trust in the political process is rock bottom, and when we have experienced a series of ‘leaders’ who have failed to lead us towards any solution to the major problems facing our planet (climate change and it’s causal twin, rampant and widening inequality), we have to ask how we hold our leaders to account? Against which principles do we measure the policies they champion? How can we see past the distraction (deliberate or accidental) and how can we demand better if we do not know what better looks like?

The old ideologies, no matter how cherished, often feel inadequate. Can we take the best from them and make something genuinely new? There are many who are trying to do just that – with a predictable back-lash from the ‘establishment’. These voices are often forced out on to the margins by the UK political process – our two-party first-post-the-post election system, but consider this small idea from the ‘extremist’ group Extinction rebellion;

Ideas like this are only ‘radical’ if they seem disproportionate, but if we are serious about democracy, then we have to make our politics human-scale. This is not revolution, it is re-orientation, and we have never needed it more.

There is an asusmption here that decisions made by ordinary people would be better, but we have to remember that the messages and cultural cues that we live with are mostly concerned with things staying the same. We can argue over how much this hegemonic hold on our consciouness is deliberately constructed, but I would argue that for anything to change we need moral/spiritual/ethical yardsticks, alongisde working exemplars that make ideas seem more real. In these posts, I am trying to grapple with the yardsticks.

I do so not without considerable bias of course. I am left leaning, so suspicious of big-scale, non-human-level, top-down economic processes. My evolving faith background tells me that people matter, that compassion comes first and that we are here not just to exist, but to do good if we can. I was a social worker for many years, working with broken, marginalised people who were experiencing severe mental health problems and so this skews my focus to those at the margins. I make a living in a very small business, and raise veg to suppliment our small income, so I am convinced we can all live on much less. I live in a former wilderness in which everything is out of balance and diversity declining, so I am concerned about ecology and how we might preserve and restore. All of this makes me convinced that my priorities are the RIGHT ones, that my biases are in the direction of the angels and that my perpective is superior to yours.

It is not.

But then again…

Perhaps we can come to some broad agreement about what we build our future upon. If this is to be ‘owned’ rather than imposed, we have to have a conversation about it all. We might have to start by being clearer about the principles that have guided us in the recent past however, because I do not think we ever had THAT conversation before neoliberalism became so fixed and common-sense-immovable in the mind of our politicians.

We can surely agree that we want to live in a safe, prosperous country, free from oppression, protected from crime, with good education for our children and healthcare available to all who are sick. Despite some shifting of thresholds for these matters and the increasing exclusion of those on the margins, Britain is that country for most. It is still one of the best places to live on the planet. However, this comes at a terrible cost.

In terms of consumption, we use almost 100 times more energy per person than in the poorest countries, and most of this energy is still from non-renewables.

We are one of the least forested countries in Europe and our wildlife diversity is still declining alarmingly. One in seven of our native species faces extinction and more than 40% are reducing in frequency.

Our rich are becoming filthy rich, and our poor are becoming poorer. One in five of our children live in poverty.

On even these narrow parameters, something is wrong with our prosperity. Like our lifestyles, it is not sustainable.

Our politics, with it’s four year cycles and expedient short-termism, seems hellbent on ignoring this simple fact, in constantly kicking the can down the road, with a few nods at action that mostly are not worth a damn. Starmer seems to have deliberately cast himself in the same mould. Once again, there seems no escape.

But there are real alternative models of what a prosperous, fair and sustainable society might look like.

Back in 1973, E F Schumacher published his hugely precient and influential book Small is beautiful in which he described “The Problem of Production”, arguing even back then that the modern economy was unsustainable. Natural resources (like fossil fuels) were being treated as expendable income when in fact they should be treated as capital since they were – and are – very much not renewable, and thus subject to eventual depletion. He further argued that nature’s resistance to pollution is limited as well. He concluded that government effort must be concentrated on sustainable development, because relatively minor improvements, for example, technology transfer to third world countries, will not solve the underlying problem of an unsustainable economy. Schumacher’s philosophy is one of “enoughness”, appreciating both human needs and limitations, and appropriate use of technology His warnings went largely unheeded, so here we are.

More recently, Schmacher’s problem of production has been explored again through the idea of a circular economy, in which old linear inpout-output models are replaced by understanding that what we use up is gone for ever, but what we throw away is with us for ever. This idea has been applied on both a macro and a micro scale, for example in top-down planning in China and at the small company level, were waste products from one company become the raw materials for the next. Welcome as this model is, arguably it appears to be trying to redeem our current economic model whilst retaining most of the industrial processes.

Kate Raworth’s Doughnut economics has pointed us towards a different way to understand what a circular economiy might work by adding two crucial limitations – firstly, that of fair distribution of resources and secondly by adding an environmental limit on what the biosphere can sustain. It is about making our economics human scaled and nature scaled. Raworth argues that we need to be at least agnostic in relation of economic growth, which she sees as a poor measure of a functional economy, particularly when it tends to be the only measure used.

Towards circular connection

What I hope is emerging in this piece is a different way to view our economy. Smaller, more local, with an emphasis on reusing, recycling and repairing.

For example, why is it that all our domestic appliances are thrown away because they are not designed to be repairable? In a circular connected world ALL such machines would have a long life and companies would be expected to provide spare parts and repair instructions.

If we follow the logic, perhaps industrial production should be subject to scrutiny as to their sustainable practice in terms of both input and output, in terms of energy use and down the line waste implications. Taxation should be scaled to enure that less sustainable products pay more. Free market evangelists will bust a gut at the very thought, but although profit as a reasonable reward for innovation is not inconsistent with the model I am proposing, it must be mediated if we are going to stop the headlong slide into destruction we are on now.

Surely, if we have learning anything in the last decades it is that the market does NOT know best. It works always towards a concentration of wealth without responsibility;

What do I mean then by circular connection?

The ‘circular’ bit should be clear enough now. We must start seeing our activities as part of a cycle, not as linear input/output models. This principle can be applied at all levels, from individual families right through to companies to whole countries and then on to international relations.

This is the permaculture principle moved from the margins right to the centre of everything we do. Writer Emma Chapman defines it like this;

“Permaculture, originally ‘Permanent Agriculture’, is often viewed as a set of gardening techniques, but it has in fact developed into a whole design philosophy, and for some people a philosophy for life. Its central theme is the creation of human systems which provide for human needs, but using many natural elements and drawing inspiration from natural ecosystems. Its goals and priorities coincide with what many people see as the core requirements for sustainability.”

This means that when designing new societal structures/economic processes/government policies/industrial practices/gardens/transport systems etc etc, we have to learn to think like nature, even in the dark.

.

But man (and woman) can not live on bread alone, we are also spirit. We need to feel things before we can fully know them. This is where the ‘connection’ comes in. I will find it much harder to describe this, so perhaps it is best just to do so by sharing this poem.

.

Connected

.

They say that everything that ever was

Is with us still and that we are all

Connected

Our DNA, or so they say,

Contains some manta ray

Along with pterodactyl

Every leaf and every tree

Grows in you and grows in me

Every fish and every bird

Listens close to every word

For everything belongs to everything

And we are all

Connected

Another spring. It is the time of year that I love most for the great burst of hope and renewal it brings to the land I live and work on, but also to the human spirit. It is also the time when I travel to one of the many small uninhabited islands with a groups of friends to take what we call our ‘wilderness retreat’.

I have lost count of how many times we have done this, and even of the amount of different islands we have visited, but suffice it to say that it has been more than two decades and more than a dozen different islands, each one with different qualities. Along the way, the community of retreatants has expanded to form a body of people – mostly (but not exclusively) men – whose friendship I have come to value deeply. Quite simply, my life would be much less without them, and without the ritual of spending this time in remote places with them.

There is a generosity to these gatherings that I find hard to describe. Beneath the abusive banter, the profanity (often shockingly filthy), the preoccupation with certain bodily functions and the moans and groans from aging bodies something deep and profound happens. People care for one another. They share their food, their tots of whisky, their knowledge of wild animals and their store of stories. Neither does it ever feel like an exclusive group (I hope!) New people – friends of friends or contacts from afar – are welcomed to most of our gatherings. I try to turn no-one away.

In terms of religious allegiance (or not) we are also a fairly diverse group. Some are ministers of religion, others are atheist, or at very best agnostic. Some have firm evangelical certainty, others have travelled far to the fringe. Because of this, the practices we have evolved are never prescriptive. Mostly it is silence, then reflection. The island, the friendship and the shared hardship of rough country does the rest. Most of us can recall moments of deep trancedence, perhaps even leading to radical life change, but mostly the depth and joy is much more ordinary, much more earthy, much more…

There is a simplicity to spirituality mixed from vulnerbility, small community and wild places. Perhaps as get older, the questions that pushed me out of organised religion have rested, unanswered. It is enough to feel love and to let the sound of sea embrace me. I could give you a whole underpinning theology that might try to say why this makes sense, but I will not.

Rather, look at this;

Sometimes our group has been twenty-plus. This year there were ten of us. I missed those who could not come, but community is made with those who are there, and was no less rich for that.

This year’s venue was Inchmarnock, an island I had not visited before because I had rejected it as boring, unglamourous, farmy and flat. I was wrong. It has a different quality to many of the off-shore islands we have been to, perhaps because it feels only recently abandoned, with ruinous farm buildings still containing vestages of the lives they once contained.

Massive highland cattle still wander freely, but we gave each other a mutually beneficial wide berth. There was plenty of other wild life to excite us though- a massive seal colony, barn owls, peregrines, otters and this little feller;

From the outward boat, the birders amongst us got excited at a bunch of graceful Manx Shearwaters, and we think we might have later given the ornothological world a first, because late on the first night, when it was fully dark, the air was alive with their song as they returned (we think) to breeding burrows on the island – something not otherwise known, and might represent a brand new site where these iconic mysterious birds raise their young.

Another difference from many of our previous destinations is that the island is wooded, partly scrub oak, but large parts have previously been managed coppice, presumably for fire wood or fodder for cattle. The coppiced trees have not been cut for a generation, but stand in tall, many-limbed rows, still tended as if with purpose by the roaming cattle, who have made them into glorious labyrinths, down into which the sun filters through the spring tracery of the the hazel and birch to light the floor with carpets of spring flowers. It was like no-where I had been before.

Each evening, over on our sheltered raised beach on the western side of the island, we shared the smoke and the warmth of the fireside. Paul cooked scones in a rock oven. Jokes were passed like hip flasks (which were passed too.)

We also told some stories mined from this book;

This is simply the best account of the spirituality of wilderness I have ever read. It journeys from his mothers death bed, via the Californian deserts then back in time to grapple with apophatic tradition of the desert fathers of the 4th C BCE. The ‘stripping away’ that they sought as a spiritual discipline is not for the faint hearted, but Lane in his book describes too how many of us experience this in grief, in brokenness, in loss, as an inevitable part of a long life. This deeply resonated with me, after my own winter reflecting on loss and becoming lost in what was done to the exclusion of anything that might yet be.

Wilderness makes us small. The wild is indifferent to us like the stars and the sea. Before it all we are not just tiny, we are nothing. Despite this sometimes crushing reality, the desert fathers found that when we are almost eroded by harsh winds, so that it strips us of everything that we were, we find something else.

Connection? A realisation that we are part of it all? That we are held in the abyss? Perhaps all of these, but most of all, they found an indescribable love.

St John of the Cross, poet mystic, described the impact of wilderness in this way (forgive my paraphrasing) ;

1. It thrills us with wild beauty, but this often turns itself back to ‘the self’- we consume it, try to capture it and make it our own. Neverless, something of the divine filters in through nature.
2. It breaks us down, shows us as vulnerable and alone. It is hard and inifferent. It is dangerous. The divine is found at the end of our comfort, at the end of our coping.
3. Some places, for reasons we can not easily account for, are holy, sacred, blessed. Perhaps like those ‘thin places’ of the ancient celts, or the burning bushes. What was ordinary becomes mystically laden with the extra-ordinary. Doubt it as you will, but these experiences can be transformative.

On a short trip like ours, we can make no great claims of transformation, but feel a flavour of all three of the above.

It is good to be home, but the island, the friendship, that coppice- these I keep with me.

I don’t think I have shared these short extracts from our recent debut performance of ‘After the apocalypse‘, featuring the magnificence of Yvonne Lyon on keys/vocals along with Emily/vocals on fiddle and Will on guitar/vocals, both of Mactalla fame.

This is the line up we are hoping to take on the road as the year unfolds, but untill we had actually done a live performance, it was a total unknown quantity.

In the end, we booked the lovely Uig Hall and had a fantastic night. If I hoped for anything, it was to curate a happening, in which we collectively found depth and meaning. I think we managed this and more.

Thanks to James for all the techie stuff, and once again to Si Smith for his fantastic images.

(We are still open for venues/hosts by the way- get in touch if this is of interest.)

.

.

Golgotha

.

It was not the end you’d want

But (as it turned out) it was no end at all

Instead, flowers still grew,

Birds still sang

Children still laughed

The still-moon dipped its rim

Into the still-blue sea of Galilee.

.

It was a terrible place to die

But (as it turned out) we did not die at all

Instead, we stood waist-deep

Reeking from the worst that

Old Golgotha was

But were not consumed

We were not doomed.

.

It was a place of no return

But (as it turned out) return we will

To the garden that grew us

To the mother that made us

To the brother who broke us

And the spirit that woke us

From our Golgotha.

What is the highest form of human expression?

Great art? The soldier who self sacrifices for his fellow fighters? Grand scientific or techincal achievements? Space travel? Our god-like ability to make machines that think?

Or could it be something called love? Could active acts of compassion at all levels of human society show the very best of what we are?

What I mean by ‘all levels’ is important here – from the lovely good neighbour who cared for my aging and difficult mother in her last years, through to the benefits system that fed her and the health care system that treated her. Within all these things we see a skew towards grace and goodness.

From whatever part of the religious/political/social spectrum you come from, I am sure most of you would agree with this, even if followed by a lot of clarification. Perhaps the devil is in the detail?

Or perhaps not. Perhaps it really is as simple as letting compassion come first, then working out the details from there, then looking back at those details through the lens of compassion in order to make sure we got things right. Then repeating this over and over again.

What would a government who tried to do this look like? Would it be totally impractical? What compromises would it have to make? What would it be forced to let go of?

Here in the UK, the news is full of efforts by the governing Conservative party to manage the number of refugees that arrive from Europe in small boats, having made perilous journeys firstly across Europe from the war zones of the middle east and northern Africa, then onto the cold waters of the English Channel, the busiest shipping lane in the world.

What principles should guide our response to the realities of this situation?

I can be pretty categorical in saying that, no matter how hard the government tries to dress their response up as ‘cruelty to be kind’, it does not have compassion as a guiding principle.

I could say so much more about this – the ‘hostile environment’, the slowness of the system, the fear mongering, the constant use of the term ‘illegal’ when all other routes have been closed, the deliberate downgrading of accommodation used to detain people within (because hotels are seen as too cushy), the racism inherent in welcoming white Ukrainians whilst rejecting brown Syrians and Black Eritreans etc. etc.

The point here though is that actions like this are justifiable precisely because other things have been prioritised above compassion.

The narrative then used to describe the ‘migrant crisis’ is then viewed through a different set of principles – ones which serve better to keep those who are comfortable free from and disturbance of that comfort, and ones that make use of the baser human emotions (fear of the outsider, fear of losing what is ‘ours’) to keep or gain political power in a system in which small shifts in public opinion have huge reward for our two main political parties.

Obtaining or keeping power is more important than compassion. Middle class ‘prosperity’ is more important than compassion.

Oddly, we then see a scramble to make this lack of compassion look like… compassion.

Our government has tried to tell us that…

• if we do not treat refugees badly, then we will encourage more to come, and this will place vulnerable people at risk
• the real issue is the ‘criminal gangs of traffickers’ who are making money from the refugees
• they are not real refugees, they are ‘economic migrants’ coming here for a ‘better life’
• we can not take everyone- there is not enough room/acommodation/beds in the NHS, therefore we have to have a ‘fair system’ (even when we have anything but)
• Our borders have to be secure because of the criminals/rapists/terrorists that otherwise will sneak in through the back door

Compassion is never perfect. It will lead us to make all sorts of mistakes. Consider the legacy of the Victorian Asylums, built at least in part with compassion in mind. It turns out that they did so much damage to the human spirit that we had to look back at them with compassion and compassionately replace them with something better. (There is a valid debate as to whether or not we have fully achieved this, but at least we can agree that the Asylums failed!)

As I said, perhaps it is as simple as letting compassion come first, then working out the details from there, then looking back at those details through the lens of compassion in order to make sure we got things right. Then repeating this over and over again.

Compassion is also a hard sell. It will almost certainly have require personal and political compromise and sacrifice. It requires bravery – perhaps of the sort that Angela Merkel displayed in the way she led her country towards compassion for the millions of refugees Germany took in during the heights of the Syrian civil war.

Merkel, from a totally different part of the political spectrum that I am most comfortable with, took a huge political gamble because it felt like the right thing to do. I applaud her for it, and I think history will do so to.

Perhaps you may legitimately point of the impracticality of what I am suggesting. Merkel aside, not many people have been able to carry this kind of committment into politics, or rather it does not seem to have survived long within a political context. Merkel spent political capital she had already been able to accumulate. Corbyn was never allowed that opportunity.

You may be right, but I still reserve the right to measure any government (or government in waiting, such as Starmer’s Labour party) against this principle.

How can anyone who has been animated by the stories of Jesus do anything else?

Last year we published a collection of poetry called ‘After the Apocalypse’, written before, during and after the pandemic. It was concerned with anger, hope and desire for change in a world shadowed by all the things we know shadow it. (You can get a copy here.)

They are not hidden after all, but because we see them only through the lens of individual consumers, our only response is to hunker down in the deepest bunkers we can dig for ourselves and our small tribes.

I have shared these two poems before, but I share them again because of yesterdays post, dealing as it was with vitalising ideas, in this case, collectivism.

The poems are both constructed from ways of understanding the wild. The dominant one (arising during the enlightenment) views the world as a great big competition, in which we scratch upwards for ascendancy. The ‘good’ here is that only the fittest survive to pass on their victorious DNA to the next generation, who do it all again, and again. Mapped on to a world of individualsm, of personal accummulation and high garden walls this makes perfect sense.

Hermeneutic #1

Do not think

Trust instead in evolution

To shape the world, if not for best

At least for least worst

Do not act

Worlds are not built, they

Emerge through tectonic friction, they

Were abraded by natural forces

Far beyond your control

So do not rescue

Let weakness whither

Set the fittest free to celebrate

Ascendancy

Do not regulate

Let greed sow seeds

Like forest trees, set

Free markets free

However, my contention is that any truth contained in this way of looking at the world (which after all is a total distortion of Darwin’s writing) only reveals itself in geoplogical time, not human time.

It might also be true to say that humans have been so successful precicely because we have learned something we might call intelligent empathy. We learned to co-operate and to appreciate the needs of one another. It turns out that Wiliam Golding got it wrong.

Which brings us to the second analogy (or hermaneutic) which comes to us through an understanding of what is happened in the secret hidden world beneath our feet in that few inches of soil that sustains the whole life of the planet.

Scientists tell us that soil is not what we thought it was. It is not just accumulated inert dirt, it is in fact a living organism.

We are also now beginning to understand how funghal networks work in co-operation with trees, but what we know is already incredible, particularly when set as a contrast to the first hermaneutic above.

Hermeneutic #2

Tree is not tree without forest

Bird is not bird without sky

Man is not man on an island alone

With no fruit there is no fruit fly

Fungus is not just about fungus

It carries the world on its back

It holds under soil the truth of us all

It gives out but also gets back

In places of disconnection

Between the you and the I

May mycelium grow and nutrients flow

Lest all of us wither and die

Simply put, one species depends on another. Or I should say, many others. Here is some of what we know.

In the same way that we need to appreciate and nurture our soil, perhaps we also need to nurture and appreciate our communality, our shared humanity,

What does a society organised on this principle look like? That is the question that constantly nags at me. I call it the voice of the Spirit…

In my last post, I was described my decision to leave the Labour party, which was partly about what appears to me to be dishonesty and underhand dealings from the leadership, and also because I no longer feel comfortable that the party is vitalised or motivated by a set of principles that I can get behind.

One of the foundational ideas behind the Labour party was ‘solidarity’, by which I mean collectivisation; mutual support; working together towards a common goal.

This idea arose in direct response to 19th Century experiences of the powerlessness of industrialised populations in which workers were subject to the whim of the wealthy and powerful. The revolution here was that ‘the people’ have a vast numerical advantage and despite a long history of sometimes violent oppression of dissent, an organised collective voice can confront manifest injustice to great effect. This did not come to us easily;

It is this collective organisation of labour – and of ordinary people – that became the origin of the Labour movement. It is all there, in these sorts of ways

• Mass protests, from Peterloo massacre to the mass trespasses on Kinder Scout that opened up private land to urban ramblers from Sheffield and Manchester.
• The co-operative movement, in which poor people tried to take control of their own food supplies.
• Universal suffrage- resisted for so long and so hard won.
• Unionisation of the workplace, bringing in a vast set of improvements to working conditiions, health and safety, a shorter working week, contracts of employment etc.
• Universal health care available for all on an equal basis.
• Non means-tested benefits in response to the punitive poor law which blamed the poor for their own indolence. The great post-war Beveridge report ushered in an era of ‘social insurance’ (that has been almost entirely wound back and replaced with the individualised punative system that Beveridge wanted to leave behind.)

The other root of British solidarity and collectivism was, ironically, the way we did religion, particularly non-conformist religious movements like Methodism, which emphasised works of charity, selflessness and sacrifice for our fellow (wo)man. I say ironically because a different kind of religion may well be undermining our collective identity. I have used this video before;

The backlash

Collectivisation become greatly unfashionable. Suspect even.

Partly this is the dominance of the American empire, in which individulism is religion and any collective action is satanic socialism. From the perspective of British history (as above) the logic of this is very hard to grasp, but goes something like this;

People should be self reliant. This is the healthiest, highest form of humanity and is the most American. Anything that undermines this, for example by creating dependency or rewarding lazyness, is immoral.

Poverty is the result of poor choices by individuals. The answer to poverty is for people to work harder. Where this is not possible (through sickness for example) the answer is the charity of individuals

This is powerful magic when filtered through a mass media machine in both the US and the UK that is largely receptive to ideas convenient to the rich and powerful. In fact, the idea is so powerful that it can be used to overwelm all research or bodies of knowledge that point out the flaws in the argument.

Here in the UK, Margaret Thatcher’s 80’s governments successfuly employed this magic in the wake of the political/social/economic upheaval of the 70’s, typified by confrontations between unions and industrial management (everyone of a certain age remembers the ‘winter of discontent’.) Thatcher was able to ride this crisis in order to confront the collectivised power of the unions, replacing the collective consensus with a new kind of militant individualism, in which she even claimed that there was ‘no such thing as society’. It also enabled her ministers, confronted with huge unemployment in the wake of the deliberate devastation of old nationalised industries, to claim that the jobless just needed to get on their bikes.

The interesting thing is that the post-Thatcher era Blair and Brown Labour governments never challenged the limitations of this kind of individualism – rather, they copied it, reshaped their language to accommodate it and left behind collectivisation as ‘old Labour’. This is nowhere more obvious than when Blair stopped using the word ‘poverty’ (the eradication of which had been a political consensus in the three dacades post WW2) and instead began talking about ‘social exclusion’.

The shift here is from understanding poverty as a structural problem requiring macro collectivised solutions towards seeing the poor as people who need to be corrected/rescued/re-included. As if the poor are not like us, not ‘normal’ so the kind thing to do is to try to ‘lift’ them back into the fold. It was as if the decades of research into the nature of poverty – how it happens, how it brutalises and how it re-vicitmises generationally – never happened.

With the coming dominance of individualism as a guiding principle not ony for policy, but of hegemonic discourse, it should be no surprise that successive governments were under no pressure whatsoever to address – or even notice – growing structural inequalities within society. At best the language used was around ‘fairness’, an amorphic concept that seemed ot owe more to individual consumer rights than the deeper morality of compassion for the most vulnerable within society.

The poor got poorer.…

The the rich got richer. MUCH richer.

Some problems can’t be solved alone. If the pandemic taught us anything, surely it taught us that?

Our percieved powerlessness in the face of the climate emergency is likewise almost entirely because we are not able to concieve of a way to solve complex problems that require collective action to solve. Internationalism seems a universe away when our borders end at our own front doors, or our own bank accounts.

Of course there are things called corporations, which require complex interactions and social hierarchies, but these are still strangely… individualistic. They are about creating individual wealth, not creating a common good.

Wait a minute, I hear you ask, doesn’t this collective action you are talking about sound like communism?

This is spectre summoned when we start to talk about what can feel like top-down solutions, centrally planned solutions or solutions derived from mass activism. The right-wing media start to talk about starvation from state farming and dreadful cars made from pig-iron.

The job of any progressive political movement has to be to reframe collectivism in a way that allows people once more to catch a vision of what is possible when humans use the power of coming together around a common cause.

The opposite is death (of the planet) from human self-centredness.

This month, I left a political party. I don’t think they have missed me, but this was not a small thing for me as this party had been my ‘tribe’ for most of my life. When I fell out with them previously, it felt like falling out with my family, but this time it feels like divorce; it feels final, similar to when I left church. Something inside has been wrenched and torn to the point where I could not live with the cognitive/emotional/spiritual dissonance any more. Anyone who has been through this process will know how painful it can be.

I am going to try to describe this process of change in some detail but before I do so, it is probably worth reading the question I asked in title of this post again. No matter how idealistic or how cynical you are in relation to politics, I think you would concede that this is a ‘both-and’ sort of question.

Of course there needs to be inspirational/vitalising ideas behind our political process- even if some have that hidden, hermeneutical quality, by which I mean they have become so mainstream as to become ‘common sense’ so we do not think about them as ideas at all, rather they are just ‘common sense’. regular readers of this blog will know that it is this area that I have often been interested in exploring. Ideas matter, even (and perhaps particularly) when we do not see them.

Not all political ideas are equal – not when applied to the vast complexities of human society. Some either by accident or design victimise parts of that society. Others are operationalised on behalf of those who already have wealth and power in order to ensure they have more of the same. New ideas are often resisted for this reason, because they tend to unseat the power of those who have benefitted from the old ones, but arguably, without new ideas (or at least better formulations of the old ones) it will not be possible to solve the two great emergencies facing our age- climate change and inequality.

At the same time, as demonstrated by two recent political failures, ideas are just the start of the political process.

Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party was full of ideas- many of them very good ones in my opinion, but whilst individually these ideas were very popular, Corbyn was unable to achieve power, so the ideas remained just that – ideas. (Spoiler alert, we will return to this later.)

The other recent example of the same is that of Prime Minister Liz Truss and her decision to enact Thatcherite extremism, pushed on by right-wing think tanks and the free market economist ultras. The extreme nature of her ideas scared even the UK financial institutions to death and she crashed an burned.

The lesson for all would-be governments seems to have been to hold your ideas very lightly and focus instead on image, mediated through… the media. There is a danger that this approach becomes so important as a means of achieving power that tiny manipulations in media message determine policy much more than ideology. Spin doctors become more important than economists or climate scientists. Media outlets become shapers of policy more than party conferences or social policy researchers.

But enough of this, back to my own story. It has a lot to do with this man;

If you are reading this from abroad, it is possible you don’t know who this is, but his name is Jeremy Corbyn, and he was the (reluctant) leader of the British Labour party for five tumultuous years from 2015 to 2020.

The fact that he was leader at all was kind of an accident. Following the resignation of the previous incumbant (Milliband) there was an attempt to have a broad shortlist of potential leaders in order to represent the ‘broad church’ that was the party. A left wing candidate was required, and it was Corbyn’s turn. He had spent his long parliamentary career out on the fringes of the party, involved in activism- working to support worthy causes and to fight percieved injustice both at home and abroad. He was scruffy, not particularly media-savvy and stubbornly resistant to saying ‘the right thing’.

What the party establishment (some of whom nominated him as the token left-winger for the leadership shortlist) failed to realise was that although the parlimentary labour party was largely centrist, rank and file labour membership was much more radically minded. They also failed to understand that when Corbyn’s brand of politics – authentic, compassionate and anti-establishment – was given a larger platform, people began to listen, including me.

I had been a member of the party previously. I grew up in a community devastated by Thatcherism, and the Labour party represented the resistance. The Tories were all about greed, our side was about looking after one another, seeking to lift up the poor and broken. In 1997, I was not particularly a fan of Blair, whose politics seemed even then to be far too compromised to me, but I was swept up in the same euphoric ecstacy when finally we had a Labour government. At the time I was a young social worker on the outskirts of greater Manchester and it seemed that things finally had a chance of getting better.

They did – at least in part. There was investment in public services that we now look back on with wonder, particularly in the education system. ‘New’ Labour had moved on though. They no longer talked about poverty – ever. Instead, we started to use words like ‘social inclusion’. This change was evidence of a clear shift in ideology, in that Blair’s government was working firmly within the same individualistic neoliberalism that Thatcher had employed – a softer version perhaps, but the fundamentals remained. The poor were not poor for structural reasons, but because of individual indolence. The purpose of government was to promote private sector innovation above almost all else.

It worked. Blair kept winning elections.

There were international shadows from very early however. The first test (which eerily fortold things to come) was the falling apart of Blair’s so-called ‘ethical foriegn policy’ when we sold British planes and weapons to regimes engaging in despotic wars of oppression like Indonesia and Zimbabwe. Blair later became a world wide military interventionist- a hero in the Balkans, but ultimately (arguably) a war criminal in Iraq. By then we were all heartily sick of him and his smug certainty.

Blair’s time in office left me politically bereft. Between him and the world he had helped create, there seemed no hope left in politics – no hope for progressive change that is.

Partly this was about ideas, in that It was very difficult to understand what Blairs ideas were. Neoliberalism had become that ‘common sense’ normality I referred to earlier and so all that was left was the power gaming. Most of the problems I saw day to day in my social work career or I saw internationally were about rampant and growing inequality, but there seemed no political solution that was possible- no political idea that was anywhere near the mainstream.

Others have argued far more persuasively than me that it was this ideological vaccuum that created space for the popularism of Brexit and Boris Johnson – that we have Blair to blame for this much more than the Conservative party. Others have said the same about the rise of nationalism in Scotland. This may or may not be true, but even though I still voted Labour, I had long lost any feeling that they represented anything I beleived in. They were the least-worst option.

The ‘better than the Tories’ option.

When Corbyn unexpectedly won the party leadership in 1995, there was total consternation within the national political establishment. He was seen as at best a fringe figure, not ‘a leader’ and would likely be a ‘disaster’.

Tony Blair made no secret of his feelings. At first, the Blairite right wing of the party (which was the vast majority of the Parliamentary party) stood as far back from him as they could and waited.

What happened though was that Corbyn continued to catch the imagination of people within the country who had previously been alienated from politics, particularly younger people, but also people like me. Membership of the party swelled with these new members. I rejoined too. My late sister became a party activist, ironically in the consitiuency that is now held by the Conservative party deputy chairman, the dreadful Lee Anderson.

In part, it felt that Corbyn’s success was popularist in nature, in that he was the anti-politian politician. He was the outsider on the inside. Even surrounded by a shadow cabinet containing a number of rather unpolished performers, he was making an impression. There was more to him than popularist protest though, for two main reasons.

Firstly, his character. He was a man who seemed to project integrity in a political system that had long seemed to abandon this as a worthy goal. His visible compassion was in stark contrast to the then leader of the Conservative party, Theresa May. Corbyn had a long track record of standing with marginalised and oppressed groups and he was not changing his stance now. Here was a man who walked where he talked.

Secondly, under Corbyn, Labour policies began to be shaped by different ideas about how the world worked. The attack lines tried at the early stage were that he was ‘old labour’ and ‘hard left’ and ‘marxist’ and a ‘throw-back dinosar’, but it was notable that these assaults, even applied by the full weight of the largely right wing media in the UK did nothing to undermine his core support.

Nevertheless, Corbyn went into the 2017 general election (called by May in order to consolidate her base in the wake of Tory Brexit ruptions) trailing by twenty five percent in the polls. What happened next exceeded all resonable expectations. Corbyn did not win the election, but he increased Labour’s share of the popular vote and gained thirty seats. This success was largely seen as a vindication of Labour policies – the popularity of its 2017 Manifesto that promised to scrap tuition fees, address public sector pay, make housing more affordable, end austerity, nationalise the railways and provide school students with free lunches – but it strengthened Corbyns position, less with the general public, more against a largely hostile parliamentary Labour party.

It all felt fragile, but people like me started to hope that a new movement was possible – one that took seriously the need to grapple with inequality on both the national and international stage and to finally get serious on climate action and climate justice (incuding the refugee crisis.)

I am convinced now that what happened next will come to be regarded as one of the most grubby periods in Labour party history.

It seemed almost impossible to understand that the downfall of Jeremy Corbyn – that great champion of anti-racism – should be caused by anti-semitism but no matter what steps Corbyn and his supporters tried to take, the narrative just kept getting worse. He was associated with Pallestinian terrorists, shared anti-semitic murals, surrounded himself with anti-semites like Ken Livingstone and, most damningly of all, he presided over a party that was found to be institutionally racist by the Equality and Human Rights commission.

At the time, I grappled with the whole thing. Whilst I wanted to listen to those Jewish voices who felt excluded, there were always other Jews within the left wing who had a very different view;

Was the late David Graeber right to say that this was a strategic attack on the left wing? If so, it was notable that this was happening from WITHIN the party as much as without. I am no conspiracy theorist, so I read the IHRC report in full. I listened as carefully as I could to people like Margaret Hodge.

Even though I had no problem believing that there were anti-semites in the party, I found it very hard to pin the issue down. The examples I was coming across did not seem to prove this as a system wide issue, or that this was a left wing problem more than it was a right wing one. The IHRC report seemed to have drawn conclusions mostly about interferance in a complaints process which were disputed and anyway, given the pressure, how could the leadership not seek to control the message in this way?

Perhaps this reveals only my own bias, but I simply could not understand exctly what the issue really was. If there were problems I wanted them dealt with, but the febrile atmosphere seemed to make this an impossible task.

Then there was that BBC Panorama programme.

For most of the population, it sealed the deal. There was something rotten in the Labour Party, and Corbyn, once held as a man of compassion and integrity was now to seen as a racist pariah.

In 2019, Boris Johnson won the national election by a landslide. Corbyn resigned as leader. Despite a genuinely brilliant, detailed and carefully costed manfiesto, Labour had won just 202 of the 650 seats and according to polling, this was largely to do with how the public percieved Corbyn.

Corbyn’s replacement leader had a problem though – the membership. Labour party members were not only to the left of the ccountry – with its aging population of home owners – they were also considerably to the left of most of the Labour MP’s, including those standing as his replacement. The eventual winner of this process managed this process by making a lot of promises, his so-called ten pledges.

I did not vote for Starmer, but understood why many did. As my brother-in-law put it, he was the one who looked most like a Tory, so would scare middle-England the least. What I did not expect was what happened next. Starmer began a war against the left wing of his own party, on the grounds of electability.

At the same time, his ten pledges – perhaps we could describe them as his motivational ideas – fell away, one by one.

In front of the media however, Starmer cut a much more credible figure, no more so than in the way that he seemed to finally get the party back on the front foot by ‘dealing’ with the issue. How he was dealing with it was not clear at first, but it now seemed that a lot of people were being suspended. expelled or silenced.

We know this not because of party transparency, or because of home-grown investigative journalism. Rather we know this because of work done by Al Jazeera, in a series of films called The Labour Files– more of this below, but if you are interested in this issue at all, you need to watch them. They are all available via Youtube, here is the first one.

(It is notable that most of the current leadership, rather than engaging with the issues raised in these films, claims not to have seen them.)

Meanwhile, Corbyn himself had the Labour whip removed, meaning that he no longer sits as a Labour MP. (Subsequently, it was revealed that he would not be allowed to stand for election as a Labour party candidate.) On the face of it, the reason for this impasse was Corbyn’s refusal to retract his statement that suggested the anti-semitism crisis had been exaggerated for political reasons.

Meanwhile, there was another process taking place within the party. The Forde Report. This from The Guardian

A long-delayed report on allegations of bullying, racism and sexism within the Labour party has finally been released.

Keir Starmer commissioned the report, by Martin Forde QC, in the wake of the leak of a document containing private WhatsApp messages that exposed deep factionalism in Labour’s efforts to combat antisemitism.

But there were a number of setbacks to the report’s publication, including legal action against the party by some of those named in the original leaked document, an investigation by the information commissioner into data breaches, and the party’s decision to sue five former staffers, who it alleges leaked the original document.

In case you do not know about the grubby beginnings of this report, this video gives are reasonably fair summary;

This was all landing at the same time as the Al Jazeera Labour files were revealing lots of details that at very least cast doubt on the new messaging that Starmer’s labour party was putting out about antisemitism, and also revealed some rather Stalinesque treatment of members of the left wing on a rather scary basis.

The staggering thing about Forde’s report was that it was NOT a whitewash. It is detailed and forensic – far more detaled and considered than the previous IHCC report. He found that Labour operated a ‘hierarchy of racism’ with anti-semitism being treated in a totally different way than racism towards black or muslim people, and that factionalism within the senior leadership was largely to blame for the failure to address antisemitism.

The report was very inconvenient for Starmer’s leadership, so mostly they ignored it. So did most of the UK media. Forde himself has expressed his surprise that no-one from the Labour leadership has spoken to him, and that he has not been invited to speak to the National Executive Committee about his 165 recommendations.

In this video, the two parts of this outside critical examination of the party- Forde and Al Jazeera – are both discussed in detail. Of particular note is how that crucial BBC Panorama programme is being revealed as… well, watch for yourself.

Where I am up to with all of this?

I have left the party because I have no wish to be part of a movement that punishes some of it members for political expediency.

I have left too because I see no ideas that I can believe in, no policy direction that I can get behind. This might be good politics, but I want more from a party I belong to than simply waiting for the morally bankrupt Tories to leave.

I left because I have no confidence in the current leadership. They have shown themselves to be dishonest and unwilling to spend any political capital on things that really matter- not least the climate and social justice issues that dominate our age.

I get that they need to be in power to do anything, but they also need ideas, principles, passion and compassion. These things seem to be in short supply in the party at present.

I left also because my current working theory (based on the evidence I have been able to see and being clear that there might be things that I am not seeing that might change my mind) is that the Corbyn project was at least in part overwhelmed by the weaponisation of antisemitism within the party. It was a convenient attack line, and it worked. Forde and the Al Jazeera reporting has revealed enough to suggest that Corbyn was right.

There has been no reflective honest examination of either Forde or the findings revealed within the Labour Files.

This is a problem not just because it is underhand and deceitful, but also because it gives voice to a resurgent extreme right wing government in Israel, which continues to oppress, murder and illegally occupy.

What next?

I find myself politically homeless at present. I have never NOT voted Labour in any general election in my entire life- not even for tactical reasons. For the first time ever this feels likely, because I do not think I can trust the people who have acted so appallingly in the purge of the left in actual government- even though I suspect that is where they are heading. Are they still the least worst option? Perhaps they are, but I am less convinced of this than ever.

Many of my best friends abandoned Labour a long time ago – many of them have given their passionate support to the Scottish National Party and believe that the only possibility for a better future is to seperate themselves from the UK government entirely. I understand this impulse, but have some real reservations about nationalism. Perhaps this is about identity, in that I am an English/Irish man living in Scotland, but all this is for a different post, this one it too long already.

Other friends joined the Greens, and these certainly seem to be most in alignment with my thinking at present. Up here in Scotland, they have had a pact with the SNP which means that the Greens do not field a candidate when this would split the SNP vote.

But, I have always been an outsider.

Perhaps my passions are best employed looking inwards…