Caroline Lucas and a team that seems to have a fair number of the Green New Deal group in it have published The New Home Front this morning.
The publication does, of course, conincide with the Green Party Conference. Sponsored by Caroline Lucas, she has said of The New Home Front:
In wartime, government engaged the brightest and the best minds, and the most practical of people in meeting the pressing challenges that faced the nation. Today we are told that there is no alternative to the path that the coalition government is currently following The reality, I believe, couldn't be further from the truth. There are a myriad of innovative, practical policy proposals waiting to be put to work. That is why I have asked a range of leading thinkers and practitioners for their suggestions of what could be done. This collection is by no means exhaustive, it is not a comprehensive plan, but it is an illustration of just a few of the wide range of proposals that might be implemented if the courage of government matched the will and imagination of the people of Britain.
I have to say, I agree with Caroline, and that's after ignoring my own contribution.
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Aside from the content… that’s a brilliant piece of cover art.
I would suggest Caroline and her contributors are living in a collective delusion. While you’re wasting your time fashioning appealing arguments the Coalition are killing people. Witness this http://storify.com/LucyTweeting/welfare-reform-is-causing-hell Further as well as expecting the sick lame and dying to work they’re contemplating removing housing benefit too for anyone in the work related activites group – and these are people the government itself has determined are too sick to work I remind you – who won’t work for free for unlimited periods of time. No doubt Grayling, newly appointed at the Justice Ministry will ensure the government aren’t embarrassed by any appeals. The sick the lame and the dying are shortly to be decanted into the streets to die – and you lot are still messing about with arguments? We don’t need arguments, we need guns, knives, weapons of any description to defend ourselves against these killers! The rule of law is long gone, non-one in authority CARES what your arguments are. This is war – can’t you understand that?
I think we all understand that all too well Bill
But I am not advocating civil war
Not least because I don’t think it would solve anything
If you propose violence again your days on this blog are over
Reasonable discussion has its place but it’s between reasonable people. This government is not composed of reasonable people. Grayling has already contrived to deny the appeals process to ESA claimants appealing their WCA decision by insisting on a reconsideration process first, a process without time limit. What’s that in effect but the end of appeals? How reasonable is that? What recourse are people left with when they are denied access to justice through law and what sort of government would seek to deny people that right? They will seek it through other means and use of violence is the only means left available. Don’t forget, I didn’t start this, the Toffs in government did, secure none of it will even remotely affect their gilded lifestyles. What stops a bully? You stand up to him. It’s increasingly no longer possible to stand up to the govt through law and this is entirely their own deliberate doing – they’ve denied access to the courts – so what else but violence (and great big helpings of it) can they or you expect?
Let’s not forget my efforts here. I’m the one who’s pushed for (and it worked to, all credit to Olivia who did it) an application from British Mensa’s Disability Special Interest Group to be made to the UN to get an observer in here to witness what’s happening. They refused, sadly, but there’s other avenues to try with them. We haven’t given up on that yet. There’s other related SIGS too and I’ve been contacting them this week. It’s me too who having had the good fortune to come across this http://gwenhwyfaer.posterous.com/tag/lawand this http://gwenhwyfaer.posterous.com/reinstatement forwarded it to the Public Interest Lawyers. That may still bear fruit. Gwenhwyfaer seems to conclusively make the case that the transfer from IB to ESA and workfare in all its forms are clearly illegal under EU law. I’m hopeful it can be clearly established the government are acting illegally (as well as with no mandate whatsoever). With the notoriously dishonest Grayling in charge of Justice though, what will that achieve? I feel like Butch and Sundance; I’ve tried going straght. However, I doubt even their activities being declared illegal would give the Toffs pause; what did they learn when they were in the Bullingdon Club and trashing restaurants without being punished? They learned the law applies to other people but not to them, witness the return of the ironically named David Laws to front-line politics recently. Look at Janogly, smirking and giggling in the House of Commons when the subject of mesothelioma victims are brought up. Does this sound like someone who is going to be impressed by reasonable argument? In my view little vermin like Janogly will only be impressed by the thought he was going to get spanked into next week unless he stopped picking on people weaker then him to profit from. He wouldn’t be smirking and giggling at the plight of those less fortunate, he’d be long over the horizon with the rest of them and good riddance. In favour of argument, the only argument that might work is one which impresses the Toffs with the size and scale of the impending violence, now that I’d like. Such an argument seems to have worked in Mesopotamia; (from David Gaeber’s Debt; The First Five Thousand Years”)… always with the same theme: the restoration of ‘justice and equity’,the protection of widows and orphans, to ensure – as Hammurabi was to put it when he abolished debts in Babylon in 1761 BC – “That the strong might not opress the weak”. In the words of Michael Hudson,
‘The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia’s financial slate was the new Year Festival, celebrated in the Spring.Babylonian rulers oversaw the ritual of ‘breaking the tablets’ that is, the debt records, restoring economic balance as part of the calendrical renewal of society along with the rest of nature…. (Hudson goes on here with more of the same, back to Graeber now- BK).
Over the next several thousand years, this same list – cancelling the debts,destroying the records, reallocating the land – was to become the standard list of demands of peasant revolutionaries everywhere. In Mesopotamia, rulers appear to have headed off the possibility of unrest by instituting such reforms themselves, as a grand gesture of cosmic renewal, a recreation of the social universe …the history of debt and sin was wiped out, and it was time to begin again. But it’s also clear what they saw as the alternative: the world plunged into chaos, with farmers… returning to overrun the cities and destroy the existing economic order entirely”
Rather obviously, we’re looking the ‘alternative’ smack in the eye. This government are doing the exact opposite what’s proven to sustain peace and prosperity.Shame they don’t seem to have taught Mesopotamian history at Eton, ain’t it?