There is a moment in every day when I have had enough of politics, tax, economics and all that goes with it. I take the dog for a walk. Talk to the family or a friend. Or pursue a hobby. None of that are done just to get away from work. But they all help me do so. I find it helps. Balance has to be an objective in life, and however great my passion for the topics I write about here they cannot be everything in my existence.
But Brexit keeps intruding now. The seemingly never ending machinations of incompetence that have lead to paralysis followed by an inability to decide how to progress invades too much of my time. And even with my capacity for politics I have had almost enough of it.
So I sat back and asked myself why.
The first is that I do want balance. And there is nothing at all balanced about Brexit. It was always dogmatic and hopelessly thought through. Then it was pursued as if the case for it was emphatic, when it never was. Alienation was built in from the start.
Second, it has highlighted the failing of every neoliberal politician who, when they see a problem run away from it, presuming the market always has a better solution than they can offer. Only in this case the solution has to be political and there is no politician left in many parties in the Commons with any comprehension as to how to deal with such an issue. Most have for so long given up political thought in favour of market acquiescence that their DNA as politicians has had the ability to decide removed from its structure.
Third, there is the possibility in all this that by our own collective action we acquiesced in this failure. In fact, somehow by not stopping it we facilitated it. And that is uncomfortable.
Fourth, there is just that feeling that it's time for for pain to stop. Surely the ibuprofen should work soon? And yet it doesn't.
In that case is this, like a hangover, our own self-inflicted wound that we must live with? I hope it is not. But what does that mean then?
Have we to join a political party to effect change? Has that worked for Labour?
Or to stand for office (ample opportunity for that in the upcoming local elections)? I personally am not inclined to do so, but hope others will.
Or is it time to simply start telling a better story as the basis for change? I get to this last point for a reason. It turned out to be the theme of a discussion I took part in with the journalist Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland, at City, University of London, last evening. The talk was arranged by the English department and largely attended by students on the MA in non-fiction creative writing.
Oliver and I discussed why we were storytellers. Because of course we are. Our characters are real. Our narratives are those we observe. We do not make them up. But the way we relate what we see is, of course, creative storytelling. I am unashamed about this. Story telling is powerful, appropriate and even necessary. If in doubt watch the video by New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern this morning. That is story telling to most powerful effect.
So what is the story that we need to tell?
That we are all one humanity, more bound by commonality than divided by any accident of birth?
That those accidents of birth are, however, part of our story and so must be respected?
That this respect enriches and does not diminish us?
That we stand or fall together now, on this our single planet that we call home?
And that we must work together to make it work for all is us?
Isn't that the story we must now tell, 8nto which we can weave all our preferences as to sub-plot, emphasis and character that we wish, so long as we remember our aim? I came away thinking so.
And where does Brexit fit into that, as a narrative of alienation, promoted difference, indifference and contempt on so many levels (and yes I include Remain in some of the criticism; me too, if you like)? It does not fit with our humanity. It is not the story we need. And maybe the inability to decide upon it is because this really is not the story we want to tell, hear or partake in at some very deep level.
We know the EU is not perfect.
We know it has had political failings.
As we have had, too.
But this was not the story to tell to find a solution to those problems.
There is a better story to tell.
Mine is the Green New Deal in its broadest understanding, as a tale of survival, commonality, joint endeavour, enterprise, change, respect and hope.
Isn't that a better narrative than the one we've got?
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‘The Green New Deal in its broadest understanding, as a tale of survival, commonality, joint endeavour, enterprise, change, respect and hope’
Another way of putting it is:
The environment must be the paramount theme of the story, with the Green New Deal as an essential subplot. In making financial concerns secondary, the hope that our civilisation will endure is enhanced and the outlook is improved for ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. A future less like hell; more like paradise.
🙂
Yes we do have a better story to tell. Yesterday I joined our local WI ( a privilege) on a visit to The Ashmolean. There is plenty about mankind’s culture through the centuries but over coffee we got talking about war museums. I stated that I had been to most of them and was utterly fascinated by the machines of war. This caused a few raised eyebrows but I explained that it was in times of war that man’s scientific and technical inventiveness made such rapid progress. I went on to explain that that was precisely what was needed now that we were faced with climate breakdown. We really had to be on a war footing where a huge amount of investment had to be directed at the most pressing problem we had. Instead we were spending all this time talking about the B-Word. How do we get onto this ‘war-footing’? Well people like AOC, Lucas and Lewis and Rebecca Long-Bailey are saying the right things but they basically have the entire media and the so-called ‘Elite’ trivialising their efforts. Blair seemed to dismiss the problem years ago with a shrug and a ‘something will turn up’ mentality. It is the biggest problem we face and maybe the biggest problem we have ever faced.
So we do, indeed, need to tell better stories
And try we will
I can’t give up on the politics of it, because that’s where the answer lies. Informed by our humanity, as Jacinda wisely says… but the operational response to so many of today’s problems lies in politics and, more precisely, political macroeconomics.
See, every war that has ever been fought – every single one, without exception – has been fought because of an imbalance of power, or fear of an imbalance of power. Someone has taken more than someone else thinks they deserve; whether it was the Nazis with Lebensraum or the incursion of one style of politics into another’s perceived arena (i.e. Communism in Vietnam being an unacceptable risk to US Capitalism). On every occasion, violence has broken out because someone has taken more of something than someone else is comfortable with. Imbalance of power.
Now look at the western economic position. Neoliberal thinking over the last 40 years has promoted what it insists is market supremacy (although it really isn’t… it’s skewed the rules of the game in favour of the holders of capital that it’s a mockery of itself) which has resulted in massive inequality. This is obvious in the UK and the US and most other developed western nations. People in work who rely on tax credits to bring their income to a liveable level… people employed on paper but on zero-hour contracts… people with jobs who still have to resort to using food banks. The latter shows that inequality is now so stark that low resources for some is manifesting itself in an assault on people’s basic dignity. It’s disgraceful. And people are righteously angry about it.
Enter the fascists who want to feel superior to everyone else, the hatemongers with their own agenda of wanting to see the world burn and the grasping capitalists who’s success in their neoliberal game depends on not being rumbled and will do anything to stop you from paying attention to the Man Behind The Curtain. These players manipulate people’s just anger and frustration. They weaponise it through lies and point it at their own preferred target. They identify “The Other” and scapegoat it to their own ends, be it obfuscation of their own agenda the promotion of their intolerance… and the result is…
Brexit (The bloody EU are the cause of this)
President Trump (The bloody Mexicans are threatening to steal Mom’s Apple Pie)
Islamophobia (The bloody Muslims.. comin’ over ‘ere… blowing stuff up and covering their faces…)
So, what’s the answer? Cos to me, it seems to blindingly simple as to be actually funny.
Share things out more evenly. Give everyone enough to eat. Make sure everyone has a warm, safe place to sleep. Extend free medical care to everyone who needs it. Extend free education to everyone who wants to pursue it. Don’t have people working 3 jobs whilst still having to rely on food bank charity whilst others have more personal wealth than they can ever, EVER spend. Ensure that everyone join in with society and don’t feel excluded. Accept that tax is the way to make these things happen. Accept that money isn’t a real commodity that has to be made or “won from the earth” and that we, as a sovereign nation with a fiat currency, have the power, authority and the RIGHT to use money as it’s MEANT to be used – as a way to ensure healthy, productive activity in society and a means to fairly share out the resources that are available – that should be available – to us all.
Share things out more evenly using a healthy, mixed economic model and I guarantee that people’s fears will lessen. Johnny Little-Englander will give much less of a toss that his neighbour doesn’t look or sound like he does if he doesn’t think that neighbour is taking food from his kid’s mouths. Trump won’t be able to claim Mexicans are trying to destroy the American way of life if the average American is doing OK. Unrest and disquiet from the Oppressed Masses will die down if we stop bloody oppressing them.
And people might think that’s a beautiful dream, but it’ll never happen… not in the real world, mate. To that I’d simply ask “Why not? It’s just a choice we can all make”.
And making that choice is in the gift of politics. And that’s why I can’t ever say I’ve had enough of it.
[dismount soap-box]
Thanks!
Geearkay says:
“Unrest and disquiet from the Oppressed Masses will die down if we stop bloody oppressing them.”
But we elect a polity that insists that everything is very complicated….too complicated for ordinary mortals to understand….that keeps them in a job.
“How to solve world poverty” is a question that baffles them completely. In reality there is only one cure for poverty and that’s to make sure poor people have more money….enough money. How did we ever make that complicated ?
Richard, how right you and Oliver are about storytelling, and the need for a new story.
The neo-liberal story is, alas, a busted flush, but the trouble is that the neo-liberals, like Francis Bacon’s headless chickens that, in one of his experiments, really did flap around for while, before keeling over, haven’t recognised this. And this is because of their flawed – flawed ab initio, alas – epistemology.
Because not only are they still implicitly running on Thatcher’s TINA – with austerity being just another version of the monetarist theory about the need to control the economy to prevent it overheating by withdrawing money from it (and especially state funding, to avoid “crowding out” the private sector), a theory I liken to mediaeval “leechcraft”, or bloodletting, where, if the patient didn’t recover, you bled him some more, with the danger that the patient died from loss of blood, which is pretty close to what has been happening to the economy under the Cameron/Osborne bogus “austerity” treatment their flawed diagnosis said was necessary.
So, as I said, they are not only still running with TINA, and the “magic”of market solutions implicit in it, but also with an unstated given – the “hidden curriculum” – of TINA, which is TINOI, or “There is no other interpretation”, because they believe that their reading – their “story” – about reality is only capable of one reading, because “facts are facts”.
But as we all know, even our sensory perceptions are acts of interpretation, with the brain selectively registering , and interpreting, sensory input, working on a “story” about the world around us, simply to make sense of it – a shorthand that enables us to navigate the world around us, but a shorthand that sometimes comes to the wrong conclusion – we “read” the road wrongly, and nearly have an accident, so we re-jig the story for future reference, to make sure the near accident doesn’t happen again.
And actually, even scientific research and investigation works on the same idea of a “story”, with the scientist positing a “story” about how some aspect of nature works, and then testing the story to see if it holds good.
As a research chemist, and virtually our only science-educated PM, Thatcher should have understood that TINA rested on the flawed epistemology of TINOI, and recognised that, as Keynes said “when the facts change, I change my mind”, which meant, “I adopt a new story”.
And my goodness me, how a new story is needed, and as you say:
“There is a better story to tell.
“Mine is the Green New Deal in its broadest understanding, as a tale of survival, commonality, joint endeavour, enterprise, change, respect and hope.
Isn’t that a better narrative than the one we’ve got?”
Thanks Andrew
Agreed
The voters of England need to stop trusting and voting for the Tory party, for any of that to happen.
We also have an even worse story to tell. While we mess on with BREXIT, we have increasing child poverty, knife crime epidemic on the streets and our support for Saudi war crimes in Yemen.
I am very keen for Theresa May to go back to Europe, not to Brussels, but to Den Haag, where there is the War Crimes Tribunal.
We have never been in greater need of a new narrative and this is a point made with great eloquence by George Monbiot in ‘Out of the Wreckage’. This books begins with an extremely apt epigraph taken from Ben Okri’s ‘A Way of Being Free’.
“Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.”
The old stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what our nation stands for have become increasingly irrelevant in the face of globalisation, climate change and the inevitable consequences of decades of blindly pursuing Neoliberalist policies. Yet many people in this country continue to view their own nation through a rose-tinted filter, emphasising what they regard as its virtues while vehemently denying any wrongdoing either in the present or the past. The Windrush scandal is a prime example of this. These blinkered attitudes are holding us back and we simply cannot move forward as a country until we acknowledge our past mistakes and wholeheartedly commit to a different path.
The Green New Deal seems to me to be a step in the right direction. It focuses on universal issues that should be able to provide a focus for unity. If we can come together around a shared vision for the future of our nation then all hope is not yet lost. There are many changes that are urgently required to eliminate the rot that has set in but if we can at least find a starting point around a single issue where consensus can be found, perhaps that can become the first chapter of our new story.
Thank you
Much appr3ciated
SusiB says:
(Quoting Monbiot) “If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies.”
Yep. We know that don’t we. You tell one lie you can never stop because you then have to lie to cover the consequences and eventually nothing you say is true. 🙁
Why do we lie in the first place?…..probably to ‘save face’ when we know we have made a mistake.
Countries, especially those that gained empires are to some extent built on myths. It is now that we will have to come terms with the fragmentation of a ‘supposedly’ glorious history that the reality of the true stories will emerge.
That’s the easy part.
The de-programming may take a generation or two.
The Mythological force is still strong in this one