Ashton Boatman

The political world is in complete turmoil at the moment. The two parties that have had the field to themselves throughout my lifetime are both deeply unpopular but we still have an undemocratic 'first past the post' electoral system which makes it possible for a party to take full power even though the majority hate them. We also have most of the "free" press owned by right wing billionaires, who also own the social media platforms. Add to this the avalanche of hate stirring AI generated memes from Russia and it's hardly surprising that the public space is so discordant. Rational debate is replaced by name calling and point scoring. People aren't listening to each other but trying to undermine each other.

At various times I've been a member of both the Green Party and the Labour party, and I haven't liked either, though my political sympathies lie in that red/green axis. 

People support particular political factions for all kinds of reasons, not all of them rational. It may be that they find a particular candidate attractive, or they have a hatred for a particular social group. It is often that a party represents their short term interests, or pretends to.

To me, the obvious starting point is to ask what sort of a society would I like to live in. Since you ask. I'll tell you!

First of all it has to be sustainable, globally. There's no point in living a perfect life, whatever that is, if it's going to lead to a population crash through global famine caused by climate breakdown. Even if we don't expect it to happen in our lifetimes, most of us care about the next generation. "Well, it'll see  me out" is the most irresponsible phrase I hear, and I hear it often. Frequently from people who have children who they profess to love!

From the above follows the need for fairness. As things stand most of the worlds resources, be they land, money or industrial facilities, are owned by a relatively small proportion of the global population. Whether they are the 1%, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos et al, or just someone who owns agricultural land or a factory in Bangladesh, their income is derived passively from other people's efforts. The majority are trapped into working hard for somebody else in order to pay rent or a mortgage for somewhere to live and to buy food that they don't have time or space to grow for themselves.

Those who live by owning wealth have sometimes worked hard to attain that position, others have got there by lucky gambling but the vast majority have simply inherited wealth. Sometimes they've managed it well, sometimes not, but the fact remains that their comfortable lives rely on others having less comfortable lives.

Now, the status quo regarding wealth distribution may be alright if it was possible for everlasting economic growth to drag everyone out of poverty. The theory is that because the sum of wealth keeps inexorably increasing the eventually those who now work hard for a dollar a day or less will eventually drive SUVs and fly halfway round the planet for their holidays. By then, the owners of everything will be flying in private starships and enjoying their superyachts on the Martian canals. This is the theory of economic growth, but its pursuit has already run up against, or beyond, the capacity of our planet to sustain it. Most of the world's population still live in poverty.

In my view, we all need to live simply,so that others may simply live. That's not a message that most people want to hear. They have been trained to equate greater wealth with greater happiness, but it is not necessarily so.

In order for everyone to enjoy a comfortable life it will be necessary to redistribute the wealth, not just money but, in the words of the old Labour party, the means of production, distribution and exchange.

Clause 4 of the Labour party's constitution, so triumphantly expunged by Tony Blair and his pals, was often referred to as a nationalisation clause, but not necessarily so. There are many ways to skin a cat, if skinning cats is your thing. I am more of the Kropotkin/William Morris school of socialism rather than the Marxist/Leninist school. One of my more right wing friends insists on referring to me as his favourite communist. I know he means well, but it's highly inaccurate. Although the original Communist vision was one of liberation, I can think of little worse than the centralised bureaucratic nightmare that the Soviet Union became. Even worse is the unashamedly National Socialist surveilance state that the People's Republic of China has become.

In general, people of the left have a rosy view of human nature. Those on the right tend to believe that everyone is out for him/herself and continually in conflict with one another. Both are wrong, but often people feel the need to behave as though they are jungle dwellers because that belief is so widely promoted in our culture. In fact our species has only risen to prominence on our planet by its ability to co-operate and to devise rules to live by.

We all tend to assume that other people are pretty much like we are. In fact people vary widely. That's OK. If I need a brain surgeon I need someone with enormous specialised knowledge, very precise motor skills and a calm disposition. That's not me, but I can build them a very nice boat. Our different traits complement each other.

The difficulty comes with the 1% who lack compassion. This is to do with an undeveloped part of the brain. If treated well as children they often develop the ability to co-operate and find a suitable niche where they do good rather than harm. They often make good brain surgeons! If brought up in a dog eat dog culture they can become axe murderers, CEOs or dictators. Such people, commonly known as psychopaths, mostly lean to the right politically, but will actually adopt any ideology that they see as giving them a route to power. Mussolini began his political career as an anarchist.

Revolutions have a problem. Overthrowing the unjust system and replacing it with something better seems a good idea, but there is always resistance, often armed, from the status quo. To organise a fight the revolutionary group needs strong leadership. which is usually taken up by a psychopath, be it Napoleon, Lenin or Mao. These people develop a cult following that empowers their followers to behave without compassion and negate the original objectives of the revolution in order to keep the glorious leader in power. As the Chinese say, "he who fights the dragon becomes the dragon."

More peaceful transitions can also lose their way. Unfortunately the Labour party took their excellent clause 4 to mean Nationalisation, which is a very distant and indirect form of common ownership. In 1945 they had a once in a lifetime chance to change over to common ownership, but they blew it. Instead of giving core industries to the the workers they nationalised them, keeping the same boss/worker conflict and making them easy for the Tories to privatise again. I think the reason that the Labour party took the route of Nationalisation rather than worker ownership was that it retained well paid roles for powerful individuals and for trades unions, which would be redundant if the workers owned the company and elected the management.

My MP is Angela Rayner. She gets a lot of flak for everything she does. A lot of this is clearly mysoginistic or classist, relating to her humble beginnings. She's made  some mistakes regarding her slightly unconventional housing arrangements, but those who criticise her for this are actually experts at getting away with dodging tax. I like her, though I don't always agree with her.

Angela came up through the trades union movement which is, quite rightly, devoted to improving wages and conditions for workers. During her short period of access to the levers of power she got legal improvements to these things. These changes have been heavily criticised for making small businesses unviable. No mention is made of the fact that many small businesses are paying crippling rents to those who live by owning rather than by working. Often that rent money is being sent abroad and so is lost to our economy. The media never mentions the drag on our economy caused by high rents. Wages largely go back into the local economy.

Trades unions have been declining in influence throughout my lifetime. Essentially they are part of capitalism, a necessary voice for workers confronted by the immense power of capital. The problem is that capital is now global but unions are national. The bosses can say 'If you don't like it we can relocate to China". We need global trades unions to defeat global capital. The only one of these is the Wobblies  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World who are seen as a threat by most unions, who seek compromise with capital rather than overthrowing it. The Wobblies are still active, and actually growing in Britain. https://iww.org.uk/

I feel that the current Labour Party leadership, with Morgan McSweeney as puppetmaster, have worked a con trick on the British public. The biggest threat to democracy and the well being of ordinary people are the handful of people who own so much of our planet's resources that they are actually wealthier than many nations. Our allegedly socialist leaders have done secret deals with them in order to gain limited power. Don't get me wrong. The Labour government are slowly sorting out the mess left by the Tories and will do better for ordinary people than their predecessors, but, they're not interested in tackling the ownership of resources. They're happy that the rest of us pay rent to the owners of everything rather than taking back ownership. Did you know that the pipes delivering gas to your house are largely owned by a Chinese billionaire. We get the crumbs left over after the tax free rents have been paid.

One of the things that I have learned about recently is the exsistence of cults in politics. Like most people, I used to see cults as things like the Moonies, The Scientologists or the Branch Davidians. In fact there are many unrecognised cults that play a huge and unhelpful part in politics. MAGA is an obvious one but they exist on the left as well as the right. How do you define a cult. Perhaps a good definition would be 'a set of beliefs held tenaciously even to the extent of denying or refusing to consider evidence to the contrary'. If Trump tells his followers that prices are going down they believe it, even if eggs are costing more. Along with cults goes the idea of a magic man. Someone who is infallible and goes against conventional thinking because he's such a genius. Brexit was a cult and Farage it's magic man. Devotees still will not acknowledge what a disaster it's been or that Farage is no more than a conman. Through Reform UK Ltd he's now leading another cult based on the fallacy of white English superiority.

I could never wholheartedly get behind Jeremy Corbyn. Corbynism got too cult like for me. I recall a vicious attack on Facebook by some Corbyn devotees of a rather vulnerable lady who dared to suggest that the Blair government did some good things. It did, and overall it was better than the Tories, but, by using PFI for almost everything we ended up paying more rent to global financiers. Jeremy Corbyn was an unlikely cult leader but the left made him one because they wanted a magic man who would solve everything. In fact he did not have the management skills to lead a darts club, ran a clueless election campaign and walked straight into the antisemitism trap set for him. I disliked his support for dictatorships, just because they were left wing, and could never understand his apparent fondness for obvious psychopath Vladimir Putin.

Today is the day of the Denton and Gorton byelection. It's a first past the post contest and currently Labour, Green and the Nazis , call a spade a spade, are pretty much level pegging. I live in the next door constituency with similar demographics. If I had a vote I would use it to support whoever was most likely to defeat the Nazi. It's hard to know who that is because the polls put them all so close. The danger is that the Nazi will get in with 1/3 of the vote, while 2/3 of the voters can't stand him. That's first past the post for you! In 1933 63% of voters did not support the National Socialist party. They didn't get the chance to vote again.

I worry about what the makeup of Tameside council will be after the May elections, I expect Labour to do badly. There are already some independent councillors, about whom I have mixed feelings.  Perhaps we'll get some Greens but, in view of the amount of casual racism locally I fear we could get an influx of Fascists.

I wasn't sure what to call this piece. My first thought was The Curse of Cassandra, closely followed by What's the F*****g Point.  I settled on a derivation of the phrase The Elephant in the Room. That seemed most appropriate because it's dealing with a subject that is so big and scary and bound to change our lives fundamentally that most people prefer to ignore it, or claim that it doesn't exist.

I must admit that I have a tendency towards depression. Some people will use that last sentence to dismiss all that I say, but no, there's a lot of factors behind my occasional mood disorders, one of them being a tendency to face and try to work my way through problems rather than shy away from them. Despair and depression come from an inability to find a solution. Kitten videos just don't work for me.

I woke up this morning full of things that I was going to do today, perhaps too many things, but my mind was also working away at apparently unsolvable problems. Strangely the last straw was to find that we'd run out of toilet paper, a very unusual problem as Em usually stocks up for about 6 months ahead. I could simply have gone to the corner shop to get some, but instead I lay down in the spare room and wrapped a duvet over my head.

Back in 1973 I had a job driving a little van for TV hire company Multibroadcast. My friend Geoff Monaghan also drove for them. I'd already pretty much rejected the usual path through life, career, mortgage, marriage, 2.4 kids etc and had my concerns about what our species was doing to our planet. I came across 2 things that underlined my concerns. One was the Club of Rome. Limits to Growth report, one of the first major computer modelling exercises that concluded that, unless our species controlled growth in population, pollution, energy use, etc etc, sooner or later everything would screw up and we would suffer a population crash. The other was that our species was churning out carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than the plants and oceans were absorbing it.

I told Geoff about this. He didn't believe me. I didn't know what the consequences would be but I could see that they wouldn't be good.

 The Limits to Growth  report was a warning. It should have been mailed to every person on the planet. Instead it was hardly mentioned in the media, dismissed, ridiculed and ignored. In the 50+ years since its publication the actual graphs of uncontrolled growth have closely followed the doompath projected by those old computers if we were to change nothing. 

Being aware of this, I've tried to live my life with a pretty low impact on our planet. Now, people may think this would make me miserable. I have admitted to a tendency to depression, but I believe that I would have that I would have that same tendency even if I lived in a mansion and travelled in a private jet. So many rich people I have met who live sad lives of tension and conflict in spite of, perhaps partly because of, their wealth. Happiness and contentment come from within, provided that you have the basic needs of life.

Some people may say that my efforts to live simply, so that others may simply live (Gandhi) were futile. Perhaps so, but at least I don't have being a big part of the problem on my conscience. 

Humans are good at solving problems. Remember the problem about fridges causing a depletion of the ozone layer that would cause us all to get skin cancer?  All the countries of the world got together to ban the offending refrigerants and replace them with something less harmful. The ozone hole is still there, but it's shrinking.

Remember acid rain killing Europe's forests? I recall being at a talk about acid rain. The lecturer pointed out that the first sign of acid rain damage was "a sudden outbreak of blindness among foresters", ie, they just didn't want to see it. That's an important observation. By international agreement coal fired power stations now have scrubbers to remove the offending chemicals from their chimneys. In Britain we no longer use coal for power generation anyway.

So, what's the big problem about tackling the climate crisis?   For most people it seems too big and its consequences too dire for them to dare to take their heads out of the sand. It also threatens their ambitions. Rich people want to get richer, poor people want to get rich and the destitute want, quite rightly, to stop being destitute. They're all in competition with each other and the fear is that, by stepping aside from that competition they'll slide back down to destitution again. This is particularly so in countries, even rich ones like the USA, with no viable support system for "losers" in the fight for wealth. 

Everyone is locked into a struggle for resources. As John Lennon put it, "There's room at the top they're telling you still, as long as you learn how to smile as you kill". Of course, for most people it's not as stark as that, but everyone knows that the people who 'get on in life' are often the ones who are good at networking and buttering up the boss. Yes, I know, working hard (or getting your staff to work hard) to get results helps too. The result of this is people wearing themselves out, mentally and/or physically to be cast aside when they can no longer perform.

The same thing happens between nations, trapping their citizens into a rat race and often fostering distrust and hatred of those living in other lands. I grew up during the Cold War. The Americans and the Russians were competing to build more nuclear warheads than the other, even though they could each end life on Earth several times over. During the Cuban missile crisis I was 8, and terrified of what was likely to happen. Happily, they pulled back from the brink and I've lived to be a septuagenarian. 

Some limited sanity in this area came along when Ronald Reagan watched a film called The Day After. This shows how getting out the true information rather than the propaganda can change things. Reagan's military top brass had been telling him that they could win a nuclear war, because their careers were boosted by him believing that. 

https://collider.com/the-day-after-ronald-reagan/

This conversion of Reagan led eventually to the SALT talks etc, scaling down each country's nuclear arsenal. However, a major factor in the Soviet Union agreeing to reductions was that it did not have the economic capacity to carry on competing militarily with the USA. Capitalism had shown itself to be capable of superior economic growth to the USSR's command economy (masquerading as socialism). 

Here's the big problem, which I don't have a solution for. Economic growth is bound to make our planet uninhabitable, but, our planet is divided into nations. If any nation eschews economic growth it will become less able to manufacture or purchase the latest weapons. Without the latest weapons that nation will become unable to deter and defend against aggressor nations. This is currently being demonstrated in Ukraine, where the greater resources of Russia has allowed it to gradually take over large parts of Ukraine, in spite of fierce and brave resistance. To many politicians, aware of the dog eat dog nature of international affairs, stopping economic growth would be suicidal, but so is carrying on with economic growth.

Strangely enough, Margaret Thatcher (who I despise) was one of the first major politicians to raise the issue.

Of course, then there's business. The rich want to keep on getting richer. They own the media and so control what information is shared with the rest of us. In the short term they can make more and more profits by selling us more and more stuff. They've got most people convinced that if they buy things that are bigger and better, if they fly away on holidays and cruises that are further and further away then they will become happy. Of course, to afford these things we'll have to work harder and harder (for them). In order to prevent change that may threaten their short term profits they pour vast amounts of funds into lobbying governments and promote online memes spreading disinformation about  what David Cameron famously referred to as "green crap". This has led to politicians consciously moving away from the very solutions that could save our collective bacon even though they clearly understand how vital a transition away from fossil fuels is.

I don't get it. Oil company bosses are not stupid, though they may be a bit crazy. They understand the science. They have children and grandchildren. Perhaps they think that somehow their wealth will protect them from mass extinction. Certainly it is rumoured that the world's richest person has a bunker in Alaska. Talking about crazy, he seems to live in a sort of Dan Dare version of reality where escape to Mars while the Earth boils is a possibility.

The climate crisis seems to have become the issue that dare not speak its name. Frustratingly it's become a political issue between left and right, with the right currently gaining traction.  I don't understand how atmospheric physics can possibly be a matter of political debate, any more than gravity or electrical conductivity can be. These are things established by scientific research and mathematical equations. I am clearly of the left, but like to maintain friendships among people of all political persuasions, as long as they're not actually promoting hatred. You may note that the two politicians that I have cited are right wing, but they accepted the evidence.

The most powerful person in the world claims to believe that climate change is a Chinese hoax, despite his own scientists having done much of the work on understanding it. It's a very personal thing. I have a friend who apparently understands the problem and lives a low impact life. He sometimes gets work on dairy farms and does not believe that bovine emissions are part of the problem, and yet the evidence is solid on this. Belief is a problem. I don't believe in belief. When someone says you just have to believe they mean that you should suspend all rational thought. I have friends who regularly fly, who drive everywhere, who go on cruises ( the absolute most polluting form of holiday) and yet I say nothing. Many of them understand the science but clearly think that somebody else should deal with the problem. How can I constantly be criticising my friends lifestyles. 

If I talk about climate change, particularly if I mention the need for immediate action, I'm seen as a Jeremiah, a spoilsport, a party pooper etc, and yet, how can I not talk about it when it hangs above us like a tidal wave about to break and wash away our secure and comfortable lives. The dinosaurs didn't know the meteorite was coming. We know what's happening, but choose to pretend otherwise.

I plant trees, partly to replace the ones I use, partly to absorb a bit of carbon. I wonder what the point is. Probably they'll die in a catastrophic drought or get burned in a forest fire, but I have to hope that my little bit will help.