Without the state

Another reboot

Technorati Tags: politics,blogging,writing

This blog began a long long time ago in a far away country with a Labour government with some radical ideas - for a while at least until Tony Blair began to have dreams of being a world statesman.

Initially it began as an adjunct to the one man consultancy I was running which had a loose focus on supporting community groups in various ways. Later after the consultancy was wound up it had a more eclectic mix of posts on politics, philosophy, art, the environment and a whole lot more. Later still it changed its name to 'Without the State' with an explicit focus on what I thought of as 'practical anarchy', trying to provide an alternative to the insidious growth of right wing libertarianism and looking at practical ways for local communities to manage their own affairs without excessive centralisation.

That focus weakened, especially after the election of the Cameron government and it became more eclectic again, but also less regular as the enthusiasm waned and Facebook grew. Of late though I have begun to hate the sheer nastiness of social media and begun to think again about 'long form' blogging. I'm not sure what the audience for such will be, I was told a few days ago that something I wrote was too long at 2000 words, but I don't care. This blog never had a huge audience anyway.

So, this is is it. These days I also have an arts blog and shop trying to sell my own work and after I clean up all the links in the sidebars and look again at the layout I'll add that to the blog roll. Coming up I discovered some notes for a post on (in)equality which I started ages ago but in the light of BLM and the disaster that we will all be facing if Trump is re-elected seems very much on topic.

Oh - and if you are reading this in the USA and haven't voted yet I only have two things to say.

1. Vote

2. Don't for all our sakes, vote for Trump. Please!

How could you, Bolsover?

I can’t deny that the outcome of the election is a huge disappointment and also a huge worry. With the most right wing government in years, Brexit now inevitable and the consequences of climate change looming over us, we are faced with existential risks to the right to dissent, to the UK economy and most seriously to our capacity to survive as a species.

What’s done is done. We need to move on. In particular we need to exert unrelenting pressure on National government to address the consequences of climate change, despite the heel dragging of the US and now Brazil. The opposition needs also to start rebuilding, to develop a coherent policy framework for the next election including tactics to counteract the inevitable demonization of the opposition by the print press. The BBC is a spent force as shown by this election, too willing to fold under pressure from the government of the day and already under threat in terms of the license fee.

What I want to do here – and via social media is to bring forward my own thoughts on policies for #thenextfiveyears. Some are already here in the bowels of this blog and will be brought out, dusted off and represented in the new context. Others will require new ideas and new thinking.

Let’s get started…

The state we're in.

It isn't undemocratic to oppose government policy. That includes the policy of leaving the EU and it certainly includes the terms on which we leave. Despite the garbage like 'Brexit means Brexit' or the shouty 'you lost, get over it' mantra from too many people who should know better, there is no clear way forward. Cameron created this mess for party political ends, but screwed it up by his incompetence. May's incompetence has deepened the divide in this country while simultaneously making it even harder to reach an agreement with the EU. Now we are expected to believe that one or other of the challengers for the leadership and hence to be PM will be able to to break through all that with a sprinkle of fairy dust, magically creating unity at home and miraculously changing the policy of EU negotiators. That would be, to say the least, unlikely but when the person leading it all is likely to be Johnson? Johnson? It would be intolerable if he was the bumbling buffoon he pretends to be, but given the number of recent reports of just how calculated that public persona really is (Andrew Marr) and generally how nasty and unpleasant he is (Max Hastings) I think the next couple of years are likely to be painful. If Ken Clarke is correct and there are enough Tories willing to put country before party then we might be lucky and get a General Election fairly quickly. That won't solve anything, but it gives us an opportunity to catch our breath and retreat from the insanity. If he's wrong, then it's looking more and more like the opening of Years and Years. But then, for a significant portion of the Tory Party that's the utopian scenario anyway. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy ride!

And so it drags on...

If the sort of chaos we've seen in the Commons and in Government over the past months had been reported as happening anywhere else in the world, you can be sure that Messrs Gove, Johnson and Farage would have wasted no time in sneering, if not in so many words, about incompetent foreigners. Yet, after almost three years of needless confusion and division we still don't know what will happen come April.

That's bad enough but we see fabricated stories everywhere accusing Corbyn personally of being anti-semitic as well as the wider party, despite the damaging claims from Baroness Warsi about anti-Islamic behaviour in the Tory party, the latest singling out Gove again as someone we should all be concerned about if he became Tory leader.

Calls for a third (yes third!) referendum are dismissed as undemocratic despite the fact that there have been three votes on the Withdrawal Agreement - without any part of it having been discussed at the time of the referendum - and despite the fact that some of the most ardent Brexiteers have been campaigning against our membership from day 1 of joining without drawing breath.  Almost 6m people have signed the petition to revoke Article 50, 16m voted to Remain, but these are dismissed as irrelevant compared to a fraudulent vote on an incompetently designed Referendum, called by an equally incompetent politician trying to defend his position as leader and his party's control of the country. But no - asking to confirm the outcome of hree years of further incompetence is undemocratic and only an attempt to reverse the outcome of the referendum.

Well in part yes, of course it is an attempt to reverse the outcome.That's how democracies work. Discussion and debate leading to a decision. It doesn't stop. If arguing against something already enacted is undemocratic then no laws would ever change.

Having another referendum is supposed also to lead to division on the country. Have you looked away from your office in No 10 lately Prime Minister? Have you seen the mess you and your predecessor have landed us in? Have you seen the violent language and violent behaviour directed at foreigners every day. Of course that probably doesn't bother you does it. One of your own party members - OK former party members - says you have a problem with immigrants and you did nothing when Home Secretary to make me doubt that. I've already mentioned the rampant anti-Islamic behaviour that appears commonplace but anti-semitism seems to be a problem too.

What's the prospect for the future? Nothing good.

Coping with climate change

Back in 2016, I argued that we needed to tackle reducing the demand for energy as if it was a major infrastructure project. Now the Independent Committee on Climate change have reached a similar conclusion. Of course, translating that report into practice will no doubt take more time, but each year we delay, means a continuing waste of resources.

Obsessed as government is with Brexit, I'm not optimistic that the policy changes we need will be implemented. The recent viral video from the US shows how hard it will be to get politicians to give up their entrenched positions.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’ve been doing,”

https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1099075460649107458/video/1

As Bill McKibben, puts it in the New Yorker

The irony is that, when Feinstein said she’s been “doing this for thirty years,” she described the precise time period during which we could have acted. James Hansen brought the climate question to widespread attention with his congressional testimony in 1988. If we’d moved thirty years ago, moderate steps of the kind that Feinstein proposes would have been enough to change our trajectory. But that didn’t get done, in large part because oil and gas companies that have successfully gamed our political system didn’t want it to get done. And the legislators didn’t do anywhere near enough to fight them. So now we’re on the precipice. Indeed, we’re over it. The fires that raged in California last fall were the fires of a hell on earth.