Why We Argue Over Politics

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…when we fundamentally agree with each other. 

All through the arguments over leaving the EU, there was an underlying mantra that Brexit represented the will of the British people, democratically expressed through a referendum.

Which was true.

No matter how much we might quibble over the goalposts, the numbers, or the quality of information provided to the electorate, Leave won an overall majority. That victory was further enforced at the last General Election, when the Conservatives were voted into power with a commanding majority on a promise to “get Brexit done”.

This is democracy in action, isn’t it? 

Well, no. It isn’t, actually. It’s a demonstration that the political system we are ruled by is not democracy. It is democratised capitalism. People are only ever asked how they want their capitalism, hard or soft. 

If we genuinely had a democratic political system designed to reflect the will of the people, we would not need referendums. Those in power would have a constant feed of information telling them what people thought. If European legislation was causing friction and discontent, that would have been investigated and dealt with in negotiation with our European partners. If immigration was causing disquiet and social tension, a truly democratic government would have intervened way before it descended into racist slanging matches. It would have investigated the root causes of the disquiet and social tension, and worked with communities to resolve them. Similarly with any abuse of the benefits system, real or perceived. It would have restored harmony where there was discord, and allowed everyone to get on with their lives.

I believe this is fundamentally what the majority want – the freedom to get on with our lives and not have to concern ourselves with politics. We want a just and fair society where we can be rewarded for our own efforts, and criminals feel the weight of the law. We want a robust public safety net which catches us when age, illness or misfortune knocks our independence for six. We want good infrastructure that means we can communicate effectively, trade competitively, and live in peace with other nations. We want to feel proud of our towns, our landscape, and ourselves. We want the bounty of nature respected and protected from human greed and ignorance. 

That is what democratic government should deliver. That is the will of the people. But what we have is a political system based on a power struggle between the owners of the capital and the people who have to work to acquire it. It’s a bargain forced on capital by its need for labour, and it only ever gives people what they can wrest from its grudging hands. In return, capital demands its pound of flesh, as it always has done. You work at the hours capital demands at the jobs capital demands, for the pay the market determines.

As automation increasingly reduces capital’s need for labour, so the bargaining power of the working population decreases. Public services are seen as unnecessary expenses. The demands of working people fall on deaf ears, and people without capital begin to be seen as expendable. This is not to say that the people running the system hold such views, let alone the people voting for them, but they simply don’t understand what the machine they are cranking the handle of is designed to do.

For those who have capital, however modest an amount, the machine has delivered comfort and prosperity – which they perceive to have been achieved through their own efforts – and they can see nothing wrong with it. For those without capital however, the outlook is bleak. Their bargaining power is reduced to the power of persuasion. Their access to basic human rights relies on the charitable instincts of those in power. There is no compulsion on capital to take any notice of them. The system attaches no value to them.

We are experiencing the kind of government this produces. When COVID-19 hit us Britain, like America, traded the lives of its citizens to preserve the interests of capital. Individuals and small businesses are being left to cope with the catastrophic economic consequences of the pandemic alone, while public money largely goes to the big owners of capital. We are seeing billions of pounds wasted on inept, if not downright corrupt, public procurements. We have seen health workers left unprotected, and care workers and those they look after abandoned to die. Key workers who stepped up to the challenge of a pandemic, often at considerable personal risk, are rewarded with empty words and a pay freeze.

Boris Johnson’s bumbling incompetence in handling both the coronavirus pandemic and Britain’s exit from the European Union, and the on-going tragedy of a mentally unstable US President systematically destroying a country that vaunted itself as the “leader of the free world” are both sad products of the system of democratised capitalism.

It doesn’t work.

It’s destroying the conditions for life on earth.

We need something better. We do not need strong government. We need good government. And all the time politicians simply have to periodically ask an ill-informed electorate for their opinion, we’re not going to get one.

Whether you are a business entrepreneur or unemployed, a farmer or a technologist, an executive manager or a homemaker, schoolchild or pensioner, this is our country and we need a government that works for us. All of us. We won’t get that until we have a truly democratic system that puts people in charge and capital in the servants quarters.

Telling the story

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So, Leaving on the Tide is with the publisher (New Generation Publishing) and Hills of Gold will be following shortly once I’ve summoned up the courage to part with the manuscript.

I owe a debt of gratitude to my guinea-pig readers, Helen, Dan and Annette, and to my wonderful editor, fellow author Karen Tucker. Not to mention Andy for putting up with me throughout the process and keeping me well-fed and watered (or rather, tea-ed).

It’s ten years since I published my last book, Spirit of Shehaios in 2010. The world and I have changed quite a lot in that decade, and this time round I have had the experience to be able to stand back just a little and observe the writing process. I thought maybe it is worth sharing some of those observations.

The key thing I figured out is that I have to tell the story to myself first. That’s the reason I write. I do not want to re-hash someone else’s story, follow someone else’s formula. I am on a journey of discovery. I want to know what happens next – but when I turn the page it’s blank. So I’ve got to figure it out from the clues already laid in the pages with writing on.

I once saw the late, great Terry Pratchett give a talk at Winchester Writers Conference, in which he compared starting a new novel to standing on one side of a cloud-filled valley. Your travelling companions – your key characters – are standing beside you, but you don’t necessarily know them all that well. You have no shared experiences. They tell you their back-story as you travel on together through the plot. And you don’t really know where that plot is going to go. You can just about make out the end-point of the journey in the hills opposite you, but you have to go down into the clouds and bumble about a bit before you can emerge on the other side.

Quite often, I find I’m climbing up the valley on the opposite side heading for the final destination, only to find I’ve lost one of my characters in the mist. Or left them stranded at the start of the story. I have to go back and retrieve them.

When Grant and I used to do hill-walking with the Scouts, the rule was always that one of the more experienced members of the group should be the back-marker, staying with the slowest member of the party to make sure no stragglers got lost along the way. (Our collie, Megan, considered it her job to keep us rounded up, but she tended to just race backwards and forwards between the fit and determined heroes at the front and the strollers sub-group at the back.)

Karen has been my “back-marker”, pointing out the missing links, the bits that don’t quite work from the reader’s perspective, and the sections where I’d left behind the scaffolding I’d built to construct the narrative on. Usually because I was in love with the words and phrases I’d used. Sometimes I was able to salvage my favourite phrases and put them in the mouths of my characters. Sometimes, they just had to go.

That’s the point about recognising that my early drafts are always about telling the story to myself. Although they do contain quite a lot of dialogue, as my characters tell me what’s happening to them, they tend to be heavy on exposition. On telling the story, rather than showing it as it unfolds. Telling the story to myself is the bit I find most exciting and rewarding. This is the part of the process that feels as if it’s coming from somewhere beyond myself, as I reach down into all the memories and experience buried in my subconscious, absorb influences from the news and stories surrounding me and process my emotional responses into the thoughts and actions of my characters. But it’s the very opposite of what works best for the reader. For the reader to invest time and emotion in reading the story, they need to be able to engage with the characters and travel through the plot with them. The motivations buried in the back-stories of the character; the history that shapes their present; the root causes of their problems and dilemmas need to become apparent as the story unfolds – they can’t be pointed out in flashing neon letters.

I used to struggle with the idea that when the final work failed to connect with people, failed to make its mark on the world in any meaningful way, that negated it’s significance to me. The conception of the story taught me so much, meant so much to me, it hurt that it meant so little to anyone else. But if it meant as much to others as it meant to me, it would have been a work of genius. And my rational brain knew perfectly well that it wasn’t a work of genius. So I didn’t know how to value it. I vacillated between valuing it at nothing and defensively thinking of it as having the enormous value it had to me. Not the most helpful state of mind to conduct a sales campaign in.

Whenever I finish that early drafting process, I have always needed a friendly reader to validate the story and persuade me that it’s worth polishing for publication. Because all I am aware of is the extraordinary, emotional, exhilarating process of creating it. I have no idea if there is anything in it that makes sense to anyone else. Grant used to be that reader – I always knew if it didn’t make sense to him it wouldn’t make sense to anyone. This time round, my daughter Helen was able to fulfill that role. She was invaluable in helping me understand what I needed to retrieve from the mist and where the scaffolding was getting in the way. And in retrospect, I began to understand, with the help of a little mindfullness coaching, a little more about my writing process.

The first stage is an outpouring of personal creativity that for me is expressed in story-telling, through the written word – others paint, dance, play music, talk, make things in wood, till the soil or nurture plants. Train dogs. Restore steam engines. Whatever. We do it for the pleasure and satisfaction we get from doing it.

The second stage is to tell the story to others. And that requires technical skills and knowledge that needs to be learned. It’s something that can always be done better. So if my stories don’t connect to readers, it’s not because my story is worthless. It’s because I need to improve my skill in communicating the story.

Of course, I also have to recognise that many people – perhaps even most people – will not be interested in my journeys of exploration. They want something that takes them on a more familiar journey – they want a formulaic tale, a re-hash of a story they’ve read a hundred times before. There are times when I want that kind of a read too – that’s when I turn to a Georgette Heyer, or an Inspector Morse tale. I don’t write that kind of story. I don’t want to write that kind of story. So I will never write a best-seller.

I am retired. I write mainly for my own pleasure – in purely monetary terms, my books cost more than they generate, just as my music always has. I’m going to spend my time writing the books I want to write, whether or not they’re the books people want to read. But I do derive a lot of pleasure from sharing my work, so I do want to improve my craftsmanship. I want the modest number of readers I do have to have the best reading experience I can give them.  What I’m aiming to do is delight and intrigue the kind of people who want a book that makes them work a bit. Think a bit. Dig a bit deeper.

I want to do it with enough wit and skill to keep my reader turning the pages. I want to create characters who behave like real people, that the reader does not necessarily like, but can relate to. I want you to feel glee when the villain gets his come uppance. I want you to feel frustrated with the obstinance of the anti-hero and the naiveté of the hero. I want their adventures to make you smile and their tragedies to make you sad. My characters teach me a lot about human nature and human folly as I swivel my writer’s lens to look at the action from their point of view. I want to share those insights.

Those of us engaged in the folly of trying to create the Fair Land in the real world have a really important story to tell. It’s about the survival and evolution of human beings on planet Earth. It’s about being part of the complex adaptive system of life on the blue-green world of dreams.

What I see happening right now is that there is a bunch of us who have told the story to ourselves quite lucidly. We are passionate about the outpouring of creative thinking that went into that process, and we have a tendency to yell at people who have just opened the book, because they’re making rookie mistakes based on the most rudimentary grasp of the problem. We’re like Olympic athletes condemning a toddler who has just mastered walking. He comes to us beaming with pride because he can walk upright on his own two legs just like us, and we scowl at him because he can’t get near the world record for the 100 metre sprint. He gets tired walking down the garden path, and we’re trying to coach him to run a marathon. How would you feel if that happened to you? Or worse, it happened to your child?

Those of us who have been active in the environmental movement or campaigning for social justice for decades need to learn how to tell the story to the reader. In a way that people who don’t want to do the deep dive into the fascinating complexity of the chaotic adaptive system of life on planet Earth can relate to. Negating the story of their own experience, telling them what they should and shouldn’t do (or even what they should or shouldn’t think) is as counter-productive as trying to get them to think like people who are fascinated by the complexity of the chaotic adaptive system. It just isn’t going to build the social consensus we need to transition to a sustainable lifestyle.

We need to start condemning less and celebrating more. We need to talk less about the problems and more about the destination, the joyous hope of life abundant, that contrasts so markedly with the dark fatalism of the old economic story. Then, and only then, can we trust each other to find a way of getting through the clouds to reach our destination.

Enjoy the journey.

Oh – and buy the book(s)!

The Politics of Hope

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I think what we have been experiencing in the last decade or more is not a political argument between the Right and the Left. It has been the politics of denial vs. the politics of protest. 

What we are starting to see is the politics of protest becoming the politics of hope. Rather than just condemning the shortcomings of the old system, we are now starting to talk about what the new one should look like. This is a change from negative to positive energy that I believe can only gather strength and momentum. 

The politics of denial arises from a conservative mindset that believes that you can keep everything in a constant state, just as it always was, familiar, safe, business-as-usual. This mindset simply denies the negative impact of business as usual. It denies the poverty and suffering caused to individuals. It denies the impoverishment of cultural life, and the stifling of enterprise, innovation and creativity caused by an economic system that is no longer fit for purpose. It denies, above all, the fatal impact on the natural environment – on Earth’s life support systems.

It is a mindset most often held by those who benefit most from business-as-usual, but those who suffer most can also cling tenaciously to it. The socially inequitable structures of power and wealth distribution that are locked into “business as usual” engender a sense of fear and insecurity in society as a whole. As a result people stick limpet-like to the old and familiar. The closest analogy is the wife who stays in an abusive relationship because her self-worth is at such a low ebb she is more afraid of the unchartered territory beyond the abuse than she is of the abuse itself.

The more the evidence against the status quo mounts, the more strident are the voices of denial. When spurious evidence fails them, they resort to downright lies. When the lies start to wear thin, they resort to bullying and coercion. The more you challenge them, the dirtier they fight. We’ve danced a long way down that road to hell already. How far do we have to go, I wonder, before the dancers realise where the siren voices are leading them?

The opposition to the politics of denial has, up to now, been the politics of protest. It is a constant reaction to the outrages of the denialists, a constant cry of pain from the victims – mainly from the spokespeople of victims who have no voice. The politics of denial simply does not acknowledge the pain and suffering of the poor and disenfranchised, the sick, the homeless, the refugees. Of wildlife, farm animals, or the Earth herself. Every petition, every pressure group, every protest and demonstration has been a reaction against something. But that’s all it’s been. It has no agency. It’s continually fighting on ground of the enemy’s choosing.

During the EU referendum there was never really a positive campaign to remain in the EU, there was just a campaign against Brexit. The Remainers gave the Brexit argument a power and agency it inherently lacked – because the Remain campaign was so negative, it made Brexit look like a positive step. So huge numbers of people who felt the pain of “business as usual”, without having the first idea what disease was causing that pain, voted for something totally bereft of all meaning and content. Brexit only looked good because it had been so attacked and vilified by those opposed to it. Implementing it cannot be other than a complete disaster, because we are replacing a stable and productive agreement with our European neighbours with an empty vessel, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. The effect on the UK economy, coming on top of COVID-19 and the biggest global recession we have ever experienced will be catastrophic. But I fear we will have to live through it now to learn that lesson.

Which brings me to the politics of hope, which is sorely needed with such a bleak prospect ahead of us. What we are beginning to see emerge in the new world COVID-19 has created is a coming together of all the channels of protest behind an agenda of positive change. We are beginning to see a consensus arising around prioritising the wellbeing of people and planet over the broken record of economic growth.

There remains a huge battle to be fought against the entrenched and powerful forces of business as usual. They have individuals held prisoner under the cosh of economic dependency, in debt and enslaved to a system that is shrivelling their souls and destroying the ecosystem we live in. Resistance to the broken record is difficult and painful and sometimes it is too much to ask of people who need to protect their families and vulnerable dependants.

The politics of hope provides escape routes for such people. It builds communities that support them, local economies that work for them, a network of colleagues and neighbours who respect and care for them. Only by growing the capacity and infrastructure that supports a mutual aid response to economic collapse can we move forward and rebuild a human civilisation fit for the 21st century.

It’s a massive change that will affect every single aspect of our lives. It can’t be done through the power structure of the old system with all the dysfunctional attributes of control-freakery embedded in it – the hero-syndrome of people in positions of power; the measurement dysfunction that underpins so much of our organisational structure; and the money-myth that disables our ability to create true wealth. It is a change that has to come from the bottom up, a grassroots movement that simply sidelines the centralised authority unless or until that centralised authority aligns itself with the direction of travel. Democratic politics is not about politicians telling people what to think through a sophisticated media circus feeding lies, half truths and fake news to a divided, unhappy and fearful population of disconnected individuals. It is about the people collectively telling politicians what kind of society we want, and holding them to account for delivering it. We need to re-connect politics to the lives, activities, hopes, aspirations and needs of ordinary people.

The UK Government has abdicated all responsibility for governing the country in the interests of the people of the country, and it is time to start asking why we are letting them have power over our lives? How does lying and conning their way to an election victory give them the right to wreck our economy, destroy our public services and eviscerate our communities? The bunch of incompetents currently holding office at Westminster got into power because they understood that it is not possible to control the “global village” we now live in. What they have done is hijack that myth of control to line their own pockets. But the more people realise that it is a complete myth that humans are ‘in control’ of nature, or the economy, or any of the chaotic adaptive systems in which we live, the more we can start to understand how things do work. As we grow in wisdom, so we are able to  wean ourselves off the poisonous narrative of blame and heroism that is paralysing human society with hate, misery, fear and insecurity.

Things work in ecosystems. Through a myriad different connections and interdependencies. We do not need control. We need connection. Human beings are both sovereign individuals and social animals – we need connection, communication and understanding.

It is a long journey we’re setting out on, but the longest journey starts with a single step. That single step is for each of us, individually, to learn how to respect life, human and otherwise. We can talk about where we go from there.

The Big Picture

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I am a writer of fantasy. I do world building. I do big picture stuff. Not very good on the detailed practical work. I am a relative newcomer to the world of environmental politics, and I’m really not an activist. I have only ever been on one protest march in my life – the peace march opposing the Iraq war. I just write stuff. Talk to people, if they’re interested in talking. Listen, if they have a good story to tell. You never know the truth until you have heard all the stories, and as you never hear all the stories, you never know the whole truth.

I am what one of my delightful Facebook friends calls the chattering liberal middle class. I don’t just write about a fantasy world, half the time I live there. It’s nicer than the fantasy world the mass media try and tell us is reality – all that doom and gloom and death. As if doom and gloom and death were not an intrinsic and indivisible part of life. Just as much as love, hope and laughter are. 

Our living, breathing presence on planet Earth is the only reality. The gift of life that is given to us at birth and taken from us at death, and the interdependencies of the complex adaptive system we are born into. Economy, society, politics, religion, nationality – these are all stories told by human beings about how human beings live on planet Earth. They only have credibility because a significant mass of human beings believe the same story. We can change those stories. We can believe in something better. We can’t change the interdependencies of the complex adaptive system, nor the impact our stories have on it. But belief – faith – can move mountains.

To change our whole global economic system is a huge ask, and I think it will take more than one generation. I also think if you take the long view, we’re making huge progress in the right direction, it just doesn’t look like it from the front line. Partly that is because the media constantly batter us with news of our defeats. Stories about the triumph of gloom, doom and death. But a lot of the reason is that we do think of it as a battle. We think in terms of winning it or losing it. We have been conditioned by the story of “good and evil” to think that all life is a battle between the two. You can see it that way. Or you can see it more like the Tai Chi philosophy, as a constant flow of energy from negative to positive, the tension between the two being what creates energy. AKA life. Evolution. Everything. The complex adaptive system reacts to the pull and push of that energy flow – so there is no ultimate victory. Every life, every day, every moment, contributes to the positive, or to the negative. And often to both. Like COVID-19. It’s a human tragedy. But a chance for Earth to take a breath after the hammering humanity has been giving it. Maybe teach us to use our adaptation for survival – our large brains – a bit more than we have been doing.

If you want a battle, then seek out humanity’s main competitor for the accolade of most successful life form on earth. Viruses. Once we start realising that all humanity is on one side and the “aliens” (the viruses) are on the other, we might start thinking differently about where we invest our energy, resources and capital, including financial capital. We combat viruses with healthy human societies where no one is left without the basic essentials of life – food, water, shelter, warmth. Dignity and self-respect. We combat it with investment in healthcare, and scientific research. We combat it by looking after and looking out for each other, around the world. We combat it with a joint sense of purpose that celebrates life over money. Those are the foundation stones for sustainable human life on Earth.

Most people won’t want to understand any of that. They just want to do things the way they’ve always done them and bullishly defend their “right” to do so. But once a new normal is established, those people forget that they ever did it a different way. They’ll defend their new “tradition” just as bullishly as they defended the old one. So it is down to those of us who are privileged to have the time, security and inclination to try and understand more – those chattering liberal middle class people – to guide, shape, steer and above all, to dream. That’s where the magic of creativity comes from.

And in the meantime, we can start building a Wellbeing Economy one community at a time.

Re-think, Recover, Re-group, Re-shape

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There has been much talk in mainstream media about “centre ground politics”. It’s supposedly where most people are, politically – we talk about politicians being “right” or “left” of centre.

I’ve never been a fan of the term, and I’m even less so after the sickening farce, rapidly turning into a tragedy, of the last UK General Election. Where is the “centre ground” between evidence-backed theory and a blatant lie? Where is the “centre ground” between the politics of denial and the politics of protest? Stalemate. No-one wins.

I would prefer to talk about balanced politics. It will not surprise you to learn that I also advocate that the balance should be struck between five autonomous voices, speaking from the perspective of financial capital, social capital, natural capital, knowledge capital and created capital. We already have voices – loud, strident, dominant voices – representing the interests of financial capital. Financial capital feeds on competition, it excels at it. It is ruthless in pursuit of growth. It is cold in its assessment of human worth and social capital, seeing humans as simply economic units who contribute to economic growth either as Workers or Consumers. It is exploitational in its attitude towards natural capital, devouring whatever it can and discarding what it can’t use without a second thought. It is highly selective in its attitude towards knowledge, and funds only the created infrastructure which directly feeds its insatiable appetite. Financial capital is a cancer that grows too vigorously and replicates too fast. The predator without competition that has eaten its way through all its natural prey and, faced with starvation, is trying to devour the people who created it.

As it has risen to dominate the human story, financial capital has come to govern our politics to the exclusion of all else. There is no balance. It has created the winner-take-all, ruthlessly competitive politics that are laid bare in that champion of financial capital, the USA.

We do have political movements that try to represent social capital. Since people invented and continue to grow and replicate money, social capital – the will to go on growing and replicating money – is the key enabler of financial capital; and also its biggest rival. The political movement that tries to draw attention to the damage the exclusive pursuit of financial capital does to the very people who created it is attacked, pilloried, belittled and sidelined by all the formidable armoury amassed behind financial capital. Social justice is depicted as “unrealistic”, “irresponsible”, “the enemy of freedom” – all the things, in fact, that the story of financial capital itself is! The victims themselves are increasingly presented not as fellow human beings demanding solidarity and support but as pathetic failures in the global economic game; losers, scoundrels, scroungers and layabouts, unfit for survival. The story always asks us to identify with the winners.

Until COVID-19 came along, and made us stop and think. Those who devote their time, energy and skills not to the pursuit of wealth but to the care of others are now not ‘losers’. They are heroes. We start to see the people in the gig economy on the losing side of the economic game as human beings, doing their bit to keep us safe and get us through. We start to appreciate the artists, storytellers and musicians who give us solace and wisdom, and bring us together at a time when we have to be physically distanced, even as the pandemic destroys the system by which many of them eke out a living in an economic system that values popularity (and its consequent potential for making money) over talent, insight or originality. We realise, with a start, how vulnerable our ridiculously extended food supply chains are and how starkly that could impact on our own individual survival.

COVID-19 makes us choose. Which do we value more? Life? Or economic growth?

It’s a choice that should inform EVERY political decision. Including who you vote for. But the two-horse race does not deliver balanced politics. It represents only the two sides of the dysfunctional economic model we’re all working to – capital and labour.

Now the unstoppable march of Financial Capital has turned into a cancerous growth threatening to re-shape the entire planet into a form that may not even support the continuation of human life, there is a growing movement seeking to represent the natural capital we are born with and relinquish when we die. Life itself. Much of this movement is the politics of protest – that’s where people start. Those who have been in the environmental movement a long time have had the time to dig deeper into the root causes of the symptoms the politics of protest are reacting to, and they have realised that it’s the whole, interconnected global system that has to change. Just as the system of international treaties brokered by European monarchs and their cohorts had to change when they culminated in the First World War, our system of cold-hearted, narrowly focussed, international trade has to change.

The system we can change. Human nature we can’t change. We will continue to be a mass of contradictory, emotional, crazy, creative, indolent individuals, full of our own importance and equally full of our own insecurities, sometimes incredibly smart and sometimes incredibly stupid.

Without the power of social capital behind it, attempts to reverse the destruction to our planet will not succeed. And while people are still in thrall to the money myth, we do not have sufficient social capital behind the push to change direction. We do not have balanced politics. Because, normally, people are never actually asked to choose between economic growth and life. Normally, this is presented as the same thing. That’s the lie. It’s not. And COVID-19 has begun to show us why it’s not.

Part of the reason the vast mass of humanity doesn’t understand the choice is because the other capital flows – knowledge and created capital – have been subverted to the service of the economic growth that feeds financial capital.

“Financial Capital is highly selective in its attitude towards knowledge, and funds only the created infrastructure which directly feeds its insatiable appetite

This is the damage the money myth has done to the story human beings tell ourselves about who we are and what life is all about. These capitals must be released from their financial straitjacket and given their rightful place as equal partners in shaping our future. 

The Grant Rule Trust logo depicts five spotlights shining down to form a single circle of white light. None of the capital flows are servants of each other. They are all vital members of a dynamic team, each with their own unique experience of life and living essential to the creation of a clear, bright light of love and hope. We need a political system that recognises and values what each contributes to the health and wellbeing of life on Earth, which humans are part of. Not masters of.

The Final Edit

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News on the next two-volume story in the Shaihen Heritage series, ‘Leaving on the Tide’ and ‘The Hills of Gold’ is that I’ve done two or three passes through both books now, and I think I’m nearly ready to commit them to print. I would welcome some other critical eyes on the manuscript before that stage, so if you would like to read an advance copy, email me sa.rule@btinternet.com and I’ll send you a pdf manuscript. The quid pro quo is that if I do, I need your comments in the next few weeks – let’s say, by the end of April.

Writing these two novels has been an emotionally-charged journey. It’s taken a hell of a long time, and there has been a hell of a lot of Life in between, personally, politically, spiritually. The world we now live in is all but unrecognisable to the world of the mid-1980s when I first amused myself with the adventures of Therro the Pirate under the title ‘Leaving on the Tide’. Incidentally, I am sure that there will be those who think Therro is modelled on Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean. He isn’t. I invented my pirate years before Disney dreamed up their franchise – they stole my idea, I didn’t steal theirs!

I’ve said before that for me, writing is an intellectual exercise, an exploration of ideas. Shehaios itself started off as a joke – a feudal anarchy. It has morphed into an attempt to reflect the reality of a chaotic adaptive system – which when you think about it could kind of be described as a feudal anarchy – through a rose-tinted lens.

Therro started out as a joke, too – or at least a rather 2-dimensional character from an adventure novel. Leaving on the Tide circa 1980 rambled across hundreds of thousands of words, a series of adventures written for my own amusement, and not really shaped into any kind of narrative. But at some point in the saga, the idea of Shehaios, the Fair Land, emerged. And it was clear that Therro’s life was at odds with it. So as a storyteller, there’s my conflict. There’s my drama. That’s the story I started to tell. And it took me to places I didn’t expect. Out of it came the concept for the Cloak of Magic trilogy, taking the history of Shehaios back in time to where the natural magic ran up against a powerful human civilisation.

I always had the idea that I would return to Therro’s story for the next books in the series. Some of the adventures were worth telling – at least I thought so, and I hope you’ll agree that the thrills and spills, the humour and the energy of these pirate tales is entertaining and you’ll warm to Therro’s indomitable spirit and stubborn independence. But when I reached the point where the story got serious last time round, I hit a problem. I couldn’t re-tell Cloak of Magic. I had to go somewhere else.

‘Somewhere else’ is recorded in the books in the counter-point to Therro’s story, Myo’s quest for the Fair Land. Myo’s quest is my quest. How do you reconcile the fantasy dream of the Fair Land with the reality of how humans behave? This extract from Leaving on the Tide sums up Myo’s dilemma, and mine:

“The first time Myo received a request to address a group of students about his work he was both astonished and slightly terrified. He knew he had such an obligation under the terms of his project funding, but he had never imagined he would actually be called upon to deliver it. He spent several weeks in a sweat of apprehension, seeking advice from anyone willing to give it, and most especially his father, whose lessons he still looked back on with pleasure. When the day of reckoning came around, he took [his father’s] approach, sharing the insights he had found on his journey and inviting comments and opinions from the students rather than standing in front of them pontificating. The enthusiasm and feedback he got in response slightly overwhelmed him. They asked questions that hadn’t occurred to him, set him off on new trains of thought and rekindled his faith in the Fair Land all over again.

… It was only when he returned to his solitary apartment and shut the door on reality that he began to feel like a fraud again. Because, as the newspapers reminded him on a daily basis, the glorious idea that inspired all that creative energy was only that. An idea. As rare and fragile and beautiful as a snowflake. Exposure to the briefest dose of reality was enough for it to melt away into nothing.”

And that’s kind of how we all feel at the moment. The future has never looked more uncertain. Everything we thought we could rely on is disintegrating beneath our feet – the economy is lurching from crisis to crisis, democracy as a force for social justice is proving to be a joke, the glorious dream of a free internet is turning into a tool for hate, deceit and predatory behaviour. The Lie is rampaging around the world while Truth is still desperately looking for her knickers. And we’re destroying our own environmental niche, along with that of a large percentage of life on planet Earth. Nice one, humanity. Tell me again why you call yourself “Wise Man”?

How the hell do I write a positive tale about the quest for the Fair Land against that background? It wasn’t easy. I’m not entirely sure I’ve achieved it. But the young magician who features in Hills of Gold is a practical joker. He’s the kind of guy who, given a large red shiny button marked “do not press this button!” will press it just to see what happens. And he likes making people laugh. But he’s also intelligent, compassionate, gregarious and ultimately humble. He loves indiscriminately and appreciates people for who they are, without judgement. He knows his own limitations. He recognises how much he doesn’t know. Both he and the magical powers he wields are grounded in the Fair Land.

The term “sense of humour” originates with pre-scientific medical thinking which held a theory that health was governed by the various ‘humours’ of the body, which had to be maintained in balance. You got sick as a result of them being out of balance, and someone who had a ‘sense of humour’ was therefore someone with a healthy, balanced outlook on life. Which is why the leaders of Shaihen communities are called Holders. They hold the balance that keeps us on the tightrope of life in the chaotic adaptive system. Somehow, we have to persuade our leaders that’s what they need to be doing, too. Or we’re all going to fall off into oblivion.

As I said, Shehaios started out as a joke. Hope lies with the joker. And maybe with the pirate, too. 

Empowerment and Freedom

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All my adult life, I’ve loved British folk music. As a teenager, I loved the robust choruses of the MacAlmans and the Corries. I rapidly fell for the fantasy of Steeleye Span, re-imagining the old ballads to a driving rock sound. I found my voice singing shanties, shape note hymns and lusty choruses full of ale and ploughs and hunting. It was all jolly fun.

It went with the “escape to the country” Grant and I engineered when we first set up home together in the late 1970s – not far into the country, it has to be said, since we were only thirty miles from London, but then we both had to be able to commute to London in order to pay the mortgage. All £12,000 of it.

Politics back then was a see-saw between Labour and Conservative, and I never imagined it would be much different. When Margaret Thatcher came into office, I was quite pleased by the prospect of a woman Prime Minister. The idea of leaving more money in our pockets so we could choose how to spend it sounded reasonable to a naïve eighteen year old. Aspiring to buy your own house was what everyone did. Working hard and earning an honest living seemed fine.

We sang the old songs about doffing the cap to the masters and fighting their wars, about hard times in the weaving trade, rural life and rural poverty, in cheerful ignorance of what they really meant. That was all history. I’d ‘done’ the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution which preceeded it at “O” Level, the Enclosures, the Chartists, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Luddites. The Corn Laws. Peterloo. The Irish Problem seemed more relevant (though I never did understand it all) as we phlegmatically dodged around the IRA bomb scares. But in 1970s Britain, we had democracy, universal sufferage, we were a world away from the Poor Laws and the workhouse. A world where a shipyard worker could be sealed inside the double hull of a ship rather than delay its launch date. Where the widow of a shepherd killed in the First World War could be evicted from her tied cottage with her children. Where people who were homeless and destitute were left to fend for themselves or die on the streets. We had the NHS. We had council houses. We had social security.

Interesting that the term “social security” has become “benefit”. Think about the words. Social security implies that every citizen is valued just for being a human being, and the state provides a safety net for when they fall off the capitalist bandwagon. Benefit implies charity. The rich choosing to give a pittance to the deserving poor, as long as they know their place. Doff the cap. Fight the wars.

How far have we fallen. How much we have lost since the days of my youth. And how on earth did we let it happen?

Well, for evil to triumph it is necessary only for good men and women to nothing. And nothing is just what my generation did, in terms of furthering the cause of freedom and justice. We sat on our backsides and listened to loud music. We talked about what to do while propping up the bar and ended up too drunk on our theories to ever see them through. We went to festivals, shared the love, went back to work and crucified love all over again.

With freedom comes responsibility. You don’t protest by smashing a guitar. You protest by smashing the established power – the age-old power the rich hold over the poor. You do that by empowering ordinary people, the aspiring middle-class.

In the Thatcher era, “empowerment” meant making everyone think they belonged on the “rich” side of the power divide, through property ownership, credit, and ever-rising wages. It worked for many of us. It’s only now that the credit bill has arrived on the mat alongside a big delivery of disruptive technology that the cruel emptiness of that cynical promise is apparent. Far from empowering ordinary people, that way of thinking now enslaves them. Those who have a job are generally up to their ears in debt and work all hours for fear of losing the means to service that debt, those who don’t have a job struggle to survive at all. There is no empowerment in that way of life, as the UK government is demonstrating all too graphically. It no longer even pretends to serve ordinary people. It serves the financial backers who buy power for their chosen front-man.

So what does that term really mean, empowerment? We frequently sling it about, usually to make sure someone lower down the pecking order can be blamed for systemic failures.

Empowerment in political terms means the ability to work together to achieve a common goal. Given all the insecurity, stubbornness and blind egotism inherent in human nature, this is not easy to achieve. It needs to be cultivated. It needs to be learned. Above all, it needs to be practised.

Empowerment means an equitable distribution of wealth. A human being continually worrying about putting food on the table and staying warm and dry is inclined to feel insecure, stubborn and self-obsessed. He/she is inclined to mental health problems and aggression; and inclined to reject the rules of a society that is excluding them from its riches.

Empowerment means knowledge. Understanding how much you don’t know, and wanting to know as much as you can. Knowing yourself. Understanding the emotional triggers that drive the decisions you make. Knowing when to speak and when to listen. Respecting the experience of others. The ability to conduct root-cause-analysis rather than just look for a scapegoat, and the ability to foresee the consequences of certain courses of action. When we don’t even teach respect for knowledge any more we are not only disempowered, we are ceasing to behave like intelligent humans.

With true empowerment comes freedom. The freedom to be the best human being you can be. To do what makes you whole. The freedom to respect the freedom of others, as you wish them to respect your freedom.

We have done none of that. We did not consolidate the freedoms our forebears fought for, and so, little by little, we have let them go.

We need human beings to be the best people we can be to survive the multiple environmental crisis our indolence has created. We need to start making up for lost time. Because our current ‘leaders’ are making us all into the worst of humans.

Keep the faith

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So here’s my prediction.

In time – not quite sure how long, maybe twenty years, maybe fifty – human civilisation will transition to more localised, less monetary, economies, with a minimal, high-level international connection. How much international connection we retain, at what level of society, will depend on how much pain and damage we inflict on ourselves in making the transition.

By transitioning methodically in an enlightened and co-operative manner, we could create flourishing local economies of much happier, more connected, prosperous people who are still able to trade  goods, services and – most important of all – knowledge around the world. Knowledge, compassion and generosity – in other words, the best that humans are capable of – take us to this scenario.

Unfortunately, the political culture of the dominant global powers is driving us to create instead  isolated, impoverished local economies, fearful and suspicious of each other, all clinging to life on a much, much more hostile planet. And most of the people who hold the privilege, fought for by our ancestors, of electing their leaders haven’t even got a clue that we’re on a journey, let alone where we’re going. By the time their cosy bubble of complacent self-justification bursts, it will be way too late. The clueless eco-cidal criminals who currently pass for political leaders in the dominant global powers of the world will have torn everything of beauty and value apart and left only a degraded form of human, displaying all the worst characteristics of humanity, to eke out a miserable existence on a dying planet.

So it is up to those of us who strive in our lives to embrace the best human beings are capable of to build the future in spite of the politicians. To build local communities of happier, more connected and  contented people who truly understand what is valuable in life, take care of themselves and each other and do not measure everything in terms of money. We may not succeed. But if everything beautiful about humankind is doomed to extinction anyway, we can at least celebrate that we were part of what was good, and creative and amazing about humanity.  

Hence my greeting to all those of goodwill as we progress through the first month of 2020 is not “Happy New Year” but  “Keep the faith”.

Songs and Poems

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I have been looking back through some of my past scribblings this Christmas. I wrote the following poem some time in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when my children were young. It’s never been published or performed, no-one’s ever read it except me. Maybe it only makes sense to me. But I find the sentiment has surfaced strongly in the latest book, so perhaps the time has come to share the insights of a thirty-something stay-at-home Mum living in South-East England in the time of Thatcher’s Britain, wondering why no-one in power was getting as worried as I was about our relationship with the rest of the natural world.

The Promised Land

They came with spear and sword and bow
Upon the promised land
The glory caught their hearts and souls
They cried, here do we stand!
Here shall we stay and feel no more
The desert ocean’s scourge
Here root and branch we stake our claim
Turn from the restless urge
Here shall we plant our seed and grow
Great riches to defend
           But the wiser heads kept travelling
           For they knew how it would end

Other searchers found them
And other hearts were lost
To greenness and to fairness
So they did not heed the cost
The prize was worth the winning
To fight for or defend
            But the wiser heads kept travelling
            For they knew how it would end

With horse and bloody sword a host
Of conquerors came down
To burn and raze and kill and steal
And win a great reknown
Till the lure of milk and honey
Drew them to the soil
They beat their swords to ploughshares
And turned to honest toil
And sought all ways they knew
The ever-weeping wound to mend
            But the wiser heads kept travelling
            For they knew how it would end.

Armies marched with fire and bow
And raged from shore to shore
Invoking gods and devils
And claiming more, and more
Seduced by dreams of glory
And the ever-promised land
            But the wiser heads kept travelling
            For they knew how it would end

Machinery of war grew grim
And peace it built it’s own
The massive bulk of factories
The huddle of the town
And fires burned in chimney stacks
And fires burned in hell
And fires burned in seas of mud
Where nameless heroes fell
And dreams of new Jerusalem
Took up the age old steel
That cuts the soil and cuts the flesh
And will not let man feel
The wind across the desert
The gale upon the sea
The spirit of the traveller
Or the raven flying free

And all the laws we’ve built to keep us from each others’ throats
Aren’t worth the trees crushed in the mills for wasted paper votes
If we cannot learn the lesson that the ancient travellers teach
The horizon is a promised land that lives beyond our reach

When spring upon the promised land has turned a bitter cold
And the mightiest of structures is built with bricks of old
And finished riches when the wealth has moved away
The prize is still ahead of us, the game is yet to play

And more and more the pieces, and the tools are changing fast
The rules get further left behind, the only things that last
Are the wisdom of the traveller, the raven flying free
The wind across the desert and the gale upon the sea

And all those through the ages who strove to get it right
So we reach out for the promised land, not destroy it in the fight
And the wiser heads keep travelling
Into the deepening night.

 

 

 

Defeat – Regroup

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So the view from Rosehaugh today is beautiful. The sun is shining, and the loch reflects a patchwork of white clouds and blue sky. There was a flock of gulls wheeling about high over the water, screeching and bickering, as I walked up the road to my Tai Chi class this morning.

Every time I walk up the road to the village hall, it reminds me how beautiful this place is. There is still a cap of snow on the mountains above the Rest and Be Thankful, visible in the distance. In the foreground, the Saltire on the end of the pier flutters bravely in a brisk breeze.

I used to feel the same about the fields of Gabriel’s Farm in Edenbridge that I could see from the window of my old house in Kent – more intensely so because that was my own country, my own land. My own history lay beneath my feet as I tramped across the fields to Marsh Green with the dog, or the kids, or both. I rode across those fields. We picked blackberries in autumn and sledged down the hill in winter. Scotland is beautiful, but it isn’t mine in the same way. I miss not belonging to England.

Last night was the first time I slept since the grim results of the election were announced. I expected the Tories to win, but not to win by 80 seats. It’s a very difficult thing to come to terms with. In five years time, much more of what we treasure about Britain will have been consigned to history.

I really haven’t been able to stop crying. I tried to rally and look for the positive, but honestly, there isn’t any. There’s no getting away from the fact that we lost the battle. We’ve been defeated. The enemy is in the ascendant. We must all be kind to ourselves, and each other, and accept that it’s going to take time to get over this defeat. I realised this morning that what I was suffering from was grief. It feels very much like how I felt when Grant died. Then, I lost one dream of who I was and what life was all about. Now, I’ve lost another.

The history of Scotland is littered with noble defeats. Listen to the songs. Listen to the heartbreak of Flodden in the Flowers of the Forest. The passionate hope pinned to Bonnie Prince Charlie –

“If I had fifty thousand sons I’d give them all for Charlie” – trad. Over The Water To Charlie

But in spite of the heartbreak and betrayal that litters Scottish history, Scotland is still proudly, defiantly, Scotland and the West of Scotland where I live is the home of the Gael. If you want a miserable song, look for a Gaelic one, but I find inspiration in a more modern Scottish folksong from a great band called Skipinnish:

“Don’t tell me I’m dead when my heart is beating strong
Though I’m down upon my knees I will rise in song…”

The song is called Anchors of the Soul, and the second verse says,

“In our day we stand now to lose or to live
We have one last chance before the lifelines give
Use the history and the pull of our people and our plight
To wake up now and see the morning light.”

We need time to grieve. Time to rage against the machinery of power that inflicted this defeat on us. I will probably cry more tears for the people who were so desperately deceived when the truth was staring them right in the face – you can’t say Boris pretended to be anything other than the lying, bullying, elitist bastard that he is. And people still believed it was decent, honest, caring Jeremy Corbyn who was the threat. That decency and honesty and compassion are weak and a dishonest, callous disregard for humanity is a sign of strength. All the time people believe that, we will be spiralling down to oblivion – and I think we’ll probably deserve it. That’s not the kind of human being I want to be.

I don’t think it’s the kind of human being most people want to be, but everybody is just trying to survive, and sometimes the work of survival simply doesn’t leave time to think – not about politics, anyway. This is why the machine makes it so hard to survive. In the words of one of my characters, “People don’t want deep they’re too busy trying to stay afloat.” There are all sorts of ways of stealing voices – death is only the most final. But even after the death of an individual, the songs remain. The expressions of how we felt, and what we dreamed about. And in those songs you can reach back and connect with people long dead; reach across boundaries and barriers and connect with people in other places, other desperate situations. Even if we can’t rescue them, we can say, I feel your pain. I share your anger. I grieve for you.

And we still have a voice. We have the power to keep fighting. We just need to fight smarter.

This morning, our Tai Chi tutor gave us a demonstration using a sword. (It’s not every day you get handed a sword and asked to sweep it down towards your tutor…)  Tai Chi is like a ballet to watch, a sequence of graceful movements as the energy flows back and forth, but it is a martial art. That energy is being gathered in, sucked from your opponent and then unleashed in targetted blows. That’s how we have to fight. We need to understand the power we have, gather it in and focus it where it will have the most impact.

We are living through the collapse of the old system, and it is throwing up grotesque distortions of all its best features as it dies – twisting democracy into the travesty that is Trump and Johnson, twisting enterprise into the malevolent greed of a Nestle or a Monsanto, twisting commercial competitiveness into the control freakery of Google and Amazon and Uber and all the others. Appropriating the freedom of the internet to spread the old messages of hate and bile and contempt. Brow-beating us with information technology until we start behaving like programmable algorithms ourselves. Feed a big lie in one end and get the power of popular support out of the other.

“There is nothing either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.” Shakespeare, Hamlet

The rich and powerful won’t save us, they’re only interested in themselves – they think they can live without us, besieged inside their castles, numbing their souls with drink, drugs and excess and telling people this is what success looks like. The things won’t save us – the money, the politics, business, science, theories. They’re just things, tools.  Only the people can save the people.

“Hold, hold and live for the goal
We still can save our soul
Hold, hold and live for the goal
And the anchors of our soul”
                Skipinnish, Anchors of the Soul

Hate and anger cannot create anything but hate and anger, and they will tear us apart. Love and understanding can hone the rage into a sword, and learn to wield it effectively. Look back at why we lost this battle not in recrimination and blame, but to learn how we can avoid making the same mistakes next time. For there will be a next time. We are fighting to make sure there’s a future for our species, and there will be a next time right up until Earth’s patience runs out and she destroys us all.

The next battle for me will be for Scottish independence. The chance to forge the future without the dead weight of Westminster on our backs. We might lose that one, too, but my point is that my English friends should not see the Scottish fight as a betrayal, as Scotland bailing out, but as Scotland leading the way for a better way of organising ourselves.

People are people and politicians are people too. Even the best of them will probably get more wrong than they get right, but if Jeremy Corbyn has taught us anything it’s that winning or losing means nothing if you don’t stand up for the values you believe in. The SNP believes in Scotland. The Tories believe in the British Empire and the God-given right of the rich and powerful to rule over us. I know which history I prefer. So I’m going to give the last word to Skipinnish:

“We will look to the future with the power of our past
And the wounds long held will be healed at last
And the rise of the Gael in our time will come
From the old through the passion of the young.”