The Home of Shehaios

If we are to heal the wounds of Brexit and change society for the better we need to start by preparing the soil. Only then can we expect healthy shoots to flourish and prosper. 

Citizen Empowerment

For too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of a small elite, largely white, largely male, largely public school educated. This has to fundamentally change. Its no good placing your bet on the knight wearing a blue favour or the knight wearing the red favour – the problem is the existence of the knights. We are not damsels in distress. We are sovereign individuals with a right to determine our own future. We need a democratic system that reflects that. 

How do we do that?

• We should create a system of regional Citizens Assemblies to debate the core political issues of the nation – immigration, wealth distribution and taxation, the health service, education, public services, our environmental responsibilities, devolution, our relationship with Europe (more accurately, our role in global trade) Etc.

• People will be randomly selected from a cross-section of society to serve on these Citizens Assemblies. As with Jury Service, attendance if selected will be mandatory unless an individual has a compelling reason not to to attend, and employers will be obliged to release staff to serve.

Accountability

Having won the tournament, the knights and their entourage sit in government for five years screwing things up and telling us what’s good for us. They are at the beck and call of powerful lobby groups and vested interests. Faced with an impossible task, most of the time they lie to us, and when they’re not lying they’re demonstrating near-criminal incompetence. 

It’s our country, not theirs. We need to hold MPs to account not for what they say, but for what they actually do with the power we entrust to them. 

How do we do that?

• The Citizens Assemblies will determine what kind of a Britain the people of Britain want. It will be the job of MPs to deliver on that vision. An MP will be answerable to the CA (or CAs) in their constituency for the decisions made in Parliament. The Prime Minister, as now, will be answerable to Parliament.

• Individual voters will still vote in General Elections based on our individual opinion of a candidate’s, or political party’s, ability to deliver the Britain we want. There should also be a system for individuals to gather support to table topics for discussion at the Citizens Assembly.

Education

The standard of debate in Parliament, on social media and in the traditional media, in the pub or on the street corner has gone down the pan. We shout slogans at each other. We make snap decisions based on nothing much more than an emotional response and defend those decisions against any logical argument. We’ve been taught to sneer at experts. We ask figures in the public eye to explain complex issues in a soundbite and lose interest when they can’t. When it comes to the nuances of democracy, we argue passionately about it from positions of supreme ignorance. 

While this might be entertaining for some its hugely damaging to our country and our prospects. It has to stop. We’ve got to move on from playground politics, if not adversarial politics.

How do we do that?

• All children should be taught the rights and responsibilities of being a British citizen. This includes those attending state schools, Academies, public schools, private schools, special schools, faith schools, and those who are home educated. It should include Young Offenders and military cadets. Everyone, including immigrants wanting to take up British citizenship, should be taught the same syllabus, which would cover how Parliamentary democracy works, how the justice system works, how the taxation system works, how the health and benefits systems work and the contributions every citizen is expected to make to these systems. Serving in a Citizen’s Assembly. Voting. Filling in a tax form. Claiming benefit. First Aid. Parenting. Jury Service. Military service. The role of carers, doctors, teachers, police and emergency service workers. How a business works. How the public sector works. What the difference is.

• All children, specifically those in state education, should be taught debating skills. How to frame, examine and interrogate an argument. How marketing works and how to tell fake news from real news. The difference between scientific evidence and unfounded opinion. Mindfullness and the role of emotion in decision making. Root cause analysis and scenario building. Cause and effect. How to reach consensus.

• Older children should have the opportunity to contribute to the political debate of the day, either in school-based mock-ups of Citizens Assemblies, or from the age of 16, having the right to participate in actual Citizens Assemblies.

What is to stop such an agenda getting cross-party support? It doesn’t propose any political agenda, other than putting power in the hands of the people. Not the politicians. 

I read an amusing quote on Facebook the other day, apparently from Somerset Maugham. When it comes to writing a novel, he said, there are three rules. Unfortunately, no-one knows what they are. I’m sure people write for all sorts of reasons, but I have come to the conclusion that when I write I set out on an intellectual journey. I play with words and ideas, putting them into interesting patterns, turning them inside out to see them from a different angle. I am part explorer, part detective and part experimental scientist, pairing things that don’t go together to see what happens.

The whole idea of the Shaihen Heritage series started with just such a juxtaposition of ideas – Shehaios was a feudal anarchy. You then have to start asking the questions, what do I mean by that? What’s it like to live in this place that couldn’t possibly exist? So the journey begins.

Shehaios has become the Fair Land, the Home of the Free. Book 1 was about the magic that created this place that couldn’t possibly exist. Book 2 was about the power contained within it and how that power could corrupt. Book 3 was about the enduring spirit that keeps the vision of the Fair Land alive.

I’m pleased to report that the manuscript for Book 4 is now making good progress after its many years stuck in the doldrums and I have finished the first draft. That means I’ve told the story to myself. I’ve conducted my investigations, and completed my expedition into the unknown – I heard Terry Pratchett speak once, and he said starting a new book was like standing on the edge of a cliff above a mist-filled river valley he had to cross: he knew where he was starting from, and he could see where he wanted to go, but to reach it he had to descend into the fog and flounder about a bit until he found a way back up the other side. I’ve got to the other side, but I lost a few of the party in the fog on the way, so I’m back down there looking for them at the moment.

Book 4 is about freedom. Shehaios is the Fair Land, where wealth is shared equally; but it is also the Home of the Free. That’s another juxtaposition of political opposites I shoved together to see what happened.

They always say you should write what you know (though that does rather assume any of us know anything) and freedom has been a dominant theme of human civilisation throughout my lifetime. I was born in the mid 1950s, not long after the end of a war I was told we fought to defend freedom from an aggressive, exclusive, Imperialist nationalism personified by Hitler and the Nazi Party. I grew up in a 1960s dominated by American culture, heavy on the myth of the Land of the Free and the liberating effects of capitalism. I was a teenager in the 1970s during the age of flower power, free love and freeing the mind through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. I was a parent in the 1980s when we all started living on credit, free to fill our houses and our lives with heaps of valueless stuff. In the 90s and 00s I was running a business, in an age of start-ups, where technology was going to provide freedom from drudgery. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century, I begin to see that the story I’ve been telling myself about the march of freedom under the banner of the stars and stripes is just that. It’s a story. It’s not true. Capitalism has enslaved the world and now it’s destroying it.

I’ve enjoyed a life of freedom – I’ve lived through the rise of the women’s movement, enjoyed the ability to earn my own living, and live my own life free from religious proscription of my choices. I was born to loving parents, who weren’t especially rich but certainly weren’t poor. I benefitted from a good education, and a National Health Service without which I, like many others, probably wouldn’t be here today. I have prospered and done well, but others in the world have not had the opportunities I’ve had and I see very little hope that they ever will. As one of my characters says, “If some people live in the Fair Land and others don’t then by definition it isn’t fair.”

American songwriters of the 20th century – the ones I grew up with – generally have a somewhat jaded view of their own Land of the Free. Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics for Me and Bobby McGee include the immortal lines:

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose
Nothin’ ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free”

And The Eagles sang:

“Freedom – that’s just some people talkin’
Your prison is walkin’ through this world all alone”
(“Desperado” by Glenn Frey and Don Henley)

So my definition of freedom – the Shaihen definition – is to be ruled only by the things and the people you love. That’s the feudal anarchy. Not that you owe allegiance, but that you give it, freely. To the people you love. To the land you love. To the principles you hold to be true.

If you love money and power, that is the thing that will govern your life and shape the lives of those around you. If you love the vision of the Fair Land, the Home of the Free, then that is the vision that will govern your life and that too will influence those around you. Just imagine, if we all started doing it, we might find ourselves actually living in the Fair Land, the Home of the Free. But then again, my magician is a fictional character.

“And the greatest of these is charity*” *aka love

I consider the novels I write to be political fantasy. I’m not going to get into the whole debate about what’s Science Fiction and what’s Science Fantasy (life is to short) – by ‘fantasy’, I simply mean novels that take a big (and generally unlikely, or ‘fantastic’) “what if” as the starting point for the world in which the story takes place.

My big “what if” is “what if a land where equality, fraternity and liberty actually did reign supreme really existed?”. I call it Shehaios. The Fair Land. The Whole Land. The Home of the Free.

Why do I call this political fantasy? Because for me politics is about the pursuit of an ideal. A belief, for instance, that we can make things better for our descendants, as our ancestors made things better for us. My novels explore the way various characters do – or don’t – seek to do that. The stories they tell themselves. The constructs they create. The legacies they leave. That is a political story.

Out here in the real world, we who believe in creating a better world for our descendants are at a crisis point right now. The path we all thought was going to take us whistling our cheery way to that better future has led us to the brink of hell. We are at a point where the decisions we make over the next few decades could determine whether or not our civilisation survives and evolves, or crashes into oblivion. We could ultimately be determining whether the planet remains a place human beings can inhabit. The UN has warned us how limited a time we have left to get a grip on climate change, before the planet itself takes control of our destiny. According to figures published by that well-known generator of fake news, the World Wide Fund for Nature, we have already exterminated 60% of the world’s animal population. We are choking the seas with our waste, squabbling over land, and our insatiable appetite for energy is rapidly compromising our supplies of air and water.

This is all big, scary stuff. Taken together with the breakneck speed of technological development, most of us just feel we want to get off the merry-go-round before we throw up.

But life is a complex adaptive system – change is a constant state. Trying to stop change doesn’t stop change happening, it just means you have no understanding, let alone control, of it. This ride is scary, but we have no choice but to stay with it. If you’re hurtling round a racetrack, the worst thing you can do is to let go of the steering wheel. Humans have been outstandingly good at adapting. We’ve learned to survive, even live, in the most hostile environments – in hot places, in cold places, under the oceans, even off-planet in outer space. We’ve learned to fly. We’ve learned to communicate, and now we can do that almost instantaneously from one side of the planet to another. We raise our voices together and create amazing sounds. We appreciate and are able to create beauty. Above all, we’ve learned to store and share knowledge, and understand what our species’ dominance of the world we live in is doing to that world.

If we don’t value these amazing human attributes, and use them to inspire us to work out how to survive on this planet, the ingenious adaptability of life will simply take another route. Unfortunately for humanity, Gaia doesn’t really care about our future. Mankind will be just an interesting layer of geology buried in the Earth’s crust.

This is a depressing prospect. Its so depressing, and so huge, we don’t know what to do with it. The temptation is just to give up, stick your head in the sand and hope you die before the worst happens. But although humanity as a real, amorphous mass of fearful, fallible, flawed people often drives me up the wall, I am rather fond of quite a number of human beings, and some of them are very young. I don’t want to bequeath them this vision of the future.

I want to believe in a land where equality, fraternity and liberty really do reign supreme. A land that actually stretches the length and breadth of the Earth’s habitable surface – because if it didn’t, how could it truly embody any of those qualities? If you have to live in a particular place, have a particular heritage or a particular store of resources to enjoy equality, justice and peace, that is not freedom. By definition, equality cannot be confined to an elite, however the elite defines itself.

These lofty ideals have informed great political changes in the past. Such revolutions are always conducted by people, and the people inevitably don’t adhere to the ideal that inspired the movement in the first place. They are, like all of us, fearful, fallible, and flawed. But we should not use the fallibility of human nature as a reason not to pursue the ideal.

Likewise, given human nature is what it is, the likelihood is that actually creating a global Fair Land is impossible. But that’s the nature of ideals. It should not be a reason not to try.

Politics in practice of course is the pursuit of power, and it’s corrupted by endemic self-interest – all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Narrow-minded self-interest has spread its tendrils of decay throughout the whole construct of power, from Presidents and Prime Ministers to the lowliest voter who sabotages themselves by believing they can make no difference so its easier not to try. Cynicism and defeatism are the enemy of idealism. Progress comes through faith, and hope. Which is why my novels also lead me to ponder the nature of religion.

It is my premise that human beings created god, rather than the other way round. I came to this conclusion by observing that my dog (whom I loved, and who responded with something that I interpreted as love) never saw the need to say her prayers, and was incapable of reading a holy text. If there was an omniscient, omnipotent Creator of all things, why did that Creator only endow humanity with the ability to communicate with Him? Having done so, why did He make that means of communication so appallingly bad that there were multiple different versions of how He wanted us to behave? Nah. That doesn’t sound like God to me. That sounds like people telling stories.

But stories are how we humans communicate. Ask any marketing professional. Stories are particularly how we communicate complex, abstract ideas. Having created a god, we and others can come to believe in that god, and by doing so we give that god agency. He/she/it can effect change.

Now, I grew up in a country very much shaped by the Christian religion – and Protestant Christianity at that. So my take on religion is very much shaped by that form of Christianity, as my take on history is very much shaped by the history of Britain and Europe – I am British, I am European. I write what I know. As an adolescent, I was very enamoured of the New Testament, of a prophet who preached about loving your neighbour, sharing your wealth, and pursuing truth. Who turned water into wine, fed the 5,000 and threw the moneylenders out of the temple – and in doing all this, claimed to be the Son of God. This is my kind of a god. I think this is the kind of god who inspired the Abolition of Slavery act, the campaign for universal suffrage, the rise of the Labour movement and the social changes that has brought about. So if you ask me now, ‘do I believe in God?’ my answer is that I believe in my god.

My god is the god of love. The Way, the Truth and the Light. I think believing in compassion, justice, fairness and a common humanity is powerful, and can bring about change.

Many of us alive today, particularly in Europe, enjoy a common public good we take for granted – public education systems, public health, pensions, employment rights, state support for the physically, mentally or socially disabled. With our short human memories, we think it could be no other way. Our complacency denies the suffering, heroism, and dogged determination of those who kept the faith in times when such priveleges would have seemed impossible for the vast majority of the population, and in denying that heritage we abdicate responsibility for stewarding the wealth we have inherited. For decades we have been working towards rolling out these privileges around the world – turning water into wine, feeding the 5,000. But we neglected to throw the money-lenders out of the temple.

In a world where basic resources and habitable land surfaces become increasingly scarce, we need to learn how to defend that public good and continue to establish it globally – because make no mistake, far from dismissing climate change, the rich and the powerful have already seen the writing on the wall, and they’re doing their damndest to make sure they grab as much of the pie as they can while we’re not looking. If we wait for the prince to give us a kiss before we wake up, we’ll be back to depending on his whims for the right to live on this planet.

We who live in established democracies have power and influence our ancestors, working the land of their feudal masters, could never have dreamed of. Their well-being – their very survival – depended entirely on the mindset of their overlord; whether he understood and appreciated his responsibilities for the people who depended on him, or not. Some did. Some were good rulers. Others weren’t. They lead their people to death and destruction. Their wars never had anything much to do with the safety, security or well-being of the people who fought them, they were conducted entirely to serve the ambitions of the warlords. Wars have no place in the creation of the Fair Land.

In a democracy, we choose our own leaders. We must start choosing ones who want to create the kind of world we believe in, the kind of world we want our children and grandchildren to live in. The others, the ones who choose the road to destruction, are incredibly good con-artists, but you can spot them in a moment, because everything they use to fire people up is a negative. They don’t inspire you. They don’t empower you. They get you feeling angry and discontented, ready to find someone to blame rather than engage with trying to make things better. They frighten you with phantoms to keep you from facing up to the big scary reality that actually, you are responsible for shaping the future of your people. And we’re human. We can’t not fall for it. I get angry. I want to blame people for not seeing what’s being done to them. I despair and I want to give up. But I know that I can’t, because that’s letting them win.

We have to keep the faith, and truly believe in creating a better world for our descendants. We are in charge of our own destiny – never more so. But none of us can do it alone. We have to join with others who share that ideal, and do it together. I’ve just taken part in my first fiddle rally, playing with Cowal Fiddle Workshop, and for much of the concert, I was miming – the bow was moving, but there was no contact with the strings, because I’d stumbled over a tricky bit and lost track of where I was in the music. A significant number of the orchestra was doing the same – but we weren’t missing out the same bits, so overall it sounded great. That’s how we do it. If you lose hope, you just let others take over, while you do whatever it takes to keep yourself sane and hold on to hope. Take a break, play music, re-connect with nature, re-connect with people you love. With joy. With hope.

When you are feeling bullish, and strong, you can take up the flame and be the strength for the down-hearted. You can give joy to others when they’re feeling disheartened, and comfort to the bereaved, the wounded, the destitute. This is the power of love, and we must believe in it. In the greatness and kindness that human beings can be capable of. People rise to greatness on the shoulders of others – we’re not all going to be Martin Luther King. But we can be in the congregation.

Look, I have to tell you something. Shehaios exists through magic. In the real world, there is no Magician, and there are no magic answers. All we can do is start asking the right questions, facing up to the truth no matter how scary it is. Then maybe we can start having a grown-up discussion about where we might find some answers. We might find that my little bit of knowledge and experience, put together with yours, uncovers a way of doing things that had never occurred to either of us before. That’s how human beings create things. That’s the magic. Some people actually call it science.