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.”

When Love Came Back to Judge Us

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There are two things you traditionally do not talk about in polite company. Religion and politics. 

I’m finding that a bit of a struggle at the moment, because as I said in an earlier blog post, these are two big themes in the next sequence of books in the Shaihen Heritage series Children of the Spirit (still not sure if it’s another trilogy or just two books – I’ll let you know when I get to an end!). So I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking recently not only about politics, which seem to me to be a pretty useless tool for achieving anything meaningful, and about religion. For me, as I’m of British descent, that means Christianity.

When I was in my late teens, I did actually read and indeed study quite a lot of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, and this is where  inspiration for the following poem comes from. I call it Revelation, or When Love Came Back to Judge Us.  

When Love came back to judge us

She asked how we had done

“Did you care for all my creatures?

Did you cherish every one?”

 

“And have you left the children

All the bounties of my Earth?

The sea, the sky, the mountains

All the gifts they had at birth?”

 

We showed her our technology

We offered her our gold

Our buildings and computers

But these things left Love cold

 

We showed her all our artworks

She thought them very fine

“You’ve created things of beauty

But none as good as mine.”

 

“Where are all the tigers?

The Orang and the whale?

Why can’t I hear the birdsong?

Is this the ending of my tale?

 

I gave you love. I gave you life.

You’re the children of my womb

Yet all you give me back is death.

You seal me in a tomb.

 

And this shall be Love’s judgement

The earth stripped of its worth

By the hungry, curious creatures

The earth herself brought forth.

System Change

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The second draft of Leaving On The Tide (Book 4 of the Shaihen Heritage series) is complete. It’s out with a small team of beta readers for a verdict – if they think it’s worth it, I’ll start on the process of getting it published and try to figure out how the hell to promote it. There will be further tweaks, but essentially the second draft is the finished item.

I’ve completed Myo’s quest for the Fair Land just as the Brexit circus lurches to its final ignominious conclusion and Britain takes a sickening lurch to the right. I hate to break this to my friends, but…we’ve lost, guys. We lost in June 2016. Just like decent Americans lost when Trump got elected. The left and centre are hanging on in Europe by their fingernails.

While the liberals and the lefties are howling with rage over the prorogation of Parliament, it’s a move that has increased the Boris-in-a-Chinashop’s lead in the polls. Make no mistake, he wouldn’t be doing any of this if he didn’t think it was popular. As my friend and fellow-author Bev Allan said to me a while back, you can never under estimate the socialist tendencies of the British public. From white van man to the smart lady in the tea shop, the disengaged British electorate are by and large conservative.

Having said that, the vast majority of the current electorate have grown up and prospered under the system that produced Boris Johnson. I once thought that system was broken, but it isn’t. It was designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and it is continuing to do that with vigorous success. The middling sort (neither rich nor poor) have been bought off for decades with special offers – from ever increasing wages to buying your council house, and making a killing by selling it on. Conned by the myth of the “trickle down effect” we were encouraged to live on credit, duped by lots of bright shiny things with buttons on that made life so much easier. I know. I lived through it. Grant and I built a business from it. It’s been very good for me, financially. You see why others who have benefitted from it don’t want it to stop.

What’s happening now is that the cost of this increasing inequality is getting more and more apparent, and the supply of special offers is drying up. The price of this system that has made quite a lot of Britons a lot better off than their forebears has been paid in lives. Human lives and life on Earth generally. The prospect for the so-called millenials, brought up with all the expectations of their parents plus a few bells and whistles, is grim. The bill landed on the mat some time ago and now we’re facing the final demand.

So why would millenials vote conservative? There is very little in the status quo for them. But don’t think the right wing haven’t thought of that. When bribery fails, try good old fashioned patriotism. Us and Them. Divide and conquer.

We are at a tipping point politically and whatever happens, things are going to change. How we change will determine the future of human life on this planet because we are at a tipping point environmentally as well, with just a decade or so to start reversing the damage we’ve done.

To explain how I see the choice we’re facing, I think the easiest thing is to quote from Leaving On The Tide;

“There were broadly two schools of political thought [in Kivor City]. The party arising from the Imperial past was called Liberty, and its ethos was one of heritable individual wealth, defined by laws of ownership. The opposing group, called Commonality, was inspired by the Shaihen myth, and believed that people inherited everything jointly, to be used for the common good. Sometimes one group held the upper hand, and sometimes the other, and between them, these two covalent beliefs had forged the Kivorian state.”

Needless to say, I am a Commonality supporter. And yes, it was difficult to come up with a term that wasn’t “communism”. All political ideas are expressed and interpreted by flawed and fallible human beings, corrupted, abused and cynically misappropriated. Reality never lives up to the myth.

The most resonant slogan of the Leave campaign was “take back control” – and it has become ever clearer as the Remain strategy unravelled both before and after the referendum that ordinary people have lost what little control they ever had over their lives. We’re all individual ants running around squabbling among ourselves while the real players do just what they want. By eviscerating the Labour movement, those in power have left us all in fear of losing the jobs and incomes we have, scrabbling for worthless zero-hour contracts for dead-end jobs or surrendering our lives, loves, hopes and dreams to the slavery of the corporate ladder – a goal that gets ever harder as technology steals more and more of the jobs people used to do. Despite our youthful dreams of self-sufficient living, Grant and I succombed to the norm along with almost everyone else under the pressure of social expectations and the responsibilities of raising a family. It gave us a lovely home and a comfortable living, and left me financially secure. But I firmly believe it was the stress of trying to keep the business afloat, coupled with chronic back pain, that contributed to Grant’s early death. And I colluded with him, both in throwing everything into the business and in accepting that nothing could be done about the back pain. I had neither the strength, courage nor insight to turn round and say, this is not the life we want, let’s change it. And why? Because, in our late 50s, without the business what would we do for money?

Well, a large part of the reason I have money now is because I don’t have Grant. When he was down, he even used to make a black joke of saying I would be better off without him. Financially, thanks to the life insurance, I am. But even writing that statement fills me with revulsion. Of course Grant was so much more valuable to me than money could ever be. The idea that you can measure peoples’ worth in monetary terms is repulsive, ludicrous, unthinkable. Yet we live in and support a system that is designed to do just that.

We might have lived in it, but we never voted for it. Now, it looks like even the control we thought we had through the checks and balances of Parliamentary democracy was just another circus, and our vaunted constitution not worth the paper it isn’t written on. My term for so called “direct democracy” is mob rule.

The people of Britain are disempowered and impoverished. We have been cheated and lied to by those in power (that’s what people in power do, read the book). If we are to rebuild the Britain that our forefathers died to defend, we need to start doing it from the bottom up. We have to generate a whole new system of living. And we start not with this generation of voters but the next.

There is a passionate movement for change among some young people. Supporters of Momentum are predominantly young. Extinction Rebellion and the whole environmental protest movement around climate change has engaged a whole bunch of youth activists. But for every young person campaigning for change, there are probably at least ten who are more interested in football, fashion, sex or whatever mind-numbing technological entertainment passes for circuses to today’s teenagers. There will be others already dedicating themselves to a lifetime of climbing the corporate ladder. Those are the ones the right will be targetting, and if they get their claws into them the future electorate will be just as right wing as their parents and grandparents. If that happens, then not to put too fine a point on it, we are fucked. We’re at a tipping point environmentally as well. The natural debt of the past century or more is overdue for payment, and the cost of ignoring it is likely to be, eventually, the end of life on Earth as we know it today.

We live in a chaotic adaptive system – Boris, like Trump, is nothing if not chaotically adaptive. Us intellectual lefties are still wedded to the idea of controlling things, trying to make everyone subscribe to our happy clappy faith, but social media immerses us in the raw anarchy of chaos. There’s no real story, no real narrative, just a steaming pile of emotional outbursts resonating around the echo chambers of our networks. It’s the pirates who continually sail a warship through Myo’s search for the Fair Land, all guns blazing. 

So my manifesto for change is threefold, and tries to address the influencers of the chaotic adaptive system of democratic power while we still have some semblance of it:

• Citizen empowerment

• Accountability

• Education

It may be a bit presumptous of me to put this forward – after all, what do I know? – but I’m getting fed up with waiting for the people who should be doing it to show any real sign that they are. As with the book, I’ll have to figure out if I try to publish through the recognised channels or self-publish, whether its worth it and if so how the hell I go about promoting it. If you want to read more, go to the post headed “Sue’s Manifesto for Change”

 

Sue’s Manifesto For Change

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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.