I Was Wrong.
You shouldn’t vote Labour this election.
Human beings learn new facts as we age, so it is expected and correct that we adapt our views and ideas.
As I’ve mentioned in other articles, I used to think climate change was a storm in a teacup. I’m naturally a sceptical person, and was drawn in to the nitpicking over this bit of data or this graphical representation. The false-equivalence of climate scientists with climate change denialists throughout the early 2000’s only gave my scepticism more credence: the truth must be in the middle, I thought!
Thankfully, eventually I was reached through a mixture of observed reality and the consistent efforts of climate activists to educate the public. The biggest reveal, to me, was the book Merchants of Doubt by Oreskes and Conway. The authors clearly articulated exactly what I was seeing: a well-funded exercise in continuing a debate that, in reality, was nigh-on totally settled… all because billions of dollars were still to be made.
I realised what a damned fool I’d been. The billions of tonnes of pollution being ejected into the atmosphere, the water and the ground was of course changing the environment. In what feel like the last words in a ragged book found on a desolate and lifeless alien world: we can measure temperatures, on average, rising; extreme weather events are now normal; our own bodies are filling with microplastics that cause any number of terminal illnesses. I had let quibbling over minutiæ become more important than what was blindingly obvious.
A similar thing is happening now in Gaza. It’s beyond comprehension that a rational human being can not see or not oppose the crimes against humanity happening there. Look at the news reports, for God’s sake.
I’ve also been wrong in my efforts to resist racism and discrimination: “not being racist” isn’t enough, and I used to think it was. The idea that if we all “stop seeing colour” then we will end racial discrimination is foolish. It’s absolute hogwash: we must be actively anti-racist. We must recognise those tendencies in ourselves and our culture and work to dismantle them, otherwise we are doing the most fundamental wrong to another person we can do.
Unfortunately, I’ve also come to some other revised positions that are much less cheerful. By looking for evidence and trusting the reality of my senses, I can say that there is almost certainly no afterlife. By all means keep your fingers crossed, but it seems inescapable that human consciousness is a wonderful emergent property from our complicated neural pathways — more than the sum of our parts — and, at the end of our lives, that consciousness disappears because the neural pathways that gave rise to it have ceased to function. Over tens of thousands of years of human history, there is not a single byte of evidence demonstrating otherwise. Consciousness is a beautiful, fragile, transient thing — like a lightning bolt, conditions allow it to occur, it has a brief time in reality, and then its constituent parts fade back into entropy.
Similarly, I’ve given up hope on large-scale reform to many national issues. Crime, unemployment, poverty, homelessness and illness: we know the answers to all of these problems. Every single one. They are all dramatically reduced by tackling income inequality: it’s not right that one human being should have billions of dollars to use affecting government whilst millions have too-little food. Multi-millionaires have to go, universal basic income has to arrive and a government provided safety-net of housing, basic foodstuffs, utilities and healthcare must be provided. All of that has demonstrated time and time again to reduce crime, homelessness and poverty.
It’s a dramatic reshaping of our world, and it will never happen. It’s just politically impossible. The majority of citizens don’t want to hear that reducing crime means reducing inequality through means like benefits and UBI. They just want criminals punished. Start talking about taking away a billionaire’s money, for the general good, and the billionaires will use their media platforms to convince pensioners that we’re actually coming to empty their piggy-banks, hidden on their mantlepieces.
The problem is that we need these changes to happen, if we’re going to survive as a species. Climate change must be met head-on, or likely billions will die as a direct result. Pollution has to stop unless we all want microplastic-induced cancer. Wars that slaughter civilians must be halted. Nuclear weapons have to go. Multi-millionaires must be stopped from taking so much from so many and living like kings from ancient history.
I foresee a future where the majority are left with no other alternative but to march on Downing Street and forcibly install new leaders. Let’s hope, if that does happen, that they are possessed of greater wisdom than the insurrectionists on January 6th in Washington, DC. Re-writing a country’s constitution and government overnight is not an easy task, as Napoleon found out.
From the existential scale of human existence, let me bring us back down to the day-to-day mundanity that is British politics — because I have something else about which I was wrong and about which I must straighten the records:
I said that voting Labour and holding them to account through the Unions was the only possible way forward for the UK, when we eventually get our election.
I was very wrong. Labour under Sir Keir Starmer are a centre-right party and they are pursuing policies that will make our lives worse. Here are their proposals, which may or may not affect you as much as me:
- Encouraging big business and following the standard neo-Liberalism model.
- Re-Nationalising the Railways — great, if they do it. This is the second u-turn that they’ve done on the subject.
- Not raising taxes — even though the wealthy simply must be made to pay more. The reasons are manifold, but not least of all because it prevents them becoming “landed gentry” with power and influence to sway government.
- Dead silence on Brexit — it seems to me that the truly statesmanlike behaviour here would be to admit it was a badly conceived and badly executed plan that only ever excited swivel-eyed career lunatics like Jacob Tree-Frog and Nigel Farage. The people have been conned. The EU has many problems, but we were better off in it and reforming it.
- Desperately agreeing with every single anti-trans culture war policy that the Conservatives propose. Five years ago, these political positions — like trans women being made to go to male hospital wards — were fringe positions held by cranks, now they are accepted wisdom by both parties. People who revise the Holocaust and who consort with the Extreme Right and Neo-Nazis are serious power-brokers in these arguments. It is maddening to think this is where we’ve ended up.
- No commitment to upholding abortion rights — we don’t have the same highly-visible schism as the USA, but we have protests; pickets at clinics and some well-funded groups with pocket-politicians rolling back rights and criminalising women.
- No commitment to abandoning the Conservative governments idiotic Rwanda plans.
- Committing to expanding the UK’s nuclear weapons capability — if you’re not sure about this, go watch Threads (1984). Nuclear weapons are an existential threat to humanity: they have to be dismantled and put beyond use for all our sakes.
The Unions do still have some power over Labour, but nothing like enough to counter these positions. The party have obviously decided that the Unions will, ultimately, support them regardless: we have a two-party system, based on our intractable First Past the Post voting model whereby only large parties can win power and there is only room for two such parties. The Labour inner-party would appear to have run the maths and decided that, since the Unions won’t support the Conservatives, they are free to court those same industries and big-money donors safe in the knowledge that trades unions have nowhere else to go.
I will not be voting for this party and contributing to this madness. All else aside, it is unconscionable for me to vote for a party that intends to extend our nuclear arsenal. I would encourage you to do likewise, best beloved. There is absolutely no daylight between Labour and Conservative now, so what does it matter which one wins?
There is an episode of M*A*S*H where Hawkeye finally has enough of the mess tent’s week-on-week offerings of fish and liver. He leads a semi-riot, demanding “we want something else!”
We need something else. For our longer term survival. Check out We Deserve Better and see if there are politicians you can support locally to try and end this madness. We want something else!
Follow the pilgrim to the Temple of the Dawn,
The altar’s empty and the sacrifice is gone.
We let the madmen write the Golden Rules…
We were no more than mortal fools.— Children of the Moon, Eye in the Sky (1982), The Alan Parson’s Project.
