There is a real elite: the very rich and the politicians who support them. They have 2 tricks for diverting blame for the multiple disasters they cause. 1. Focus it on an entirely different group - public servants, academics and other experts - and call *them* the elite
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2. Channel the anger that would otherwise be turned on economic injustice, ecological destruction and misrule into culture wars, ensuring that BLM, feminists, LGBTQ+, refugees and Muslims get lashed, instead of billionaires and their poodles.
It works. So how do we fight back? How do we ensure that blame is not transferred from the perpetrators to innocent people? How do we make it clear that we are not attacking the victims of this hoax?
I’m not expecting – and don’t want – instant answers. But I think we should all be asking ourselves such questions every day, and slowly and carefully developing answers.
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Where in the #KingsSpeech is the promised end to new oil and gas licences?
Instead, there's a bill "to support sustainable aviation fuel". But there is no such thing as sustainable aviation fuel, and no prospect of it materialising, unless you rewrite the laws of physics.🧵
Perhaps, like the last government's Rwanda bill, the sustainable aviation fuel bill will legislate the nature of reality, asserting that such a thing exists when it does not.
What we see here is the government ducking the hard but necessary policy of stopping new oil and gas - despite repeated promises that it would do so - and instead embracing magical thinking to address the climate crisis.
One of the penalties of changing your mind about a topic is that it provokes a certain kind of glitter-eyed fanatic, who will see you thenceforth as the devil incarnate. From that day on, in my experience, they will devote a large part of their lives to hounding you. 🧵
Because I’ve changed my mind quite often, I’m now cyberstalked by a pack of these obsessives, some of whom have been scribbling furiously about me for over 20 years. They lace together every thoughtcrime I’ve committed, to construct a narrative of pure evil.
Responding to them is pointless – it only makes things worse. You just have to let them get on with it, and recognise that it’s the water in which you swim.
1. This is a thread about a new form of political organising, which proved spectacularly successful in this election, and that other constituencies would do well to adopt. It’s a means of navigating our unfair, unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral system. 🧵
2. It’s the People’s Primary model developed by some very smart folk in my own constituency, South Devon. They set up the @SDevonPrimary. This article explains how it works. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
@SDevonPrimary 3. There was a great deal of hostility, from the Conservatives, Labour and even the LibDems (the ultimate beneficiaries). Why? Because the model enables voters to take back control of the electoral process from political parties. They hate that.
#IDthought 6: At every general election, we are faced with a binary choice. With one cross, we are deemed to have signalled our agreement everything in a party’s manifesto and everything else – if it wins – it can ram through Parliament over the next five years. 🧵
It’s not that different from the cross or thumbprint with which indigenous people were asked to sign treaties with European colonists, which in some cases they were unable to read. It arises from the same mode and style of governance.
There is no means of refining our choice, of accepting some items and rejecting others. With one decision, we are presumed to have consented to thousands of further decisions. We do not accept the principle of presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?
#IDthought 5: Until the neoliberal era, inequality declined for some 60 years. From the 1980s onwards, it returned with a vengeance. Since 1989, America’s super-rich have grown about $21 trillion richer. The poorest 50 per cent, by contrast, have become $900 billion poorer.🧵
Why? Because trade unions were crushed. Because tax rates for the very rich were slashed. Because any regulation that big business viewed as constricting was loosened or eliminated. And, perhaps most importantly, because *rents* were allowed to soar.
I don’t just mean housing rents. I mean all *access fees* to essential services that have been captured by private wealth: water, energy, health, railways etc. And the interest payments arising from the financialisation of higher education.
#IDthought 1: Throughout the media we see an unremitting, visceral defence of capitalism, but seldom an attempt to define it, or to explain how it might differ from other economic systems. We propose a definition that seeks to distinguish it from other forms of economic activity
I did produce a neater definition, which has the virtue of parsimony, but the disadvantage of being incomprehensible to almost everyone.
"Capitalism is an economic system that both creates and destroys its own n-dimensional hypervolume."