THREE. February 22nd 2019
Strange times. A dozen weary politicians rouse themselves from the torpor of anguished impotence and decide to go and sit somewhere else to see if that will make a difference. One difference it definitely makes is that quite lot of people will start abusing and insulting them rather than those who, through a mixture of arrogance, complacency, and selfishness, got us into this mess. Whether it will make any other difference is hard to predict, and maybe it was not exactly the right thing to do or exactly the right time to do it, but at least they have done something. Even if you don’t share their political viewpoint, you might at least applaud their willingness to take some action which might shift things toward a better place. The opprobrium they are attracting from many quarters – some of which I’ve found quite shocking – reminds me a bit of the condemnation levelled at environmental activists for blocking roads or spray-painting the Department of the Environment: ‘Where’s the sense in annoying motorists and raising the level of carbon-monoxide fumes with traffic jams, or with upsetting civil servants who are just doing their job? How is that going to change anything?’ To which one may reasonably retort: ‘Well, what’s your plan?’
As far as I’m concerned, almost anything which seems to have a chance of loosening the awful, anxiety-provoking, energy-sapping deadlock in which we are drifting towards potential oblivion seems worth doing. I’m aware this might not be a correct intuition. Patience is not my strong point and activism is in some ways just a nervous response to the sense of trouble around the corner. Perhaps it really would be best to do nothing and to trust those in positions of authority – mostly put there through legitimate, even though flawed, democratic processes – to do the right thing.
This was basically the argument of an annoying but impressive person I came up against recently when trying to persuade the members of a pensions committee to divest from fossil fuels. He is the Chair of said committee and his basic strategy is to speak soothingly but firmly (and eventually crossly) to a succession of citizens like me who turn up to his committee meetings and make a nuisance of themselves by repeatedly suggesting that a pension fund investing in an oil company is like somebody with lung cancer using their savings to buy cigarettes (and variations upon that theme), The truth of this seems so self-evident to me that I find it a challenge to listen to an alternative point of view; but listen I must if I am to ‘engage’ with the democratic process such as it is and not just get thrown out of the committee room for refusing to shut up when the Chairman tells me to.
The terrifying thing about this is that you can find yourself actually entertaining some of the nonsensical double-think with which you are presented. While I had quite expected to be told that there was a financial imperative for investing in fossil fuels – which the patronising Chair didn’t expect me to understand or offer to explain but invited me to go away and read about on the labrinthine official website – I was unprepared for a moral / philosophic argument in its favour. The basic premise of this was that if you lend money to oil companies then you can influence what they do; the implication being presumably that you could eventually stop them from taking oil out of the ground or, at least, have them do it in a ‘nice’ way. This is called, apparently, ‘engagement’. This seems to me pretty much the same as a vegetarian putting their money into a butcher’s shop with the ultimate aim of turning it into a florists; or, of course, a government department financing a drugs cartel in order to make its business practices more ethical (which quite possibly has happened)
I will need to wait for the next meeting to say any of this because, in the moment, being asked by the Chair and his cohorts to consider the merits of their sophisticated approach to the problem in contrast to my own unrealistic and childish tantrums, I found it impossible to do more than scratch my head and laugh. I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland must have done when told by the Mad Hatter that there no room for her at the tea table. As I recall, Alice allowed this to pass for the sake of good manners, although she eventually found herself in court shouting ‘Nonsense!’ at the Red Queen, and that was what did the trick in the end.
I think I am much more likely to go down the ‘Nonsense!’ route next time; which may well get me thrown out but will maybe have more impact and at least is likely to be more fun. The trouble with the ‘engagement’ idea is that, grown-up as it sounds, it can easily lead you into a place where you are compromising things which you really shouldn’t compromise and where, in the end, you can be persuaded to see a non-existent cloak on a naked Emperor. What is called ‘engagement’ often ends as (or was always, really) appeasement. I seem to remember our current glorious leader talking a couple of years ago about the merits of ‘engagement’ with the Trump administration as a means of moderation. Again, you can only scratch your head and laugh.
I’m aware, nevertheless, that engagement and compromise are probably key concepts for the newly ‘Independent’ group in parliament whose actions I was affirming earlier on. Here is the ‘rub’, I suppose, the point of tension between insisting upon the absolute truth as you see it and acknowledging the need to co-operate with other people who have a different perspective. I was gladdened to see, early on, that the group had sought to resolve this conundrum by recourse to the idea of reference to core values – arriving at policies and making decisions through a process of rational consideration of the evidence, employing tolerance and respect for different opinions. I was disappointed not to see ‘honesty’ highlighted as one of these core values – although you live in hope – and it may of course be just a ruse to get around the fact that they haven’t got any sort of manifesto yet. But actually, if they kept their policy as simply to arrive at rational conclusions based upon the evidence, and implemented it faithfully, that would be good enough for me. I think it would pretty much cover, for instance, not investing money in an industry which is destroying the planet.
An interesting but probably little-known fact is that there is a whole town council made up of ‘Independents’ in Somerset which operates on these sorts of principles, where what they call ‘Ways of Working’ – Integrity, Respect and so forth – are held as more important than set policy objectives. They took 10 of 17 seats in the 2011 local elections. At the next election in 2015 the major parties put extra effort into winning back seats and this time the Independents took all 17. It appears to be a trend spreading to some other local councils. I’ve met a couple of these people and been struck by their evident positivity, goodwill and lack of attachment to tribal agendas.
There is a very ‘grown-up’ and hopeful part of me that longs for this to happen at a national level and for it to to be true that there can be a real difference between such principled, co-operative leadership and dull consensus / compromise. This part of me is ready to put time and effort into supporting such apparently civilised initiatives even though I might not agree with all the policy outcomes. Another part of me, however, expects to find out soon enough that the new boss is just like the old boss and that ‘engagement’ just means pretending to believe some bullshit for the sake of expediency. Let’s see.
A Reluctant Activist 