13. January 1st 2021

I’ve been a bit up and down since the last ‘big push’ in September, during which I was whisked smartly out of the road and carried off for another night in a police cell. The police officers were markedly less patient this time around (although still perfectly pleasant)  which I suppose indicates progress: “first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win” as Ghandi said. They are definitely not ignoring us or laughing at us anymore, as evidenced by Mrs Patel’s ridiculous foot-stamping after some of her very rich newspaper-owning  pals were upset. In less than year we seem to have progressed in the government lexicon, and without changing anything significant about what we are actually doing, from  “uncooperative crusties” to dangerous terrorists

I don’t think we can worry about that; it is to be expected, so bring it on. Similarly I didn’t mind the police cell, although the journey in the back of the van on this occasion was long and bumpy and I was forced to listen on the way to a very tedious argument between a particularly  earnest young activist who had also been arrested and an extraordinarily opinionated, ill-informed and generally annoying young policewoman who has clearly – judging by their shaking heads, raised eyebrows and deep intakes of breath – been irritating her colleagues for a long time. They were evidently as relieved as I was to arrive at the police station and escape from the role of captive audience for her hectoring. This may be some sort of karma, I suppose..

Anyway, four years of feeling shaken and made fearful about sinister and disturbing developments in the political world and, in the last two, since I first sat myself on Lambeth Bridge and waited to be arrested – which on that occasion took a lot longer – becoming more and more acutely aware about the climate crisis, have taken their toll. I decided around October that I’d better have a bit of a break before I ended up with a break-down, and that i should withdraw from organisational roles and leave other people to worry about what to do about it all for a while, returning to the role of foot-soldier. This has worked imperfectly and after a fashion, but I do now feel a sense of some regeneration and greater readiness for a return to the fray in the new year. For a while, however, I was feeling as useless as a government cabinet minister, as unfit for purpose as a test and trace system managed by Dido Harding. I felt a shift in my spirits around mid November, though,  as it finally became clear that we really were going to get shot of the awful creature in the White House.

I think Biden’s election victory was a bit of a watershed, perhaps because it was Trump’s ascent that really got me started on this road. As the results crystallised, I felt a bit like I’d just about managed to crawl out of a very deep hole that had looked impossible to get out of, and that I am, possibly, going to survive. This feeling has been supported by some evidence not directly connected to Biden’s win, that the world might, just might, be starting to take the climate crisis seriously. Nearly everything that any politician says about it has to be countered with a “Yes, very good, but… [not soon enough / fast enough / strong enough etc]….”. However, it is undeniable that the subject has become a front and centre concern; a scenario we seemed very far away from in October 2018. That doesn’t mean we can or should stop the activism – this is paradoxically the time of greatest opportunity and greatest danger – but it did seem to mean that I felt I could rest up a while and let go of some things which other people could do just as well and perhaps better.

This sense of lying exhausted and shattered, but mightily relieved to be alive, and knowing that renewed energy and determination will come in due course, was literally the experience of a bloke called Joe Simpson who wrote a book, later turned into a film, called Touching the Void. In 1985, he was mountaineering with a friend, to whom he was tied by a rope. There were difficulties, Simpson fell and, after an excruciating period when he was hanging suspended while his friend on the ledge above tried to work out what to do, the friend eventually cut the rope, figuring there was no sense in both of them dying, and your man Simpson plummeted into a deep crevasse, suffering serious multiple injuries. After a period of unconsciousness followed by a spell of intense fear, grief, despair and rage during which he used up most of his sparse supply of food and drink, he finally got it together to try and climb out. To his own surprise, over a period of several days including some without food or water, he ultimately made it. If you watch the film you’ll see that it seemed improbable he would survive and yet he did; and eventually regained his health (although his relationship with his friend was somewhat  badly affected, as you might expect).

I was powerfully struck by this film when I first watched it and have come to understand it as a sort of parable about the Will: the experience of falling into the deep hole and touching the void is deeply traumatising and yet it is potentially a source of strength. The monumental effort made and the personal qualities discovered and marshalled towards an ultimate victory against seemingly insuperable odds are of great value in themselves as a resource to draw on in the future. Resolution, discipline, determination and endurance are more crucial to the fight than brilliance, creativity or charisma.

The fact that this is not fully appreciated explains, I think, why people underestimate the likes of Trump and Johnson. It’s not that they are actually that clever or skilful; it’s just that they are singularly devoted to their own advancement and utterly ruthless. They will basically do anything to get what they want, which is what makes them so scary. (We may be about to find out quite how horrific this is going to look in practice as Inauguration Day in the USA grows nearer). Being in opposition to such powerful and unscrupulous forces requires a great deal of the aforementioned resolution, discipline, determination and endurance. This is hard to muster when you’re paralysed with fear and / or driven toward despair, as Joe Simpson experienced, by circumstances which appear to be progressively worsening. It takes a massive and exhausting effort to drag yourself out (which he did quite literally).

For these reasons I have actually felt more hopeful about the future than I did after Obama was elected, to much greater fanfare, in 2008. I know that many people feel that Biden’s electoral success, especially given the likelihood of a continuing majority for Republicans in the Senate, represents only very limited progress. But for me this is partly the point: I think that the fact that this old guy has had to fight tooth and nail against such powerful (because so ruthless and unprincipled) opposition bodes well for what might follow. The very limited hopefulness of the present may in fact be much more realistic than the euphoria which followed the 2008 election and which was itself followed by no very great improvements in the USA or the world in general; and then four years of control by an ignorant bigoted psychopath. The current rather gloomy collective mood among political progressives might  be characterised by psychologists of a certain persuasions as the “depressive position” – which doesn’t sound great but is considered by them as an important advance from a more primitive psychological position, which I think characterised the mood in 2008, and which they call the “paranoid-schizoid position” (which I expect you will agree definitely sounds worse).

I think it’s very unfortunate that this whole psychological perspective is so neglected by those who try to understand the behaviour and character of our political leaders; for instance, how terrifyingly quickly it has been possible for a pathological narcissist like Trump to shift the needle of political ’normality’ to the point where tens of millions of people are prepared to declare that they believe in blatant falsehoods; and, for another instance, how our own government is, because of the similarly narcissistic character of its leader, caught in a seemingly endless cycle of hopeless failure to meet improbable promises which have been based upon fervent wishes rather than actual plans. Climbing out of the  deep crevasse of covid 19 – a hole dug all the deeper by the craven corruption and outright foolishness of the government – requires, of course, resolution, discipline, determination and endurance; definitely not helpful, by contrast, are the methods which have largely been employed – a refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation or to admit mistakes in order to learn from them, a tendency to shift blame and responsibility to others and a reliance upon wild ambition, unrealistic targets and absurd “moonshots”. With this methodology, Joe Simpson would have died in the crevasse. What he did instead was to bring himself to face the awful truth of his situation and the need for absolute self-determination, independence and ruthless discipline. He set small achievable, measurable  goals – “that rock, half an hour” – and he literally dragged himself out.

The activist movement that I belong to has, I think, had to go through a learning process of its own with respect to these sorts of dynamics: early success and renown has been followed by disappointment and sometimes bitter frustration; wild ambition for big strides forward has needed to give way to acceptance of a slow, gradual, difficult journey towards an ultimate goal which, for the most part, will remain out of sight, merely envisioned. “That rock, half an hour”. The fact hat we have adapted again and again, learned, grown stronger through f many setbacks and mistakes, and built a remarkable resilience upon the experience, gives me hope. I suspect that pmost of us would say that we have neither confidence nor optimism; but that we do have resolution, discipline, determination and endurance

Whatever happens I hope and intend to enjoy it. To really succeed I think there are a few things we need to reclaim from the likes of Trump and Johnson – these essentially crazy but nevertheless effective – in terms of achieving power, which is all they care about – megalomaniacs. Most obviously, we need their single-minded ruthlessness, their refusal to admit defeat, their utter devotion to their cause (which in their case is simply and exclusively themselves).  But we  also need their exuberance and spirit, rooted not in denial and false pride but in a deep conviction about the value of what we are doing.

Happy new year.

TWELVE. August 21st 2020

I sometimes think that the routine of the serious activist is comparable to that of a professional sprinter: time, effort and discipline is focused on a desired goal, but the amount of time devoted to preparation vastly outweighs the time spent actually performing. Alternatively we might think of a feature film; the two hours or so that you spend watching it is a tiny fraction of the time which was devoted to script-writing, casting, preparation, rehearsal and the diverse administrative and logistical arrangements which were necessary in order to produce it. Sometimes the film will be a wild success, sometimes a flop., Anecdotal evidence suggests that it’s hard to know in advance and that, with the film analogy in particular, there is no guarantee at all that the amount of energy expended on producing  the film will be in proportion to its eventual success. The1982 film  Fitzcarraldo is a case in point: the film had a star-studded cast of actors and Director and  production was very long, expensive, fraught with difficulty, delay and misfortune and re-started several times over; although critically acclaimed by some it wasn’t a money spinner at the box office and loads of people have never even heard of it. I learned about this when I stayed at a hotel in a Peruvian jungle town owned and run by a man called Walter who had been the film’s executive producer and who had ended up, essentially as a financial rescue strategy, turning the house he had purchased for the crew and cast to live in while the film was made into a hotel 

All this is food for thought for an environmental protest group which has devoted very serious time and energy over the past four months or so to careful strategic thought, planning, organisation  team-building, training  and other preparation for a mass campaign of civil disobedience to be coordinated across three major cities whilst maintaining a reasonable level of the absurdly named ‘social distancing’ and other health and safety protocols appropriate to a time of continuing pandemic. The plan to do this and to create significant impact and a favourable impression upon public opinion at a time when a lot of people are likely to feel preoccupied with coronavirus does of course present considerable logistical and psychological challenges. I remind myself that the plans for previous campaigns of rebellion by this and other organisations during history have achieved notable successes despite having been improbable and ambitious. I also remind myself that Fitzcarraldo involved a highly ambitious and improbable plan to move a 300 ton steamship from one river to another across a mountainous land peninsula covered in dense jungle vegetation with the help of a hostile group of native residents and a couple fo railway engineers; the difficulties of which led indirectly to the the film’silengthy production period and contributed significantly to the penury of the aforementioned executive director. Food for thought indeed.

The Fitzcarraldo plan seems absurd in hindsight but I had a couple of lengthy chats with Walter and he seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable and practical person. We never discussed whether the ship-on-rails plans was completely necessary or a piece of hubris but maybe there simply was no other way. Certainly that’s how it seems to me now with the climate emergency. By any standards, this is a very poor time to be asking people to devote significant chunks of time and energy to engaging in acts of collective civil disobedience and protest in order to draw attention to the need to act with urgency to do as much as possible to prevent a coming catastrophe which is going to make covid-19 seem like a walk in the park. But what’s the alternative? Sit quietly while the current excuse for a government continues on its path or reckless endangerment, prioritising its false nationalistic ideologies and shamelessly corrupt rewarding of its financial backers over any attempt to consider seriously a plan for avoiding the extinction of the human species.

I know this sort of language seems too extreme to some people but I feel like I have to keep saying things like that in order to draw attention to the awful realities. I appreciate that it’s very worrying that a lot of people might get very ill or die from coronavirus; and that a great deal more people have already lost or might lose their job, their business or even their home. People are rightly exercised about these things. .What I don’t really understand is that they are mostly not exercised about the impending climate emergency. There is really no dispute about the fact  that it’s happening and almost every piece of scientific evidence which emerges makes clear that in fact the situation is worse than was previously thought and that almost all of the plans which have been made to rectify or ameliorate it are both inadequate in original conception and way behind schedule in execution. 

Not to put too fine a point on it we have known about impending climate catastrophe for well over 30 years and have done more or less fuck-all about it. We are heading for 3 to 4 degrees of warming before the end of the century. There are tipping points which may already be unavoidable. The practical impact of this doesn’t bear thinking about. If we keep heading in this direction then the lives of the current generation of young adults are going to be ruined and those of their children unimaginably difficult and unpleasant. Now that the effects are beginning to impinge upon our lives (having long ago started to mess up the lives of people in poorer, distant countries) we still have no serious plan to do anything about it. If you question this, ask yourselves why the government has appointed Alok Sharma (who holds the title of Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – ‘climate change’ or ‘environment’ not even mentioned), a man who, according to the website They Work for You has “consistently voted against measures to prevent climate change”, to the task  of leading the next international COP conference . Imagine if Rishi Sunak was the Secretary of State for Paddle Boarding but was given the task of looking after the economy as well. This is how seriously these incompetent chancers are taking things.

One of the things which might reasonably prevent the average person from taking too alarmist a view of the future is the belief that political power is generally held by people who can be expected to  adhere to reasonable standards of honesty,  probity and competence and that if they don’t they will be swiftly replaced by some others who will. But all the available evidence of recent times points to the opposite. In such a situation, I honestly can’t understand why people are not generally alarmed and activated to do whatever they can to change things. Indeed, I’m also surprised that more people don’t have contingency plans in mind for when the shit properly hits the fan.

Given that this is being written on a day when storms and flooding in England are coming in on the back of a period of days on end with temperatures well into the thirties and given that such spells of extreme record-breaking weather are becoming routine, it does seem only a matter of time. I accept that the length of that actual time is a matter of doubt and debate and that my own rather pessimistic expectations might not turn out to be correct. Any optimism about the idea that we have time to turn around  the tanker which is steaming towards  its own destruction, however, surely rests upon the premise that there is someone at the tiller who not only can distinguish between his own delusions and interests and the collective welfare but also gives a shit. Clearly, there is not, either in this country or in many other powerful and influential countries. The trend towards government by corrupt narcissists  and charlatans is as inescapable as the obvious fact that to stop it we need to act collectively, with determination and solidarity, to ensure at the very least a return to decency, common sense and a modicum of honesty, 

I have to acknowledge, in order to avoid falling  into my own home-made denial trap, that the protest movement is not growing as fast as I think it needs to, which raises the question of what to do about that, besides trying harder to involve more people. What’s Plan B, in other words? I’ve come across quite a few people in the movement who are well on the road to very alternative lifestyles, not only as a statement of values and principles but as a preparation for what they believe is probably inevitable sooner than you would like to think. I still find it hard to go there in my imagination, although I believe I should. I’m not sure if it simply feels too hard to develop two plans simultaneously – on the one hand, fight the bastards, on the other head for the hills – or if I’m just avoiding what I believe is the truth and burying my head in the sands of activism.

In fact I’m just coming off of a few weeks holiday from the activist role. I find that holidays not infrequently provoke dreams of an alternative lifestyle. This time around the holiday mode combined with heightened awareness of the climate crisis and utter fury and despair at our ‘government’s criminal negligence of duty to produce the improbable fantasy of living in the Welsh mountains, where i was on holiday for a while, and where the heatwave was experienced as pleasant warmth and sunshine offset with cooling waterfalls rather than the unremitting,  blistering heat of the English home counties. I doubt this would be a real solution to a serious collision of shit and fan but it might be an amelioration; it would mean not having to continue suffering the indignity of being English and it’s more accessible without flying even than Scotland, which is my other fantasy.

My conviction that independence in both these places is on the cards, again quite a bit sooner than most of us imagined, was strengthened by a conversation with a very nice Welsh family around a campfire one night in the very  pretty valley where we were staying. Both generations, parents and offspring were confident that this would soon become the expressed desire of the majority of Welsh inhabitants. They were by no means people of a radical tendency and evidently shared an ordinary and well-functioning life of many joys and everyday concerns and, for the youngsters in particular, hopeful plans for the future. The eldest girl was studying geology at university (without, because this is Wales, having to rack up an unsustainable debt in the process) and clearly entranced by its possibilities for her future, including the opportunities for international work and travel.. The youngest had a passion for wildlife biology and foresaw a potential in that for her future life. They appeared as talented and creative people, well-balanced and thoughtful.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself having the thought that neither of their futures were likely to be as rosy as either of them imagined and that it is unquestionably odd, really, that neither of them expressed any provisionality about these plans; as in, “if it is still possible to travel around the world safely when I’m an adult” or “if there is any wildlife left to study”. It would have been cruel and stupid to mention this around the campfire on their holiday and of course how do I know that such thoughts don’t sometimes keep them awake at night like they do me. Nevertheless, the fact remains that people do now routinely contextualise their short and medium term future plans in relation to coronavirus: “if we are allowed to by then” or “if that’s possible then”. But they routinely don’t for climate breakdown. If we can see and plan for one sort of horrifying reality, why not another? Sadly, as I expected, the confident predictions of so many people back in the spring who intuitively perceived a link between the pandemic and the climate emergency, that ‘things are bound to change now’ and ‘we can’t go back to how it was before’ were mistaken. Nothing is bound to change unless we will it. Things can go back to how they were before, and worse. The disturbance of the pandemic creates an opportunity for change, but it won’t be realised unless we seize it. 

Even if  some more people are now more aware and concerned about climate breakdown, the awareness will probably fade and in any case the reality is still that most of  them are doing basically nothing about it. Confronting this – it is effectively complacency, however goodwilled –  only strengthens my resolve to be on the streets again in early September and doing whatever apparently daft and / or annoying things are necessary to try to demonstrate to the authorities that I am not willing quietly to go along with this and to try and draw the attention of the public, once again, to the fact that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. No doubt this will result, as it has before, in a mixture of indulgence, approval, condemnation and outright hostility. Many of those against will say “I agree with your cause but not your methods.” They mean, presumably, that I should vote for the Green party that hasn’t a cat in hell’s chance of achieving political power in our warped and decadent electoral system, or that I should sign petitions or give money to Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace or lobby my corrupt MP or my Councillor or seek election myself or do any of the  many worthy but ultimately useless things which so many of us have been doing for thrirty-odd years to no effect, and which I continue to do because I[‘m trying to do everything I possibly can. particlpating in what is essentially a socio-political game in which the awful status quo is inevitably maintained, 

When challenged in this way on the street my typical response is to ask, as calmly and politely as I can, however hostile the challenge, “Well. what’s your plan?” Honestly, if you have one and it’s plausible and feasible, I’d really like to hear about it. There are many things I enjoy about my life as an activist, including strong connections with a great many people I have grown to trust and like very much, including many who are quite different to me;  but I also enjoy Welsh mountains and waterfalls and the garden (when its under thirty degrees)  and the guitar and rest and relaxation and a hundred other things with which I could occupy my time. I should also, no doubt, and assuming that the world hasn’t been shifted on its axis by the end of September, direct the same question to myself and devote some serious time to Plan B. 

ELEVEN. April 1st 2020

I’m surprised to note that about 3 months has gone past  already since I last found the energy or inclination to post. A by-product of life as a more-or-less full time activist seems to be a very poor sense of time passing, so that in the main the last 15 months period seems to have taken about 15 years. But as things actually slowed down in the new year when I stepped back from some things in recognition of being seriously ’burnt out’, time apparently began to pass faster.

This was all before the coronavirus crisis started up properly, which has inevitably put the brakes on even more, as it has for most people. Although I’m enjoying the peace, quiet and slow pace for now, I’ve a feeling this could start to be a lot more difficult for all of us eventually , so I guess it will be good if I am able to retain the sense of time passing quickly while there is not so much to do. 

Curiously enough, as the world and its systems of maintenance teeter on the  edge of collapse and breakdown, I’m feeling quite a lot healthier. This might well be a simple coincidence of timing, but then again it might not. It could be that, as the anxiety and the sense of urgency and alarm typically felt by activists (or climate change activists, at least) is more widely experienced, albeit for other reasons, we calm down a bit. It was definitely my view as a  therapist that the disturbance  exhibited by individuals is often the outcome of unacknowledged and unaddressed dysfunction in their environment and that if this could be resolved – or at least identified and named – their chances of getting better would improve.  

I’m not saying that  coronavirus has anything directly to do with the climate and ecological crisis but I certainly think it is revealing some worrying realities; for instance about the lack of resilience in our globalised society and the speed with which trouble and chaos can be created and spread from natural occurrences about which we hadn’t worried and for which we hadn’t prepared as much as we should have done. It is also  pointing up some potentially cheering evidence that people are, after all, perfectly able and willing to act as if there is an emergency and to stop flying all over the globe and burning fossil fuels in various ways like there is no tomorrow when they feel sufficiently motivated and shown a modicum of political leadership. (And a modicum is all we are getting).

I think that the virus has possibly freed me and some of my colleagues in various ways; aside from the obvious one of being able to have a bit of a rest because mass demonstrations aren’t a good idea for the foreseeable future. There was a bloke called Bradshaw who wrote about family systems and highlighted the role of the “problem holder”, who tends to cause quite a lot of trouble and to become the focus of ‘treatment’ unless and until the others in the system wake up to the dysfunction and start taking responsibility. The fact that practically everyone is currently behaving with awareness and responsibility regarding the greater good gives us a bit of a break, My guess is that quite a few ordinary members of the public allow themselves to assume that climate activists – particularly the kind that sit in the road and get themselves arrested – are somehow irresponsible; but in fact I have never encountered such a responsible group of people in my life. Evidence for this responsible attitude is that our movement was pretty much way ahead of the eventual ban on gatherings,  cancelling even small local actions and meetings some time before it became official advice.

To be fair, almost everyone seems to have been ahead of our government. as far as its precautionary approach to the health issues are concerned. There’s a poem foretelling anarchy (‘The Second Coming’) in which W B Yeats includes dark and foreboding phrases like “things fall apart” and “the centre cannot hold” and in which he goes on to say that 

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of a passionate intensity.”

For me this pretty much sums up the image of our so-called Prime Minister as his gruesome visage has filled ever larger amounts of the TV screen each day and he has struggled visibly to make contact with and to convey an authentic semblance of dignity, courage and wisdom.

Fortunately, for now at least, the great British public is pulling together in some fashion. This is probably not quite as much as the media, attached to a simple romantic narrative, would have us believe. I remember that when Diana died, if you read the papers you might have thought that the streets of London were flowing with tears whereas in fact the evidence of one’s own eyes was that  most people were just going about their lives as usual. There is the palpable sense of a wind of change, however. As the scale of the emergency and the kinds of steps necessary to deal with it dawned unevenly across the population, I was aware of a couple of acquaintances who, ahead in the awareness stakes and urging friends to be more disciplined in their behaviour, remarked that they now understood a little better how I often feel. I wasn’t in the vanguard on this occasion and was in fact one of those needing to be told what to do. (Another learning from this crisis which my movement will need to highlight when the time is right is that we simply can’t expect everybody to change their behaviour in line with the common good – we need some leadership and some rules). It was a relief not to be in the front seat and it is a relief now to feel that, again for the time-being at least, we are all activists.

Of course this is a curious sort of activism, characterised as it is by dong not very much at all. Those bursts of  togetherness and noisy activity which do take place are largely happening on virtual platforms like Zoom. Spending a lot of time monitoring phone chats and talking to people on zoom meetings is, interestingly, another way in which the life of the average person is now more closely resembling that of the average activist; who, as it happens, is probably doing a fair bit less of it.

There is definitely something to do, nevertheless, and this is to prepare for action when the time is right. I think that this action, whatever form it takes, needs to be focused very precisely upon the learning from the  current crisis and the opportunities it presents . Those who have read Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” will be familiar with the idea that after most international crises in recent times (like the Gulf war, tsunamis, 9/11, and of course the financial crash of 2008 although the book was written before that) a certain political lobby  has been ready with its agenda of tax-cutting, decreased public spending and ownership, international bullying,  increased inequality, austerity, etc) to exploit the situation for its own ends. The environmental lobby has to be equally ruthless, to make sure that this time is our time; the second coming, not of some dystopian nightmare as envisaged in Yeats’ poem but of rational, sane and basically kind government by and for the people, led by rational, sane and kind people rather than crackpots.

I’ve heard quite a few friends now – not generally activists themselves although sympathetic to the climate cause – say that they confidently expect  things to change for the better after this. I’m more cautious. It’s easy to forget when you are feeling inspired and enthusiastic that hard work and some difficult choices need to be engaged with if the energy from moments of awakening is to be channeled into real change. It’s worth remembering how many people went around saying the UK had changed irrevocably for the better after the euphoria and optimism associated with the 2012 London Olympics. Within 4 years we had the misery and discord  of Brexit and a few years later the awfulness of Johnson and his cronies. Expanded consciousness is pretty useless without Will and can be even harmful in leaving a legacy of disappointment and disillusionment if not acted upon with resolve and determination. We can end up feeling that we are simply incapable of learning from experience.

I’m still stumbling on with reading ‘A Short History of England” (as it it happens I’ve just got to to the mid 17th century century, just before the plague) and I have to say that if offers very little encouragement for any view that progress is made through the intelligent application of induction. It is, to this point, and at least so far as political leadership and decision-making are concerned, a tale of almost unmitigated stupidity, barbarism and waste. 

I know that an obvious retort to this is that life in the 21st century, whatever its shortcomings, is a whole lot more pleasant than life in the dark ages and that the mid seventeenth century is correspondingly a better time than the centuries which preceded it and a worse one than those that succeeded it. Because the book concentrates so much on the behaviour of those in positions of power and privilege, which is in nearly every case crass, selfish and frankly absurd, it doesn’t really illuminate quite how actual progress and development has been achieved. What we need to notice, I think,  is that this ‘progress’ is in fact driven by the initiative and efforts of ordinary citizens (actually quite a few of them extraordinary people, but the point is people not born or elevated into positions of political power) and carried forward by sometimes subtle and sometimes overt forces of collective will.

In other words, it’s down to us. Progress depends precisely upon how many of us and to what extent are willing to become and to remain activists. It would be dangerous and irresponsible to assume that the population as a whole is going to come to what seems at the moment like the obvious conclusions and exert their political will accordingly at the ballot box. Alongside the evidence that people do indeed seem more open and awake to ideas about environmental sustainability and socio-economic justice one needs to consider the fact that, for instance, Donald Trump has grown more popular in the USA in recent weeks even whilst manifesting in the starkest terms  his gross unsuitability for office. Let’s not make the naive mistake of assuming that either political leaders or those they lead will behave rationally

There are of course openings, unexpected opportunities, acts of nature, unexplained forces, and these can generate feedback loops, cascades and movements for change as powerful in a social sense as those which are feared by campaigners and scientists as likely to create unstoppable climate breakdown; but this will only be the case if a decent number of us get on the same side and push in the right direction. 

In my psychotherapy training days I  remember feeling enlightened and uplifted by the idea that disturbance was essentially a good thing. It can be a difficult idea to hang onto. It requires faith. It also requires paying attention to what’s happening and exercising judgement about the right intervention at the right time. The idea is to bring about breakthrough rather than breakdown. Yeats’ poem says

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”, and then

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.

The implication is that the centre needs to be pretty robust in order to manage in turbulent times. A casual survey of those in the centres of political power right now does not give grounds for optimism. If we are going to come through this and emerge whole on the other side I think we are going to have to stay active, in much greater numbers and with greater determination. However we do it, we need to get in the centre somehow, and stay there. If it’s true that there is a new collective spirit then we need to work consciously to hang onto it and make it count.. The leaders aren’t going to change. If it’s true that the people have changed, then the people need to be the leaders.

TEN. December 29TH 2019

As I’ve mentioned before, I sometimes think that activism may be only a covert technique for the avoidance of reality: we look as if we are doing something, but perhaps all we are doing is denying the facts – which, on the face of it, are very bleak indeed – and the improbability of doing anything useful about them. I refer here not just to the climate and ecological crisis which has become, almost exclusively, the domain into which I have been pouring my own energies, but to the political crisis which is providing an insane and absurd backdrop – like the madness of King Lear being played out on the cliffs of Dover while the apocalyptic storm rages – bringing to unfettered power the likes of Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro and now Johnson.

When I say ‘pouring’ this may give a false impression, since my energies have become so depleted that in order to draw on remaining reserves it is really necessary to pick up the metaphorical bottle and give it a shake and a couple of good slaps; even then the results are meagre and sludgy and in recognition of this I’ve been trying to give it all a rest for a couple of weeks in the  hope that a winter pause and perhaps an embrace of the gloom, will eventually herald a new spring.

Before making this retreat, I spent a peculiarly peaceful and soothing couple of hours sitting in the hallway of a local community centre being chatted to by an amiable and apparently good-hearted woman somewhat older than me who, in between attempts to get me to flatter her by saying that she didn’t look over seventy (which I eventually did , even though she did) told me all about the challenges of caring for her sick husband, her excitement at having begun a course of study in hypnotherapy and the pleasure she had gained through years of public service as a local councillor. Even though she is not the kind of person with whom I am ever likely to become firm friends, I was struck by her warmth and goodwill and genuinely meant it when I said, as we parted, that it had been nice to meet her.

The thing hard to square with this impression was that this woman was, at the time, actively trying to assist the election of the most regressive and probably oppressive right-wing government in modern UK history. Nevertheless this was my impression. We were spending the two hours together because I, feeling guilty about having been unable to muster the enthusiasm and energy necessary to do any active campaigning for the Lib Dem candidate whom I desperately hoped might displace the embodiment of entitlement who is our awful Tory incumbent, and whom I genuinely regard as a talented  and decent man who would actually make a good MP, was doing a  session as an election day polling-station ‘teller’ for him whilst she was doing the same for the Tory.

How could it be that this evidently harmless and friendly person was prepared to set aside the scruples she must have about the awful and immoral Johnson and his shameless acolytes in order to support ‘her’ party, notwithstanding that it has clearly provided a political home and  social network for her during much of her life? Could she really be such a hypocrite? (The other explanation, that she somehow hasn’t noticed or realised what they are really like, I dismiss as unfeasible). How can these things be reconciled?

My conclusion, so far, is that they can’t. It was actually a bit like being in a parallel universe; the world as it might have been had this or that or that not happened, or perhaps as it once actually was; a world in which people had honest differences of opinion about the best way to manage things and debated respectfully and sensibly with each about them; a world in which mistakes were made and rectified, in which yes, people did bad and selfish things but for which those same people were usually ultimately punished and dishonoured rather than rewarded. It was in fact, like I always supposed politics was supposed to be, or at least could be, with people disagreeing relatively politely and maintaining a mutual regard for some shared objective reality and the capacity for enduring friendships across political divides..

That went, I think, in the very long run-up to the 12th, with what I experienced in that hallway on the day itself just some sort of ghostly echo. I still don’t understand how that woman could have not only voted for this Conservative party – the one that is now led by a lying, corrupt, abusive narcissist and doesn’t have room for Dominic Grieve –  but actually given up some of her free time to assist them. The only explanations I can think of are mental illness or a degree of self-interest that is so fierce that it amounts to evil. And that is really very difficult to square with her cheerful chatter, her readiness to share her ‘data’ with me, her friendliness to the voters wandering in off the street, and theirs to her, the humanness and civility displayed by all of us, which seemed of a different time and place.

The cognitive dissonance evoked is strong enough to make one feel a bit mad. Indeed, I do increasingly feel a bit mad, or at least that it might be easier to believe that I am mad – that this is the explanation for why things don’t make sense – than to believe that things are like they are. More and more the political struggle seems like one between good and evil – its narrative and the character of those which dominate it more redolent of the genre of the comic book than that of the one or two intelligent ‘broadsheet’ newspapers keeping their heads above water.

This ‘fantastic’ narrative style makes it seem, precisely, like a fantasy. It is hard to believe that all this is happening at all – that order in the world is approaching irrevocable breakdown and that the vast majority of people are unconcerned enough about it to allow it to happen without engaging in meaningful protest – let alone to believe that it is happening in my lifetime. To believe that this could happen ’to me’ or ’to us’, even if we take ‘us’ to mean the several generations over which, according to my guess, global society is likely to degenerate into something approaching the world of Mad Max, seems actually so self-centred and grandiose as to justify an assessment that I am indeed a bit mad. Conversation with activist colleagues tends to focus a lot on the practicalities of activism, leaving not much space for discussion of this sort of thing, but I know that at least a few of my colleagues share this feeling. 

According to the Wikipedia entries about the number of generations in human history. the chance of this happening ‘to us’ are about 1 in 12,000, which you’ll agree is quite long odds. As an alternative to indulging the idea of us being ’special’ in this way, I‘ve found myself using a bit of the spare time afforded by my retreat and the need for some distraction from the painful present, to dip into some random bits of history. My conclusion so far is that while many very terrible things have happened, far more uncomfortable to endure in terms of anything which anyone my age now is likely to experience, none of them can actually compete with the current reality – a likelihood of the actual end of human civilisation and a mostly uninhabitable earth – in terms of long-term seriousness

Not only is it hard to believe, I also don’t want to believe it. Most people who know me would, I am pretty sure, agree that I am arrogant and opinionated enough to enjoy an argument and to carry on engaging in it sometimes past the point where it would be appropriate to concede defeat, simply for the satisfaction of ‘winning’ . Having discovered quite early the pleasure of being praised for coming up with the right answers, I like being right and am quite attached to it as a concept. On this matter, however, I would dearly love to be wrong. Even though I have been prophesying in private conversation and theoretically ‘in public’ through the book I’ve been trying to write for god knows how long, that the very serious psycho-social disorder from which we are suffering is going to lead us all to hell in handcart. I would really like to find out that I have been mistaken. This is particularly so now that it seems clear to me that Armageddon is quite a lot closer and less available to mitigation than I initially realised.

The trouble is that I do trust what I think; and of course it doesn’t help that I have been thinking and writing about this stuff for years and that sinister things which I have darkly but half-jokingly predicted like the apparently insuperable rise of the ridiculous but terrifying Johnson have come to pass. Believe it or not I quite recently discovered in my loft a note book in which I had written, over 40 years ago, that in the future, during my lifetime, the president of the USA would be an ex-TV -game-show host. Of course, that was meant to be ironic too.

This would all be more bearable – less maddening – if I thought that other people didn’t believe that things are like they are. Although annoying and upsetting , having others unable or unwilling to see the truth of what you are pointing out is a psychologically more comfortable experience than having them acknowledge it but shrug their shoulders and get on with daily life as it nothing extraordinary had been revealed. It has occurred to me recently that the experience of this is analogous to the psychological disturbance experienced by victims of abuse after they have disclosed the abuse and found it inadequately or incompletely addressed, or simply accommodated within a new reality, 

Normalisation, Business as usual. The rotten state of Denmark in which  the evil murderous king reigns while the hero-Prince flounders around like a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, desperately trying to get someone to listen to him. Eventually the tragedy is played out, more or less everyone dies and the stage is reduced to a bleak empty finality where everyone gets a chance to have a think about what went wrong.

This is what’s meant to be happening now, of course, following the disastrous 12th and the suggestion, from one of the people who bears a particularly large share of personal responsibility for having got us into this mess, that those of the progressive left now enter a period of deep reflection. It might be his first act of leadership.

But of course reflection is very difficult when you’re traumatised. It’s hard to switch off from the sense of urgency which was driving you before and, if you manage it, uncomfortable enough to make you likely to switch straight back on again for some relief from the pain. This, alongside the fear of being left behind or out-manoeuvred by political rivals, may explain why a few Labour hopefuls so quickly began a leadership campaign – a context in which honest and accurate thought is almost inherently impossible.

For myself I find it hard to imagine that anything  anyone in the Labour party – the one that just went along with a march over the edge of a cliff because it was too potentially embarrassing or awkward or politically costly to do otherwise – could do in the short term will alleviate the harm or the pain, and I think it would be better to suspend the idea of trying to think a way out of the crisis and just hit the rock beneath and get on with discovering quite how hard that feels. Leonard Cohen (borrowing the words of a Canadian poet writing about 85 years ago within a political context which appears to have been somewhat similar, which I suppose is some comfort) called it “Bitter searching of the heart”. It implies absolute acceptance, grieving, and a rigorous self-questioning. Sometimes I think I’m getting there with the first two, and then the bleakness and horror kick in and fire up the monkey-mind to start again with its  silly schemes and plans which surely the evidence of the last six months should be enough to prove unfeasible. The third one, anyway, I find most difficult, and in some ways energetically contrary to the first two. The questions are too hard. What should I do, or not do? What is the point of continuing to follow a course of action which is increasingly challenging and exhausting, will likely have diminishing returns, and which, while it is has often been amusing and attractive to others, is likely to start annoying them more as time goes on, and will probably fail anyway. On the other hand, how can I live at peace by opting for the ‘quiet life’, seeking pleasure or to make myself or others simply ‘happy’, now that my eyes are open? Beyond all this, and perhaps easier to answer but harder still to contemplate, what’s the plan for when the shit really hits the fan? 

I’ don’t think I’m equipped either mentally or practically for that bit. It’s a cruel irony that over the past twelve months I have been on a rapid learning-curve, discovering or re-discovering ways of working, tools and techniques which I had never imagined, at the time of my retirement, that I would need to know about or apply. In many ways discovering all this has been invigorating and interesting and if I was a younger person I imagine this would feel like a silver-lining, a kind of saving-up of skills and experiences for the CV of the future (assuming I expected to have one). But these are nearly all ’soft’ organisational / communicational skills and the ‘harder’ technological ones are anyway dependent upon materials and resources which, from my point of view, look to be pretty unreliable as time goes on. Our activist organisation is intrinsically hopeful to the extent that most of would claim that all these soft and community-building skills are going to be key for survival in the future that’s coming. But the pessimistic part fo me is inclined to feel that it might actually be more useful to concentrate on developing some more practical knowledge like how to find a mushroom that won’t poison you and how to shoot a gun.

It’s hard enough to think about these things, let alone talk to one’s friends and loved-ones about it. Even if I felt I had some practical survival skills or resources to offer – “Here’s the keycode for the bunker with its lifetime supply of tinned food” – they may reasonably enough not want to consider them. Paradoxically, at a time in my life when I probably most need to talk about troubling things I feel least able to do it and I suspect that many of those I might normally choose to talk to might be disinclined to hear about them. Of course, I’ve met literally hundreds of new people in the last 12 months and many of them are quite ready to talk about it; but it’s not so easy nor always so safe to be vulnerable around those with whom bonds are much newer or feel less secure.

In short my ‘bonds’ do feel less secure, relationships overall more fragile, and perhaps this is inevitable and natural given that the overarching context, according to my assessment, is breakdown – environmental, political, social. Notwithstanding the great goodwill and warmth which I sense from many people, I feel more alienated, more alone. Probably the nearest thing to actual reflecting I’ve managed  is writing this (which I guess is mostly why I’m doing it) and spending the odd half an hour with the poems of Clive James who, annoyingly as I’d just decided that perhpas he was going to somehow outlive the worst horrors of the contemporary world , died a short while ago. Whatever he did in his personal life – which by all accounts, including his own, was not great – his capacity for insightful observation and accurate self-examination and his willingness and ability to convey that beautifully in his writing represents to me a sort of civility  entirely in contrast with the shameful, fearful, repugnant ugliness of most of what dominates public and cultural life right now. I suppose his apparent peacefulness at the end seems like something to emulate. At any rate, reading the poems seems to have provided for some sort of vicarious experience of reflection and perhaps brought me a bit closer to the bitter heart of things; from which, according to Leonard Cohen, we may “rise to play a greater part”.

All the theories I trust and the experience I have tells me that getting as deep as you can into the darkness is indeed the key to emerging as healthily as possible on the other side (provided you can bear the journey). Despair is where we discover our deepest caring self. The darkest hour is just before the dawn. All that. But in this case the darkness is really pretty dark, and scary, so that it’s difficult to believe in the light really coming back. Maybe it won’t. I’m pretty sure, however, that my own spark of activism will soon flare up again and that then, at least for a while, I will feel better. This might be only whistling or dancing in the dark, but hopefully it will at least be an authentic kind of joy in action – the simple pleasure of doing something which feels truthful and, however momentarily, powerful – rather than a manic flight away from depression. It being Christmas and the house full of cards, I’ve found myself pondering what might be the difference between a Merry Christmas and a ‘Happy’ one and realising, a bit late in the day, that in fact the former is probably the desirable state: you don’t have to be happy to be merry, and merriment may in fact represent a state not of denial but of defiance and of honourable, life-affirming rebellion.

NINE 1st December 2019

Oh what a lovely rebellion

It was always going to be a difficult trick to pull off twice – turning up in the capital city, having given fairly detailed notice of your plans, with a load of vehicles full of artistic installations, staging blocks, solar power rigs, marquees and the like and expecting the authorities to let you put it all up in the middle of important and politically sensitive locations and block all the passing traffic for a fortnight. Still, it was a bold plan, and even though I think we are all ready to  acknowledge that it didn’t achieve the spectacular impact of the first ‘April Rebellion, I take comfort from the fact that we nevertheless drew serious attention to the climate crisis at a time of high political drama and excitement about other  topics and that the movement took another leap forward in terms of its own development;  not least by demonstrating to ourselves and others what can be done in the face of some seriously adverse conditions including determined resistance  from the authorities and really shitty weather.

Exactly how one should go about measuring success is anyway a moot point. Had I been writing this as intended shortly after the October shenanigans were over I would have set the needle considerably lower than I would now, some weeks on, as I finally start to emerge from the post-rebellion trough. Then it seemed like our impact had been disappointing. Now it seems that the profile of the climate and ecological emergency is way higher than it was at the start of October. I suppose it’s like planting stuff in the garden. One doesn’t always feel great after digging for a few hours and burying some  tiny bits of seed under the ground. Staring at the brown earth and nursing a sore back immediately afterwards it can be hard to believe that green shoots will come up. But they usually do.

It was a hard slog though. Whereas the abiding visual impressions from April had been of sunshine, colourful flags and smiling faces, the  imagery which immediately  springs to mind from October is of soggy tents, lost (confiscated) belongings, bitter exhaustion and a cold, hard road.

It’s a strange thing really how easily we deceive ourselves. Of course as mostly sensible and thoughtful adults we knew perfectly well that it was unlikely to be sunny in October, that the police would be ready for us this time and that anyway, one dazzling performance  in any context is rarely immediately followed by another. But this is somehow hard to programme into the human mind, so that we nevertheless bowled along in our gladrags with all our fancy gear not adequately prepared for the stiff opposition and difficult conditions we were about to face.

I remember being taught as a child in school about the Crimean War, and how the British literally turned up to the battle as if for an extended picnic, with deckchairs, sunshades, and sometimes family members along for the ride, expecting easy and glorious victory. I also remember being simply staggered by their stupidity. I suppose the failure to think properly, which is what it amounts to, is anyway what is behind the whole problem of the climate emergency: we find it very difficult to adhere to a sense of purpose or to adapt out plans  in the face of changing circumstances. The graphs of the people who measure these things show that when the news media was full of stories of serious and prolonged flooding in and around Gloucestershire and Somerset about ten years ago, the level of public concern about global warming and weather patterns changing shot up massively. A short while later it plummeted again. It shot up again in April this year. I think it’s probably a good sign that after a slight drop it’s now climbing again on a more steady but sustainable curve.

I tried – apparently unsuccessfully, because she found me guilty anyway, but who knows whether, as per the dynamics referred to above, she will come around to my way of thinking soon – to explain this to the judge when conducting my defence of ‘Necessity’ against the charge of committing a public order offence back in April. (Conveniently, the trial took place during the second week of the October rebellion, so that I was able to join in with the demonstrations which were coincidentally taking place all around the area of the magistrates court during the lunch breaks). What I tried to convey to the judge was that if I waited until the obvious and unquestionable evidence of destructive climate change was apparent in front of my eyes (a tidal wave rolling along the Thames, for instance, or a temperature of 50 degrees along the Embankment) it would be way too late for any meaningful action: my unwanted task is to draw attention to the fact that these things, sooner or later, are coming, and that the time to act in order to do something about them is right now. (In fact it’s sooner than that).

Putting worrying things out of one’s mind (or indeed, just allowing them to drift out of consciousness) is unfortunately something that human beings are very good at. Activists are quite bad at it, which is one of the reasons we are stressed a lot of the time. (Although if some more people got out of their armchairs we could of course share the stress around a bit and feel a bit more relaxed). 

I can’t, however,  blame acute consciousness about climate change (I believe that ‘woke’ has become the fashionably derogatory term for this, although I find it hard to understand why determined ignorance should be seen as a virtue) for all the stress I experienced, in relation to the October rebellion. Indeed, a fair amount of it was doubtless engendered by a subconscious awareness on my part that trying to occupy an area of Whitehall right outside Downing St, the most well-known resident of which is a notoriously touchy, self-important and volatile man, and the guards for which actually have automatic guns in their hands all the time, was not going to be a walk in the park.

Neither was it, but it was nevertheless exhilarating and, in retrospect, satisfying,althought rather gruelling. The build up to it was actually a much more stressful experience, characterised  as it was with attempts to master the intricate bureaucratic and technological systems which had been invented to facilitate organisation by some very clever but in my view, over-optimistic young people, and by the pressing sense that we might have bitten off more than we could chew. A part of the problem undoubtedly was the level of expectation created by the dazzling success of April. This was, as an astute colleague pointed out to me in the aftermath, the “difficult second album”. 

As he went on to say, it’s important to shrug off and move beyond the disappointment that this experience engenders and to build upon experience and learning so as become more deeply creative in the future. Notwithstanding some annoying and occasionally bewildering features of our organisation, I actually think that the values and principles at its core will help us to do that; but in the short-term  it can feel a struggle to get motivated. It’s easy to feel wounded, worn out and battle-weary. One can picture, imagine and even foresee  victories ahead but in the meantime there is a very strong urge to simply hibernate and try to forget about it all for a while. 

Doing this (taking ‘Leave’, as it were) would feel a bit easier to do were it not for the overwhelming evidence that, just at the time in the world at large that we need some seriously able and thoughtful people to take charge of things, we are choosing precisely the worst kind of nasty, ignorant and frankly evil individuals to lead us onwards. These things are of course connected, but right now I’m a bit too tired and depressed about it to articulate how. In the awareness of being led off towards one’s doom by the Pied Piper who is likely to win the UK election whilst those standing by, who could do something about it, are either, like the parents in the story, pretending not to notice, or are so incomprehensibly wrapped up in their own egoic delusions as to be unable to act rationally and do what they could to prevent it, it feels like all you can do is hold your breath and pray for a miracle. I’ve a strong sense that needing to get our of that state of mind, which I had begun to find intolerable, is what got me into the activism in the first place, but right now I really feel a bit too weary of the trench warfare to do much except close my eyes and hope the shells don’t land too close.

EIGHT. August 23rd 2019

I suppose discontent is inevitably a characteristic of the committed activist. We are, more or less by definition, unhappy about things and we spend our time making this apparent to others – pointing out what we consider to be wrong with the current state of affairs, demanding changes, and so forth.  There are some amongst my very close acquaintance who might, I suspect, suggest that I was psychologically suited to this role long before I took it up, with critical and even judgemental faculties quite honed and with a tendency, in the manner of mythical old blokes like Alf Garnet and Victor Meldrew, simply to complain. But we’ll leave that to one side for now.

One thing I can’t complain about is the diversity of my life as an activist. The last couple of months have brought a variety of challenges which have stimulated emotional uplift, intellectual interest and, occasionally, the sense of existing in a very weird dream; the kind which defeats attempts at analysis  but which you feel sure would reveal itself as deeply meaningful if only you could work it out.

The weirdest moment, perhaps, took place outside a large and quite grand official-looking building. I was standing at the end of a path leading from the doorway of the building.  I was playing a slow loud beat on a snare-drum suspended around my neck by a thick blue ribbon. I was wearing a bear mask. From within the building stepped a man in a suit, evidently someone with authority. He stepped over and between an array of 40 or 50 dead people lying on the ground on and around the path, all of them also wearing animal masks. Approaching me, he called my name. I stopped drumming and lifted the mask to speak to him. A short while later I cheered from a gallery, alongside all the dead people now magically come back to life, when the man in the suit stood up in the chamber below and said that there was a climate emergency.

The actual meaning of these scenes is, it now seems to me, much less interesting than the imagery or the visceral experience at the time; signifying only that a Council Leader had decided to make a gesture of concession in what is shaping up to be a long battle to get him and his largely-unconvinced political colleagues to Tell the Truth about the climate crisis and Act Now, as if that truth is real. This battle, of course, involves a great deal of less fancy stuff behind the scenes including  a laborious process of emails, meetings and whatnot. Even this stuff is mostly very interesting, although the ratio between effort and product, admin and action, often seems disproportional –  I suppose in the same way that it can take years to make a film which eventually lasts just a couple of hours.

A while after the ‘die-in’ action there was another ‘dreamy’ interlude from the frenetic rush between communications, meetings and strategising which makes up a good deal of daily activism. This one involved hanging about for a few days in central London and witnessing numerous inspiring speeches, songs, poems, musical recitals and one particularly delightful dance performance from the deck of the one of our now proliferating fleet of boats, which was moored in the street outside the Royal Courts of Justice before being sailed across Waterloo Bridge to be anchored outside the Old Vic theatre. All this was a part of the advertised ‘Summer Rebellion’, conceived and birthed quite rapidly as a sign of our developing confidence that we needn’t feel constrained to stick to the social movement theory which says that rebellions are only likely to work in the spring and the autumn.

It did seem but an interlude, nonetheless, with the feeling of powder kept as dry as possible for the coming ‘big push’ in October. Curiously enough, the end of the same week took me, along with numerous partners-in-crime, to another of Her Majesty’s courts of law (the City of London Magistrates Court) to answer charges of failing to comply with a section 14 notice issued under the Public Order Act back in April, for which the 30 or so rebels assembled that morning had all been arrested – part of a much larger group of about 1100 against all of whom, it would appear, charges are to be brought. It was a noisy and good-natured atmosphere in the court anteroom, with lawyers and court officials evidently as bemused as the defendants about how proceedings were to be managed, especially given that about ninety percent of us  seem determined to plead not guilty. Even with group trials and joint defences (the arrangements for which took up more or less all of the morning), it will, according to my rough calculations, be about a year of court time before we all get through the system and emerge on the other side, most probably with a conditional discharge. Again, the ratio between admin – conversations with and between lawyers and endless checking of paperwork – and action – How do you plead? Not guilty. – was highly disproportionate.

 I was fairly sanguine about the prospect of being charged, as I had been about being arrested. According to my understanding of the model of civil disobedience which we are pursuing, large numbers of arrests and the penalties which are bound to accrue are a necessary part of the process; as are the disruptions and delays created within the legal system by our not guilty pleas. I felt less at ease about all this when actually in attendance at the court, however. This was not to do with finally being confronted with the consequence of my actions in refusing to move out of the road when told to do so, but to do with the internal conflict created by my own behaviour and later response. 

Viz: there I am one sunny morning calmly refusing to move when politely asked to do so numerous times by numerous police officers who offer careful explanations for their requests. In doing so, I  claim a moral high ground, saying that the sacrifice of my arrest is necessary to bring attention to my cause. (This I fervently believe). Then, later, in order to create further disruption and dilemmas, I employ fine legal minds (the owners of which are clearly making sacrifices of their own to do their best to provide outstanding service for minimal costs) to try to demonstrate that the crime, for which effectively I wanted to be arrested, was not a crime at all but merely an expression of my human rights and an action necessary to prevent a much greater harm. (This I also fervently believe). If the paradox of this is not felt by the arresting officers and the rather urbane and dapper District Judge – which I doubt, they all seemed intelligent and reflective people – then it is by me. “Please arrest me”, I say, more or less (in lighter Pythonesque moments on the bridge some people actually did say that) but then I insist that I have committed no crime.

Our theory, of course, suggests that these dilemmas are for the authorities to struggle with – arrest the activists and it feeds publicity and sympathy, don’t arrest them and we have to give into their demands; subject them to lengthy trials costly to them and the public and generate more publicity and sympathy, or let them go unpunished and undeterred to do the same again. I have to say, however,  that in the moment of being required to confirm my personal details and then say “Not guilty” (my only real contribution during four and a half hours at court) I felt that the dilemma created for the authorities through my behaviour was also a dilemma for me. It was difficult to feel comfortable with it but I equally felt that I had no choice – according to the moral imperative – to do otherwise. The outcome of this was that I felt a level of discontent – and even outrage – that I was in this position – a position which, of course, I had put myself in. I recalled that I had experienced a very similar feeling when in the police van on the journey from Waterloo Bridge to Belgravia Police Station. I had wanted to be arrested but I objected to it, inwardly, strongly. I genuinely appreciated the restrained and compassionate conduct of the police officers and I refused to do as they asked me, or even to lessen the inconvenience to them by walking to the police van rather than insisting on being carried.

The absurdity of such dilemmas had made me laugh on the bridge but made me cry in the police van; we were all putting ourselves and each to such a lot of trouble, marshalling huge resources in creating a series of impossible conflicts and problems. Surely it would be easier to work together to set about solving the very challenging but probably  not impossible problem of climate and ecological breakdown.

Apparently not. As a society, it seems, we would prefer to remain in denial, unconscious to the seriousness of the climate problem and the need to get on now with doing something about it and distract ourselves with the sorts of games described above. Notwithstanding that these games are often fun- in the sense of providing emotional and intellectual interest as already described – this is nevertheless counterbalanced by a sense of stress, anxiety and frustration (in short, discontent) associated with constantly trying to face the world – and thus face it oneself – with how bad things are. Some on the ‘other side’ of course, might claim that the activism through which we try to bring the  problems to awareness and demand their solution is itself a form of denial; the problems can’t be solved, we are just using our activism as a manic defence to escape our feelings of discontent. I sometimes wonder if this is right.

I’ve also been troubled lately by the idea that my activism is enabling others to remain in denial of the need for them to do something: it’s ok, no need to worry so much now, ‘those people’ are doing something about it, I can just get on with business as usual and support them from the sidelines. I’m not intending to dismiss the value of this ‘support’, even the armchair variety, but if it ends up looking to too man people like an alternative to real activism then we’re sunk. In the end this is a numbers game. We don’t need everyone by any means but we do need more of us. Three times the number on the streets, three times the arrests and the dilemmas presented to the authorities start to look completely unmanageable. Five times and maybe everything changes.

And of course this – everything changing, as quickly as possible – is what we need. It seems increasingly blindingly obvious to me that all of the alarming trends in the world – alongside climate crisis, the rise of nationalism, the election of corrupt egomaniacs to positions of leadership and the visible collapse of civil society – are all connected. This seems equally obvious to most people I speak to and I am therefore increasingly at a loss to understand why there isn’t a really massive collective uprising. It would be less incomprehensible were it not for the inclusion of climate breakdown in the mix. The other stuff, although signifying a deep malaise of decadence difficult to reverse, is at least technically changeable at the ballot box. Not so with climate change. Eleven years and counting.

These thoughts bring growing impatience with the armchair support and the potential for discontent to develop into a kind of fundamentalism, forming itself into questions like ‘Are you with us or against us?’ and possibly into a more radical agenda for those who have left their armchairs. I’m pretty sure that this wouldn’t be helpful, and it brings me back to the earlier reflections about my Alf Garnet / Victor Meldrew subpersonality. The task, it seems, is to manage, contain and direct the discontent, possibly even to transform it into something more careful and loving. I recall that something like this did indeed take place when we were on the streets together in April. Maybe anticipating another outpouring of creativity and goodness in October can help me control my discontent until then; and perhaps encourage a few more to get out of their armchairs and be a part of it.

SEVEN. June 15th 2019

Somehow, in the midst of the frenetic build-up to the April rebellion in London, I agreed to stand for election as a Town Councillor, produced a leaflet setting out my ‘pitch’ as an Independent candidate and got it delivered to about 900 houses with the aid of a friend and my amazingly supportive spouse (notwithstanding her dodgy hip). This seemed improbable enough to me at the time and I more or less forgot about it in the excitement of everything else; and then, even more improbably, it turned out I had got elected. I am thus part of what I believe is referred to as a ’rainbow alliance’ of councillors from different progressive parties who have decisively ousted the Tories at both town and borough council levels and are now poised to change the world (well, a town and a district, as far as we possibly can).

This happened a few days after my last biog post and since then it feels like my feet have barely touched the ground. I can’t say that the duties of a Town Councillor are in themselves hugely onerous but in combination with effectively having a full-time job as an an environmentlal activist they are proving the straw that could break a camel’s back. The feeling of stress thus engendered is now reducing to a more manageable level but it has been a bit of  a challenge.

I suppose the primary issues are inner conflict and exposure. Although I had never expected to enjoy reading boring papers, attending formal minuted meetings, listening to some quite tedious speeches, and having to tolerate arcane and opaque procedures, I had been prepared for it. But I hadn’t anticipated – although it seems obvious now – that I would end up worrying that I was not doing my duty nor living up to the expectations – whatever they are – of the 578 people who put a a cross beside my name. There is definitely a part of me that would like to take all of the ballot papers back to the people who filled them in and explain that there has been a mistake.

It is early days, however, and I think the early feelings of discomfort and anxiety  are easing as the role and its encumbrances become more familiar. One of these encumbrances is a gown, which Town Councillors in our ‘historic’ (what a stupid term that is) town are expected to wear. This is, to me, such a ridiculous piece of ‘tradition’, making representative democracy look more like a theatrical demonstration of the hierarchy and privilege that it supposed to have replaced, that I (along with the 4 Greens on the Council) refused to wear it. Interestingly this seemed to create more of a stir at the first council meeting, judging by the reactions to it on local social media pages, than anything which anybody actually said. 

I didn’t in fact say anything on that occasion, which is mainly because I had promised myself that I will only speak when I have something useful to contribute. I must say, however, that had I wanted to speak I would have first had to negotiate my way past several obstacles including not understanding how my microphone worked and not having received any introduction to the rules of engagement – when one is allowed to speak, how one is supposed to address the Chair (there was, amazingly, fierce opposition from the 3 remaining Tories to the  proposal that this term now be adopted in preference to Chairman) and so on. It was all a bit like the first day at public school; although he politely poured me a glass of water and showed me how to prop my name badge up on the desk so that it would be visible to Madam Mayor in case she wanted to  ‘call’ me, I had the distinct feeling that the veteran Conservative ‘triple-hatter’ (a councillor at 3 different levels) sitting beside me was enjoying my discomfort at not really knowing what the hell was going on. As we waited for proceedings to begin he asked  about my ‘background’ in the manner of a  slightly senior boy and managed to express extreme distaste and scepticism at my response at the same time as being scrupulously polite. During the meeting this man made several long speeches to no purpose except demonstrating his proficiency and confidence with the technology and procedures; and then , at the end, flounced off, flinging his gown over his shoulder, without a word. Madam Mayor, who is in normal life my friend , was officially ‘made’ in some weird ritual, part of which took place behind closed doors. Like the other ladies in the chamber, she wore a funny hat as well a gown. The Town Clerk sat in front of a portrait of the Queen and wore a curly wig. It was all very strange.

But stranger still was finding myself less than a week later singing a ‘Police’ song to an assembly of county councillors, one of whom was the very man I had sat next to during my ‘initiation’ as a Town Councillor. This time I was in the public gallery with a sizeable bunch of fellow activists embarking upon what we had desigated as an ‘introduction’ to the county councillors, upon whom we are calling to declare a climate emergency and deny licences to shysters trying  to make a fortune by speculating for oil in the Surrey Hills. (We are also calling upon them to divest the pension fund, for which reason we disrupted another meeting more recently, but that’s another story).

It was really quite an odd experience looking down, whilst singing “Every breath you take, I’ll be watching you” to see not only the aforementioned public schoolboy veteran of local government, but also my friend Madam Mayor (she too being a triple-hatter) and a couple of other political acquaintances gawping back up at me amongst the crowd of bewildered councillors. Needless to say the Chair (or possibly the Chairman, I can’t remember) adjourned the meeting rather crossly on account of the singing, but quite a few of the others seemed to take it in good spirit and one of the Conservatives even filmed us on his phone and tweeted the footage around later  alongside warmly positive comments. (It was a couple of days after Nigel Farage had been covered in milkshake and I think he appreciated our contrasting lack of aggression). The somewhat surreal tone of the experience was continued when, a few days, later, correspondence with the Council Leader whose meeting we had disrupted led to his offering to get together with a few of us to see what we can do for each other. I don’t think this means that he’s going to be coming on demos with us but I suppose you never know and I await the appointment with interest.

Once it sunk in that I had actually been chosen to serve by the good people of the Town I did anticipate that the split between my two ‘new’ personas – in one of which the raison d’etre is to break the law and in the other of which the code of conduct specifically charges one to uphold it – would be a bit of a challenge. In reality, aside from the awkwardness of unexpected meetings out of context as described above, it’s actually not too bad. Since our newfound celebrity engendered by the London rebellion we seem to have become actually quite popular with local politicians, and several  have joined our group. I expect that a radical sociologist might sniff the danger here  of the movement being pulled too much into the mainstream – accommodated, pacified and compromised – and I’m sure that’s a valid concern. I hope, though, that the reverse is happening; at our most recent ‘action’ there were three people including me who are elected to public office but were nevertheless singing quietly to the members of Pension Fund Committee whilst showering the room with flower petals.

I have no idea where this will all end but at least a lot of the time it’s interesting and exhilarating. This is a good job because some of the time it is also very demanding and upsetting. It’s distressing to consider human extinction on pretty much a daily basis and I think this is why our actions tend to take on a slightly crazed tone, (which hopefully is also quite attractive and engaging). It’’s a bit like people working in the emergency services who are renowned for dark humour (We are of course the 4th emergency service). It we weren’t thinking of essentially silly things to do in order to shake things up I suspect we might all  be cracking up with despair.

When I’m not feeling exhilirated or excited or distressed or despairing I am mostly completely knackered and quite possibly burned-out. It feels like several years since this journey got so intense, although it is in reality barely 3 months. In that time I seem to have gone from tentative semi-commitment  to hard evangelical conviction. Increasingly, as the entirely dysfunctional and weirdly disturbed tapestry of political ‘reality’ unfolds itself as a backdrop. it feels like I am engaged in a simple battle between good and evil and this only serves to drive me further into a kind of ’superhero’ mindset ; ‘if not me, then who, if not now then when?’ . Its actually very good for self-confidence but it’s also a bit wearing, perhaps for others as well as for me. I think I may have become the archetypal ‘tireless’ activist’ ; except of course that this is a serious misnomer. Those of us suffering with this condition are not tireless . We are in fact very tired, we just can’t stop.

SIX. 1st May 2019

Well, I didn’t expect that.

Like almost all of my several thousand comrades who turned up in London on April 15th rather sheepishly carrying flags and banners and sporting strange patches pinned onto our clothing, I imagined that we would probably be home in a day or two having got the climate emergency onto page 7 of the Guardian and a very quick mention for our activities on ITV news. What i didn’t anticipate is to find myself and my colleagues all over the media and social media for days on end, including brief personal appearances on prime time television news and several wide circulation YouTube videos and a brief cameo of myself doing yoga on Waterloo Bridge on Newsnight (plus, apparently a photo of same in the New York Times). 

More importantly, I did not expect that the audacious plan for a relatively small group of activists to bring most of central London to a prolonged standstill would be anything like as successful  as it was, nor, on the back of that success, the surge of sympathy and support from the general public, the press and TV and even, heaven help us, actual policy makers. Several days on from the pausing ceremony which was the denouement of the adventure I still find it incredible. I am almost as stunned by it as I was by the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump that activated me in the first place. Did that really happen? Articles in todays national newspapers about very serious attempts in the UK parliament to declare a climate emergency backed up by proper proposals for real change, and by the actual passing already of such motions in Scotland and Wales tell me that it did. Plus, for good measure, there is the local newspaper on the kitchen table with a photograph of my wife being arrested emblazoned on the front page.

We appear to have changed the world in a significant way, a fact so astonishing and delightful to me that i am a long way from having integrated it yet. What does this mean? Does it mean after all that activism works, that a small group of determined people really can change the course of history? Does it mean I can return to my original plan of retirement – travel, tennis, writing, guitar, gardening and just generally being a lazy old git, all that?

Yes and no seem to be the answers. Yes activism works. It does, There is no denying it. There has been a seismic shift of consciousness and this came about because several thousand people (with the support of several thousand others who stayed at home) took it into their heads to act upon their convictions and implement, together, an improbable, even ridiculous plan to blockade central London, stage a series of logistically difficult stunts like parking a boat its the middle of Oxford Circus, turning Waterloo Bridge into a garden and staging rock concerts at Marble Arch on a stage powered by solar panels, remain steadfastly peaceful and goodwilled notwithstanding prolonged discomfort, arrests, and sleep deprivation, and in doing so win over the hearts and minds of others. Everything is changed.

And no. No first, of course, because winning over hearts and minds is only the first step. I’ve been around the block enough times in my earlier life, especial as a therapist, to know that the intention to change (even when it’s completely sincere, and let’s not kid ourselves where people like Michael Gove are concerned) is just the start of a long journey in an act of will which must be supported and consistently reinforced and recharged with the energy of activism. The road to hell really is paved with good intentions. Even if they agreed to all our demands there would still be a very challenging process ahead, in which the ways of achieving these ambitious goals are deliberated upon, choices made and held to in the shit-storm of deluded denial and  multitudinous self-interested counter-attacks which will follow, not to mention the implementation of a sustained programme of complicated and difficult, painful action requiring loss and sacrifice and which even then is by means certain to succeed. 

This all implies that continued determined activism will be necessary – to reinforce, to remind and to resist the reactive oppositional forces which will most certainly be activated in due course. We will need activism most of all to insist, in the phrase of the Yippees of the late 1960’s that “We want everything now”; otherwise our dreams will be torn to so many shreds by a process of compromise, minimisation, manipulation and attrition that we will scarcely remember them. That part, I suspect, is not going to be pretty, and possibly not as much fun either.

No also because, since activism evidently does work, the moral imperative is to continue. Anyway, as a colleague remarked to me recently, in this particular movement there’s no stopping once you’ve started. The energetic forces you have stimulated in yourself and others start to act upon you, generating new ideas and actions which carry you forward whether you like it or not. Mostly, you do like it. It’s completely exhilarating and exciting. The self-organising culture within a strong framework of clear purpose and simple boundaries is productive in a way that I have never experienced in any other field of work. Things not only get done, they get done well and quickly. It’s worth remembering hear that no-one is getting paid. The motivating reward seems to be pleasure. It is no exaggeration to say that the period 15th – 25th April was one of the happiest times I can remember in my life. I was generally uncomfortable, constantly tired and frequently stressed – in the sense of having things to do which were too difficult and too many given my resources. But I have never felt more at ease with myself nor more sure of what I was doing and why. I met many ordinary and extraordinary people, received more kindnesses than I can remember, saw beauty, sadness, joy and pain, witnessed and took part in many creative, collaborative endeavours, laughed, cried, shouted and sang my heart out and generally loved and was loved by it all.

I suppose this feeling won’t last. Basically I and others are coming down off of an extended peak experience and a bit of anti-climax is only to be expected. As they say. “After the enlightenment, the laundry”, and there is plenty of that. Aside from the pile of domestic things to do that I had neglected and indeed completely forgotten even existed, there is the matter of being physically exhausted and emotionally burned out. A bit of a downer is probably round the corner . But I don’t care much at the moment.  I know the fight is far from over, but I’m not afraid anymore.and I am convinced, from my experience in London that we will be able together to manage whatever difficulties arise in this post-rebellion period, to recuperate and regenerate and come back at least twice as strong for the next challenge.

Time will tell. Unexpected things can go wrong as well as right. An illustration of this occurred on my last day in London, just as an action outside a government building, a fairly light-hearted media-targeted stunt involving an amusing cloak and dagger preamble in St James Park, was coming to a peaceful and successful conclusion. As we congratulated ourselves on the impact we had made and celebrated the fact that the police had even declined to arrest anyone on this occasion, it emerged that no one had thought to bring any solvent to help unstick the people who had glued themselves together like a line of paper cut-out dolls across the entrance to the building. The police had been pretty kind and courteous to us all week, but they understandably drew the line at calling out their specialist solvent-carrying team given that that were choosing not to arrest anyone. They remained polite to the last but I imagine that a few of them had a quiet chuckle to themselves as they went off for tea and left us to it.

We did eventually manage to source some solvent and get the good people unstuck without undue distress but I suppose the incident shows the importance of not taking anything for granted. Perhaps fortunately, the TV cameras had left by this time, leaving the rather slick image which I think we had established intact. It wasn’t the first time in that fortnight that the timing of things – such as the appearance in the city of an iconic teenage climate hero and on television of an iconic presenter of nature programmes – had gone our way. The weather, ironically enough, was pretty favourable as well. Maybe the times really are changing.

FIVE. March 30th

I once came across an amusing spoof answerphone message for a therapy centre, which went along the following lines: “If you are narcissistic, press 1, if you are co-dependent, press 2, if you have obsessive compulsive disorder, press 3 repeatedly …. and so on. It concluded “If you are manic-depressive, it doesn’t matter which button you press, nobody will come”. 

Manic-depression is called bi-polar disorder these days, but I quite liked the old label as I think it was more evocative of the emotional experience. Certainly the sense of despair and isolation implied by the answerphone guide for ’manic depressives’  speaks fairly accurately to my experience at times in trying to ‘get something back’ from activism. It can feel desolate.  Most times, it seems you have to plant an awful lot of seeds before anything grows. Then when something does it’s as like as not to get gobbled up by a rabbit or a slug. The knowledge that there are other people out there doing the same thing is supportive, and a side-benefit is getting to know loads of new people, but that doesn’t necessarily prevent regular spells of despondency  and occasionally, the onset of a heavy sense of futility which can be hard to shift.

Something which does usually help to shift it is receiving a long-awaited email reply with useful information, or hearing a report of or being involved in a creative and well-attended ‘action’ or being invited to some new group or enthusiastic initiative. It lifts the mood, even though of course it may amount really to nothing more than the brief appearance of  a green shoot which will die in the frost next week; or the sound of footsteps which seem to be coming to answer the door you are knocking on, but ultimately march right past. The sense of being part of a growing movement and of impending change around the corner (or the next one, or the one after) is meaningful and I retain faith in it for the most part, but it is nevertheless difficult, a lot of the time, to feel that one is actually achieving anything. When my dad was still alive he would sometimes ask me in a jolly way , “Well mate, are you winning?” If he were around to ask that now I would have to answer No.

It occurs to me that this is a relatively unusual phenomenon. Generally, when one devotes oneself to endeavour in a particular area, results, at least of a sort, come in due course. You pass a course and get a qualification, or you get a job and later a promotion, or the business you started gets customers and grows, or you establish a family, learn a skill, build a house, grow (and eat) some vegetables, or something like that. I can’t think of many endeavours besides political activism in which the actual chances of measurable success are so doubtful. I wonder what it must be like to work one’s whole life for a political cause which is never actually realised? To beTony Benn, say, who I’m sure had many satisfactions in life but ended up, on his death bed, further away from the main things that the had striven for than he had been at the start of his political career. Worse still, what if you were in the Socialist Workers Party and spent your whole life going to demonstrations at which even the other demonstrators didn’t want you there? Of course, you never know what is around the corner and I might have been saying something like this about bloody Nigel Farage a few years ago, and look at him now (although I trust he will get his come-uppance eventually).

In fact, even when you do get something back, what seems to count as a result may be no more than an echo, which, while gratifying is of course empty of real substance. Seeing oneself described in a local newspaper as part of a group of ‘angry campaigners’ shouting “shame” from the balcony  of a council chamber, or spotting oneself in a YouTube video of a road-blocking demonstration is quite fun momentariIy but I’m not certain it really counts as ‘making a difference’ . I have made a couple of forays into radio phone-ins recently, reasoning that some of them have surprisingly large audiences and finding that, if you keep your nerve and don’t get intimidated by the rather curt ‘researchers’ who answer the phone, getting through is easier than you might imagine. The first time I achieved this I was quite uplifted by the experience of being afforded air-team to explain at some length my view that Teresa May is completely bonkers and then having my neighbour text me two minutes later to congratulate me. But does even something like this actually make a difference? I did think that what I said was lucid and persuasive enough and I even had the odd experience of being able to confirm  this impression by hearing myself ‘rounding up’ reasonably eloquently  a couple of minutes later when I turned the radio back on . This was due to the ‘delay’ they put on to stop crazy people from saying offensive things (unfortunately not a technology utilised in the the Houses of Parliament). But despite my moment of fame I feel quite doubtful that it had any actual impact. I have to bear in mind, after all, that the reason I haven’t  engaged with talk radio in the past is that I generally think that  the people who phone  in are idiots.

The second time I called in (to say something very obvious but nonetheless very clever about the link between teenage knife-crime and the  fact that government has systematically been stripping away all resources from youth work for decades) I had the very tantalising and frustrating experience of being told several times that I was the next caller to be put through only to be summarily cut off without explanation when the presenter abruptly switched to a different topic. In contrast tot the previous experience. this was very disappointing and left me feeling depressed for a couple of hours. Ridiculous, I know. especially when you consider that the likelihood of what i might have said making any positive difference to anything is minuscule.

Or maybe it isn’t. That’s the trouble, I suppose, you just don’t know. If you are one of a million people on a march, surely it won’t matter if you don’t go because there will still be 999,999 others. What on earth could be the point of sending an email to your MP, or even of voting in an election (or a referendum), when the numbers are so big and the actual impact of what one individual does so inevitably small? Of course, we all know that this an error of thinking, because the only way you get a million people behind something is through a million individual decisions to do the same thing. But this challenges the mindsets of our lazy brains, which collude with our psychological defences against taking responsibility to encourage us towards passivity. In fact, contrary to what my feelings sometimes tell me, reason and evidence suggests that some of this activism, by me and the other 999,999 people, or however many there are of us, is actually making some sort of difference. If I look back over the past six months to see how much news coverage the climate crisis now gets, for instance, I would have to say that it is more. Did I do that? Did we do that? Maybe, At least, maybe.

All that leaves us with, it seems to me, is the requirement to be active in whatever way one can, notwithstanding that we may find ourselves sounding like an idiot on the radio or ’wasting’ the time in which we might be doing something enjoyable on signing petitions, emailing MPs, attending dull meetings and, occasionally, hitting the streets in some more lively activity. Which brings me to anther conundrum: does the fact that actual activity – in the sense of being on a big march, or walking around campaigning, or blocking the traffic in the local High St, (as happened recently in a rather elegantly-designed gesture of ‘alarm’ and defiance) – leaves one feeling better actually mean anything? Certainly I feel  expressed, empowered, enlivened, through the visceral experience of doing something with my body , with other people, but so what? I read a rather intellectual article about this recently which suggested that this is really important, but I’m not sure where the evidence is. Who knows what brings the change. It’s all rather puzzling. My mood shifts from elation to despair often without reference to real external changes.

If I was still a therapist I suppose I might be concluding that the internal changes are really the issue; or, at least, that it’s not isolated concrete achievements in the external world – Brexit or no Brexit, a crap voting system or a decent one, the council agreeing or refusing to declare a climate emergency (or to allow some oil cowboys to dig a fucking great oil well in the middle of an ancient forest) – which will count in the  end, but rather the more general changes we might make in coming alive collectively and starting to do things differently, with care and commitment and honesty and responsibility. In this respect I have been greatly cheered by the rapid growth and flowering of a new local environmental campaigning group which I initiated simply by setting up a meeting, and into which a diverse array of lovely, good-willed hopeful people have poured energy and creativlty. Although we’ve already done loads in terms of preparation, discussion and networking, we haven’t actually ‘done’ anything in terms of any ‘action’ yet, and even when we do it must be considered doubtful that our ambitious aims will be realised. Nevertheless I am made very hopeful and even joyful to be a part of such a thriving and boisterous organism and it feels, right now, like the most important work I have ever done. 

If ‘change gonna come’, real change, I think it might be this way, through the regenerative power created by people collaborating  in a common cause, believing a bit in themselves and each other, and taking pleasure in the endeavour of doing good things together.

FOUR. March 6th 2019

In contention for ‘highlight of my activism journey so far’: the feeling of hope and solidarity engendered by finding myself among 700,000 people at the second People’s Vote march; the unexpected thrill of being arrested on Lambeth Bridge at the first big climate demo and hearing the cheers of hundreds of people behind me as I was marched away by two policemen (who, by the way, were very nice about it).

The low point is to be found somewhere among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of minutes of discussion about stuff  in draughty halls or overcrowded front rooms.  Agendas are circulated. Minutes are read through and agreed. Proposals are made and voted upon. Most of us are patient and stoic, team-spirited to a fault, recognising that this is somehow what we have to do in order to ‘get organised’. Somewhere, sometime, as a result of these machinations, no doubt as necessary but also as tedious as cleaning the bathroom, somebody actually does something. I suppose this is activism, but it really doesn’t feel like it.

Most likely, if we didn’t do this, we would never get anything organised and we wouldn’t build the sense of familiarity, connectedness, trust and solidarity  necessary to mount a challenge to the status quo which has any remote hope of being effective. John Cleese once presented a very entertaining film about meetings – their pitfalls and purposes – which did the rounds in the public and voluntary sector in the nineteen-eighties and which pointed out, as a central thesis, that the purpose of meetings was not primarily functional but social; we need to get together and feel this sense of collective discipline and order sometimes, even though there might be all sorts of easier ways to organise and coordinate action than to sit together for hours on a Wednesday evening and record every last matter arising and item of urgent any other business; which, in my experience, rarely turns out be urgent, except in the sense that the person raising it feels an urgent desire to speak about it.

This brings me onto a particular problem with meetings, which is the tendency for their real purposes to be hijacked by the personal needs and interests of one or two individuals. This is partly why Cleese made his film and tried to convey the importance of good ‘Chairing’ and other procedural skills which can help things to go smoothly. If there is not good Chairing, plus attentiveness and discipline from most participants, and if there are people present who we might describe as having “high needs”, then the meeting can quickly become a drain upon rather than a support to the group’s energies and endeavours, Meetings in general may start to be experienced as a drain (Cleese’s film was entitled “Meetings, Bloody Meetings”) and, feeling themselves alienated, activists will drift away and become lost to the cause. Of course, this is one very big reason why the world of national politics is dominated by manipulative people with insufferably large egos and unappealing personalities; their needs are so high and their capacity to meet them anywhere else except within a political organisation so low that they are prepared to devote twenty odd years of their weekday evenings to enduring these meetings – which are generally something like 10 percent creative. 30 percent useful, 30 percent frustrating / infuriating and 30 percent plain boring – until they inevitably rise to a position of power.

I’m realising that the simple act of attending meetings  – being seen and sometimes heard and eventually recognised – is an important part of building a base for influence, whether or not one hopes to rise slowly through the ranks, like the current Prime Minister apparently did, to a position of eminence (which I don’t). It makes complete sense when you think about it and it accords with the results of research by psychologists and behavioural economists about how people form beliefs and opinions, but it’s bit depressing; the fact that you’ve seen someone around a lot, recognise their face, their name, makes it more likely you’ll trust them and maybe even start to admire them and think of them, for no better reason than their familiarity, as a potential leader.

Having said that, it’s also true to say that it’s quite easy to get tired of some people quite quickly. My schedule has been quite dense with meetings of late and, having sat with a wide variety of people for hours at a time, I can testify that one two of them should definitely not be considered as potential leaders of anything; although of course this doesn’t mean they won’t be. Being the wrong sort of person to be in charge, as is evident from a brief look at the TV news any night of the week, is no disqualification.

It might be possible to divide into two broad groupings the people who cause problems at meetings. They are  (a) high-needs people who are not suitable to be in charge but want to be and (b) high-needs people who don’t want to be in charge but whose need for attention hampers the efforts of those who do. The first group (obviously, Trump is the archetype) are likely to get power and then do something bad with it. The second group is likely to prevent anyone achieving anything. Both put their own needs way ahead of the group’s.

Because we seem to need to have meetings, managing these people is an important activity and if we don’t have skilful Chairing etc then the proportion of creative / useful  time in the meetings will decrease and the proportion of frustrating / infuriating time will increase. (The boring bit I think we just have to live with). The task of getting organised to bring about change needs to be well managed if it is to avoid being an actual obstacle to change.

In one of the organisations with which I’m involved it has been interesting to observe a different approach to the this task, one which seems to side-step some of the pitfalls of the traditional approach – agendas, matters arising, any other business, and whatnot –  by employing an apparently less-organised approach. Using terms and ideas like ‘self-organising’ and ‘holocracy’ they permit themselves what seems like a loose and even chaotic style and structure which, while it may suffer from an apparent lack of order and imposed discipline, has the advantage of avoiding getting stuck in disputes about subsection 3.5 (b) of the Minutes of the last meeting or of participants losing the will to live because the need to stick to a rigid format and/or the failure to actually keep people to it and to allow them to talk endlessly about their pet personal interests (and sometimes even their pets) has meant the meeting overrunning by 2 hours. 

Indeed, in these meetings, there are no minutes or matters arising or any other business, which I must say is a merciful relief. Maybe it’s there at other levels in the organisation but at least at my ‘foot-soldier’ level, so far,  it isn’t. The absence of this stuff has been refreshing if a bit scary. Empowering people to just get on with things rather than trying to corral them with bureaucracy seems to have enabled a lot of action to get going very quickly. The pace has been invigorating, the atmosphere creative and relational, and nobody turns up to things with that ‘meetings, bloody meetings’ look.

Perhaps most cheering of all, it has given grounds to question a mindset long held my me and others of my acquaintance, which basically goes along the lines of the left being unable to organise a piss-up in a brewery. I have evidence of this with which I won’t bore you as I expect you have your own. Whatever the paucity of the right’s message, they are generally better at getting it across, and whatever their moral bankruptcy the coffers are full for reasons which go beyond the relative wealth of their supporters. Say what you like about Mussolini, as the saying goes, but he made the trains run on time.

The fact is that with apparently quite ramshackle structures, plus methodologies for organisation and communications which were set up very rapidly and appeared to rely largely on imagination and faith, thousands of people did arrive in London last autumn at the same time on the same day and organised themselves effectively enough to keep six major river crossings blocked pretty much all day and to avoid behaviour which was aggressive, dangerous or even impolite; which in my book is a remarkable achievement. There have been other large and very many smaller localised actions which have been similarly successful.

I’m looking forward to more of this, not least as a refreshing antidote to hearing those numbing words, “Matters Arising” in the more ‘mainstream’ activist contexts in which I find myself. It occurs to me that the whole business of agendas and minutes and reports etc can be interpreted, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, as simple resistance; meaning, we know what we need to do and are perfectly capable and ready to go and do it, we just don’t want to because we are a bit scared or shy or lazy, and sitting around talking about stuff is essentially easier (if boring). We avoid real responsibility like this. My inner experience just prior to the bridge-blocking stuff confirms this – I was, despite my convictions, very reluctant to take real action and I more or less had to force myself to do it.

The reason why nearly everyone of a certain age recognises the phrase “Judean People’s Front” is because the hilarious scene in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ (also featuring John Cleese) where the activists don’t get around to saving Brian from crucifixion, because they are too concerned with getting the wording of the minutes politically correct, is such a perfect illustration of this.

I’m sure all movements have to come up against this resistance issue and will progress or founder to the extent that they negotiate it effectively or not. As the climate rebellion group gets bigger and inevitably takes on more of the trappings of the mainstream it will be instructive to see where and how this subtle resistance appears. I didn’t notice much at all of it in the autumn – we all seemed to be too busy and possibly carried away with the excitement of doing active  things – but I’m sure there are many ways it can find it’s way in even if there are no minutes and matters arising; disagreement about structures and procedures, misunderstanding and misinterpretations and, of course, the inevitable high needs people confusing their own requirement for security and attention with that of the planet. If not handled well, these kinds of pressures inevitably lead to splitting – Judean Peoples Front vs People’s Front of Judea – and we definitely don’t need that right now. Here, maybe we could learn a lesson from the right, with their dedication to solidarity in adversity. We may see this as ruthless self-interest, but from another perspective maybe they are just more serious than we are about having power (although I expect their meetings are equally tedious).