How to take care of our children's children...

By Rupert Read

Last week, the new ‘Green House’ thinktank launched, at Parliament, a new report that I’ve written about how to restructure democratic institutions, to take care of the people of our kingdom who are not here yet: future people.

Here are some pictures of the event. Have a butchers!

The starting point of my thinking on all this is this question:
‘Democracy’ means ‘government by the people’, but who are ‘the people’?

I insist, following Burke, that society exists over time and decisions taken today can have significant consequences for people yet to be born. My report argues therefore that the interests of future generations should be formally represented within our existing parliamentary democracy. Building on the philosophies of Plato and of deliberative democracy, and on the precedent of Hungary’s innovative office of Ombudsman for Future Generations, my report proposes the creation of a new legislative house, to sit above the upper house – ‘Guardians’ of Future Generations. The members of this body would be selected by ‘sortition’, as is current practice for jury service, in order to ensure independence from present-day party political interests.

The Guardians would have a power of veto over legislation that was likely to have substantial negative effects for society in the future, the right to review major administrative decisions which substantially affected future people and perhaps also the power to initiate legislation to preserve the basic needs and interests of future people.

I proposes the creation of such ‘Guardians’ locally, nationally, and internationally (e.g. at the U.N. level). A modest version of such a proposal (for an international ‘High Commissioner’ for future generations) is going forward to the Rio-plus-20 governance discussions (see http://rio20.net/en/iniciativas/zero-draft-and-sustainable-development-goals ).

There has been extensive coverage of my proposal: including for example in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Liberal Conspiracy, & www.politics.co.uk . The House of Commons launch last week was attended by an extensive range of journalists, politicians and civil society representatives. Speakers at the launch included Caroline Lucas MP (Leader of the Green Party), Jon Cruddas MP (a leading Labour intellectual), and Norman Baker MP (of the U.K. government). The Hungarian Ombudsman for Future Generations sent an explicit statement of support (for the proposal) to the meeting.

If you want to read my report, which I prepared with the assistance of the new ‘Alliance for future generations’ umbrella-group of NGOs, here it is.

And comment below, to let us know what you think of the idea!

A burning issue: ‘embodied emissions’

By Rupert Read

I recently submitted evidence to a key Parliamentary Select Committee on a key issue of our time: the huge increase in carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels relatively inefficiently in parts of the world which have low levels of state regulation (e.g. China). This ‘outsourcing’ or ‘offshoring’ of emissions completely undermines Britain’s supposed reduction in carbon emissions since 1990.

Go to this link to find out how to read all about it: http://rupertsread.blogspot.com/2011/12/embodied-emissions-my-evidence-to.html

We share one world. It doesn’t benefit us or our common world at all if we reduce carbon emissions in one place, only to increase them more in another…

A Load of Rubbish

By Rupert Read

How Norwich shows the way: Regular food-waste collections renders Pickles’s bribe to Councils to abolish Alternative Weekly Collection a white elephant

Eric Pickles’s recently-announced hare-brained plan to incentivize local authorities to bring back weekly collections of rubbish-to-landfill is an anti-localist move by an allegedly localist Government; an extraordinary waste of a quarter of a billion pounds at a time, allegedly, of austerity; and a measure that has been proven by the Government’s own research likely to decrease recycling rates by at least 5%. (‘Alternate-weekly collections’ have tended to increase recycling rates by between 5 and 15%:

Things are however even worse than that, in at least two respects:

It is an integral part of Pickles’s Department’s plan to seek to damage-limit the dangerously negative impact on recycling rates of this measure by encouraging Councils to ‘commingle’ more recyclate, to help increase recycling rates. As I have shown previously it can actually be a move in the wrong direction to increase headline recycling percentages, if the quality of the recyclate is lowered by so doing. And this is exactly what happens under commingling.

And secondly, the main premise of the drive to bring back weekly rubbish-to-landfill collections is, in Pickles’s words, that ‘It’s a basic right for every English man and woman to be able to put the remnants of their chicken tikka masala in their bin without having to wait a fortnight for it to be collected.’ .

But this premise is fatally flawed. For, here in Norwich City Council area, where I am writing from, as in various other parts of the country, we Councillors added a food waste collection component into the job of dustmen

In Norwich, which is among those Councils to have consistently year after year increased recycling rates over the last decade (in rough correlation with the increased numbers of Greens on the Council…), recyclate is collected every fortnight (alternating with rubbish-to-landfill), but food waste is collected every week. Anyone’s tikka masala remnants are collected regularly without stinking out the neighbourhood – and without the vast additional expense and negative impact upon recycling of abolishing Alternative Weekly Collections.

Once this is understood, the case for the bribes that Pickles is seeking to introduce is entirely eliminated.

'Never mind’, though: We’re all bin this together, as they say…

This is an updated version of an article first published in Left Foot Forward.

Are we a consumerist society - or a 'producerist' society?

By Rupert Read

We are thoroughly used now to thinking of our society as a ‘consumerist’ society, and of ourselves as, above all, ‘consumers’. This seems to many of us now quite simply an obvious truth, and in some ways a good truth: think of ‘consumer protection’ and ‘consumer rights’ organisations, from Ralph Nader to Which? Think of ‘ethical consumerism’.

But: what if this self-image were in fact both misleading and disastrous? The term ‘consumer’ summons up images of endlessly-open mouths, waiting to be filled with more and more stuff. It evokes ideas of us consuming the resources of the Earth. It figures us as the problem. But what if thinking of ourselves as ‘consumers’ were both to allow and facilitate the consumption of the Earth to continue (even: to mandate its continuation) and to take ourselves as individual consumers to be the primary agents of this consumption? And what if in fact we aren’t its primary agents?

The concept of ‘consumerism’ is extremely useful for those who want to sell us things. Because it then seems as though they are only doing our bidding. We are the agents: they are merely satisfying our wants and needs. This is exactly how mainstream economics characterises the fundamental nature of human exchange: it’s a matter of demand and supply. Supply exists, allegedly, only to satisfy demand.

I say that ‘consumerism’ is a piece of false consciousness, and indeed a tool for our continued and growing enslavement. The real push for us to be ‘consumers’ comes from producers. It is producers who need to sell us stuff, in order to profit – and the most effective way that they can do is to artificially create in us ever-growing ‘needs’. That’s where marketing and advertising come in. Marketing and advertising are the selling arm of the producers’ interests in our society. They are what turns us into consumers. Mainstream economics conceals this truth behind its rhetoric of individual consumers being the ‘pull’ factor at the root of economic exchange. But in fact, it is the ‘push’ factor that dominates – producers push their products at us continually, with thousands of coded messages a day. They even get us to blame ourselves for the disposal of the waste that such endless pushing inevitably creates: you wouldn’t know from listening to government and corporate rhetoric that by far the largest proportion of the ‘waste’ stream comes from corporations, not from households.

Our economy, our system, our world, is not really ‘consumerist’. It is producerist. Capitalism is a producerist system. Its most brilliant product, its greatest — its foundational — achievement and lie, is to produce individuals willing to participate in it, grateful for it, and in ignorance of its real nature. Its ultimate product, that is to say, is: consumers. It makes you and me into/as consumers… Producerism is a system – our system – the crowning achievement of which is to conceal from its workers and its bottom-level clients (those whom it changes in order to sell its products to them – to us) its own real nature, such that it becomes the accepted wisdom – and it even becomes a kind of pseudo-leftist or pseudo-ecological creed – that we live in a ‘consumerist’ society.

Producerism’s subtlest product is consumerism itself, as a hegemonic ideology. ‘Consumerism’ conceals the very great extent to which producerism is hegemonic. The production of consumers, of people as desiring-machines always wanting more, with inexhaustible ‘needs’, allegedly fuelling an endless need to expand the economy (and to eat up more and more of our ecosystems in the process): this is really what producerism is all about.

So long as we think of ourselves as ‘consumers’ we are blaming the victim. What we need to do is to slough off the consumerist self-image, and instead to get clear about who is primarily to blame for the waste, the ecological destruction, the ethicless profit-maximisation, the endless commodification of our world. It isn’t us: it is ‘the market’, capitalism, profiteering producers.
Of course, they aren’t even really producers. It is really workers who produce things, in factories, etc. . Well, actually, even that is an exaggeration. Unlike real plants, strictly-speaking factory-plants don’t ‘produce’ anything! They just re-arrange bits of the Earth, with (ever-larger) inputs of energy. But that’s a story for another occasion. For now, it will be quite enough of a transformation, of a truth-telling, if we can overcome the idea that the degradation of the Earth is our fault.

Don’t blame yourself. Don’t blame ‘consumers’. Blame those who made consumerism: the ad men, and the ‘producers’ for whom they work.

To say it again, in conclusion: the ultimate product of our times – the ultimate work of ad-man genius — is consumerism itself, and each of us (thinking of ourselves) as ‘consumers’. Strictly speaking we live in a producer-ist, not a consumer-ist society.

We need to move beyond the danger in the ‘consumerism’ concept of a widespread blame-culture, which I call blaming the victim. We never seem to pay enough attention to those who light and stoke the fires: the ad-men, the product-designers, etc.

Let’s start to do so.

[This is a revised version of a column that first appeared at BetterNation.]

The ignored report sitting on the Met’s website that indicates the possible consequences of Operation Trident: why these riots are really happening…

By Rupert Read

It was very striking in Cameron’s first speech responding to the riots and looting (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/8690895/David-Cameron-condemns-sickening-riots-across-UK.html ) that there was not one word – not one – about why this violence may be happening. Cameron was happy to enunciate very clearly that “If you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment”, which appears to me to be an incitement to jail children however young they be; but he said literally nothing about why these crimes are taking place.

This is a complete failure of thought and of leadership. Come back Lord Scarman and ‘Hezza’, all is forgiven?…

Here in East Anglia, thankfully, we have been spared the riots. But let’s not forget that there are pockets of extreme poverty in East Anglia… How easy it is to forget that relatively wealthy counties can disguise some appalling relative poverty (in rural areas, and especially in town and city estates) ...which should not go forgotten while the focus – because of the violence -- is on big cities.

Why is the violence happening and spreading? Why is so much criminality so easily sparked? As has been argued fairly convincingly over at LeftFootForward (http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/08/a-crowd-psychology-analysis-of-the-riots/ ), it is simply not enough to talk about ‘copycat’ violence. Why is the copying occurring? And what exactly is being copied?

Hypothesis: Part of the copying is not just of other rioters and looters. It is of the rich. As Sunny Hundal put it, here (http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/08/09/only-poor-people-go-looting-and-other-silly-claims/): “rich people do go out looting; they just do so in otherways.” Some of the copying that is going on, I would hypothesize, is of massively wealthy law-breakers and corrupt individuals and companies, be they in tax-evading corporations, in the media, (in) the banks, in Parliament itself, etc. . A society that projects unattainable images of wealth and opulence and then is surprised that, at a time of government cuts to community centres etc., there are lots of young people prepared to risk jail or worse to get their hands on a plasma-screen TV -- or just to thumb their noses at society at large, at get their 5 minutes of fame -- is a society that deliberately is refusing to know itself.

This is how and why a respectable protest against police brutality can morph into a far bigger wave of disorder and disaster.

My philosophical colleague Dr. Phil Hutchinson made some of these points 7 years ago, in a report (see the Appendix to this Met Police report) which you can still find on the Met website!:

http://www.mpa.gov.uk/downloads/committees/cop/cop-040206-04-appendix01.pdf

His argument that Operation Trident – the London police operation against ‘black-on-black’ (sic.) guncrime in London, responsible it would seem for the death of Mr. Duggan, which began this whole imbroglio -- is racist made the front page of the Indy at the time (albeit the reporting on his arguments there was of very poor quality); but his report and his recommendations were greeted with great hostility by the police, and were ignored by politicians.

It is likely that Operation Trident played a substantive hand in starting this trouble in Tottenham, as a BBC reporter put directly to Simon Hughes on TV earlier today. But it did this not just by being a racist targetting of black people, but also, more broadly, by sequestering off 'the black community' as a ‘them’ and not part of ‘us’, thereby making it easier for their problems and aspirations (e.g. for what society tells us all is a desirable level of material wealth) to be ignored … at the same time as our society has ruthlessly stoked materialism and generated the fantastic levels of inequality whose natural consequences (in terms of alienation, desire to emulate the rich in terms of material consumption, reduced levels of trust and mutual care, etc.) have lately been documented for instance in THE SPIRIT LEVEL (see my http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/rupert-read/philosophical-and-political-implications-of-spirit-level-response-to-gerry-ha ).

Take a look at the key relevant sections of Hutchinson’s report: e.g. p.73 (3.11 & 3.12); p.74 (3.16 & 3.17(; p.85f. (Section 7 as a whole). Operation Trident has long been a repugnant mistake, an open wound, an accident waiting to happen: waiting to light a tinderbox.

In sum: Racism seems to have played a significant role in the police shooting that started all this off. Racism and social exclusion is endemic to Operation Trident in a far-wider sense too; in this sense, indeed, Operation Trident is simply symptomatic of elite ideas and practices in a society whose materialism and race- and class- hierarchies generate widespread cynicism and a sense that the only principle that needs respecting is the pursuit of personal profit, whatever the wider costs. The police, the government, and all those who have stoked a rampantly inegalitarian materialist culture bear in that sense some responsibility for the disgraceful and repellent looting and destruction that is at present consuming several parts of our country.

‘Consuming’: much as in rampant out-of-control consumerism…

The case for electoral reform: Why to vote YES to fairer votes on May 5

By Rupert Read

There’s a good old saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But: BRITISH POLITICS is BROKEN. Our electoral system is unfit for purpose. It was designed for a two-Party system: it can’t cope with a multi-Party system. We need to fix it: Ergo, it’s time for electoral reform. It’s time to vote Yes to fairer votes. It’s time to vote Yes2AV. AV [The ‘Alternative Vote’] is the change we need.

How is our current system ‘broken’? Because being able only to crudely put an ‘X’ in one box just doesn’t work when you have 3 or more serious candidates standing for election – as in virtually all elections nowadays we do. In the 1950s, 97% of people voted Labour or Conservative. That figure keeps dropping and dropping every year, with the presence on the scene of the LibDems but also the dramatic rise of new Parties such as the Green Party, UKIP, etc. . We need a system that allows you to list your preferences, from 1 all the way down, so that you can vote FOR those who you support AND AGAINST those who you oppose. AV is voting for who you really want to vote for, and being able to stop those you really don’t.

Our current system, ‘First past the post’, means that you have to try to guess who is best-placed to win, and who you should vote for if you want to keep someone else out. The new proposed system, the ‘Alternative Vote’ [AV], means that you simply list the candidates in descending order of preference. AV really is as easy as 1, 2, 3…

That’s the core case for voting YES, and joining the many countries that use AV in their national elections: Australia, India, Ireland, Papua New Guinea, etc. AV is a modern system, an improvement on the antiquated, outdated FirstPastThePost system we currently have.

Think about it this way: If you go into a pub, and your first choice drink isn’t available, do you just walk out again? Of course not – you ask for an alternative, your second choice. But under FirstPastThePost, you don’t get a second choice! FPTP means no second choices in the pub. Whereas AV means a second choice if your favourite drink isn't available! Thank God that we don’t use FPTP when ordering at the bar… And, for the same reason, we should stop using it for elections, too! Because it is just far too crude. Because it’s just silly. Whereas AV is democracy – your choices – in action.

So: The case for voting YES is clear. What’s the case for voting NO? These are the two main lines I hear:

1) ‘AV is good for extremists’.
This is simply a lie, a Goebbelsian big lie that right-wing newspapers and the Prime Minister, to their shame, are spreading in their desperation to stop electoral reform from winning the day. The truth is the very opposite of this lie. The truth is that AV is far worse than FPTP for extremists such as the BNP. Which is presumably why the BNP are vigorously opposing it... That’s right: Nick Griffin and his dreadful little-Englander Party of racists are campaigning for a NO vote on May 5. Voting YES to AV -- a system in which voters can in effect work together to make life harder for unpopular, hated Parties -- will help ensure that the BNP never gets elected to Westminster. Moreover, if AV were introduced in local government elections, it would lead to the defeat of virtually all their Councillors. For under AV, you need to get 50% of voters onside, to win. The BNP hardly ever achieve that, because a majority of voters hate them. The BNP have only ever got one Councillor elected with 50% or more of the vote. Under AV, most people would put the BNP bottom of their preference-list. AV would shut the door on the electoral prospects of the BNP.

…But if you want Nick Griffin to wake up with a big smile on May 6th, then vote NO...

AV would have saved us from Thatcher. AV would have kept us safe from values that weren’t really ours. If we bring AV in, it will safeguard us now against the BNP.

2) ‘To hurt the LibDems, vote NO’.
The NOtoAV campaign, understandably (given that they seem to have no constructive arguments at all to offer) are trying to turn the AV referendum into a referendum on Nick Clegg. This is an unacceptably-cynical way to treat a hugely important constitutional question; but there’s another reason, less obvious, why it’s wrong, and it’s this: Nick Clegg's Party will not benefit from AV. Under AV, you can give your first preference to whoever you want to win. The LibDems might under AV gain votes in areas where they are weak, as they will no longer be perceived as a "wasted vote" in those areas. (A great thing about AV is that it abolishes the ‘wasted vote’ argument against voting for who you want – you can vote for who you really want, and give your 2nd preference to the lesser of three evils.) However, in some quarters the LibDems are now hated, so see my argument (1) above: AV will make it possible if you want to to put the LibDems bottom of your voting-order! Moreover, under AV the LibDems will lose some first preference votes in areas where they are currently strong, as people will no longer be compelled to vote for them ‘tactically’ in order to cast a vote that is not "wasted". Losing votes where you are strong loses you seats; gaining votes where you are weak does not ...Ironically, it simply isn’t true that AV will be good for Clegg’s Party! AV is good news for democracy, but not good news for Nick Clegg . . .

To sum up: AV won’t heal everything about our political system. But it is a positive step; it represents real progress. This electoral reform is a change worth believing in – and so this referendum offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to help revive British politics. Because AV is fairer. AV allows you to express your preferences, to vote for who you want to. That will help small Parties such as the Greens. But at the same time AV helps stop extremists (such as the BNP), by allowing you to place them bottom of your preference-ordering.

AV should be viewed as the proud legacy of the Suffragettes. AV is the natural next step forward for British democracy.

• Are you totally happy with British politics as it is? Do you think everything is going just great? If so, then you should vote NO to change on May 5. (Sadly, doing so would make Nick Griffin’s day . . .)

• But: If you think there's room for real improvement, if you want a democracy to be prouder of, if you want to help fairness and truth to triumph over foolishness and lies, then vote YES to electoral reform . . .

Poster from www.yes.greenwordsworkshop.org

Decentralised ‘Yes to AV’ campaigning moves into action

By Rupert Read

Living in Norwich, I am all-too-aware of what a bad system ‘First past the post’ is. For the MP elected in Norwich South last year won just 29% of the votes cast.

The great thing about Alternative Vote (AV) is that it ensures that in virtually every seat the winner will have the majority of the votes cast behind him or her.

To help explain and communicate this and more, in visual user-friendly ways, a new ‘Yes to AV’ site has just been launched.

This is a new, independent site with loads of Yes2AV e-postcards to choose from. You can send the appropriate postcard to the appropriate person you know, in a bid to enthuse them about voting Yes on May 5.

It’s a sort of http://www.mydavidcameron.com/ with the work already done for you…

The site is the product of Matt Wootton, with editorial help from myself; it is a 'Green Words Workshop' production. (See our joint blog on reframing and values, of which this new site is an offshoot).

We think that this is the kind of thing that could potentially be transformative, over the next several weeks. The Yes campaign needs independent support; it needs a bit of razzmatazz and innovation; it needs to go viral.

Go to http://www.yes.greenwordsworkshop.org/ and help this to happen.

Lastly: Matt and I don’t think what we’ve done is particularly ground-breaking, yet (and here’s the important thing) neither the Yes nor the No campaigns appear to have much like it. The No camp has postcard-like adverts on their front page (compared to the Yes site’s uncommunicative photos of people holding a placard saying “YES”). But they don’t allow them to be sent.

This is not just a technical issue, it’s a political issue, one of messaging, and one of public engagement. It’s not just that emailable postcards don’t exist. It’s not just that more tools for online engagement don’t exist. It’s that many of the political messages themselves don’t exist, because the campaigns are not creating them.

That’s where we’ve come in . . .

From alternative media to Alternative Vote…

By Rupert Read

I missed the major Norwich #Yes2AV organising meeting this week – because I was at the @OneWorldColumn party, which unfortunately was taking place at the same time…

To make up for missing the meeting, I am devoting my column this month to the reasons why I think it is so important, for democracy in this country, for the AV referendum, when it happens, to be won. This issue is very pertinent at the moment because, worryingly, the bill to provide for the referendum is still moving at only a snail’s pace through the Lords, due to ongoing and constitutionally-dubious delaying tactics by AV’s opponents. As the person who scooped the entire establishment media to bring the news to the nation of when the Coalition was scheduling the AV referendum for I have, naturally, been following this story more closely than many. I hope it will end happily. For our political system badly needs this referendum to be won.

Why?

Well, check out this poster. I think that this nicely sums up some of the central reasons for voting Yes in the referendum, and why it matters:

Now let’s consider some common arguments against AV, and see how well they stand up. People sometimes say, for instance, that AV maximises the votes of extremist candidates. This might well be technically true, in the sense that people are no longer discouraged from voting for the candidate of their choice, under AV, because AV eliminates the 'wasted vote' argument that is the bane of small parties under FPTP. However, relative to AV, it is FPTP that maximises the seats that are gained by extremist parties. This is demonstrable for example in relation to Council elections in this country: there are many seats that the BNP have won under the present system that they would without doubt have lost under AV: for the second and third and fourth preferences of voters voting for mainstream/non-fascist parties would in very many cases have transferred against the BNP. In seats where it is not obvious who to vote for in order to stop the BNP, FPTP is the system of choice for the BNP. Which may well partly explain why the BNP, somewhat understandably, is calling the AV referendum a conspiracy against the BNP...

People sometimes claim that it is wrong that under AV votes transfer at full strength. Should a 5^th preference really count as much as a 1^st or 2^nd preference? The answer to this is that if you allow some second preference votes to count for more than others, than you reintroduce into voters' calculations, from the start, standard 'tactical voting' considerations - the very considerations that have increasingly deformed Britain's democracy as we have moved away from being a political duopoly. AV cuts through all that, and abolishes tactical voting in its classical form. AV means that one does not have to shy away from voting for the candidate(s) who one supports, in simple order of descending preference.

Once one understands the reality of how the two systems work, then the choice between FPTP and AV is really a no-brainer: unless either one wishes for some unaccountable reason to keep mass tactical voting alive for the sake of it, or supports fascist parties such as the BNP….

But people say that AV won’t much change our political culture, because it wouldn’t much change our election results. But: this is to make the rash assumption that those who voted (say) LibDem at the recent General Election actually do have LibDem as their 1st preference, that those who voted Labour actually do have Labour as their 1st preference, etc. . In fact, this assumption is much worse than rash - it is manifestly false. It is falsified by the existence of large-scale tactical voting, under FPTP.

The big question about the effect of AV on election results is how the abolition of tactical-voting and of 'wasted vote' arguments (an abolition that AV very largely, thankfully, effects) and the drastic reduction in safe seats that it will simultaneously bring about will affect the first-preference votes of the LibDems and of smaller Parties. In some seats (notably, Labour-Conservative marginals), the LibDems are at present perceived not to have a chance; their first-preferences will go up under AV, in those seats. But this is unlikely to help them much at all in the short term - because, in such seats, they are in most cases far enough behind that they will still be eliminated before either the Conservatives or Labour. In many seats (including obviously most of the seats they actually hold), the LibDems currently benefit a great deal from tactical voting: in these seats, their first preferences will slump, under AV. It may well be that in some cases those first preferences (which will turn into 2nd or 3rd preferences, under AV) will slump so much that the LibDems will be eliminated before the 2 'main' Parties - or indeed before smaller Parties, whose first preferences will in many cases leap up, once tactical voting and 'wasted vote' arguments have been eliminated by AV.

This is a reason for believing that the LibDems may, ironically, suffer in 2015 from AV, rather than benefitting from it. So, if you are one of those people who is worried about voting for AV because you don’t want to do the LibDems a favour, then I would suggest to you that you need worry no longer…

In the longer term, a great advantage of AV is that it enables smaller Parties (which the LibDems may well be again, after the next General Election!) that are not thoroughly disliked by a majority to build up their votes. This is how the Green vote has grown in Australia, for instance, to the point where the Greens have won seats in the Upper House (elected by PR) through being able to build up their first-preference votes (through AV) in the Lower House. And the Aussie Greens have now won their first seat in the Lower House, through second-preference-transfers under AV…

Thus AV, unlike FPTP, makes it comparitively easy for democracies to outgrow ossified Party structures - such as arguably we have in Britain, today.

To sum up: Because it puts an end to tactical voting and the 'wasted vote' argument, AV changes the expressed first preferences of voters. For example, the rise of the Greens in Australia has been predicated on growing numbers of Aussies voting Green even if and where the Greens have little chance of winning; voters can affords to do this, because their second preferences etc will still count.

If the AV referendum goes through, expect substantial changes to British politics - including an accelerated rise for the Green Party. It is interesting to reflect on what might have happened in Norwich South in the 2010 General Election, had the Election been run under AV. The LibDems narrowly won, as a result of mass tactical voting for them, to get rid of Charles Clarke. Under AV, as the election may well be in 2015, would they still have won? Or might we have seen a Green MP, in Norwich?...

It will be good for democracy for small non-extremist Parties which are hurt by FPTP to grow, as AV facilitates. It will be good to end the nonsense of mass tactical voting. It will be good to create a momentum of successful political reform, which could lead on from AV to democratisation (at last) of the House of Lords, to…

And it will be good to give one in the eye to the BNP, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, and the other awful people who are ‘leading’ the #No2AV campaign…

For all these reasons and more, when the time comes, I’m voting Yes. I hope you will, too…

Why aren’t we acting to save ourselves on climate – and how can we start to actually do so

By Rupert Read

In the wake of the very tenuous ‘success’ of the just-concluded Cancun climate conference (see liberalconspiracy.org/2010/12/15/why-climate-talks-in-cancun-failed-miserably/), it is more important than ever to think about why the human race seems to be failing so miserably to address this existential challenge to civilisation on Earth. I have a suggestion as to why, and a suggestion as to what we can do about it.

Let me begin with this very thoughtful post that carefully makes the argument that those opposing serious action on dangerous climate-change eerily echo the arguments of those who opposed serious action to stop slavery. It points out for example the striking parallels that exist between the arguments of the capitalists who called for only voluntary action to reduce the negative impact of slavery, and the arguments of the capitalists who call now for only voluntary action to reduce the negative impact of manmade climate change.

But I believe that the parallels can be taken one stage further:

Global over-heating is happening because of our burning of ever more fossil fuels. This burning gives us access to a vast energy glut, compared to which almost all the preceding existence of human beings has been extraordinarily low energy. But Peak Oil and the soon-to-follow Peak Gas mean that this glut will be temporary. In future, people will not have access to cheap energy in vast amounts; and they will have to deal with the potentially-utterly-dire consequences of our burning up fossil fuels into greenhouse gases like there is literally no tomorrow... In effect, we have grown accustomed to depending on what I call 'fire-slaves', to run our cars, to heat our homes, to do just about everything that our economy-on-speed depends upon. We use (up) non-renewable fire-slaves in huge numbers - thus depriving tomorrow of access to them, and heaping on tomorrow a dire burden of climate instability.

In other words: like the slavers before us, we today, in our profligate and selfish use of 'fire-slaves', are imposing terrible costs -- unfreedoms, manmade 'natural' disasters, sicknesses unto death -- on other human beings. Unlike the slavers, we can't see most of them, for most of them have yet to be born. But that doesn't lessen our responsibility. It just makes it all the more acute. For at least a few slaves managed to escape, to survive, to win their freedom. At least the slaves triumphed in the end, and the proud American South was even defeated, humbled over the issue (and a damn good thing too). Whereas: if we are not careful we will utterly trap our descendants into a life (or death) where they are energy-poor while having to cope with disasters which Hurricane Katrina and the like are only trailers for. For them, there will be no escape.

We ought to think long and deep about the parallels between being soft on slavery and being soft on climate-inaction. When this parallel really strikes us as it ought, and when we wake up at last to care for future people like our own children (have a listen to me here for more on this) then we may begin to turn the corner, as we succeeded in doing on slavery two centuries ago -- despite all the dire warnings about how it would mean economic ruin, etc. . . .

If we handle the climate crisis wrong, there won’t be an economy, because there won’t be a society. If we handle it right, then it can actually help our economy (see http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joss-garman-obamarsquos-new-fear-is-a-cleanedup-china-2158047.html ). But my key point in this piece is: it is simply the most basic justice (not to mention love or care or fellow-feeling), to not enslave our children … and so we need to stop depending on fire-slaves. It is obscene to rely (either way) on arguments about economics alone, when what is actually at stake is a slow mega-holocaust…

Growth and death

By Rupert Read

Death. Death. Death… Have I put you off yet?

We don't like thinking about death. We'd rather think about life. But death is of course an inevitable feature of life.

At least: of individuals' lives. Our hope for our species, and for this wonderful living planet, is that it will go on and on. That our individual lives (and deaths) are just part of the story of that common life without end.

I've been reading a fine book lately: Jeremy Rifkin's The empathic civilisation. Rifkin argues, controversially, that human civilisation is marked by a gradually increasing level of empathy for our fellow beings. The problem is that this increasing empathy has tended to fuel and be fuelled by increasing energy-use, increasing pollution – what the physicists call increasing 'entropy'. Because, as people's fellow-feeling spreads from their local area further afield, they want to go to those places, to trade and communicate with them, and so on. The huge challenge now facing us, according to Rifkin, is to turn a corner never turned before: to increase levels of mutual empathy, while decreasing the energy-use, resource-use, and pollution that is killing our planet. We have to achieve a new level of empathy with people living in vulnerable tropical locales, with many many species of non-human animals whose well-being is tied inextricably to our own, and (most crucially and most challengingly of all) with future people, those generations not even born yet. Unless we achieve an empathy – a genuine solidarity - with them, we will surely not do enough to reduce the entropic burden we are currently producing, that threatens to snuff them out before they are born…

The biggest obstacle to doing what is necessary to achieving this solidarity with our own descendants is the 'common sense' that our economy must keep growing and growing. We need to ask the question: What is our economy growing into? Well, as the economy grows, it eats up more and more of the Earth, colonises more and more of its treasures, and turns them into (harmful) junk and waste.

Something that has to keep growing in order to survive – whether it be a capitalist economy, or a cancer – cannot be indefinitely sustained.

Why are we so reluctant to countenance an end to economic growth? Why aren't we thinking more, at this time of profound ecological (and financial) crisis, of creating a new, prosperous economy that can be sustained indefinitely, a 'steady-state' economy that is not like a shark, but more like a stable woodland or a peaceful people, changing without needing to grow, without needing to invade more and more of the planetary ecosystem?

Jeremy Rifkin has a fascinating answer to this question. He believes that the idea that 'You can't stop 'progress'', and the connected idea that 'Growth is good' are tacitly ways of trying to avoid death. If we invest our - secular, materialist - faith in the fantasy of endless material 'progress' and endless economic growth, then we can distract ourselves (at least temporarily) from the harsh truth: that nothing can go on growing forever; that we as individuals are destined to die; and that if our society tries to go on growing, then it will destroy itself, through killing off its 'host', the living Earth.

We don't like to think about death – so we escape into New Age fantasies about reincarnation, or materialist fantasies about endless economic growth / 'progress'. There is a better way. Through empathic feeling and solidarity-in-action with one another, and with those who have come before us and those who will come after us, we can be part of something deathless. A 'steady-state' society, which will be able – wonderfully - to go on, indefinitely, giving new life to our children's children, and new hope to our imperilled civilisation.

Our responsibility to the future: justice or love?

By Rupert Read

How ought we to think of our relationship to - our responsibility for - future people? Is this question (a question pressing all the harder in the wake of the recent failure to adequately safeguard those future people, at Copenhagen) essentially a question of justice? The rallying cry at Copenhagen was, "What we do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!" But what if it's not enough to call for justice?

Let me explain…

Future generations – future people - are collectively our children. We give birth to them. They are even more powerless than the newest new-born baby. They cannot entreat, nor even scream, let alone return our gaze. They are dependent upon us for every aspect of their life-chances. For we cause them of course to come into being; but moreover, and ever-increasingly, we cause their conditions to be what they are, too.

What is fair is decided in a negotiation, or in a court. In the course of the negotiation or case, one deploys principles to make one's case. These principles, ideally, secure a reasonable agreement. But, there is no fairness, no genuine equity, between two utter unequals. Treating one's baby merely 'fairly' is abominable. Dividing food,warmth or shelter 'fairly', in such a circumstance; doing this ought to be a matter of profound shame. Such 'fairness' is an invitation to bad faith; because there is no actual 'contract' here, no agreement, no negotiation; just whatever you decide 'is' fair.

So: fairness is not what is most to the point, here. We need to rely on something stronger.

What?

Well, one must love one's newborn child. It must be second-nature to treat it as generously as one can. Or, to treat it as not separate from oneself at all.

The very same is true of future people. The analogy is so direct, it is barely worth calling an analogy: future generations are our children. The case is stronger still: if it is true that we must love our new-borns, then it's even more obvious that we must love our descendants, the future ones. Because they are still more profoundly our dependents (our children) than our own dependents (our children) are, for they are nothing without our love and care. Without that care, they will in many cases not even get the chance to exist…

There is no real chance of our descendants inheriting a planet habitable for civilisation, unless we love them. It is not enough to seek to be fair/just. We are going to have to open our hearts to the people of the future as we open our hearts to a new-born. We are going to actually have to care about them enough, for instance, to be genuinely willing to sacrifice the fripperies that decorate our dwellings, our lives, etc., and which are being produced at the cost of the future. It would be truly terrible not to do this, as (on a business-as-usual model) seems likely.
It may be very demanding, to demand love. It may leave us with little hope that we can do enough. But it's better to try to do something that would be enough than not even to try.

Let us give our all for our descendants, our collective children. For us not to be myopic, they need to be real to us. In short: let us love them.

That's the answer to the question which forms my title. It's not enough to try to do right by future generations merely by trying to do them justice, or merely to be 'fair' to them. We should give up, and admit that we do not love and do not really care, and consign them to their terrible fate – or we should love them.

I recommend the latter course.

Churchill was an 'unelected PM'.

By Rupert Read

Last Saturday, I was in London, taking part in a big demonstration in Trafalgar Square in favour of changing on antiquated voting system in this country. Alongside Libdems, Greens, one or two Conservatives and UKIP-ites, and many people belong to no political party, I marched with Billy Bragg to where the Conservatives and LibDems were talking about a possible coalition. We chanted "No deal without PR [proportional representation]", until eventually Nick Clegg felt obliged to come out and address us. I stood a few yards away from him, as he spoke with us and (sometimes) we chanted back friendlily to him. It felt like democracy alive.

Now, a week later (how long a week can be in politics!), Nick Clegg is actually Deputy Prime Minister, in a coalition with the Conservatives. And all the intervening worries about how we might end up with 'an unelected Prime Minister' (if we had ended up with Brown’s successor as Labour Leader, as Prime Minister) seem like ancient history.

But they are not. For the new coalition government, whatever its faults (and I suspect that they will be many), is promising some interesting political reforms. We may end up with a changed electoral system (not, sadly, PR, but at least AV, the 'Alternative Vote' system, in which you rank the candidates in order of your preference, and therefore no candidate can be elected without a majority of votes). We may end up with an elected second chamber. And we will probably end up with fixed-term-Parliaments.

Now, if we have fixed-term Parliaments, and if those Parliaments are hung (as they often will be, especially under AV voting), this makes it inevitable that there will sometimes be 'unelected Prime Ministers'. For, if power changes hands during a fixed-term Parliament – if there is a rupture that forces a change in what the governing coalition is - then the Prime Minister will by definition be changing without a new election.

Some might say this is awful, having an 'unelected Prime Minister'. But note the following three facts:

1. We are not talking about a Prime Minister from the House of Lords. We are talking about a Prime Minister who has been elected just like any other MP, to our House of Commons. We have a Parliamentary system, not a Presidential system (the misleading format of the TV debates notwithstanding). MPs choose who the Prime Minister is, the people don’t choose the PM directly. We saw this in action a few days ago, when it was the balance of preferences among the MPs that ultimately determined that it was Cameron who would end up in number 10.


2. Many countries on the Continent are well-used to this. Germany, for instance – and if you travel Germany's railways, see Germany’s green infrastructure, etc., then you’ll know that Germany is often governed much better than Britain…


3. Commentators have often pointed out recently that it is exactly 70 years since Churchill’s coalition government was formed. But they omit to mention that Churchill too was an 'unelected Prime Minister'. He succeeded to power after Chamberlain resigned, without any intervening General Election. If being an 'unelected PM' was good enough for the man who is by popular acclaim the ‘greatest Briton ever’ (though actually Churchill wasn't great in how he behaved toward the miners, Gandhi, etc. – but that’s a story for another occasion), then it should be good enough for us now.

As I say, if we have fixed-term Parliaments (which would end the ludicrous uncertainty about when General Elections are going to be), then we will get used to it being thus. And why shouldn't we; for there just is no decisive argument, at the end of the day, in our political system, against having a so-called 'unelected Prime Minister'.

Future people

By Rupert Read

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; …any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. - John Donne

We are starting to recognise that humankind is one precious tapestry, one unified mosaic. One people. It is no longer socially-acceptable to exhibit prejudice against ethnic minority people on grounds of their ethnicity, women on grounds of their gender (thus: humankind, and not just mankind), or working-class people on grounds of their class. The last bastions of discrimination are being overcome: such as prejudice against gay and lesbian people, and against disabled people.

…Or, is there one more, crucial bastion of discrimination still strongly in place?

Take this kind of remark, that I've heard on an alarming number of occasions, and perhaps you have too: "I don’t really care about what happens after I'm dead and gone." We might dismiss this as the attitude just of some old curmudgeon, and think that it is of no moral or political consequence. But: it directly implies not caring about future people, the next generation. How would we react if someone said to us, "I just don't care about what happens to black people" or "I just don't care about what happens to disabled people"? We would be appalled.

Future people count, too. Their lives matter just as much.

Or what about this: "No-one is going to infringe on my rights! I can drive or fly as much as I like. That's freedom!" This kind of sentiment, in one way or another, is widespread these days. It is a product of the extreme individualism of our times. Now think what it implies: Because of an unwillingness to tolerate 'infringements' on one's own 'liberty', one is willing to take many things that future people might need. We don't any longer tolerate stamping on (the life-chances of) black people, working-class people, disabled people… Why then do we have any respect at all for the person who prizes their own 'freedom' above the right of future people to have a decent life, or indeed any life at all?

Because we haven't fully thought through yet that future people deserve to be well-treated and decently provided for, just as children and severely disabled people (etc.) must be. Just because we can't hear the cries of anguish of our descendants yet to come, doesn’t mean that they don't count… On the contrary – it just makes it all the more urgent that we make the effort to think and care about them…

We will not flourish as a species unless our ecosystems flourish. I believe that it is high time for future people to be given the kinds of rights and protections that present people – black or white, gay or straight, abled or disabled – already take for granted. Our human descendants need to be granted legal standing. This will protect them, and will offer some significant protection – probably, much better protection than any we currently have in place – for ecosystems.

A tentative start has been made, for instance in Hungary with their bringing in a Commissioner for Future Generations, a sort of ombudsman with the interests of future people in mind. But this is only the most tentative of starts…

What John Donne's timeless poem tells us, is that we are all related, all one: past people, present people - and future people. In the wake of the utter failure at the Copenhagen climate summit - which had the chance of being the most important Conference in the history of our living planet - there has never been a more timely idea.

From Norwich: eyewitness Gaza

By Rupert Read

My friend Peter Offord, an artist and local 'Stop the War' leader, has just recently returned from a historic visit to the Gaza strip, part of Palestine. 'Historic', because it is almost impossible to gain entry to Gaza, if the Israelis don't like what you intend to do there. As peace activists, Peter and his colleagues were considered a threat… Peter wanted to enter Gaza to be able to work with the traumatised local inhabitants there, in his capacity as an art therapist.

Why are so many Gazans traumatized?

The Israeli siege of Gaza began in 2005 when Israel withdrew its illegal settlers, and tightened in 2006 when Hamas won 74 of the 132 seats in the Palestinian Assembly, leading to collective punishment of the people of Gaza by Israel. The siege severely restricts the entry of food, fuel, medical supplies and other necessities through all the legitimate border-crossing-points into Gaza.

Just after Christmas 2008, Gaza fell victim to a viciously disproportionate attack by Israel. Gaza suffered 1,400 dead during the next month including 412 children, and 5,300 injured. By contrast, just 13 Israelis died during the attack. Israel pretended that this was a war; and Hamas, not wishing to appear cowed and humiliated, went along with the pretence. But this wasn't a war. It was a massacre.

One is reminded of the words of one of Israel's most famous ever war-leaders,
General Moshe Dayan, who once said "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous 
to bother."

So: Peter sought, along with a thousand other peace activists from across the world, to enter Gaza, last month, as part of the Gaza Freedom March, to offer help to the Palestinian people. Shamefully, the Egyptian government sought to stop them, revoking previously approved coach permits, and banning all protests. When Peter managed to proceed 'incognito' too close to the Gazan border, he was placed under house-arrest by the Egyptian police. The situation only changed when Suzanne Mubarak - the Egyptian President's wife, and chair of the Red Crescent (the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross) - intervened, angering the Egyptian government but persuading it to allow into Gaza 100 people carrying humanitarian aid for the desperately suffering Gazan people.

Peter and his colleagues then had just three days to do all that they were trying to do, in Gaza. Peter managed for example to visit a centre for war-traumatised children who are using art materials to draw their experiences. They then describe these to their class (which takes place in devastated building) in order to try to reframe the terrible sufferings that they have undergone.

Earlier this month, Osama bin Laden said, "America will never be able to dream of living in peace unless we live it in Palestine. It is unfair that you enjoy a safe life while our brothers in Gaza suffer greatly." So long as the inhuman siege of and state-terrorisation of Gaza continues, Israel and its allies such as the USA (and UK) provide a ready-made excuse to bin Laden and his vicious minions for their savage campaign of violence against Western targets. For bin Laden continued his remarks: "Therefore, with God's will, our attacks on you will continue as long as you continue to support Israel." If we want to be tough on the causes of non-state terrorism, then we have to be tough on state-terrorism. That means, at minimum, calling time on our government's backing for Israel's cruel siege.

Well done to Peter Offord and to all his fellow activists for being brave enough to put their bodies on the line, and to make their way into Gaza despite the pressure put on them not to do so, by Israel and its Egyptian lackeys. If only our government could now be one-tenth as brave.

No chocolates please – we're British

By Rupert Read

Have you noticed the insidious way in which newsagents nowadays not only have chocs and other sweeties right by the counter, trying to tempt you to impulse-buy them, but actually push them on you. At every train-station-shop, at most WH Smiths, and on and on they say, "And would you like this great big chocolate bar, for just a pound?", when you step up to buy something. They don't even bother putting discount labels on them any more. No; the cashiers are simply instructed to try to get you to add a big hunk of processed fat and sugar to your purchase, whether that purchase was a newspaper, a drink, or even some medicine…

Why does this get me annoyed? Because we are supposed to be a society that cares about people's health. A society that is trying to reduce obesity, cut heart attacks, live healthy… And yet we tolerate this relentless oiling of the wheels of capitalism, of 'the market', of the mega-corporations taking advantage of our wants and needs…

I decided to write this column the other day, when I just couldn't take it any more. The lady in front of me in the queue knew the cashier. The cashier, who seemed a very nice woman, said, "So do you want your usual treat as well, then?" The lady in front of me, who was clearly overweight and feeling it, said, "Well, maybe not today; it does all end up on my waistline…" She seemed sorry to disappoint the cashier… I felt sorry for her, having these opportunities to make herself fatter dangled in front of her all the time, and it being implied to her that she was a fool to turn down such a bargain…

As I say, the cashier seemed good-hearted. But I confess, when I got to the counter, and she started asking me whether I wanted a slab of fat and sugar to go with my paper, I just said a curt 'No', and awaited my change…

Of course, it's not only chocolates at the newsagents. This is just the most in-your-face example of something that really gets my goat: we pretend as a society that we are serious about things that we show implicitly – by our actions - we aren't really serious about at all:

• Prominent quality newspapers tell us how important it is to reduce our climate-dangerous emissions-pollution – right alongside adverts that they are happy to run for flights to Glasgow for £1…
• Corporations' PR people jet around the world – to go to conferences about and tell us how serious they are now about 'corporate social responsibility'. (The most responsible thing to do would of course be – to run the thing by video conference, instead!)
• On my own campus, at UEA, you can tell that the place is 100% serious about learning – by the fact that the sign for the student bar is about three times as large and prominent as the sign for the library…

This has got to change. Let's get serious about kicking the fat habit, and stuffing ourselves with 'treats' that we will only regret, ten minutes (and ten years) later. Let's start taking action on dangerous climate change that is commensurate with the scale of the threat – we need to rein in flights, not advertise them madly at every opportunity.

Yes, we all know that choccies taste nice. But there's a time and a place. We've clamped down (a bit) on turkey twizzlers and alcopops. Let's start thinking like a nation, like a society - not like greedy kids. Let's say No Pushing Chocolates At The Counter Please – We're British…

It's the inequality, stupid

By Rupert Read

Are big ideas dead in politics?

I don't think so. For there is a big idea that is coming back, and strongly. The idea is: equality. That people are equal to each other. That economic and social inequality is a huge harm, in itself.

The leading scholar of inequality is Richard Wilkinson. Here are a few of the key results that Wilkinson has shown:

• Life expectancy is closely related to differences in income within societies, but unrelated to differences in average income between rich countries, and only fairly weakly related to differences in average income between poor countries. It is mainly inequality itself that is leading people to die younger, not income levels.
• The UN index of child wellbeing in rich countries is related to inequality, but not to GDP.
• Virtually everyone in a society is harmed by the society being unequal.

The list of ills that can be attributed to inequality is shockingly long. Wilkinson has demonstrated significant connections between all of the following and the level of inequality within a society:

• Levels of trust (i.e. far more people trust strangers in more equal societies than in less equal societies)
• Levels of mental illness
• Infant mortality, and also children's educational performance
• Obesity (people are fatter in more unequal societies)
• The status of women, and teenage pregnancy rates
Homicides, and also imprisonment rates
• Voting rates (i.e. the more unequal a country, the lower the participation in elections)
• Levels of friendship (if you live in an unequal country, you probably have less friends than if you live in a more equal country)
• Levels of (self-reported) happiness.

Wilkinson has shown convincingly that there are remarkably strong influences of inequality in itself on well-being. These considerably outstrip the influence of absolute poverty (certainly across the entire 'developed' world), and are not accounted for by differing lifestyles of the rich and poor (i.e. the poorer lifestyle on average of the poor (higher levels of drinking alcohol, nutritionally-worse food intake etc.) does not account for more than a fraction of the differences found). Here is Wilkinson, in his recent book, The Spirit Level:

"I, like most researchers working on this problem, [had] assumed that the health differences we saw between different classes resulted from differences in material living standards. (…[S]tudies had shown that differences in health-related behaviour – differences in drinking, smoking, exercise and so on – failed to account for the bulk of the health differences.) Most of us assumed that our task was to identify what aspects of the differences in material living standards contributed to which diseases. But what has become clear from numerous studies over the years is the surprising success of psychosocial variables in explaining differences in … mortality."

The main such 'psychosocial variable' is: inequality. What Wilkinson is saying here is that, while inequality may well exacerbate lifestyle deterioration, it is in itself the main problem. (Wilkinson develops detailed hypotheses as to why: including the effort to emulate the rich in one's level of consumption, the stresses this involves, and the damaging psychological effects of failure to successfully emulate one's 'superiors' or to attain their level of wealth.)

Wilkinson concludes:

"There are still people who say that greater material inequality does not matter, who think that only the absolute levels of income and wealth enjoyed by a society matter. That is a view that can no longer be sustained in the face of the evidence."

Wilkinson has launched a new non-governmental organisation / think-tank, to promote the idea that what we ought to be doing above all, all of us, is trying to make our society more equal. Check it out: http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/. It's a whole new way of seeing our world.

The world’s most useless gadget

By Rupert Read

While I was thinking what to write for my column this month, I happened to be in my kitchen, and my eye lighted upon a brush of some kind that I have in my cutlery drawer. It's a weird shape, with a big curved handle, and I really have absolutely no idea what it is for. And I thought: "Hmmm: it's pretty much a useless gadget really, isn't it?" (And it isn't the only such thing in my house, try as I might to 'spring-clean' regularly.)

And then suddenly, I had the title for this month's column: The World's Most Useless Gadget… And the search was on!

To be certain that I was going to come up with the right answer, of what really is the world's most useless gadget, I did what any self-respecting journalist with a limited time-frame does these days: I put the word out on Twitter and Facebook. Within no time, the candidates came pouring in. Here are some of the highlights…

Let's start with the brushes: it seems like there are LOTS of pretty useless specialist brushes out there! For instance a specialist brush specifically for cleaning grave stones. It looks sort of like a posh toothbrush. Probably it would be easier and certainly cheaper just to use an old toothbrush, rather than lash out on this product with its (ahem) somewhat limited usefulness.

Or how about a mushroom brush? A brush specifically and (supposedly) only for cleaning mushrooms. Yes, folks, honest, I am not making this up: you can buy mushroom brushes, gravestone brushes, and weird-curvy-not-sure-what-they-are-for kitchen brushes…

Now here's another beauty, of a different kind: a tie that doubles as a golf ball polisher. How crazy is that?

And then of course there's the fascinating case that hit the headlines a few years ago: NASA once spent millions developing a pen with a pressurised ink cartridge that could be used in space / upside down. While the Russians? They simply used pencils…

One of my Facebook friends directed me to a particularly useful website, if you want to laugh at useless gadgets. Gems you can find on the site include a 'french fry holder' that fits most cars (it is specifically designed to hold certain kinds of packets of chips); Dunkin Donuts cereal; Bubble Bath marketed by blood type (truly bizarre); and an inflatable neck extender – scary!

All good clean fun, and these gadgets certainly can give us a laugh; but there is of course a serious point here: we are wasting our time, wasting our money, wasting our resources on these frivolous wastes-of-space. And doesn't it seem a sad reflection on our culture that huge resources go to make and market these useless gadgets, when they could be going instead to environmental protection, animal protection, education or - you name it…

And the winner? The world's most useless gadget? Well, the one that I think really takes the biscuit is this, that I saw at an acquaintance's house last year: an electric pepper-grinder. Yes, for those too lazy to grind their pepper by hand, you too can have an electric pepper-grinder, making an annoying whining sound as it does what you can do yourself, quicker and better. It's the in-thing, it's useless and stupid and wasteful, it's available now at a shop near you…

But, maybe I am wrong. Maybe there is an even more useless gadget out there somewhere. If there is, then do get in touch and let me know what it is! Better still: write to edpletters@archant.co.uk, and let us all know…

You can follow Rupert on Twitter at http://twitter.com/RupertRead.

Dismediation

By Rupert Read

The media has been a hugely powerful set of institutions for several generations, and especially in this last generation or so. It has achieved a level of influence and even dominance in contemporary culture that would have surprised most citizens of the Victorian age.

But is it time to write the media's obituary? It seems the media may be in decline, perhaps terminal. Its mediation of the messages we receive is under threat. A process that we might term dismediation is seemingly underway.

What is happening is that the ostensible products of the media are being increasingly made available free via the internet, and are simultaneously being broken down into bite-size chunks. (When one looks for a podcast, one needn't look for the rest of the programme / of the series / of the paper.)

The process of dismediation, that might spell the end of the media, is fairly widely (though by no means universally) seen as inevitable. Those who think it is inevitable typically worry about some of its consequences (such as the end of newspapers, unless they can find an alternative funding stream, such as philanthropy), but typically welcome its vehicle: consumer-choice. It's widely seen as a good thing that media-consumers can bypass media to go directly to the stories / information / infotainments etc they desire.

I wish to challenge that assumption. While there is clearly something superbly democratic and levelling about the process of dismediation, I wish to suggest here a powerful reason why the end of media would be a bad thing:

There is good reason to think that such maximisation of consumer-choice is not good. Excessive choice leads to extra unnecessary time trying to make such choices; it involves usually a net loss of information; it leaves us less able to negotiate our world.

There is a good reason then why many people regret and warn against the threats to media. The loss of the Guardian or the BBC would be a genuine loss. These 'mediators' have a style; they hang together in a particular way; they help us know our way around. They embody a wisdom. They help us 'navigate' the world. In simple terms: they make us feel at home, for a reason.

Printed newspapers and public-service broadcasters bring together all that they've decided is worth looking at in one place, and force me to be aware (at least briefly) of a lot of stuff I wouldn't have gone searching for on the web. They make me step outside my information comfort zone (a little).

The welcomers of dismediation ignore this truth: that the collective 'social mind' of communities is very frequently superior to the individual mind that consumerism as an ideology elevates for highest praise. The 'social mind' of something like the Guardian or the BBC or the EDP may be flawed; but it also contains much wisdom. And obviously, alternative media can sometimes contain still more: look at something like Z magazine, and Znet.

But isn't my argument one-sided; won't it be an unalloyed benefit to lose Fox, or the Daily Mail? No; because even these help us know the world. They provide a lens, a gathering system. We come to know our way around them, and to understand something of their biases. Without media, there will only be the individual pitted against an incalculably vast array of sources of information and entertainment.

Mediation is not then prima facie a bad thing, insofar as it helps us to navigate our way about, to a greater extent than we could ever do as isolated individuals. The media must not and will not end, for that reason. Because actually we are wise enough to know that we are not as individuals wise enough to know all we need to know about…

Going nuclear – Iran, and us

By Rupert Read

Iran this week opened up its own very first nuclear power plant to public view. This plant is expected to be operational before the year is out.

There has been a big international debate over the past few years as to whether Iran should be allowed to 'go nuclear'. Israel (anxious to preserve its position as the only Middle Eastern power possessing nuclear weapons of mass destruction), backed by Britain and the USA, has said that it should not. While Iran has insisted that all it wants is a nuclear power plant, to generate electricity from.

OK then; taking that at face-value: isn't there an even more important question, underlying but ignored by the debate over whether Iran should be 'allowed' to build a nuclear power plant? Namely: Is it a good idea for Iran to be building a nuclear power plant, at all? It clearly makes sense for a country like Iran to be diversifying out of oil, which is running out, and the burning of which is meanwhile horribly damaging our planetary climate. But, leaving aside the question of nuclear weapons, does it actually make any sense for Iran to invest in nuclear power?

Let me add to those questions that I've raised so far some further questions:

1. Can nuclear power be produced in a way that does not bring with it increased risks of nuclear terrorism or nuclear-bomb-making?


2. Can nuclear plants be made in such a way that they are invulnerable to the risk of meltdown?

And, most crucially of all:

3. Do we have any solution to the problem of what to do with nuclear waste?

The answer to all these questions, sadly, is no.

And now one final question:

4. Does Iran have good renewable energy resources easily available to it?

To this question, the answer is, of course, yes. Iran has wind, wave, tidal – and, most obviously, solar power, just waiting to be harnessed. If Iran were to put serious money into the very exciting new technology of Concentrated Solar Power (which generates heat and electricity by concentrating the sun's rays on one point through mirrors), it could make nuclear power seem oh-so-20th-century by comparison. For scientists calculate that an enormous country like Iran could provide in perpetuity all the energy it needs for itself, by covering with concentrating-solar-panels a desert area about the size of Suffolk.

In a week which has seen some of the media in a bit of a tizzy about a tiny handful of British green-leaning thinkers who are thinking about nuclear, these questions are salutary. These British greens are thinking about nuclear out of despair about how dreadfully slowly - disgracefully slowly - our government is going green.

But surely the response to that has to be to push harder for us to go green, faster. And let's bear in mind that a renewables revolution would hugely benefit East Anglia, with the tremendous resources of tidal and wave power – as well as wind, of course – that we are fortunate enough to have, here.

It would be a cynical and stupid manoeuvre for us in Britain to start full-bloodedly going nuclear once again. It would make it impossible for us to tell countries like Iran, while keeping a straight face, the truth: that nuclear power just isn't a very clever idea…

In conclusion then: if we want to counsel Iran not to go nuclear, then we must first start moves in earnest to rid ourselves of nuclear weapons – and we must resist our government's ridiculous idea of a new generation of nuclear power plants. It's time instead to go renewable; to go green…

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A hunger for peace

By Rupert Read

The recent critically-acclaimed film Hunger brought home powerfully to many of us the brutality of the regime that faced republican hunger-strikers in Northern Irish prisons back in 1981. Fast forward a generation: who in the early 1980s would have thought that Northern Ireland would now (in 2009) be at peace?

I was a witness to one small part of the earliest stages of that real-life drama, the drama of the Northern Irish peace process.

Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, first rose to prominence as a result of the hunger-strikes recently dramatized in Hunger. He was elected an MP in 1983, but refused to take his seat in the House of Commons, because he did not accept the legitimacy of British rule over Northern Ireland. In 1984, he was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by 'ultra-loyalists'. In 1987, while I was in my last year studying at Oxford, he was invited by my friend Simon Stevens, then President of the Oxford Union, to speak in a major debate over 'terrorism'.

The invitation was extremely controversial. Adams had only recently been allowed onto British soil at all, being considered persona non grata by Thatcher's government. This was to be his first major speech in Britain as an MP and Sinn Fein’s Leader. Many did not want the visit to go ahead.

I helped Simon work on ensuring the visit could successfully happen after all. I vividly recall several phone calls discussing the arrangements, during which we heard various clicking noises on the phone – phone-tapping was a less sophisticated operation, in those days…

Simon had to go through a great deal more, to get things straightened out. He was taken to secret meetings with Sinn Fein officials in safe locations; so fearful were they for the safety of their leader after what had happened to him a few years before.

Before the Oxford Union debate, I met Gerry Adams, and noticed the way he walked, still affected by the bullet lodged in his body. At dinner, I sat beside one of his bodyguards, a man from a background so different from my own, that, by the end of the meal, I felt I could start to understand why someone might take as hard-line a position on the possible use of violence - as a means of resisting what they saw as an occupation - as he and Adams did.

The debate was a little landmark, an early public moment in the slow journey towards negotiations and then, after a decade, peace.

Why rehearse this history? Because my mind is on the terrible conflict in Palestine / Israel. Ireland was colonially occupied by British people, much as Palestine was colonially occupied last century by Jewish (now Israeli) people – therein lies the root of the trouble(s). Decades of violence however seem hopefully to have come to an end in Northern Ireland; not so in Palestine / Israel. Might one dare to hope that, if we fast forward a generation, there could be peace there, too?

But first, there must be a real peace process. That means, for starters, that we all have to be willing to talk to Hamas, the democratically-elected government of Palestine. The Israelis say they will not speak with Hamas until Hamas recognises Israel. But why should Hamas recognise Israel, when Israel occupies Palestine and will not recognise Palestine as a state?

To overcome this mad impasse, it is necessary to talk. If there is ever to be a 'Good Friday Agreement' in Israel / Palestine, then the US, UK, EU and Israel must be prepared to talk with Hamas. After all, if our government is willing to parler with Israel, which has just killed a thousand Palestinians, then should it not be prepared to parler with Hamas, too? Let's hope that Obama sees sense on this and agrees to open up a dialogue with Hamas.

Hamas are allegedly 'terrorists', Israel allegedly not. But: were not the IRA terrorists? Hamas are the elected government of Palestine. After Adams and some of his colleagues were elected, we talked with them. And we talked even with the IRA, who were never elected by anyone.

If there is to be peace in the Middle East, there needs to be enough hunger for it that one is prepared to parler with people who one doesn’t much like. Even with people who kill civilians. As Israel has cruelly killed many hundreds of civilians, in Gaza, in the last month. The dozens of police officers it has killed: civilians. The people sheltering in schools and basements that it has killed: civilians. The hundreds of young children it has killed: civilians…

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