Voting For, Against, and Despite on 23 June 2016

hen I vote to remain part of the European Union on 23 June 2016 it will not be out of a fear of change, nor for any imagined short-term benefit.

I'm a human being on a planet with over seven billion others, facing a host of challenges. I believe that those of us with the freedom to do so need to embrace and develop the most generous, imaginative political ideas.

I'll vote Remain hoping that the European project is informed by ideas other than self-interest, nationalism and neo-liberalism, even if its economics have been flawed.


If internationalist European structures are preserved, then they are open to improvement in the future, and MEPs we vote for can be involved in that process. If the structures collapse, it's much easier for opportunist power-grabbers to do what they want with everything from health and social care to energy and the environment. I want checks on such opportunism (and successive British governments have been ambiguous, at best, about those).

My vote will not be influenced by current economic arguments. It's ridiculous to suppose that economic circumstances should "naturally" serve someone well, just because they are a citizen of a particular country. Even if that were true, by what mechanisms, precisely, are poor Brits going to become much better off after Britain leaves European Union? The distribution of economic benefit depends on the will of those in power to steer things this way or that, and who among the Brexiters seems committed, specifically, to the wholesale redistribution of wealth among all citizens?

My vote will not be influenced by the pedlars of so-called sovereignty. National sovereignty (like economic growth) has never served everyone in Britain equally. What use a green and pleasant land in the Great-War mud; a new Jerusalem against lung-fulls of twentieth-century coal dust? British sovereignty today is a patronising trick, dressed up by all available means: from the culture of remembrance to Royal-Family tittle-tattle, and relentless nostalgia.


The qualities of Britishness that I value are those that make me sceptical of anyone whose desire for power seems stronger than their ideas. That would include most prominent Brexiters, and all those Remainers too guarded about their own political careers to say that Europe is a bigger idea than Britain.

We face critical, global circumstances: the systemic, diminishing availability of work; a planetary ecosystem under increasing strain; and the multiple crises of culture, democracy and basic resources that are prompting migration on a massive scale. All demand imagination, compassion and greater selflessness in our politics. Narrow-minded retreat would be shameful.

If we recognise that a secure future will require the emergence of some truly radical political thinking, we might ask what kind of culture will encourage it: one inspired by self-interest and nationalism, or a supra-national one? I think the latter.

I'll cast my vote in the direction the most promising, future-oriented cultural space I can discern, amid the campaign rhetoric and posturing.

A Joyous Summer in Neoliberal Britain

here we have to wait years to assess the "impact" of no-brand cigarette packets in Australia, but can't wait at all to see whether fracking for shale gas in the United States pollutes the water table.

Just to stress: that's CIGARETTES, about which everyone has personal choice anyway, and THE WATER TABLE, which, if screwed, will be screw a sizeable part of the population with it, whether or not they chose to go the way of fracking. Ideas about where the water will come from if the water table is polluted? Here, the wizened captains of industry are silent.[1]

Of course, they'll be dead, the short-term profits from fracking having been salted away offshore in their family accounts, and why would they care anyway about the children of the lumpen consumerati, the milch cows of trickle-up capitalism, of whom they know little and care less?

 For guidance in this weird logic, follow the money.[2]

The inventor of fracking, George Mitchell died at 94 in July 2013. According to his granddaughter, and others interviewed for BBC Radio 4's 'Last Word'  he was very concerned about the roll-out of possibly imperfect extraction technologies. [3]

In the UK, we've had a decade or two of whinging about wind turbines, often from folk who happen to be used to having a nice view, whose electricity and gas nevertheless originates in places where other people live with the filthy air and the shitty view resulting from energy production. That whinging has affected the complexion of debate; limited what's deemed possible. Perhaps communities who prefer their nice view (so to speak) should propose means of meeting their energy needs which don't impact on other communities... or initiate a wider move towards a post-industrial living, whatever that may mean.

Personally, I love the "natural" environment, to the extent that I find needless despoilment quite painful, but I also think that we're now in a balance-of-evils situation. If it's a choice between having wind farms in my favourite places and possibly damaging a basic resource (clean water), I'll go for the wind farms; thousands of them, please.

Fracking obviously seems easy to politicians habituated to short-termism, and an easy way to create  a bit of capital churn. This explains why other arguments for it - officially at least - are so weakly made.

[1] http://fracfocus.org/chemical-use/what-chemicals-are-used 

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/revealed-fracking-industry-bosses-at-heart-of-coalition-8707589.html


[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/lastword (Friday, 9 August 2013)
 

As Good as Gods: Progress Dreamed as Shitstorm

o (to borrow the scientists' favourite opener) we'd barely got past avoiding being eaten and building shelters before we got into all the shamanistic, mystical and religious shit. Then, before we were really done with that (although probably because we were done with it) we started with the rational scientific shit. We let that become really quite complicated and detailed, so that quite soon, as with God and all the rest, we were no longer running it but it was running us. And we seemed to like it that way. But simultaneously, after barely a moment engaging with the wonders of nature (within us and without us), we were beguiled by all kinds of industrial and if-you-like-it-you-can-own-it shit, and rolled over by the socio-economic bamboozlement that came with it.

Notice that we were never fully done with any particular kind of shit before our gaze wandered on to the next kind, and so it's not surprising that after barely a few centuries we reinvent it all – even though it's all still there in its original form – so that we can enjoy all the same shit all over again in digital form, along with all the new shit that's happening. Forget that shit, look at this shit. No, don't forget it, but access it this way now. Please complete your profile, enter a mobile phone number, state your date of birth, log on to online banking. Please contribute to the knowledge base whilst clicking on the brightly coloured ads in the sidebar. And shit.

Meanwhile, back in the dreaming mind of the concerned citizen: stop worrying about clean drinking water and social inequality and ripping the guts out of the planet for short-term gratification. Please, everyone, cooperate as a species so that one day we can terraform Mars and everyone can go into space and live to be a thousand years old, enjoying all the shit we did and can do whether or not we've settled the existence of any god or the rightness of bioengineering creatures that are all meat and no motion so that we can keep eating some shit that we got used to and can't give up because we're still big babies even though some of us think we are as good as gods.