neoliberalism – The Potwell Inn

Hazel catkins beside the River Wye at Hay on Wye

I haven’t written for more than two weeks, which is an unusually long silence. There’s no particular reason apart from seasonal ennui and the slow collapse of our culture into angry senescence – OK so that’s a rather big reason, and the most dangerous of all. Whilst in Hay on Wye this weekend we scoured the bookshops and I came across a marvellous volume of essays titled “The Welsh Way – Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution” – which I devoured mostly sitting in bed in our hotel room because the drains in the building were blocked and the trenchant smell of sewage forced us us keep the window open, in spite of the outside temperature being -3C. It all somehow reflected my mood. Even on the drive home the sun struggled to shine and just hovered us like a black and white pastel drawing of a poached egg. Our dirty weekend had turned out dirtier in a different way than either of us ever imagined.

The book, on the other hand, is brilliant and gave me much food for thought hinging, as it does, on the continued fantasy of Welsh radicalism examined against its actual deployment over the past 50 years. “Could do better” hardly describes it. But the book also brought home how the individual and separate crises of our time are nothing more than related symptoms of the single malignant disease known as Neoliberalism. The book also gave me an unexpected metaphor expressing two ways of living with the crisis drawing on a structure I know well from the inside. Huw Williams writes of the contrast between the old independent and baptist churches that they were:

…… reformed beyond recognition by the Methodists. To [Iorwerth Peate] the Methodists performed a corruption of tradition, in particular in their aspiration to engage with the world, reform it and transform it. The true spirit of the original nonconformity was to distance oneself from the world, seek salvation in the next life, and carry the burden of this life with dignity and patience.”
Huw Williams; The New Dissent: Page 105. Neoliberal Politics and the Welsh Way

I was almost born into Primitive Methodism and later moved into the Wesleyans and from there to low church and then Anglo Catholic Anglicanism. A long path through the traditions that taught me a great deal about the ancient rift between the activists and the withdrawers. I learned well that withdrawal from the world, whilst it might feed the religious ego, just allowed the devil free range. Where’s the virtue in finding some new cruelty or horror to turn away from and ignore every day?

So the photograph at the top was taken – as the caption says – on the banks of the River Wye; now polluted almost to extinction by intensive chicken farms which have proliferated along her banks and which pour many tons of phosphorus and nitrogen from poultry manure into her water every day. The ray of light is that the tree was growing just a few yards upstream from the bridge under which I finally and suddenly realized that I had lost my faith somewhere along that long journey.

It’s December 14th and in just a week we’ll celebrate the winter solstice which signals the return of the earth from the darkness of the declining days and I remember the words of Mother Julian of Norwich ; ” … all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”

A friend in Australia wrote today about the situation in Tamborine Mountain, South East Queensland. Here’s what she wrote:

The water situation is now getting desperate. Families are completely running out of water, and having to wait weeks while the only local supplier tries to keep up with demand. Meanwhile, multiple commercial extractors continue to take millions of litres of water to fill plastic bottles. The creeks are dry and the trees are suffering …….

It’s a scary example of the global phenomenon we’ve come to describe as the climate catastrophe. But of course the example says something else which is, or should be, equally challenging, because the global climate catastrophe and the global economic structure aren’t two problems, but one. The uncontrolled commercial extraction of water; the drought which is causing widespread suffering, the uncontrollable fires, the degradation of the environment and the destruction of forests, are symptoms of a single problem – I could go on, but I know there’s no need for me to write it because every single person who reads it will understand – it makes us feel sick with anxiety or overwhelmed with anger or at its worst, cynicism.

There’s a reason I don’t write much about UK politics. The fact is there are no easy answers because we are living in a time of what Thomas Kuhn called ‘paradigm shift’. Anyone who claims to know what life will be like in 2050 is almost by definition a charlatan. It feels as if the ship has sunk already, and we’re in the water arguing about which lifebelt to grab hold of and which of our fellow passengers knows how to pilot the lifeboats, now the crew are all drunk after raiding the stores.

Do you remember the political fashion, so beloved by New Labour, of ‘evidence based policies’? Loved, that is, until the evidence started to show that things were going to hell in a handcart because the patient was fundamentally sick, and a few paid ads saying that ‘everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ was not selling well in the derelict mining towns of the North East. This is the most terrible and heart wrenching mess and it’s all connected in a rat’s nest of trans-national greed.

However we have the opportunity in the UK this week to turn protests into policy. Saving the earth from climate catastrophe begins with challenging an extractive economy that destroys the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we need to eat. It throws people across the world into slavery and poverty in the name of international trade, and blithely dismisses mass extinctions – including even the human race. When I walk around the grand Georgian crescents of Bath, built on slave money, and see the same people in power, I know that nothing’s changed, and I know that unless we seize the opportunity nothing will change.

There is no area of our lives that hasn’t been disfigured by so-called austerity, whether it’s health care, pensions, social care, education, cultural development, employment protection, environmental policy, transport – you name it. So I’m voting for change, real change. I want to be able to teach my grandchildren their plants and butterflies in the knowledge that they’ll still be there when they’re my age. I want our sons to move out of squalid rentals into properly built houses and I want them to feel secure in their work without facing arbitrary contract changes. Selfishly, I’d like for us to be able to look to a future in old age without fear, and to walk down the street and hear ten languages spoken and a dozen cultures celebrated openly. I’d like to be able to write about the allotment without the lurking fear that the council will sell the land off to another property developer, and if that meant paying a few quid more in tax I’d be happy to oblige as long as the offshore muggers paid theirs too.

There isn’t an option out there to allow us to ignore the climate catastrophe in the hope of building some new technology to purge our sins and let us carry on as before. Our electoral system is rigged against us in the name of stability – i.e. more hardship – and so this coming Thursday is possibly the only opportunity we’ll have to vote for change; paradigm change, and in the US – your chance will come next year. We already know they’re scared, from the tide of promoted lies that flood like effluent into our minds every day.

I had a radio producer once whose recorded message said “you know what to do, so do it!” Let’s do it then.