The New Political Reality
When you are in unknown territory & have a broken compass you have little idea of where you are going, of where you came from or where you got lost. Without really noticing it, we have crossed a threshold.
The world has changed.
We live in a new era where the amplification and concentration of power and money is unprecedented in human history. The old political spectrum of left and right and centre is incapable of navigating the new geo-political-economic reality of the 21st century.
Today over 3000 billionaires have combined wealth equivalent to the GDP of China
with virtually no restraints on their urge to take more power, control and influence over markets, states, institutions, universities, media and democracies. Their slogans are “Freedom & “Take Back Control” but the freedom & control is for them not for us.
Their method is Putin’s tactic of Maskirovska – a Russian military doctrine of deception that encompasses a range of tactics, including camouflage, disinformation, and strategic manipulation, aimed at misleading the enemy about military capabilities and intentions. It has evolved to include not just battlefield tactics but also political and diplomatic measures.
Hiding behind notions of false “Sovereignty” and “Patriotism” and puppet think tanks, university departments and business schools, oligarchs promote their political and economic agendas beyond the control of governments, academic institutions or scientific bodies. Their aim is to capture not only the narrative but the means to power including the legal means of regulation that might inhibit their freedom of action to control, extract and harvest the value that ordinary people depend upon.
As GK Chesterton might have quipped.
‘Beware oligarchs in flat hats or baseball caps’.
The philosophical foundations of our politics have been eroded by powerful global forces. But whereas one might have thought that the solidity of our democratic institutons and constitutions might have withstood enclosure through built in checks and balances and provided a bulwark against autocratic capture, this is no longer the case. Their inherent liberal predisposition has been fuel to the flames.
Tolerance that tolerates its own demise has no future
Liberalism is past its sell by date. It is wholly incapable of holding self-indulgence, self interest or predators to account because its focus on individual ‘rights’, entitlement and ‘freedom’ has systemically weakened its boundaries politically and philosophically as well as the character of individuals who identify with it. Being ‘nice’ offers no defence in the face of entitled extractive power and defining freedom through neo-liberalism is merely another face of extractivism. In as far as UK political parties are concerned such as Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens embrace the different flavours of entitled liberalism, they offer no route to sustainable progress.
Indeed Labour’s attempts to create economic prosperity through neoliberalism and their mysogynistic culturally liberal concepts of false equality are prime examples of their broken compass.
Meanwhile, Conservatism has equally become unhinged and is now merely a mask for neo-liberal or libertarian extractivism – holding up values of absolutist free speech and action that enables the super rich to hollow out every kind of value from people, place and planet. Some have now recognised that Conservatism has hit a ceiling of efficacy and relevance, yet they joyfully leap further off the cliff edge into inbred populist tribalism justified by an identity-based ‘churchianity’ that has absolutely no connection with the true principles of Christ.
Extractivism that turns living value into dead digits in absentee landlords bank accounts is nothing to do with conserving.
Neither the Conservative Party nor Reform, or any of their associated flavours, offer any way of conserving value. We need to shift our perspective from a two dimensional frame to a multidimensional one that can truly conserve value and protect the means by which value is created as means to progress. Mainstream politicians will likely be the last to get it.
It is time to make stewardship of value (in its widest sense beyond a money-only perspective) the central aim of politics.
Any detective worthy of the name – when investigating a crime, for example the loss or theft (of value), would ask who had the means, the opportunity and the motive to commit the crime. In 2016 there was a pivotal geo-political moment when the EU Referendum, influenced by dark money, unleashed a pandoras box of disharmony which divided our nation by Brexit with consequences that are still unfolding.
Just as it was in the interests of the oligarch-billionaire class to support Putin’s foreign policy – to weaken and separate Britain from Europe as a necessary prerequisite for his invasion of Ukraine, it also serves the American billionaire class to separate Europe from America because in Europe institutional checks and balances are much stronger. The billionaires who own the social media promote divisions of woke and un-woke 24/7 through their unregulated political propaganda, which globalises American culture and cultural divisions, their magnum opus. across the world as though they are somehow natural phenomena rather than the artificially fabricated agendas of a barbarian elite and a culture designed for profit rather than human purpose.
Old -isms and old systems just cannot handle the new concentration and configuration of power in a world of instant global communication and financialisation that hollows out value 24/7
from people place and nature from every corner of the planet by transforming it into dead digits in the banks accounts of absentee shareholders, absentee landlords, absentee corporations, absentee traders, absentee buraucrats and absentee tax collectors.
In the meantime politicians still live in the past and add insult to injury declaring they have a “mandate”. But it’s surely time that we prepare for the next election not the ghosts of elections past. As long as the electorate can only vote for the least worst option – as has been the case in all recent UK elections – true mandates cannot exist in the current two party system under FPTP. Labour’s “mandate” at the last General Election was merely a vote against Tory failure for the previous 14 years not a vote for any manifesto.
When people have been stripped of meaningful agency, meaningful representation and can only vote negatively for the least worst option, it is not surprising that they look for someone to blame. Unless something changes in the next general election people will once again vote against the ruling orthodoxy whatever the consequences – which they have no way of knowing. In a volatile unpredictable complex and ambiguous world such politics threatens the prosperity, wellbeing and stability of the nation.
In this sense our current electoral system is a threat to our national security
Blair recognised that the natural position for the British electorate is slightly right of centre because of the British natual distrust of extremes. Tragically however he swallowed a corporate neoliberal Thatcherite perspective on the economy and passed this on to Reeves and as the only game in town. But Thatchers slogan -“There is no alternative” is pure neo-liberal myth – a false construct sustained by ignorance funded by the billionaires think tanks and so called business schools and the crass journalism fostered by the Atlanticist lobby within the anti-conservationist, neoliberal Conservative run BBC.
We need to change the system so life can rise above and escape the chains of this extractivist, anti-life machine.
To do that we have to change ourselves by remembering who we are and reframing how we see ourselves, nature and reality through a different lens of value other than only money and GDP. Both the dominant traditions of left and right increasingly enable extraction: state liberalism through GDP as a measure of success, and market liberalism through commodification, speculative markets and concentrated ownership enclosure and rent capture.This has resulted in declining public trust and social cohesion as institutions prioritise short?term financial returns over durable communal wellbeing.
The way to re-unite the kingdom is through a productive conservationist synthesis that foregrounds stewardship, obligation and mutual fair share use-rights .
We need a new British Standard of value, valor, behaviour, integrity and service that is congruent with the ethos of the 2012 Olympics
This aligns with widely held British civic and Christian ethics of duty, neighbourliness and custodianship which can appeal across constituencies.
This is not so different from remembering what Labour originally stood for or from the values of intelligent ethical conservatism embodied in Noblesse Oblige and the charter of the Commons.
Conservationist Productivism reframes politics beyond the conventional left–right divide by uniting intelligent stewardship-oriented conservatism with duty centred liberalism.
It treats value as relational and usufructuary (use, care and mutual benefit) rather than solely monetary or commodity transferable, and proposes policies that prioritise long-term community stewardship, civic obligation, community benefit and sustainable prosperity.
Conservationist Productivism is a coherent post-liberal perspective that unites responsible stewardship with civic duty: securing long-term local use-rights so communities can care for and benefit from land, housing, fisheries and infrastructure — preventing displacement and destructive speculation while restoring shared prosperity.
It is a way of growing real value and is a way of liberating and unlocking the hidden potential energy in every conmmunity rather than allowing corporate giants to degrade the living cultural, natural and economic value of our communities for absentee shareholders who dont share.
It offers a way for people to contribute and thereby belong which has been eroded by rentier capitalism and neoliberal statism. It offers a potential compass for a new harmony and a re-United Kingdom