Alternative Editorial: Vote For A Future
Students demonstrating for climate action in London on February 15, 2019 Ben Stansall
We would prefer to ignore this election. The spectacle of dysfunction and inadequacy on the part of politicians. The shameless manipulation of the media, so far from being trustworthy reporters of facts. And maybe worst, the poor idea of an electorate that is fed back to us through these narrators of the public space. It’s depressing.
Yet it’s no surprise. The whole reason we set up The Alternative UK was to challenge the narrowness of our political discourse. We’ve repeated it ad nauseum: with only 2% of people interested or invested enough to become members of political parties, the story about power – who and what matters – will be driven by a tiny Westminster bubble. Itself largely a political cartel, overly defined by pecuniary interests.
The best of idealists, driven to become MPs by their concerns about society, are obliged to reduce all their subtle intelligences to numbers on a spreadsheet, fed into the competitive growth economy. The most sensitive men and women are unable to be heard unless they turn their pain into aggression to blame the Opposition.
Because unless they trigger emotional turmoil, the media won’t report them. After all, that same commercial media have got to make a profit themselves and only pain, fear and irrational promises sell.
Possibly the worst outcome of this election will be the way we look at each other as citizens afterwards. Such is the way politicians have been portrayed on the front pages of our most illustrious papers, as well as the most popular, we are left wondering how on earth any of us could vote for any of them. Whether true or false – and within this news culture, it’s simply not possible to judge – they have variously been labelled racists, anti-semites, liars, puppets, traitors.
That we will all be looking at each other in the coming years as the fools (or worse) that voted for ‘that candidate’ is a victory for our outdated political system. One that depends upon the deep division of our society and communities—even our families—to thrive.
Within a first-past-the-post political system, it’s a zero-sum game: your gain is my loss. So instead of collaborating, every party has to shame and humiliate the others.
If you are now shrugging your shoulders and thinking, “well that’s politics”, then that response is proof enough of how degraded our political sphere is. In our stressed-out lives, in which we are subject to a constant battering of our instincts, we have somehow been persuaded that ‘most people’ are not up to a more complex set of choices. ‘They’ are idiots. ‘They’ don’t care.
Can we not imagine a better culture within which we might be, today, considering seriously the pros and cons of competing visions of a future that respects everyone? One that knows, at its core, that people are smart enough, humane enough, imaginative enough to participate in the decisions that affect us all.
From the first day that this election was called, we at A/UK have been arguing for a re-frame. Let’s not be beaten by the old politics and use this election to respond to the one clear need that affects us all: the climate emergency. If you doubt that, think of the young people who are directly affected. Whether rich or poor, they are the ones who will be facing the consequences in their daily lives.
And there are already millions of people in less developed countries who never had the resources to burn fossil fuels at the rate we did in Europe, now suffering extreme weather events as a result of our ignorance.
At the other extreme, wealth did not save the luxury mansions in Florida, Santa Barbara or on the beautiful outskirts of Sydney where the fires are now burning out of control either. Weather does not obey the deserving v undeserving story line we manufactured.
Rather than live in the old binaries on offer – Left v Right, Leave v Remain – let’s make this an election about the future. Whether or not we are willing to act on theoverwhelming evidence from the science that we need to rapidly transition to a radical green economy in order to save millions of lives across the globe. Or whether we are going to put that second to a growth economy that will continue to destroy our planet.
While that sounds like yet another binary, our strategy has to be proportional. Sadly, it just won’t work to ask everyone who gets the climate emergency to vote for the Green Party. Our first-past-the-post political system would then hand the victory to those who care much less.
Instead, we have been advocating tactical voting around the handful of parties that are putting the climate emergency at – or in a cluster near- the top of their agenda. In other words, those that arenotplanning to continue down the path of mass self-destruction. In the false belief that the needs of the planet come second to the desires that consumerism elicits, in order to keep us growing at all costs.
We called for those who have the best tools – who have spent the past decade revealing the climate research – not to shy away from naming those political parties, so that we can help people to use their vote in a climate election.
So we’re grateful to Greenpeace and then Friends of the Earth for offering their findings. In both cases, although in different order, they have put the Green Party, Labour and the Lib Dems at the top. Our only caveat would be that in Scotland and Wales, the choice should include the 4thand 5thparties, SNP and Plaid, as constitutional issues will be strongly driving the choices of those countries. And both are clearly green parties.
Out of those five parties – which we are naming as a Future Majority - who has the best chance of winning where you live? This is where it gets complicated but not impossible to decide. (See here for help with tactical voting.) It’s also where some life-long allegiances, forged through the old binaries, will be challenged. What if a Lib-Dem candidate can win against a Conservative? Or a vote for Labour beat the Brexit Party? Putting our undisputed collective future above the confusion of any number of short-term gains will be painful for some.
Some say that none of this will land in an electorate so shaped and defined by fully inadequate democratic structures. There are simply no proper mechanisms available for accurately capturing the true wants and needs of the people. No tools for deliberation, and no architecture by which these choices could even be integrated at a national level.
We completely agree with this assessment. Our past three years have been dedicated to both observing the democratic deficit and helping to put up the scaffolding for something new.
A/UK is now, in a variety of places and ways, sensing, actively reporting on, encouraging and co-creating these new alternative cultures and structures . Expect a revelation in 2020.
But for today we have – all of us - to use the power we have to get an outcome we need. It won’t be enough to sit still, criticising the old framework, if we ourselves are not prepared to take the action we can on our own terms.
This is especially for those that have the power of influence. Now is the time to clearly lead your tribe, whoever they are, to the exit signs that will give them the best chance of getting out of the burning building alive.
Our democracy does not yet capture the wisdom of the people. Yet within this old system, the General Election is a day on which power is being transacted: it is in motion. For 15 hours, the people can make a difference. What happens on December 12thcan broadly move towards or away from a viable future for all of us.
Let’s not hesitate to not only use our own Vote for the Future but to help others use theirs. As if our future depends upon it. Because it does.
