This week sees the launch of the Climate Popularism Report written for the Climate Majority Project by friend of the podcast Professor Rupert Read, co-director of the Climate Majority Project, and Caroline Lucas, former Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales and for a long time, the sole Green party member of the UK’s Parliament.
” The first and most fundamental duty of a civilised state is the safety of its people.
Not just safety from overseas adversaries, or crime in the street. Economic security. A bill you can pay without going overdrawn. A house you can afford before your children have children of their own. A job that lasts long enough to plan around.
Britain guarantees none of these…” (from the Hostage Nation paper)
What are the actual, practical shifts in our political economy that we could do tomorrow, that would not require extra legislation and could transform our society? While there are many economists looking forward to an idealised system some way down the line, very few people – politicians or economists – are exploring what we could do now, today, within the guiderails of the existing system, with the politicians we have and the economy we have and the constraints of a world undergoing rapid geopolitical as well as geophysical change.
We talk a lot on this podcast about the need for a new system: politically, culturally, in business, media and art…in everything we do. And yet, we don’t often have the opportunity to talk with someone who has set up a new political party – still less one explicitly predicated on the core values of courage, generosity, transparency, humility, humour and empathy. You’d think it would be hard to argue against these, but, as Uffe Elbaek discovered when he entered the Danish Parliament…the system doesn’t always want to be courageous, or transparent, or generous, or to embody humility, humour and empathy.
How can we bring power to those with wisdom and wisdom to those with power? Specifically, how can our new Prime Minister deliver a future that repairs the ruptures within our national and international culture in a time frame that works while in the face of biophysical collapse and the onward march of the political wing of predatory capital?
We’re at a pivotal moment in world geopolitics. Increasingly the masks and the gloves are both off – but it’s not a binary choice any more between two sets of suits in slightly different coloured ties: now we have the right showing its true colours – and a chance for the progressive majority in this country to find its feet and lead us towards a genuinely thoughtful, emotionally literate, high-bandwidth politics that ditches the toxic tribalism and instead lays the ground for a future that could actually work.
Can we separate politics from democracy? Our political system is wholly corrupt and no longer fit for purpose – if it ever was. What if Citizens’ Assemblies could bring agency to the whole of our population, helping people to find empathy with each other, to engage in conversations in good faith and work together to solve the wicked problems of the polycrisis: social inequity, climate chaos, the death cult of predatory capitalism. These are so interlinked, we won’t fix one unless we fix them all.
What is a Network State and how does the concept matter in relation to the Trump administration’s attempts to take Greenland – and their ‘peace’ proposals in Gaza and Ukraine?
Across the world, our legal systems are crumbling, the rule of sane law dismantled in real time. Yet at the same time, rivers, mountains, bees are being granted legal rights in ways that would have been thought impossible even a few years ago. And in boardrooms around the planet, C-suites and businesses are increasingly looking to the natural world for guidance on how to be in ways that heal the web of life. So how do we make this work? How do we ensure that it’s not just another layer of corporate greenwash?
If we ever had a genuine democracy (and I would argue we never have) then it is clearly disintegrating now, along with the entire system with which it was entwined. Everyone agrees we need something new, what we don’t necessarily agree on across the board is the design of this new thing. This week’s guests are two people who spend their lives imagining how things might be different, particularly in the US, where even the pretence of democracy has been abandoned.
When people have experienced ways to bring Power to those with Wisdom and Wisdom to those with Power, then they’ll work together to make it a reality at a larger scale.
Our legacy – or status quo – media is owned and run by billionaires for billionaires and the stories they promote are the ones that will keep us all in line. How do we shift the global narrative towards a future of mutual flourishing?