Any Political Solution to the crisis we are in must develop and grow from our communities and grassroots; NOT from any existing Party that still wants to rule everyone Top-Down
One of the key problems with UK Politics today is that it operates as almost the mirror image of wider culture, where most people fall into the trap of believing that their own perspective is the right one. But that anyone with an alternative view of any kind – even in just the smallest of ways, is or will be fundamentally wrong about everything else, too.
Yes, you could easily argue that this is how tribes and groups work.
But politics or rather the UK political system is supposed to be about delivering public policy that is created and then implemented in the best interests of ALL British People.
The one thing that we can be sure of is that when it comes to the political classes who have been running Westminster and our local Councils for decades, there is very little about any of it – apart from the Election campaigns, that has anything to do with or what is best for us.
As I have been discussing in some of my recent blogs, time has now run out for the way that government and our economic system runs. Neoliberalism and everything such as MMT, FIAT money, and the increasingly illogically impractical schemes like Net Zero and everything that pushes people and businesses into being reliant on credit are no longer sustainable.
That is why everything is now in the process of crashing around the Labour Government’s head.
Yes, the politicians in power are incompetent.
No, the mess we are in didn’t begin the day after Labour were elected to power and Starmer arrived in No.10.
And No, not Labour, nor the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, Reform or any other group of politicians currently looking ahead to the next General Election are going to offer and deliver to us anything different. Certainly not in any way that the UK actually needs.
For a time, I was open to the idea that Reform could find itself pursuing a different way. One that would offer the cross-tribal consensus and answers that the UK now needs.
Instead, it has become clear that the mechanics of this 4th evolution of the anti-EU movement certainly hasn’t moved on in any kind of people-centric direction.
Instead, Reform is just reforming itself, but in ways that have a very familiar likeness to political parties that have been in power before, who have increasingly aligned themselves and been led by the machinations of the establishment instead.
The mess over Rupert Lowe and the inescapable optics suggesting that at every level of the Reform Party, the whole thing is all about Nigel Farage, really does speak volumes for itself.
That’s before taking the time to read the outpourings of words from former party activists and ‘officers’ who have recently walked away. Just like better known voices associated with Reform such as those of Howard Cox and Ben Habib.
If any of the names instantly trigger feelings that suggest you have taken a side as you read – no matter the reason, it is exactly that kind of emotion that is our collective problem.
Disagreement over the smallest of things shuts so many of us down to the reality that we all have views about different things that we might never agree on. But when it comes down to all the things that are actually important, there is an awful lot of commonalities between all of us to be found.
Difficult to hear though it might be, it is the division that is deliberately sown between us over issues that we do have in common – by them being presented in ways that make them appear and trigger us as if they are something else – that really plays into the hands of the incompetent political classes that we regrettably have.
As things stand, and without a lot of us choosing to approach our relationship with politics very differently, the same people dividing us and guiding us to hate people we should not have any hate for, are set to keep guiding the ship that we are all beginning to sink on. And they will happily continue to do so, until the whole thing actually goes down.
Westminster is just the tip of the ruling iceberg that we can actually see.
Behind central government sits all the things like power, influence and the wealth accumulation that money controls and which is carefully kept outside of open view.
Because the truth is that the only people who benefit from us continuing to elect politicians who are under the spell of the establishment are those politicians and all those who are benefiting from the continuation of the establishment itself.
Whilst there is very good reason to believe that the wheels could fall off this broken bus at any moment in time, for those who have been aware and watching the direction of travel of the UK (and for that matter the whole of the Western world) for a considerable period of time, both the Global Financial Crisis and then the responses to the Covid Pandemic could, and arguably should, have already been the catalysts that introduced a genuinely new way of doing governance to the UK.
That these two massive events didn’t doesn’t indicate that change cannot or will not come.
The fact that we have been led to believe that what the politicians have done in response is in any way normal just tells us even more about how deeply embedded those who genuinely believe or work with this Top-Down, them vs us culture really are, right across the establishment.
We can see just how far they are prepared to take things in their attempts to stop the whole thing from crashing down, even now. Indeed, they are growing so desperate to maintain The System, they are even attacking the people who their ‘tribe’ have always typically helped.
Whilst the talk of absolutes will certainly sound like a contradiction to the words used as I began writing this Blog above, the one dividing line that we really do have no choice but to observe and then decide upon, is which side we sit between the establishment and all it stands for, and on the other side, the people and what putting people, our communities and the environment surrounding the places where we live and work, first.
Whilst even the Tories are successfully making themselves sound very plausible, just 8 months on from losing power, in the context of everything that the Labour Government is doing wrong, none of these political parties – and that almost certainly now includes Reform, show any sign of genuinely offering an alternative to establishment-directed public policy today.
However, it isn’t today and what is now past that we need to worry about. The most important thing is the future, and specifically what happens when we reach the next General Election and what must be ‘our time’.
The UK and we as its people cannot afford another General Election result that delivers power to any group – whether elected directly, or assembled as a result of some kind of post-election ‘deal’, that then goes on to do whatever the hell it likes.
No political party out there today, currently canvassing for votes in this years Local Elections is offering to do anything in any different kind of way.
We know this, because the way that they are running their election campaigns right now; how they are communicating and most importantly, how they are engaging with real people outside the bubbles of their own members and activists, is exactly the same as it has always been before.
To put it bluntly, we can no longer afford to take the risk that comes with accepting a choice of political candidates in any election, that not us, but the political parties themselves actually choose.
Change will not come in the way that we now so desperately need it, if we keep on doing politics at every level in the UK in exactly the same way!
It is our communities and the people who are around us every day who should be selecting the people who will represent us at all levels of government.
Not people we don’t know beyond the pictures, websites, social media and TV screens.
We need public representatives to represent us who have genuine skin in our game. People who are answerable only to us and who are committed to delivering locality-centric democracy, that is the only way that democracy can genuinely thrive, survive and most importantly, work.
Whilst government and the public sector really do now need to undergo massive change, the reality is that our communities could be working together to select and elect non-party candidates in all elections, right now.
We certainly don’t need any kind of change to the electoral system that just favours the election of more incompetent candidates. Ambitious and self-serving politicians whose actions will be made even worse by the guaranteed requirement for compromise on public policy that schemes like Proportional Representation as a replacement for First Past the Post would bring.
Power MUST come back to the people. Not through carefully crafted labels like ‘devolution’ and ‘devolved power’ that is nothing more than Regional Centralisation sold to us with a very misleading name.
The power – OUR POWER is already ours and that power can be made to work for us right now. IF we choose to use it. Look beyond the manufactured differences. And focus on working together, on the important things that we all have in common, and to deliver a new world and way of being that is happy, healthy, safe, secure and governs life with fairness, balance and justice for us all.
Anyone can begin this process of change and the appointment of new candidates to become the public representatives and politicians who will create and deliver our new future, right now. And we need them to, IF we are going to experience beneficial change.
That change will only be certain if we all change the way that we think. What we can be sure of, however, is that a good future for us all doesn’t and will not start where anything ‘new’ for the politicians and voices that we already recognise as public figures begins.
Adam Tugwell 