Some sobering words from lawyer David Allen Green
Image – from the Rebel Badge Club which is coming to Cambridge in late April!
You can read his article in Prospect Magazine here – noting that the print version (available in all splendid outlets and a few downmarket ones too!) has an interview with Dr Ian Sollom – the MP for St Neots and Mid Cambs, who several of you will know. So feel free to go out and buy it – as it’s also in a supplement on the UK’s chronic skills crisis. Which I’ve been moaning about for years.
“What did D.A.G. say?”
This:
“You may be looking to pundits to tell you where all this is going.
Well, I have not a clue, other than US is nearing a constitutional crisis.
And if so: nobody can know what will happen next.
For that is the nature of any genuine crisis: it is a situation the outcome of which cannot be foreseen.“
Above – from Bluesky – noting also the thread that follows.
Switching off from the bad nooze on TV-land
A few days ago, Prospect Magazine published an article about how rabid and out of control the Westminster political lobby reporters have become. The woeful lack of policy knowledge is all too easily hidden by stories on personalities that feel feeble and petty in the face of not only the huge political and policy issues of the day, whether the ongoing collapse of constitutional government over the pond through to the multiple crises hitting the housing sector (skills shortages, impact of the climate emergency, poor construction standards, corruption and the breakdown of trust following what Grenfell exposed, and so on), through to the failure of the same set of political reporters to hold successive Conservative and Conservative-led governments to the same high standards.
If the Chancellor has done something major that should disqualify her from high public office, by all means hold her to account for it. But the drip-drip wearing down over an extended period of time? Or are some reporters behaving as if their bosses have given them a target of the number of ministerial resignations they must incite within a given period of time? (See also the Byline Times’ series of reports here on the crisis in UK political journalism)
I’ve stopped watching BBC Question Time and Politics Live altogether because it has become so predictable – a weekly slot where the panel of repeat-appearance talking-heads are invited to ‘solve’ the UK’s immigration headlines that have been of a similar theme dating back to the 1800s – and do so in a handful of soundbites.
So…back to the crisis?
Everything I know about what’s happening state-side comes from former UK diplomat Alex Hall Hall, who is based out there. And a handful of other contacts and online people who I’ve stumbled across over the decades. I’m not going to claim any in-depth knowledge of comparative political systems. It’s something I should have done in the 1990s at sixth form college but in those days I had even less courage than I do today. and regrets over choice of A-levels are something I’ll take to the forest burial site that I hope to end up in. Which reminds me – I need to moan at someone in authority in Cambridge to ensure that enough land is set aside to establish one. It has the added bonus of becoming a wildlife haven in a county that lost most of what was left of its tree cover during the world wars when everything was ploughed up to grow food.
“How will this crisis end?”
It’s as D.A.G. said – we don’t know. Not least because we don’t really have any recent historical precedents to go by. i.e the head of state of an all-powerful nation state taking down its own long standing institutions, norms, conventions, and internal checks and balances in such a short period of time – egged on by extremely powerful and influential non-state actors including the heads of multinational corporations.
When institutions come under huge and sustained pressure, and when previously long-assumed stable assumptions suddenly go, they change.
They have to in order to survive – and we got a front row seat of that in the fallout of the catastrophic decision by David Cameron and his Conservative Government to try and deal with his party’s internal splits over European policy with a referendum on EU membership.
The most radical of the pro-Leave movement inside political circles made it clear that they saw the UK leaving the EU as a first step towards bringing down the entire union. But they forgot that the rest of the world was watching on and listening in. The EU – in particular the smaller member states, saw this as an existential crisis. Even – and especially the EU members who are normally strong UK allies such as Denmark and The Netherlands. (For centuries the UK has been a guarantor of the independence of both countries against other great powers because as the UK found out the hard way in WWII, keeping the UK coast secure during wartime when both countries are occupied and have enemy sea and air bases on them is prohibitively costly.)
One of the biggest developments in recent times? The very public online presence
Have a watch of this video produced for NATO a couple of months ago. Are such videos new? No – compare that one to the British Pathe newsreel propaganda piece showcasing the defences of Singapore in 1940 here. In that latter piece they showed what looked like modern aircraft over ‘the great fortress’ and Indian soldiers of the British Empire on a training exercise with medium to heavy anti-aircraft artillery. The impact of The Fall of Singapore in February 1942 – the largest military defeat of British forces in history, was particularly hard for the people of Cambridgeshire because two battalions of the Cambridgeshire Regiment, including one made up mainly of recruits from Cambridge ‘town’, were lost – and many never returned.
**What would you do if a violent authoritarian group tried to take power?**
…was a question I vaguely recall discussing every now and again in GCSE history classes at school during the mid-1990s. As well as at the odd pub lunch in the 2000s and early 2010s putting the world to rights.
“Well…whatever your answer to that question is today, it happens to be what you are doing now.”
…as I’ve heard more than a few people say in response to events again on the other side of the big pond. Knowing that the August 2024 riots should have been something of a wake-up call given how organised disinformation campaigns fanned the flames of the violence, we can’t bury our heads in the sand and pretend we’re somehow going to be shielded by it. (Worth noting more positively for the BBC how their youth news pages BBC Bitesize have been doing a better job explaining the essentials than perhaps their main politics functions!)
“How do you encourage people to do something positive, but not sound all ‘preachy’ about it?”
Ha ha! You’re asking the wrong person!
(TL/DR? Start small: Find out who your local elected councillors are, and see if you can find out what they do as councillors, and why they do it. And if you do, suggest this to a friend or acquaintance and see what they come back with).
Actually, there is a more serious point because of the risk of activist burnout which, after 15 years of blogging, tweeting, filming, and reporting, I wouldn’t want anyone to end up in the sort of chronically-fatigued state that I am in. Furthermore, the more I’ve read up on and learnt about my as-yet undiagnosed ADHD, the more I’ve become self-aware of how off-putting such an approach – especially from me, can be. Hence I generally go with the principles of:
- Try lots of things
- …and try them more than once…
- …and then pick one or two of them to run with and become good at them (knowing that other people will have the other stuff covered)
It’s one of the things I like about Resilience Web Cambridge, because you can see who else is doing what and where. Therefore you can choose where to focus your very limit time and resources.
And a strong civic society is one of the biggest safeguards to overpowerful institutions – whether state or business.
Think of the campaign groups that scrutinise the business activities of multinational corporations – from big oil to fast food to fast fashion.
With local and mayoral elections coming up, I was going to say that finding out the basics of what the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority, and Cambridgeshire County Council actually do, would be a good place to start. The problem is I couldn’t find a page for the county council that actually does this! (So you’ll have to watch the video explainer following The Budget meeting on what the council will spend its money on next year to get some idea)
Communicating over coffee?
There are a handful of us who meet fortnightly on Sunday afternoons at The Rock Pub in Cambridge – the next gathering is on 23 Feb 2025 from 2.30pm. I normally bring along some books or meeting print-outs for people to browse through and discuss – it helps people stay up-to-date and spark ideas on activities they can do in their own time. I’ve also got some new workshops coming up which will be listed at https://cambridgetownowl.com/workshops/ (just waiting for venue confirmation).
If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:
- Follow me on BSky <- A critical mass of public policy people seem to have moved here
- Like my Facebook page
- Consider a small donation to help fund my continued research and reporting on local democracy in and around Cambridge.
Below – should you wish to get involved in local discussions on possible unitaries, see the Cambs Unitaries Campaign at https://www.cambsunitaries.org.uk/ – which also has a meeting coming up in early-mid March 2025
The Cambridge Town Owl 