Back to 1980s? Hopefully.

So it was the big day at the Labour Conference, so what did we get?

Well no big surprises, there was the usual biographical stuff you expect from a new leader, although at least with the Miliband family they don't have to try too hard to make it interesting, and the predictable mea culpa from a Party that has just been given a kick up the pants by the electorate.

What we also got, in fairly lightweight form admittedly, was also a bit of the old The Crisis of the Left. How did the Party of Keir Hardy and Clement Attlee end up mired in Iraq and taken for a ride by the wide boys in the City? How did Labour become the party of Liberal Interventionism and Neoliberal Economics?

The current Crisis of the Left goes back to the 1980s. By then virtually everything the social democrats wanted had been achieved. True, Britain lagged a bit behind the rest of Europe, but basically we were there. The workers had power, the people had rights and the NHS, schools and social services had money. It didn't necessarily work as well as it should, but the basics of civil society were there.

This left the Left in a quandary. Is it Onwards to the Glorious Revolution still, or do we become the new conservatives, defending the status quo against the forces of the right? The result split the left. Meanwhile the ongoing collapse of the totalitarian communist countries in the East gave succour to a Right that had just discovered it's own revolutionary doctrine. Cloaked in the language of freedom beloved of the Flower Children of the now defunct New Left, Neoliberalism made the parties of the Right the new revolutionaries.

The result was a bloody and brutal decade in which what was left of the ideals of the nineteenth century and the 1960s were crushed, literally so in the Battles of Orgreave and the Beanfield, metaphorically so in the hearts of those who were to form New Labour.

Blair, Brown, Mandelson and the rest accepted this and through a mixture of naivety, realpolitik, arrogance, greed and plain old stupidity sought to achieve the ideals of the old Left using the tools of the new Right. The result was an Iraqi imbroglio, a Credit Crunch, a massive PFI bill and all the rest.

And so in walks Ed.

Hopefully out goes Liberal Interventionism, formerly known as the White Man's Burden. Nobody has the stomach for any more wars, not even the Generals who in Basra and Helmand have had to suffer the worst indignity a British Army can ever endure - being rescued by the Americans.

Neoliberallism will no doubt linger a little longer, but a system that has brought massive inequality, environmental devastation and an economic collapse every five years or so must crumble at some point.

In 1985 Neil Kinnock had to acknowledge the failure of the tactics of the NUM and shout down the Militants who wanted to hang onto an old dogma, long past its usefulness. Kinnock did both whilst reaffirming the compassionate values at the heart of the Left.

Miliband will no doubt be his own man, but I hope he will be the new Kinnock, not the new Blair.

Mystical Airman

As you can't help but notice it's seventy years since the Battle of Britain ended. But who actually won it?

Well us, obviously, but who was in charge? Most people know that Nelson won Trafalgar and Montgomery won Alamein, but the man who led the RAF to victory over the Luftwaffe has mysteriously dropped out of history. Possibly because he was unjustly sacked shortly after his victory, but probably also because he spent the last years of his life literally away with the faeries.

In 1940 Dowding didn't just have to fight the Germans, he also had to fight his own side. His method of defending Britain, with fighters dispersed to avoid being destroyed on the ground and swooping on the Germans in small groups didn't go down too well with his colleagues who believed that aeroplanes should be paraded in huge aerial formations like battleships. Never mind that when it was tried it didn't work, if the top brass left the tactics to the jocks in the fighter planes how could they justify their own existence?

Dowding was nothing if not his own person. He fought, and won, the Battle of Britain his way and for his trouble was sacked in November 1940,  victim of internal RAF politics. Having a lot of time on his hands he wrote up his autobiography which he called "Twelve Legions of Angels". The title was perhaps a hint of what was to come next.

The country having no further use him, Dowding retired from the RAF and then took the unusual step of joining the Theosophical society. Rejecting Christianity, he mixed the eastern mysticism of the theosophers with an earthy interest in faeries. In between he hunted ghosts, joined spiritualists on esoteric journeys where he met the departed spirits of deceased airmen, lobbied the House of Lords for the humane treatment of animals, argued the virtues of vegetarianism and debated the existence of UFOs with a young astronomer called Patrick Moore in the monacled xylophone player's first TV appearance. He knew his former colleagues thought him a crank, but he didn't care.

To go from war hero to premature hippy is quite a feat, but Dowding seems to have managed it. So if anyone ever asks you what New Age weirdos have ever done for the country, you can say that one won us The Battle of Britain!

Toxic Fuel (From Pentacle Issue 31, Spring 2010)

In the forest of northern Canada, in the tales of the Woodland Cree, the Trickster often takes the form of a Raven. In one tale, common to many tribes, he banishes the primordial darkness by stealing the Moon. Finding a cabin in the woods in which the Moon is imprisoned, he transforms into a pine needle and is drunk by the lady of the house whilst she is collecting water. Reborn as a baby he demands to play with the Moon. Then, seizing his opportunity, he escapes through the smoke hole. Breaking up the Moon he forms the Sun and the Stars. The darkness is banished but the Moon has left its mark on the Raven, and his feathers, formerly as white as the snow, are now burnt black like the night.

Our local Co-op is traditional supermarket shopping. The checkout staff chat away happily to themselves whilst firing your shopping down the conveyer belt. They appear to know every customer in the queue except you and discuss in intimate details their numerous relatives and mutual friends whilst you are waiting to pay. Then when that’s done there is none of this “would you like any help with your packing” nonsense. Instead the lever is pulled and your groceries are squashed into a corner so they can serve the next person.

However over the last few years there have been subtle changes in the store. First it was the Fairtrade chocolate, then Fairtrade wine, then Fairtrade and organic coffee, then reusable shopping bags, then cucumber without any plastic wrapping and so on. Even the café, previously a place that served chips and beans only, reopened as the Fairtrade Espresso Bar. Gradually I started to wonder if by any chance the Co-op, cheap place to do your shopping, might actually be the same as the Co-op, ethical place to stick your money.

They are indeed one and the same and as well as selling you stuff and taking your money, they’ll also bury you when you’ve shuffled off to the Summerlands. They also turn their hand to campaigning every now and again, and whilst it may seem a long way from the baked bean aisle to the woodlands of the Cree, the Co-op is now helping a First Nation people in a fight to save their environment and ours.

In one corner we have a medley of international oil companies including Shell, Exxon, Total and BP, whilst up against them we have a tribe of about 900 people up in Alberta, Canada. Not so much David taking on Goliath so much as a Smart car taking on a 400 ton dumper truck.

The issue in hand is the exploitation of tar sands, a dirty form of oil that Canada hopes to exploit and sell to its southern rival to help fuel their addiction to oversized cars.

Tar sands contain bitumen, the sticky black stuff that is used to make asphalt. If you dig them out of the ground in industrial quantities and boil them for long enough you can get oil, the sticky black stuff that is used to make money.

The effect on the wildlife can be imagined. Trees are clear cut, the soil is stripped away and vast machines carve our great scars in the ground. Roads carved through the virgin forest stop the caribou from migrating. Tailing ponds of toxic sludge trap migrating birds, and like the raven in the tale above, turn them black - more than 1600 ducks in one tank alone.

For us, separated from our pagan ancestors by hundreds of years and living in a post-industrial landscape that few of them would recognise, a few acres of struggling trees is a forest. For the Woodland Cree, a forest is boreal woodland stretching from coast to coast across a continent broken only by wild rivers. This is the same forest in which their ancestors first told the tales of the Raven and in which the Trickster, in his many guises, still roams.

It’s no surprise then that the Cree aren’t planning to taking this lying down. One nation whose ancestral lands are threatened has led the way. In May 2008 the Beaver Lake Cree Nation released their Kétuskéno Declaration, putting down a line in the oily sand.

The declaration begins “Let it be known that we, the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, are the keepers of the lands”. It continues “We keep this land in honour of our ancestors and on behalf of our future generations, so that as long as the sun shines, the rivers flow and the grass grows, we can continue our traditional way of life. This is the land where we and our future generations will practise our spiritual ways and exercise our rational rights”. You don’t have to have grown up watching cheap westerns to know that that’s fighting talk.

However it‘s not just the Cree Nations who should be worrying about tar sands. Climate Change threatens us all and we need less oil, not more. The extraction of oil from tar sands is one of the most energy intensive industries around. To extract two units of energy from the ground you need to use one unit of energy to boil out the bitumen. This is three times as much as you use to drill for oil the conventional way. It’s probably better for the environment to drive a Land Rover on ordinary petrol than a Mondeo on fuel made from tar sands.

Such is the energy demands of tar sands extraction that there has even been talk of building nuclear reactors up there just to boil the oil out. That’s probably not going to happen, but what is happening is that natural gas, one of the cleanest of fossil fuels, is being piped in to be used to extract one of the dirtiest. If extraction gets into full swing the amount of gas they’ll need would be enough to heat all of Canada’s 12 million homes.

I could go on, but you’ve probably had enough doom and gloom. Hopefully though what separates readers of Pentacle from readers of Fairy and Fetish or other pagan publications is that you want to actually do something about it.

There’s plenty of reasons to support this campaign. Preservation of a real wilderness is one. Helping to fight Climate Change by stopping one of the dirtiest of dirty fuels is certainly another. Then there’s solidarity with a pagan people who genuinely want to be caretakers of the earth. But there is another reason to back this campaign, one that I think trumps all those.

We can win this one.

Tar sands are not having a good year. In January Shell announced it would slow development after a shareholder revolt. Then California, home to more gas guzzlers than any other state and a key market for the oil, announced a series of measures aimed at promoting low carbon fuels. In February BP shareholders launched their own revolt and shortly afterwards Whole Foods, a major US organic food chain, announced it would be boycotting any fuel associated with tar sands.

The campaign against tar sands reads like a gazetteer of environmental groups. Greenpeace Canada have been digger diving at the extraction site, which must be really good fun when the diggers are bigger than your house. Friends of the Earth in this country have been campaigning too. WWF (the panda people, not the wrestlers) have produced a feature length film called Dirty Oil dishing the dirt. And so on. If you want to help, you’re in good company.

Those shareholder resolutions for the BP and Shell Annual General Meetings will be being voted on pretty much as this magazine comes out. If you’re in a pension fund, and you’re quick, you can ask your pension fund manager to vote against tar sands. Money talks, and the £40 billion invested in these companies gives the pension fund managers loud voices.

The Beaver Lake Cree meanwhile are putting their trust in something with the dull sounding name of Treaty Number Six. It was signed in 1876 by someone with the anything-but-dull name of Chief Ko-Pah-A-Wa-Ke-Mum. In return for giving away vast tracts of their land to good old Queen Victoria, the Cree kept the rights to hunt, fish and gather plants and medicines, undisturbed by the Crown.

This is where the Co-op comes in. A fighting fund called The Raven Trust has been set up and the Co-op has dropped a fair chunk of its money into the kitty. This has allowed the Beaver Lake Cree to hire a hot shot lawyer specialising in First Nation cases to fight their case.

Lets wish him all the best and hope he has the cunning of the Raven.

(Pentacle is now in the shops.)

Duel on a Dark Mountain

Last night I was in Wales, where they are planning for the end of the world.

The event was the Uncivilisation: Dark Mountain Festival, a cultural event that describes itself as a "training camp for the unknown world ahead". The prosperous, industrial civilisation that we know and sometimes love is unsustainable and could be coming to sticky end soon and the environmentalists who are trying to stop this are either desperately optimistic or in serious denial.

Dark Mountain was started a year ago by journalist and Guardian writer Paul Kingsnorth and social networking expert Dougal Hine, and the highlight of the first day of the festival was a debate between Dougal and Guardian columnist George Monbiot. (Guardian environment editor John Vidal was also hanging around and most of those attending the festival appeared to be Guardian readers, so it was all a bit of a Guardian love-in really.)


George had clearly arrived in pugilistic form, perhaps expecting he was being set up as the ritual sacrifice to the Dark Mountain the faithful. Using the polemic tactics with which he has dispatched Ian Plimer and others he put Dougal firmly on the spot for some of the things written in the Dark Mountain prospectus and book.

George has no time for a post-Apocalyptic future where the men have stubble and shotguns and the women wear fur bikinis. If he did he would spend more Saturday nights in Lewisham. The system we are fighting, he told the festival, is more robust than we give it credit for. Oil may peak, but it won't run out, coal seems to be going to last almost forever, and though the biosphere may wither and the climate boil, industrial capitalism will blunder on - unless we do something to stop it, and nihilism and taking to the hills to live solitary and frugal lives in hexayurts will not do that.

Perhaps not since social ecologist Murray Bookchin laid into Earth First! founder Dave Foreman has one strand of the environment movement laid into another. (Okay, I'm forgetting Monbiot laying into David Bellamy, and also Monbiot laying into the CPRE and also....I think I see a pattern here) and for much the same reasons.

Both movements have their roots in Deep Ecology and the writings of Arne Naess, and having been to numerous Earth First! gigs in the 1990s it was easy to see the Dark Mountaineers as EF!ers got a bit middle aged and jaded. Both movements rejected the promise of social democracy to solve the crisis, and both movements at least flirt with primitivism and a return to a simpler age.

All of that is Kryptonite to the approach of Enlightment inspired thinkers like Bookchin and Monbiot. But beyond Monbiot's sound and fury he does appear to be willing to give the Dark Mountaineers a chance. They are after all, by their own admission, a cultural and not a political movement.

Perhaps Monbiot's actions were more significant than his words. As (literal) darkness fell the Dark Mountain literati went into a conspiratorial huddle whilst George let his (metaphorical) hair down and enjoyed the music. Dark Mountain was clearly being warned, but not ignored.

Perhaps what Dark Mountain will become then is a chance for those of us who repeatedly bang our heads against the wall in the hope of making a saner world to pretend for a couple of days that it doesn't matter, that the world will stand or fall without us and that, should it fall, we will survive at least in spirit.

Maybe we should all just put our feet up and enjoy the music occassionally.

RIP New Labour

A week after John Major's disgraced and discredited government finally shuffled out of office I was being interviewed on a sofa by Davina McCall for the Big Breakfast. I'd just been turfed out of my camp on the proposed site of Manchester Airport's Second Runway and Davina wanted to know what we were going to do next. "Well" I replied, "We've got a new government. Hopefully they'll listen to us and start taking the environment seriously."

Oh how naive I was!

New Labour not only had no intention of stopping new runways in the north of England, they were planning them in the south as too. Jets were good, they made money. But the best jets of all, like the best schools, and the best hospitals, were private ones.

If I had to pick one object that typified where New Labour went wrong it would be the private jet.

Private jets carrying the Master of High Finance around the world to convince us all that Greed is Good and prosperity is round the corner......and private jets taking terror suspects to torture and illegal detention.

When Blair eventually left office he even got is own so he could fly round the world with his message of hope, which included trying to tell the world to take Climate Change serious. Seriously.

When New Labour came into power in 1997 those jets were very bust ferrying people to and from South East Asia as financial turmoil gripped the markets there. New Labour listened to the Masters of High Finance and refused to let the Tiger economies rescue their own banks. "Don't worry, it can't happen here" we were told. Ten years later we are in the same boat as the Indonesians, the Koreans and all the rest.

And what was New Labour doing on the eve of the storm braking? Getting ready to launch a crackdown on Incapacity Benefit. Six months later sick banks were being handed billions to stave off total disaster. Socialism is alive and well, but only for the rich.

Public finances, already groaning at the cost of privately financed schools, hospital and prisons finally gave up the pretense of being balanced and sank inexorably and terminally into the red.

And so here we are, in debt up to our eyeballs, with two and a half million officially unemployed, a million odd under-employed.

Thirteen wasted years have come to an end and I really can't be bothered to get upset about a Tory PM as it's hard to see how they could be worse.

They've allowed BP to drill for oil in the deep water west of Shetland (and set the Security Services on Greenpeace when they tried to stop this) using technology that has just gone disastrously wrong in Gulf of Mexico. They've tried and fail to get us to grow GM crops, they've planned a new generation of coal fired power stations. So much for putting "the environment at the heart of policy-making."

They've bungled two wars, one of them definitely illegal. They've fluffed electoral reform.

They've ................ gone. That's all that counts.

Now, will you give us the Labour Party back please?

Why It Would Be Great To Be A Caveman In The 21st Century

This is a response to the e-book by my friend Jeff Rice "The Next Level - How Not To Be A Caveman In The 21st Century". You have bung old Jeff some money to read it, but I'll summarise: we should aspire to become gods.

Jeff is clearly more interested in the wood than the trees, and he starts by looking at life's most startling property - its capacity to manufacture complexity out of simplicity, seemingly flying in the face of entropy. Entropy, the tendency for all things to decay, the force that did for Tom Baker's Doctor Who and the scientific proof of Keynes quote that "In the long run we're all dead" is something to seriously worry about if we're planning on making a permanent mark on the cosmos, so Jeff's right to take an interest.

Next he looks at our psychological heritage from the days of banging stones together on the African plains. It wasn't a black monolith from space that saved our primitive bacon, it was our thumbs and our big brains. Jeff seems to ignore the thumbs bit, but he's very interested in the contents of those Pleistocene brains.

Inside those Cro-magnon skulls was all the hardware needed to live in the modern world. Although they wouldn't have know it, there would have been stone age men wandering around who, if properly trained, could have even done the really tricky stuff even I never actually figured out like flying a jet fighter, passing a Physics exam or separating the laundry into cold and warm wash.

But possibly more important than that was the psychology of the stone age brain. What kept you alive in a world when the next cave might contain a hungry bear wasn't IQ, but instinct. Cave man psychology contained healthy doses of fear and anger, a yearning for happiness and sex, a respect for hierarchy, conformity and status, and a tendency to stereotype others into groups usually labelled "one of us" and "not from round here" (a very strong trait in stone age Glossop). This software kept us alive at night on the dangerous African plain, but in the 21st century it is dooming the planet.

The solution, says Jeff, is to rise above our psychological heritage. We must take control of our evolution and actively promote that part of our ancient psychology that is still useful; our curiosity, our desire for co-operation and our awareness of our place in nature.

To the Ancients a god was an archetype, the best that a Man could be, but no better. Hercules could wrestle Apollo and Odysseus could mistake the words of his wise old councillor for those of Pallas Athene.

Jeff it seems to me, is suggesting we ditch Zeus and his hierarchies, Mars and his war like ways, and all the other useless gods. We should en devour instead to combine the cunning of Odysseus and the wisdom of Athene to move forward to true enlightenment. Entropy be damned!

But lets back pedal a bit. Jeff starts his book with a familiar hierarchy. Starting with subatomic particles he works his way up through organic chemistry to life itself. He then has "the evolution of plants and animals", "ecology", "psychology" and "technology". This is a hierarchy of increased complexity. It is similar to the old school biology books that had "the time of bacteria" followed by "the time of fish", "the time of reptiles" up until "the time of mammals".

But those school books were wrong. Mammals did not follow reptiles by divine decree. Had it not been due to an unfortunate encounter with a passing meteorite it would still be "the time of reptiles". And even when dinosaurs really did rule the earth the life in the seas was still more abundant than that on the land, and then and now it was actually the humble bacteria that made up the majority of the biomass of the earth.

Complexity is always interesting, but not always important, and we should think carefully before putting ourselves at the top of any sort of evolutionary tree. As Douglas Adams said "on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons."

Whether you put us or flipper at the top of the complexity ladder, I would agree with Jeff that there is another rung above us. Whether you call it ecology, Earth Systems Science or Gaia, it seems clear that a group of organisms living in harmony is a system more sophisticated than even Fraser Crane.

But what of the next rung? Psychology? Hmm. Is this not just the study of the behaviour patterns or one part of this complex eco-system that we call the Earth? Why should human psychology be considered any more complex, any more interesting or any more relevant than the sex lives of amoeba?

As Popeye the Sailor said "I am what I am what I am". What if, like the famous spinach eater, we are no more able to rise above our psychological inheritance than a randy terrier? What if we are stuck as Cave Men?

Well, it could be worse. First there are the Cave Women (see Rachel Welch above) who speak for themselves - despite millennia of men trying to deny them this right.

Secondly , was the Cave Man life really all that bad? No bosses you couldn't look straight in the eye, gods that were bigger than them but smaller than the world, a paradise to wander around in and best of all three hours work a day.

It seems to me that, rather than make Man fit for the 21st century, we could do a lot worse than make the 21st century fit for Man.

As Earth First! used to say "Back to the Pleistocene"

Political wipeout

They were once the leading left wing party of British politics, with a Prime Minister so popular that he could have been dictator for life if he's wanted to. But then came trouble. Firstly a war, which split the party and led to ministerial resignations, then there were the unfortunate compromises with the political right. Finally trouble in the Middle East and a cash-for-peerages scandal toppled the Prime Minister and then in the General Election that followed they finished a dismal third, with a hitherto minor party taking up the torch of progressive politics.

No, not my prediction for May 6th, but the result of the 1922 General Election.

There were a few differences between then and now. Lloyd George was a political genius and in the First World War he at least did all the right things. He also didn't just steal Tory policies, he governed in alliance with the party, and whilst he did sell peerages shamelessly, he did so because he considered such honours useless and any man willing to pay for them a fool who deserved to loose his money. The Middle East crisis was in Turkey and, although the country was terrified of getting entangled in another European war, everything worked out all right in the end.

However I suspect 1922 is a date that we could be hearing rather a lot about soon - the year the Labour Party overtook the Liberal Party as the progressive voice in British politics.

There were several reasons for this. The Liberals, formerly the aristocratic Whig Party, had been changing gradually over the last century as the franchise increased. When the rise of the Trade Unions and the formation of the Labour Party took the votes of the ordinary working class from them (the Independent Labour Party had the votes of the radical Middle Class) there was nowhere else left for them to recruit new supporters from

The First World War had also split the party, with Lloyd George, the ultimate political outsider, governing with the support of the Tories, non-conformist back-benchers and the popular support of the country as a whole. In opposition was virtually the whole of the pre-war Liberal government. Lloyd George was probably the best British politician of the Twentieth Century, but he was almost a man without a party which meant that when the chips were down he had no-one on his side.

And so the party that won the First World War, introduced National Insurance and laid the foundation of the Welfare State was ousted, and in it's place came the party that gave us the NHS, gave India its independence and introduced National Parks, state funded Care Homes and the greenbelt.

So is it the 1920s all over again? Should we look forward to a new Jazz Age of hedonism, fashion, music and fun? Art Deco, Dada, Cabaret, a General Strike and England winning the Ashes with some dodgy bowling? Possibly.

Or perhaps coalition government, Prohibition in the USA and the inevitable aftermath of economic (or maybe this time environmental) crash and the rise of fascism? Possibly rather more likely.

Endless articles in the press comparing then and now? Almost inevitable, but at least I got mine in first.