C.J. Stone's Blog, page 17

Whitstable & Canterbury history: Watling Street by John Higgs

Whitstable Views

Age old question still relevant

Watling Street is a new book by John Higgs.

As the name suggests, it involves a journey along the old Roman road that stretched between Canterbury and Wroxeter, and which was itself laid over a prehistoric trackway which may have gone all the way from Dover to Angelsea.

That, at least, is the journey that our author takes.

Written in the same year as the Brexit referendum, John uses the symbol of the road as a way of examining the conflicts of identity that lie at the heart of the British psyche.

Who are we, exactly?

Picts, Celts, Romans, Saxons and Normans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, all fought for control of this road. More recently we’ve seen our country divided along ideological grounds, between Leavers and Remainers, between traditionalists and innovators, between those who “want our country back” and those who seek to give our…

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Does Corbyn have a Messiah Complex?

I received the following email from an associate of mine:

Hi Chris, I need your views… I was sickened yesterday when I saw on TV Corbyn at Glastonbury acting like he is some sort of Messiah, lauded by all those white, middle-class kids who paid £200 plus for their tickets who were applauding him for using the GRENFELL tragedy to to score political points… He then tells the organiser in private that he is going to scrap the British nuclear programme when he is PM. I think he has a Messiah complex. Suppose all those privileged kids had contributed their festival fee to helping the poor, now THAT would have been revolutionary.

Glastonbury echoes the great class  divide in our country. Posh people  stay in yurts, arrive by helicopter, are roped off from the not-so-posh. The festival was once a democratic event, everyone roughing it in crap tents on boggy ground, tickets cheap, no fancy food vans, no multi millionaire celebs wandering about in wellies, no leader of the Labour Party getting in on the act. It was once a Pop gig for youngsters, now it’s all about money, celebs, oh I am so disillusioned… I want your in-put!

Here is my reply:

What do you want me to say?

Let’s go back to the beginning. Remember, Corbyn only got onto the leadership ticket because a couple of Labour establishment figures thought we needed a proper debate and agreed to include a left winger. This is because the Labour Party had been transformed under Tony Blair into a centralised neo-liberal party in which constituencies no longer got to choose who their candidate was. They were mainly Blair loyalists parachuted in from central office. But once Corbyn was on the ticket it galvanised the membership in the Labour Party who wanted to see an alternative to austerity.

Corbyn only got chosen as it was his turn. The left in the Labour Party were a rump consisting of about dozen or so MPs, and everyone else had had a go. He never wanted to be PM.  He never chased office. He has the lowest expenses returns of any MP. He’s been consistent in his views throughout his life, voting according to his principles.

Under Blair, if you remember, the Labour Party had become as corrupt and self-serving as the Tory Party. Remember Stephen Byers, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt. Blair left office and made himself unimaginably rich: the richest ex-Prime Minister ever. The Blair method was to appeal to the right wing press by instituting policies that the ruling class approved of. In other words, these weren’t Labour policies. Margaret Thatcher, when asked what her greatest achievement was, said “New Labour”. And there you have it. There was no longer a choice in politics. It was blue Tory vs red Tory, with hardly anything to choose between the two.

The financial crisis of 2008 gave governments around the world the opportunity to institute austerity. It was the corrupt, and frankly criminal, activities by the banks that caused the crash, but it was the public and public services who were being asked to pay. The banks were bailed out, hardly anyone went to jail, and the rest of us were asked to tighten our belts. But it was always fake. Austerity was the opposite of what was required. Old fashioned Keynesianism says that in a time of recession you need to stimulate the economy, not shrink it. The point is that austerity had nothing to do with helping the economy. It was a means by which wealth was being transferred, from the bottom to the top, allowing both Labour and the Tories to sell off what remained of our public services.

That’s the background to Corbyn’s rise, and the reason his message is proving so popular. It’s not because he has “a Messiah Complex”. It’s because the Labour manifesto is promising something other than this continual transfer of wealth from – for example – BHS’s pension scheme to Sir Philip Green‘s third yacht; from the less well off to the wealthy, a process that has been going on for the last 40 years and which has been accelerating under austerity.

Here’s the reason austerity is wrong. If you redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, all they do is to squirrel it away in tax havens where it does nothing. If you do it the other way round, and redistribute from the rich to the poor, the poor spend their money, thus stimulating the economy, thus making us all better off. It worked in 1945, it continues to work in the Scandinavian countries, why wouldn’t it work here and now?

So rather than attack the policies, the press have decided to attack the man. He was a clown, if you remember. A fumbling idiot. Unpatriotic. Scruffy. Unelectable. Didn’t bow his head at the right angle at the cenotaph. Didn’t support our armed forces. A whole bunch of other stuff. Now he has “a Messiah Complex”. The amount of bad press has been extraordinary, and not only from the right wing media, which you would expect, but from the left and the centre as well: from the BBC, the Guardian and the Independent as well as the Sun and the Mail. From his own back benches.

So “Corbynism”, if you want to call it that, isn’t about the man, it’s about the policies. It’s a movement, of the sort that brought the Labour Party into being in the first place, and which brought it to power in 1945. Everyone thought then that Winston Churchill would be the post war leader, but what the pundits didn’t know – as they failed to recognise this time – is that there was a genuine grass-roots movement taking place. Then it was in the forces, amongst the mainly young men and women who had been asked to risk their lives in the fight against Nazism. Now it is amongst the youth, who have been asked to pay for the profligacy of the rich and of the old through increasing insecurity, low paid jobs and zero-hours contracts, while our governments, instead of fighting Nazism have been supporting it: selling arms to Saudi Arabia and supporting terrorism in Libya, Iraq and Syria. Then it was Atlee, now it is Corbyn.

As for him “scoring political points” over Grenfell: yes and why not? Grenfell is precisely the symbol of all that is wrong in this country: using inferior non fire resistant cladding for poor people and immigrants in order to save money on the council tax bills of the richest people in the richest borough in the UK. Why would he not point that out?

As for all those “white middle class kids” paying over the odds in Glastonbury: haven’t they got a future too? And Corbyn is mobbed wherever he goes: in Gateshead, in Liverpool, in Birmingham and Manchester, and not just by the white middle classes.

Remember Grime For Corbyn?

People all over the country are rising up against the corruption of nepotism of the old politics, where, for example, Theresa May’s husband runs a company specialising in tax avoidance using loopholes his wife arranges while in government, or Boris Johnson closes down fire stations and then sells off the fire fighting equipment to his mate for £2 the lot.

Most politicians are corrupt, but instead of celebrating the one politician who is not corrupt, we say he has a “Messiah Complex” because people are responding to what he says. Don’t you think that’s a bit petty? What we are watching is a genuine transformation of social relations of the kind that happens every so often in politics, when a corrupt and venal political class go too far, and the people find them out.

We’re lucky to have Corbyn. Can you think of another politician who could go through the campaign of vilification he has suffered over the last two years and not want to give in? I don’t think anyone else, on the left or the right, could have done it. But it’s not about him, it’s about us, and the future we want to see for our children and grandchildren. We had free education, a national health service and a welfare state, why would we not want to bequeath those things to future generations? The magic money tree is real enough. It is the wealth that people generate through their hard work and ingenuity, when they are freed from poverty wages and the stress and anxiety caused by the false philosophy of neo-liberalism and the self-serving rule of the very rich.

Bring on the revolution, that’s what I say.

Chris.

Who is the real terrorist sympathiser?

So Andrew Neil spent half of his interview with Jeremy Corbyn last week aggressively questioning him about his relationship with the IRA.

The following day, Nick Robinson, on Political Thinking on Radio 4, referring to the interview, said: ‘No one could doubt, really, that Mr Corbyn had indeed been a cheerleader for what used to be called IRA/Sinn Fein.’

You can’t get a more direct statement than that. Such is the supposed impartiality of the BBC during an election campaign that Nick Robinson is allowed to state unequivocally that Jeremy Corbyn is a terrorist sympathiser, even when there is no actual evidence that he is. The use of the term ‘IRA/Sinn Fein’ is particularly telling. It the exact formulation of words Margaret Thatcher and Ian Paisley always used to use to describe Sinn Fein during the Troubles, which in the minds of older people can’t help but to spin them back to those fearful times.

Newspapers, on the other hand, are not obliged to show any impartiality whatsoever, either during an election campaign or at any other time. We’ve had newspaper after newspaper analysing every statement Corbyn ever made about the IRA, checking every meeting and digging out every photograph, calling him ‘an IRA sympathiser’, ‘Britain-hating’, ‘a hard-left, Marxist, terrorist sympathiser’, along with a variety of other names. We’ve had meme after meme on Facebook: picture after picture showing him in the company of one Sinn Fein leader or another, even though some of the photographs are clearly from a time when the peace process was already underway, and Sinn Fein were talking to everyone.

It’s the constant repetition that does the damage. Even though Corbyn signed a motion condemning IRA violence in 1994, and has always been clear in his opposition to terrorism, the impression is that he must be an IRA supporter because the media says he is.

Theresa May, on the other hand, faces no such questioning. Not from Andrew Neil, not from Jeremy Paxman. This is despite the fact that it can be shown that, as Home Secretary, she helped to facilitate British terrorists fighting in Libya, and that there is a direct link between one Manchester based terrorist group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and the Manchester bomber, Salman Abedi, himself.

In other words, Theresa May is not only a terrorist sympathiser, she is a terrorist enabler: and not several decades ago as a rebellious but relatively powerless back-bencher, but within the lifetime of the current government, as a serving Minister.

In the words of veteran reporter John Pilger: ‘The “smoking gun” is that when Theresa May was Home Secretary, LIFG jihadists were allowed to travel unhindered across Europe and encouraged to engage in “battle”: first to remove Mu’ammar Gadaffi in Libya, then to join al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria.’

When Jeremy Corbyn spoke of ‘connections between wars that we’ve been involved in…. in other countries such as Libya, and terrorism here at home,’ it was precisely the links between the British secret services and terrorist groups abroad that he was referring to.

Again, he was condemned by all sections of the press for making this intervention so soon after the atrocity in Manchester, but it was not only timely, it was accurate.

The British establishment has been routinely involved in facilitating and enabling foreign wars in order to meet the objectives of the oil lobby, the arms lobby and the banking lobby, all of whom do very nicely out of the ensuing chaos.

The press, meanwhile, have been deliberately covering this up and using past connections between Jeremy Corbyn and Sinn Fein as a diversion.

No doubt if Corbyn ever gets into office he will be in a position to investigate these and all other crimes by the British State.

It’s no wonder they are so scared.

Why I Pray

I started praying three years ago, in the spring of 2014. How it came about: a friend of mine lost his son unexpectedly, and I was looking for a way to express my condolences.

I really can’t imagine anything worse than losing a child, can you? I’d lost my Mum a few years before, and the waves of grief that washed through me at the time were like a force of nature. But my Mum had cancer, and I was expecting her to die. Mums are supposed to go before their sons; sons aren’t supposed to go before their Fathers.

So I was trying to put this into words. I wanted to tell my friend that I felt for him, that I was with him in his grief. I wrote the words “you are in my thoughts”, but that seemed trite somehow, mundane, and I quickly scribbled them out. I needed to refer to something deeper than thought, something that would truly express the profound mystery of grief.

So this is what I wrote, as the only proper form of words I could find under the circumstances:

“You are in my prayers.” And that seemed entirely fitting, entirely natural and true.

Belief Structure

But that set me thinking. What is prayer? What is it that people think they are doing when they pray? And how could I write the words “you are in my prayers” and then not pray? It seemed hypocritical. I was forced into a dilemma by it.

A weight suddenly descended on me. I kept imagining myself in an attitude of prayer. I would look down at the carpet in my room and picture myself there, on my knees, with my hands pressed together, my head bowed, whispering solemn words to the aether. It was quite eerie and out of keeping with my ordinary view of myself.

We all carry a self-image around with us, don’t we? I guess I would imagine myself as, to some degree, sophisticated, sceptical, urbane. I’m an agnostic. I have no beliefs as such, and I hate to be labelled. Call me religious, and I’ll deny it. But call me an atheist and I’ll deny that too. No one is going to pin a belief-structure on me, like the tail on the donkey at a children’s birthday party.

[image error]The image of me in an attitude of prayer seemed the opposite of that. Naive, not sophisticated, fervent, not sceptical, primitive, not urbane, it was like this crude image had jammed itself into my brain as a denial of everything I considered myself to be. It was like something welling up from the bottomless ocean, some forgotten memory from the deepest part of my being. I realised that I had always had the urge to pray, at certain difficult times in my life, and that I had suppressed it in order the create that self-image of mine, of what I thought I should be.

And then one day I glanced around my room and saw that I had a ready made shrine. And that was it. I fell on my knees and allowed the prayers to come.

The shrine is a little bedside cabinet by my bed. I hadn’t created it as a shrine, but that’s what it has turned out to be. It’s exactly the right height for me to kneel in front of with my hands held together in an attitude of prayer. It has an icon of a Madonna and Child on the wall above it, which I’d given to my Mum in my youth, and which she had gifted back to me when I’d moved into this flat. There’s a tiny African fetish of the river god of the Zambezi, like a spiral dragon with a single eye, and a Native American dream catcher; also a picture of me when I was seven years old, and a bowl with three Chinese coins in it, which I use for casting the I Ching.

You’ll see that I’m covering all bases with this: an African fetish, a Christian Icon, a Native American ritual object, and a Chinese oracle. It’s not exactly consistent. But I’m not praying to any of these things. They are vehicles for the imagination that’s all, a focus for my prayers, not a destination.

Secular Age

I was very uncomfortable at first. I felt acutely embarrassed to be stuck in this peculiar pose, on my knees in front of my bedside table, praying to a God I didn’t believe in.

At the time I shared my house with a Marxist. He was an ex-member of the Socialist Workers Party and had a picture of Leon Trotsky on his wall. Trotsky was a notorious atheist, and I lived in dread of my flatmate coming home and catching me at it. I thought that the only thing worse than being caught praying by a Marxist would be to be caught masturbating by your Mum. That always made me laugh.

But this tells you something. We live in a deeply secular age. It’s not only Marxists who will look at you strangely. Mention the idea of prayer to almost anyone and they will give you this weird look, as if you’ve just done something unmentionable in mixed company.

Isn’t this odd? People have been praying for thousands of years, for as long as human beings have been on this planet perhaps, yet somehow it has become offensive in the last half-century or so. You can’t help wondering why this should be?

Maybe it’s because we have no sense of the ineffable any more, of that which lies beyond what we already know. Our culture’s view of the Universe is that we have it all done and dusted, all categorised and defined, like the list of ingredients on a soup packet; that there’s nothing left to discover, and nothing left to pray to either.

Nevertheless I kept up the practice. I’ve been praying ever since.

That’s how I see it: as a practice, as something I do, like meditation. In fact I see the two practices as part of the same dynamic process. Meditation is silent prayer; prayer is meditation with words. The one informs the other.

The act of prayer alters every time. There’s nothing fixed in it. I look at the images, I kneel down, I press my hands together and I open my heart. That’s it. I allow my innermost being a presence in that space. I say to the Universe, “look, this is what I am, with all my faults and foibles, my bad faith, my failures, my fragilities and loss of faith: this is me.” And then I allow the words to come.

Prayer is sacralised thought: thought made sacred. It’s as much to do with the posture as anything. It is an attitude of submission. It acknowledges your insignificance in the grand scheme of things and asks for guidance. It waits. It waits patiently. Most of all that is what you are doing when you pray. You are practising patience. You are waiting for an answer to a question you never knew you needed to ask.

Deep Significance

I’ve had different thoughts on what I’m praying to exactly. Sometimes it’s as vague a notion as “the Universe”. That’s a very big thing, and it would take a particularly vain nature to imagine that the Universe was going to pay any attention to little old me, a mere speck of a being, on a speck of a planet, circling an out-of-the-way star, with seven billion other specks also vying for attention.

The same goes for God. I was struck by the absurdity of this after the Tsunami of 2004. There were many stories of people who had prayed and had survived, saying that their prayers had been answered. But what about the more than 230,000 people who didn’t survive? How many of them had also prayed? I imagine even confirmed atheists pray as a Tsunami wave washes their life away. Are we to say that they were not as worthy as the ones who had survived, that God didn’t love them enough to listen their prayers? Were they all of the wrong religion?

In fact, the Tsunami killed people of all religions: Buddhist, Christian, Moslem, Hindu and Jew; people of faith and people of no faith; and people of all religions survived too, whether they prayed or not.

And that is precisely the contradiction that lies at the heart of the practice: the awareness that, although we are insignificant on a Universal scale, yet we are deeply significant too. Significance refers to signs, to the things that signal meaning in our lives. And therein lies the answer to both questions: what is prayer, and what is it we are praying to?

Because the Universe is vast, mysterious and beyond measure, and can hardly hear our prayers; but the inner space of the heart is also deep and unfathomable. It is that part of the Universe that only we can know. This is the domain in which our prayers will be heard.

Prayer that asks for something in the outer world is inevitably doomed, either to failure, or worse: to being answered. Because if you believe that God answers your prayers by giving you what you want in this world, then you must also believe that other people, those who are hungry or toiling or lost, are given what they are given by God and that is what they deserve.

This is so far away from the meaning of prayer as to be a real danger to your soul.

No. Prayer is a dialogue. It is a dialogue with yourself: with your higher self, with the divine presence within you, with the being you might become. It is a conversation with that part of yourself that has distance and perspective, that can see beyond your present horizon and can guide you on your way.

And the only prayer that matters is the one that asks for wisdom, that asks for guidance and forgiveness: not the forgiveness of God, but the forgiveness of yourself, both for yourself and for your loved ones, for the ones you choose to judge.

Amen.

From Kindred Spirit  Issue 150 May/June 2017

Against tribalism: “for the many, not the few”

I’ve just spent the weekend at the Roots Gathering festival, put on by my good friends Phil and Lynne Cowley Jones of Shamanic Drums and Rattles.

It was a brilliant affair, and shows what you can do with energy and enthusiasm and a clear moral perspective.

I spent a good deal of the time with Stuart Jeffrey, who is standing as the Green candidate for Maidstone.

You couldn’t hope to meet a nicer chap. He’s as left wing as anyone I know, inside or outside the Labour Party: committed to proper green politics and to a future where private profit takes a back seat to public need.

It was during one of our chats that he reminded me of why I am so against tribalism in politics.

Stuart was the Green candidate for Canterbury at the last election, which is when he first introduced himself to me. At the same time a number of us were also running a campaign to save our local Crown Post Office from closure.

We held a meeting with the Post Office up in London, involving local campaigners, and most of the election candidates – barring the Conservative, Julian Brazier, who had already indicated that he approved of the franchising out of postal services.

I was Stuart’s main enabler, making sure he was always informed about meetings so that he could attend. I did this, despite the fact that I am a life-long Labour supporter, because, it seemed to me, a campaign like ours needed cross-party support.

So at this particular meeting, Stuart arrived late, which meant that he missed the initial get-together before we went into the Post Office. He was very keen to have his voice heard and was quickly on the phone after the meeting was finished.

It was only some two or three days later that we found out that he had briefed the papers about the meeting with his own Green Party message, thus undermining our efforts as a cross-party campaign.

That was a clear example of party-political tribalism, something that I know that Stuart now regrets.

So what happened? How did this generally polite, thoughtful and considerate man end up making such an obvious blunder?

It was tribalism. So focussed was he on his personal campaign that he lost sight of the bigger picture. He lost sight of the fact that, in some cases, political parties have to suspend their rivalry and come together to fight an injustice. He wanted his party to get the advantage, at whatever cost. He let his ego get in the way.

This is something I’ve seen many, many times. Politics is the art of putting our energetic egos in the service of the things we value. No one does anything for nothing in this world. But if the cause is right, and the ego is properly regulated, it can be a powerful tool for transformation.

At the same time, it can also distract you, so that you lose sight of the main cause.

I’ve seen the glint in people’s eyes when they are in with a chance of being selected as the parliamentary candidate for a political party, even when the party is unlikely to win. The mere prospect of getting into power is visibly exciting. The urge for power is a fundamental drive with pretty much the same compulsive force as the urge for sex.

Access to power in the UK – assuming you are not already a billionaire or a sociopath, or both – can only be achieved through the democratic process, and it’s a rare person indeed who doesn’t succumb to its fascination.

Very few MPs, of any political party, come through the process unscathed.

The Tories, of course, delight in it. They revel in it. They are naked in their self-interest and will lie, cheat, steal, do anything they can, to get access to wealth and power.

Most of the other parties at least have some basic morals underlying their political stance, but individual MPs, of all parties, will still be subject to its lure.

Once in Parliament they will be lobbied by those who have real power in this world: the wealthy elites, the newspaper moguls, the captains of industry, the hedge fund managers, the arms dealers, the worldly landowners born into wealth and privilege. They will be wined and dined, made friends of, their egos flattered, their appetites indulged, in exchange for political favours.

It doesn’t matter what party you are in, it doesn’t matter what your ideals are, it doesn’t matter what your party’s policies are, it’s a rare person indeed who would not be severely tempted by such an onslaught of indulgence.

Tony Blair’s years were characterised by this kind of embedded corruption. Not only did Blair make himself fabulously wealthy by enabling and promoting the neo-liberal agenda through Parliament, he presided over a system, and a party, that was deeply compromised by its urge for self-promotion, for kickbacks and private perks.

Remember Geoff Hoon, Patricia Hewitt and Stephen Byers? If you don’t, then you should look them up.

And those were just the ones who got caught.

But don’t think it’s just the Labour Party. If there was ever a sniff of the Green Party getting into power (or the Trade Union and Socialist Alliance, or the Monster Raving Loony Party, or any other party you can name) people who crave power would soon be lining up to join. They will learn all the right words to say to rise up in the party. It doesn’t matter what the words mean, they will say them and mean something else. What is your party’s favourite word? Prepare to have it devalued. They will smile, dissemble, manipulate, whisper behind other people’s backs, bribe, threaten, lie, cheat, creep, undermine, patronise, whatever it takes, to worm their way into a position of power and influence in the party. That’s the psychopathic way.

And it is precisely here that the danger of tribalism lies, in that variation of “my country right or wrong”: my party right or wrong.

All parties need to be kept in check from the dangers of personal ambition.

Any member of the Labour Party who does not see that the Labour Party in Scotland deserved to get a good kicking, for its nepotism and neo-liberalism and support for austerity; any Labour Party supporter who found themselves incapable of celebrating Mhairi Black’s stunning victory in Paisley and Renfrewshire South, and who hasn’t been charmed by this fresh, young, authentic Scottish voice; any Labour Party supporter who works against Caroline Lucas in Brighton, or against Dr Louise Irvine of the National Health Action Party (NHAP) in Jeremy Hunt’s seat in South West Surrey (and, in particular, those Labour Party apparatchiks who forced the expulsion of Labour Party members for forming a progressive alliance with the NHAP); any Labour Party supporter who does not see the purpose of the Green Party, or identify with its aims and values, or who did not thrill to the debate that took place in Scotland around the independence referendum; any Labour Party supporter who failed to understand the overwhelming support for Brexit by working class communities in the North and the Midlands, and who disparaged such communities as racist: all of you need to take a good long look at yourselves and ask yourselves who you are really serving with your stance? You are succumbing to party political tribalism.

I say this as a committed Labour supporter.

But, by the same token, any Green Party member, or member of any other political party standing in a marginal seat, with Labour in second place, or who would vote for any other party in such a seat in this election, is also succumbing to tribalism.

For the first time in a generation, since the “white heat” of the sixties, we have a Labour Party committed to radical change in this country, with a manifesto that any progressive party would be proud of, with the means and the passion to deliver it, with a leader with integrity and a cabinet-in-waiting with hope and vision and real intellectual verve.

These are not people who have been jockeying for position in the Labour Party in order to further their careers: that lot were wiped out after the last failed coup attempt against Corbyn. No: these people are brand new. They’ve been working quietly in their constituencies for the good of their constituents, not chasing wealth and power. They are, by and large, the rump of the Labour Party who did not give in to Blair’s excesses.

We are watching the potential transformation of the Labour Party into what it was always meant to be: the party that our grandparents and great grandparents fought for and sacrificed for; the party that brought us the NHS and the welfare state, Comprehensive education and the post-war consensus; the heir to the Suffragettes and the Chartists and to all the groups who struggled for our right to vote; the party of real change in our society, who will close off the tax loopholes that allow corporations and other rich individuals to escape their fair share of tax; the party that will fully fund our NHS, that will create a National Education Service, that will ensure that our young people have a real future; that will not pay off the rich at the expense of the poor, that will not pay off the current generation at the expense of the future, that will not pay off the corporations at the expense of civil society, that will not take us into needless, dangerous, unasked-for wars, that will seek peace before war; the party of hope, the party of vision, the party of the future: “for the many, not the few”.

You’d better believe it.

So you don’t like Jeremy Corbyn

So you don’t like Jeremy Corbyn.

How do you know you don’t like him? Have you met him? Have you spoken to him? Did he come round to your house and kick your dog?

No. You saw him on the telly. He was bit scruffy and he didn’t know how to do his tie up properly. He didn’t bow his head enough at the cenotaph. He didn’t sing the national anthem. What else do you know about him really?

You like his policies. You want railways and other utilities back in public hands. You don’t see why foreign-based state-owned rail companies should be taking profits from our subsidised rail system. You want to see our Health Service properly funded. You don’t want to see our nurses using food banks. You think that corporations that use our infrastructure should be properly taxed. You are against tax havens and tax cuts for the rich. You are fed up with foreign wars.

But you don’t like Jeremy Corbyn.

Shall I tell you a secret? We don’t live in a democracy. You think it’s one person, one vote and that the will of the majority should prevail? It’s not. You get your vote, your thirty seconds of choice, between the man with the red rosette and the man with the blue rosette, but it’s the will of the most well off that prevails. Power resides in the hands of those who have the most wealth, and governments do their bidding, not yours. So the choices you get are the choices between one set of wealthy people’s priorities and another, between one brand of neo-liberalism and another: between the blue Tories and the red Tories, Tory heavy and Tory lite. Your choices don’t come into it.

But you don’t like Jeremy Corbyn.

We’ve had relentless negativity about him since he first appeared on the scene. Why would that be? Maybe it’s because he’s offering you a real choice. For the first time in a generation, those are your priorities being set out before you, as a set of policies, not those of the wealthy elite. The same policies brought to you by the 1945 Labour government, and by governments across the Scandinavian world. Not extremist policies: Social Democratic policies. Policies that are known to work. So, unable to attack the policies, they attack the man.

It’s been non-stop, day-in and day-out, since he first won the Labour leadership, from every branch of the establishment. From the BBC, from the Guardian, from the government, from members of the Labour Party, those whose career trajectory has been knocked off track. From the Daily Mail and the Sun. Is it any wonder you don’t like him, really? If the BBC told you that cornflakes were bad for you, and repeated this message every day for two years, chances are you wouldn’t like cornflakes either.

A friend of mine asked me why the Labour Party didn’t pick a more charismatic leader, a more handsome leader, someone who looked good on the telly?

That’s because we were fed up with Tory lite. We were fed up with only getting the choice between one brand of neo-liberalism and another. We were fed up with being told that if you didn’t pick the policies that suited the wealthy elite, you wouldn’t get into power. But what’s the point of power without principles? Tony Blair got us into power. He was handsome, charismatic and he looked good on telly, but look where he took us: into an illegal war in Iraq that has caused devastation across the Middle East, and terrorism across the world.

And meanwhile Theresa May is refusing to debate with Corbyn, refusing to meet the public, refusing to take unvetted questions from journalists. She’s being sold to us like a commodity, like a soap powder brand or a type of washing up liquid. Strong and stable, strong and stable. Hands that do dishes. It’s an advertising slogan not a political platform. How many of you know what her actual policies are?

So this is my appeal to you. So you don’t like Jeremy Corbyn. Fair enough. But let’s see what the choices are at this election. Let’s hear a debate. Don’t let Theresa May get away without answering questions.

We want a TV debate between the two leaders to see who is genuinely strong and stable and whose policies we really can agree with. We want to see what the choices are.

Isn’t that the least we can ask?

Anthropomorphism: From the Trials of Arthur Revised Edition

For Dave Westacott a stubborn old friend.

Genius Loci

[image error]Halfway up Solsbury Hill there was a shrine which the protesters used as a meeting place. It was a small obelisk built of local stone, with a carved motto on it. The motto read “Genius Loci”. The story was that the man whose land this was had died of a broken heart soon after being forced to move and that local ramblers had erected this shrine in memory of him.

“Genius Loci” means “Spirit of Place”. A “genius” in this sense is like a genie. The two words are related. It’s a type of small god who occupies a particular territory, and represents the character, the soul of that place. Terrestrial, not extra-terrestrial, earth-bound and parochial, not cosmic, the “Genius Loci” inhabits the realm between the earthly and the spiritual in the ancient rural imagination. They live in hills, in tree-stumps, in knolls, in copses, in clearings, in rocks, in rivers, in humps, in caves, in springs, in shrines and in hearths and need to be consulted with and placated when tasks are undertaken. They are the creatures that a human being can see with his child-like eye, in the twist of a branch or the shadows under a tree, and represent the personality of a place. They can be wayward, they can be benevolent, they can be mischievous, they can be wise. Often they shift arbitrarily from one thing to another. They can trick you and deceive you. They can lead you astray.

We don’t quite have a proper English word for the concept any more. Most of the words we used to have are tainted. They’ve lost their flavour. The word “Fairy” or “Fey” is one. It has become overlain with a particular, twee 19th century children’s book image of diminutive creatures with butterfly wings. In fact the Fairy-folk came in all shapes and sizes, from the very small, to the very large. Some fairies were giants. Some fairies were ugly. Some fairies were horrifying or wild. They could change in an instant, from terrifyingly beautiful, to extraordinarily repulsive. They had no concept of morality. They were wayward and capricious, like a tribe of weird feral children whose only concern is their own self-gratification.

Sometimes human beings are led astray by them. They have a magic of appearances which is known as glamour. They cast a spell over your eyes so you see the world in a different way. They lead you into their caves and their fairy-mounds where time stops still, and there they enslave you.

They have the power to change their appearance, to shape-shift and morph from one creature to another. Sometimes they can appear as animals. Sometimes they can appear as human beings. Beware the stranger and treat him politely, as you never know: it might be a malignant fairy on his hauntings out to trick you of your fate.

Often they are associated with times of the season – with Halloween or Mayday or Mid-Summer’s Eve – and with places in the landscape, like hill-forts and stone circles and standing stones: places where ancient humans once lived and worked and wondered.

They live in the Alongside world beside us, only a blink away, in the place where the human imagination delves and melds and mixes with the world of nature – delves and then forgets. It’s a very real world, for all that we have forgotten where it is. Children live large parts of their lives inside it and we re-enter it every night in our dreams.

Scientists call this process “anthropomorphism”: meaning the tendency of human beings to project their own characteristics on to the world around them. This is true. Of course we project ourselves outwardly on to the world around us. The whole world is an anthropomorphic projection, in the sense that we have seized it with our senses and interpreted it with our brains. The mundane world of un-magic out there is also just a projection from the functional part of our brains: the part that needs to simplify to survive. We can’t go round being distracted by the glint of sunlight on the surface of a brook or mesmerised by the whispering voices of the trees when there’s food to be gathered; but what we’ve forgotten how to do now is to turn off the un-magic filter once we’ve eaten our fill, to turn the magic back on, to see the whole vast fascinating complexity of nature once again, with its presences and its powers and its hidden personalities, to see it and to feel it and to engage with it again.

You see, these old stories have something to tell us. The “glamour” that can turn a handful of fallen leaves to a handful of gold, is real. A handful of leaves is indeed golden. We’ve made a specific differentiation in our brain between what is useful to us and what is not. So leaves are worthless and gold has value. But under the spell of glamour, maybe we can see the golden leaves in a new and shining light once more. Maybe we see the inner radiance of the leaves from the inner radiance of ourselves.

So we project ourselves into the world and create characters and stories and legends and tales. We see giants in the hillside and wild-hunts in the night. There are hauntings and possessions and ghostly presences in out-of-the-way places. We see mysteries where there are shadows and forever the fairy-folk are there, the Good Folk, misguiding us with their glamour. They are only “good” in the sense that we daren’t call them anything else for fear of arousing their displeasure. We should always fear and distrust them as they are our own capricious selves let loose on the world.

Here’s the problem with dismissing all of this as mere anthropomorphism: that the beings we see are indeed aspects of ourselves. The stories we tell are us. If we look out on the world and no longer see them, it is only ourselves we are losing sight of.

Solsbury Hill

Solsbury Hill, as the name suggests, was associated with the sun. Perhaps sunrise rituals took place here. Sam, of the Donga Tribe, suggested that the landscape all around was carved out ritually in a form of a complex sacred geometry. When she spoke it was like the breath of the wind rising from distant oceans. Looking out from the hill you could sense the meaning of her words. The landscape stretched out all around like a living being. Perhaps the ancient people left markers on the landscape, so that as the sun made its journey through the year, it also journeyed through the landscape. Perhaps they told a story of the journey and peopled it with characters. Perhaps the characters were the gods, the heavenly beings who moved about in the night sky against the fixed backdrop of the stars. Perhaps by that means the people could judge the progress of the year.

That was how the ancient people thought. It was a story, it was science, it was time, it was space, it was measured, it was immeasurable, it was landscape, it was cosmos, it was “out there”, it was “in here” all at the same time.

Buy the Trial of Arthur Revised Edition here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/Trials-Arthur-Revised-Pendragon/0956416314

Life After Death

Communication

People ask me if I believe in life after death, to which I reply, of course I do. And I can prove it too. When I die, when you die, life goes on doesn’t it? So there you go: there really is such a thing as life after death.

Look around you now: the world is teeming with life. It’s bursting with it. The Earth is a cornucopia of continual abundance, overflowing with life. How can you say there’s no life after death, when the evidence is clear everywhere that there is.

Ah no: you mean YOUR life, don’t you? Your ego’s life? Will YOU still go on? That’s another question, which I will get round to answering presently.

About two days before my Mum died I had a last communication with her. She was home from the hospital by then, dosed up with morphine, hardly moving, in a specialist bed in the living room, in the place where the table used to be. I must have been standing over her looking at her in a worried way. And she opened her eyes and glanced at me. It was very brief, no more than a second or two. There was the merest hint of a nod of recognition as our eyes met, and then she closed her eyes. I’m not sure she ever opened them again after that.

But that communication, for all its brevity, was very deep. My eyes, I know, were filled with concern. I didn’t know then that she would soon be dead. So there was worry in my eyes. The worry of not knowing.

The look in her eyes…. Is that even the right word? The presence in her eyes. Her presence. It was the presence of knowing: of knowing who I was. It was the presence of awareness, of simple recognition, uncluttered by demands or requirements, of questions and answers, of past and future. It came from a place before there were words and spoke to a place before there were names. It was elemental and unconditional, clear and simple, peaceful, just there: a last gleam of life from the being who had borne me and whose eyes and whose presence were the first I had known in this life.

She was saying goodbye.

I was present too at her death. Dad was holding her hand on one side of the bed, and I was on the other. He suddenly spoke up, sounding worried. “Her breathing is slowing down,” he said. I panicked. I tried ringing 111, but it was just a recorded message. I passed the phone onto Dad to wait. Still no answer. In the end I rang 999 and, in a voice charged with emotion, told them I thought my Mum was dying.

I was being completely absurd, feeding her from a bottle of vitamin enriched milkshake, which is all she would take in the end. There was an autonomic response which made her suckle, like a baby from the teat. It died slowly away with her breath, and after a minute or two a little curl of chocolate milkshake ran down her chin from the side of her mouth. I didn’t need to ask what that meant.

The ambulance was very quick. They bustled in efficiently, and got on with the business. They were absolutely glorious beings those two, like energetic angels. I remember the woman particularly: wire thin and sinewy, in the peak of health, with cropped hair and a tan. These people spend their working lives at the front line between life and death and it showed. It kind of emanated from them. There was compassion and intimacy mixed with a strong dose of rude efficiency for good measure.

They ripped my Mums top so her chest was exposed. She’d had her breast removed at the start of her illness, but there was no squeamishness from me, no embarrassment. This was a technical event and had nothing to do with any relationship I might once have had with the woman who had previously occupied this body. It was already a cadaver by then, bereft of life, a husk.

They applied the electrical pads, and the body jumped but no life came. After a while – how long I don’t know – they said sorry but there was nothing more they could do. She was dead. But I already knew that.

So where had the life gone, that presence that had spoken to me only two days before? Had it just fizzled away, like a battery running out? Or had it flown away from the body, shedding words and explanations as it went? It seemed to me to have sailed away like a boat on a rising tide, or like a feather on the waft of a breeze, and who am I to say where it had gone really? Into nothingness, or emptiness? Or into song, into air, into rainbows and the silent miracle of light?

Afterlife

There’s a dismal story going about. When people talk about death they affect the grim face of realism. When you’re dead, you’re dead, they say, and that’s all there is to it. Those old beautiful mysteries of the past, like the one in the song above, the stories we told our kids to comfort them, were just that. Just fairy stories, that’s all.

There’s no heaven, no hell, no afterlife. Just the body that rots in the ground.

But this seems to me as much an argument from ignorance as the tales that went before.

What is life? Do you know? Do the scientists know? Can they make it? Has any scientist produced the proverbial Frankenstein’s Monster yet, from bits of cadaver animated by lightning bolts? Has anyone ever connected up the right number of molecules in the right way and made them squirm with the ecstasy of life?

No, they never have. I suspect they never will.

In other words, life is a mystery. No one can tell you what it is. If the religious people are arguing from a position of ignorance, the atheists are doing the same. One lot are arguing up, to an optimistic conclusion, while the others are arguing down, to pessimism disguised as realism; but neither of them knows what they are talking about really.

We’ve let go of the religious certainty of an afterlife and replaced it with the religious certainty of nothing. But nothingness does not exist. There is no such thing as nothing. As they say, nature abhors a vacuum. Every void invites a presence. Every crevice is a home. Every nook, every cranny, every space is filled.

Life is everywhere. It’s in the air you breathe. In the darkness of the earth that teems with wriggling, crawling, many-legged things. In the fungal mycelium that twists and threads through the dank soil like a living web, bringing communication between the trees. In the leaves that shimmer in the light, feeding the branches and the roots. In the seas. In the deepest oceans. On the tops of mountains. In sulphurous, boiling pools and in the drilled cores of Antarctic ice going back millions of years. Even frozen into rocks. Prolific, unstoppable, ubiquitous life.

So is all of that completely meaningless?

When you go to make a cup of tea, is that an accident? Of course not. You had purpose in it. Desire. You wanted a cup of tea. So why do we say that life is purposeless? Surely evolution implies intent. The intent is to survive, to get better, to get stronger. That too is desire, is it not? We ascribe purpose and intent to ourselves, but not to the rest of life. How arrogant is that?

Mandaeans of Iraq

The Mandaeans of Iraq call God the Great Life. They say that water is sacred. It is a living thing, the living water, and they baptise themselves in it every day. Is there not some truth in this? What if we make Life our God? What if we say that Life itself carries the mystery of purpose within it? We are made up of millions of independent cells, which somehow, in their collectivity, manifest a purpose, even if the purpose is just to make a cup of tea. The cells don’t know that they are part of a higher purpose do they, so why should we?

I give that example not in order to convert you to anything, but to show that there are many stories, many myths, many explanations with varying degrees of elegance and beauty. Science is beautiful, but so is Mandaeanism. We’ve been telling ourselves stories ever since we first appeared on this planet. If the purpose of the other creatures is to live, to love, to move, to eat, to communicate, our purpose might also be to tell stories.

As Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, the great American sceptic and socialist once put it:

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;

Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’

Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;

Man got to tell himself he understand.”

I saw a Hindu woman in the aftermath of the tsunami of 2004. She had lost her child. She said, simply, “God has returned to God.” And if you are not moved by the elegant beauty of that response to a personal tragedy, then I feel sorry for you.

Story

So now I am going to tell you my story, the story as I see it. I don’t guarantee it is 100% true, but I do guarantee it is as honest as I can make it. I have my own reasons for telling it, which I will share with you one day.

See if you can remain still for a moment. Silent. Let the only sound be the sound of your breath, moving in and out of your body. Do you hear anything? I do. I hear a kind of hiss, a buzz, a hum, like electricity in my brain. It’s running throughout my body, from the crown of my head, to the tips of my fingers and toes, like ripples through the ducts of my skin. That’s life. It is real and entirely measurable. It is electromagnetic energy and every living creature surges with it. You have your own electromagnetic signature, like an aura, hovering around your body. That’s you. That’s why you don’t like people stepping too close to your space. It’s like they are treading on your electromagnetic toes. But it is out there in the aether too, hissing and sizzling through the branches of all the trees, rising like breath through the buds and the flowers as they bloom, surging through the animals in the throes of sexual ecstasy, roaring gloriously with life.

The Buddhists have a good word for it. They call it Nirvana, which in some translations is said to mean “the roaring silence”. The roaring silence is the blissful electromagnetic ocean of life. When the body dies, because it is worn out, old and decrepit, that electromagnetic signature, the all that you really are, leaves the body, flies out from it, to re-enter the glorious ocean of blissful awareness in the Great Life of us all.

There are two yous, not just one. There’s the old familiar you you know, that is attached to your body. It’s purpose is to protect your body, to look after it. It is the temporary you, nearby and familiar. It learns to speak, and then becomes an incessant chatter in your brain. It’s the ego, a very important function of your psychic being, but, like your body, it will die. That’s the bit of you that is scared of death, so when another creature dies, the cold hand of death enters your heart, and you either make up stories about heaven, or you put on that old grim face of realism and say that the world is meaningless.

But there is another you, ancient and deep, connected to you by the endless, fine thread of synchronicity. You are like two particles in quantum entanglement. I don’t know where it exists. A long, long way away: maybe in another dimension, maybe in a parallel universe. Maybe in the backwards universe that will exist once this universe collapses in on itself, systole to your diastole, in-breath to your out-breath, Yang to your Yin, light to your shade, immortal to your mortal bones. It existed before there were words to describe it, and it will exist after the words have ceased to have meaning. It is the you of pure awareness, of pure knowledge, of pure being. It is like an energy wave in that ocean of bliss, a sine wave of electromagnetic awareness, made up of three parts, to represent the three parts of your being: your sexual centre, your emotional centre, and your intellectual centre. In the body these are represented by your sexual organs, your heart and your brain, in ascending order, but they exist outside your body too, in your bliss body of pure awareness. “You”, the real you, is a pulse of self-identity that surges between the three in a continual dance of creativity and joy.

It’s OK: you don’t have to believe these words. It’s just another story I’m telling you. Your sceptical brain is right to be wary. Wariness is another form of awareness and you should trust its impulses and nurture them, as you nurture your heart and your heart’s desire and your urge to connect with another in the ecstatic union of dance.

Just don’t be afraid of your death, that is all. It really is your friend, come to embrace you in its loving arms, to take you home again.

For information about the Mandaeans , please read their sacred texts here.

My thanks to Peter Wilberg for some of the terminology and concepts used in this piece.

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Monday morning time confusion

So it’s 9.07 on a Monday morning. Except it isn’t 9.07, it’s 8.07. Or is that 10.07?

I’m completely disorientated. My brain keeps switching back and forth between the time it would have been two days ago, and the time it appears to be now.

That’s right, the clocks have changed. We’ve just started British Summer Time, having been on Greenwich Mean Time before that, also known as Coordinated Universal Time or Standard Time.

As a chronic insomniac, that can be pretty devastating for me. The one thing an insomniac needs is a routine. Break the routine and your sleep patterns disappear; lose your sleep patterns and your whole relationship to sleep crashes into a horrible mess. I can end up with days without a proper rest.

I write about it every year, twice a year, but nothing changes. That’s when you learn how powerless you are. No matter how many words I expend on this issue, no matter how often I plead, no matter how many people read what I write, everything will just stay the same.

I don’t like it. You don’t like it. The Queen doesn’t like it. The Prime Minister doesn’t like it. Parliament doesn’t like it. The head of the armed forces doesn’t like it. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner doesn’t like it. Nobody likes it.

No one can give a reason for it. People mutter on about the First World War and Scottish farmers, as if that answers the question. But the First World War is long gone, and if Scottish farmers need to get up early, then why don’t they just get up early? Why does the whole country have to get up with them?

It’s one of the examples I give to illustrate just how insane our world is. Every one in the entire world hates this, no one can give a reason for it, and yet it continues, seemingly out of everyone’s control, and against everyone’s will.

It doesn’t help anyone, it leaves everyone disorientated. Even people people with a normally relaxed relationship with sleep suffer a few days of mild confusion. No one quite knows where they are for a while. And yet we still do it, year after year.

In my more paranoid moments I think maybe it’s being done deliberately, in order to disorientate us, in order to remind us just how out of control we are.

It’s like a magic spell. Maybe it’s those black magicians in the Illuminati doing it in order to keep us perpetually enslaved to their false notion of time. If we don’t even have control over something as fundamental as time, then how can we function as free beings?

Maybe they will be privatising it next. Maybe they’ll start arbitrarily altering the time of day, as and when they chose. Maybe we’ll all have to take out Time Insurance in order to protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of time. They’ve privatised almost everything else, why not time?

Don’t answer that. I think I might be giving someone ideas.

The hypocrisy of the West

There’s a great quote from Chomsky which everyone should learn by heart: “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism,” he says. “Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

So one lone, mad Muslim convert decides to attack a bunch of pedestrians in London using a hire car, and everyone is going on about Islam being a malign force.

Have we forgotten already: those weapons of mass destruction; the more than a million dead; the utter devastation of an entire country; the depleted uranium munitions that will mean generations of mutations in Iraqi children; the millions made homeless; the vengeance on Fallujah; the turkey-shoot on the Basra Road; the deceit, the lies, the never-ending hypocrisy?

I won’t go into the ongoing violence in the region: the attacks on Libya and Syria, the Western-backed coup in Egypt. You must have heard it all, and then quietly decided it was irrelevant if you want to talk about the malignancy of Islam.

No one should be killed because of a political ideology, whether that ideology is fundamentalist Islam, or fundamentalist Capitalism, but if you look at the scale of the carnage, one side comes out clearly on top.

We’ve been interfering in the Middle East for more than a century now: ever since oil was discovered there.

We’ve overthrown democratic governments in Iran and Egypt. We’ve committed mass murder. We’ve supported corrupt, nepotistic regimes like Saudi Arabia. We’ve supported the vile Wahhabi philosophy which they have promoted around the world. We’ve turned a blind eye to their continuing support for terrorism.

You want to know who is behind ISIS?

We are.

You want to know who is behind the never ending cycle of violence in the region and throughout the World?

We are.

You want to know who targets women and children and civilians on the street?

We do.

There’s a famous New Testament text: Matthew 7, Verse 3 (King James version): “why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

Or another, from the Old Testament: 2 Kings 20, Verse 1: “Thus saith the LORD, Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.”

In other words: before we start going on about the malignancy of Islam, we would do well to observe, and do something about, the malignancy in ourselves.