Be informed

Many years ago when I first migrated to the South Coast, I joined the Green Party. It was, I thought not unreasonably, a quick and easy way to meet some like-minded people, one of whom became a close friend, now sadly deceased. I canvassed a number of local elections and proudly watched the party increase its support and eventually run the Council.

The party had few famous inspirational leaders, but I believed in localism and supported the local nominee for the parliamentary seat against the Party’s eventual decision to nominate its biggest name, the then MEP, Caroline Lucas. I’m still not reconciled to that. En route to the constituency being the first to elect a Green to the Westminster parliament, the local party organised many events and invited speakers, one of whom was George Monbiot. I regarded Monbiot as being a windbag with a platform in the Guardian newspaper. I helped set up the event on the day and then left immediately prior to his arrival on the stage.

I am someone who spent his formative years on demos. Every weekend I was somewhere – outside a factory farm, animal experimentation laboratory, and most memorably a weekend at Porton Down in Wiltshire. The overnight demo (right) was outside the Reckitt factory in my hometown of Hull. At these events, particularly the mass gatherings in London and other cities around the country, I heard many – what I thought were – inspirational speeches. The late Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, was a regular and particular favourite.

As I grew older, I began to get bored with speeches. If I attended a demo – whether it be against war in Iraq, the Pope’s visit, Fridays for the Future or more local industrial disputes – I have not stayed for the speeches.

In recent years, I started reading Monbiot’s Guardian columns again. My new-found environmental zeal directed at climate change extended my reading. Monbiot is an advocate of re-wilding, unloosening the shackles of the National Curriculum to enable flexibility in the classroom and an opportunity for children to experience the outdoors and flora and fauna. He’s also a Marxist, which brings me to the point of this blog entry.

I’m a regular reader of Chris Grey’s Brexit Blog. It is classic, longhand academic musings about the labyrinthine journey to Brexit. This week, Grey (left) takes on Monbiot using his highly effective academic spray that puts the targets to sleep before killing them painlessly. The article in question this week was Monbiot’s “follow the money” piece, published in the Guardian on 25 November 2020. Monbiot argues that there are two types of capitalists: warlords (disaster capitalists as well as the zealous free-marketeers/deregulators) and the housetrained (one-nation, post-war consensus Tories). Brexit is being defined by the Warlords and the campaign was funded by offshore, dirty money such as that supplied by Robert Mercer, Christopher Harborne and Jeremy Hoskin. The piece flows with allusions to “false consciousness” but, according to Grey, leads to a cul-de-sac. That is because the remain side also received money from the likes Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Sainsbury’s. With Sainsbury’s being exposed this week as contributing to deforestation in Brazil, this money is hardly clean, housetrained or otherwise.

What really caught my attention, however, was Grey’s reference to Stuart Hall, the hugely influential cultural sociologist writing in the 70s and 80s. Hall’s contribution is to point out that the follow the money approach, whilst not invalid, is not causal. Grey quotes Hall: “material interests … are not escalators which automatically deliver people to their appointed destinations, ‘in place’, within the political ideological spectrum”. It is the culture war, the tangibility of the intangible “sovereignty”. If Monbiot is right, Biden might have defeated Trump by something more than he did.

Grey concludes: “So whilst the debate about the relationship between economics and culture is a perennial one, and discussing…in general I think of them as inextricably bound threads, not base and superstructure. I prefer both/and explanations to either/or explanations, prefer contingency to determinism, and see as much cock-up as conspiracy.” 

Monbiot is a journalist. His epistemology – through training and the graft of weekly newspaper column writing – is different from that of the academic. I cannot speak for Monbiot, but I doubt that he is in too much of a disagreement with Grey; but Grey’s argument would be subject to some editorial scrutiny. Monbiot does well to get “false consciousness” into an opinion column in a liberal newspaper, let alone trying to introduce Stuart Hall. Grey’s critique demonstrates two different epistemologies – those of journalism and academia.

There is no revolution coming. The housetrained capitalists are the best we have – and may be re-asserting themselves in the United States. We should focus on the Green economy, not the economic system. We need somehow to inspire youth. Get them interacting with nature and help them develop a desire to dig down, literally and metaphorically, into the knowledge of these complex systems, by whatever means. Taking on Chris Grey is a bit of a cul-de-sac.