Watching the Westminster commentariat over the weekend reminded me of a lesson I learned from my pet hamsters when I was nine. There is something particularly sickening about seeing a mammal eat its own pups.

As it became clear that a majority of MSPs elected in Scotland would be from parties who had committed to an independence referendum, the cheerleaders of the Westminster system started to invent new tests for whether there is a mandate for such a vote.

‘The mother of parliaments’ claims to have parented parliamentary democracies around the world. And in a parliamentary democracy, a mandate for doing something is derived from securing a parliamentary majority for those promising to do it.

But now, mother was scoffing her young to save herself.

Yesterday, Andrew Neil, a leading courtesan of the Palace of Westminster, declared “a majority in the Scottish Parliament is not the same as a mandate from the people”.

Apparently it wasn’t a parliamentary majority that mattered. It was an SNP majority alone, irrespective of the Scottish Greens also having a commitment to independence in their manifesto. “During the campaign,” he wrote for the Daily Mail, “the Greens assured voters they could vote for an environmental agenda without endorsing a second referendum or independence.”

That’s a particularly odd claim given the Scottish Green Party literally spent money advertising its support for independence on Facebook, and talked about it repeatedly in each of the televised debates. Of course, many Green and SNP voters will, on balance, oppose independence just as many Labour and Liberal Democrat voters will, on balance, support it. But in a parliamentary democracy, voters weigh up manifestos, and choose or not to endorse the programmes they contain.

For some in Westminster, a majority of the popular vote was suddenly what mattered. But then it transpired that, while pro-independence parties got 49% of constituency votes they got 50.1% of regional votes. Which one is it?

A distraction is what it is. We live in a parliamentary democracy. A majority of MSPs in the new Scottish Parliament ran on manifestos committing them to an independence referendum. That’s the mandate. That’s how it works in the system that Westminster birthed.

The Claim of Right

On 30 March 1989, 58 of Scotland’s then 72 MPs gathered at the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland, along with church leaders, local government and trade union representatives, and signed ‘the Claim of Right’.

“We, gathered as the Scottish Constitutional Convention,” it said, “do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of government best suited to their needs.”

All but one Scottish Labour MP signed, as did every Scottish Liberal Democrat MP.

Ten years and two months later, another now-famous sentence echoed around the same hall: “The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on 25th day of March in the year 1707, is hereby reconvened.”

The constitutional convention had won. The devolution era had begun.

In the coming weeks, the new generation of Scottish Labour and Liberal Democrat parties will need to decide if the principle their parties supported 32 years ago is one to which they still subscribe.

Both parties ran in this Scottish election opposing an independence referendum. But the question now isn’t whether they want one. It’s whether, having elected a majority of MSPs who do, the Scottish people still have the “sovereign right” pledged to us all those years ago? Or is the United Kingdom a compulsory arrangement?

And this isn’t just a question for Scottish politicians. If Boris Johnson chooses to block an independence referendum, he will be leading a direct confrontation with democracy. Keir Starmer and Ed Davey will have to pick a side for Labour and the Lib Dems respectively, and their choices could well define their political careers.

Political reality

Walk out of the Church of Scotland Assembly Hall and you’re perched on the Mound – in Edinburgh’s medieval Old Town, looking north over the Georgian New Town, across the Firth of Forth and to the hills of Fife beyond.

The sweeping streets below were built with the plunder of empire and slavery that the union between Scotland and England gave access to, and are named to commemorate it: Thistle Street and Rose Street after the respective national flowers, Princes Street, Queen Street and George Street after the then Royal family, St Andrew Square to the East and, originally, St George Square to the West, after the patron saints – though the latter was soon renamed as Charlotte Square to avoid confusion with another George Square.

It was in Bute House on Charlotte Square that, in 2012, permission for the 2014 independence referendum was given in the Edinburgh Agreement, signed by David Cameron and Alex Salmond, who would both go on to disgrace themselves. At the time, this was essentially a matter for UK domestic politics. Support for Scottish independence trailed at around a third. Few people believed it would happen. For Cameron, this was a piece of political management, a concession to a quirky fringe interest while he got on with the real business of slashing public services.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In the 2010 general election, the fascist British National Party and UKIP got 12.2% between them in Hartlepool. By 2015, Nigel Farage’s party had mopped up the far-Right vote, coming second in the seat with 28% as Labour support fell 7%. But in 2017, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour put the vote up by 17%, only for it to fall back by 15% in 2019, as the Brexit party, the new outpost of Faragism got 26%.

In this by-election, as in local elections whose results are flickering in from across England, one thing is clear: Boris Johnson has won over the far-Right vote. Whoever it is that taught those teenagers that their problems are the fault of people with less power than them, who voted BNP in 2010: it seems those people wanted to congratulate the prime minister.

If, as it seems, many people voted Tory for the first time yesterday, the results that have emerged so far across England show that there is an electoral dynamism on the Left as well as the Right. In one ward in South Tyneside, the Green Party vote was up by 44%, taking the seat, despite previously having been nowhere. In Stockport, it gained a seat by growing its vote from 7% to 48%. Many people are looking for change, and see Labour leader Keir Starmer as more of the same.

But the overwhelming sense for observers in Scotland is that England’s lurch to the Right isn’t just a temporary affair. And many who have flirted with the idea of independence will be getting more serious as they flick through the results this morning.

And meanwhile, keeping an eye on all of this, too, are the people of Wales. As Cardiff University professor Richard Wyn Jones pointed out in openDemocracy’s live discussion last night, next year, Labour will have won every major election in the country for a century. And we can be sure that they have won again this time. As Scotland, England and Northern Ireland grapple over their futures, the Welsh are watching, and waiting, and wondering how to respond.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

This version of unionism has dissolved over the past decade, as Scottish distinctiveness has become more than a tradable commodity and started to represent a serious threat to the British state. Scotland’s Tories have fallen back on an Anglo-British Conservatism, distinguished by flying the Union Flag, uncontrollable rage at bilingual Gaelic/English road signs and red-faced, spit-loaded fury at any notion of Scottishness.

Conservatism has retreated from an expansive notion of unionism to the core of Toryism: a belief in the mythology of the British state and its monarchy. It’s the power of this story for the English that is, essentially, why England consistently votes Tory despite its people generally being almost as social democratic and socially liberal as their neighbours in Scotland. And its weakness in Scotland explains why we don’t.

Capitalists and Jacobites

How far back should we follow the threads of Scottish political culture? At least as far as 1767, when Adam Ferguson, born in the village of Logierate in Perthshire – just near the Highland boundary – published ‘An Essay on the History of Civil Society’, which coined the term ‘civil society’, influenced Karl Marx and made him a grandfather of sociology.

In the book, Ferguson documented the arrival of ‘commercial society’ – what Marx later christened ‘capitalism’ – in the Highlands of his youth, contrasting it with the ‘civil society’ which had existed before.

While the expansion of capitalism was consistently met with resistance across early-modern Europe, when this conflict reached the Highlands, it fused with anger that the Scottish Stuart family had been replaced by the Dutch King William on the by now joint throne of Scotland and England, and combusted into the Jacobite rebellion, a civil war which ended with the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the last battle fought on mainland Britain.

That’s not dead history in Scotland. This weekend, I found myself absent-mindedly singing old Jacobite songs to my baby daughter. Half-memories of the uprising pervade Scottish culture, and dampen the support for the House of Windsor that is so crucial to Anglo-British Toryism.

Being less royalist than any other part of Great Britain, attempts since the financial crash of 2008 to replace the feel-good drug of cheap credit with kitsch imperial nostalgia haven’t resonated in Scotland as they have in much of England.

The jubilee street parties and royal weddings, the gaudy poppy-fests, the cultural tropes in which Brexit came wrapped: none of these raises as many goosebumps in Scotland as in England.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t have their audiences. Between a quarter and a third of people in Scotland identify as either British before Scottish, or equally British and Scottish. The cultural institutions of this group include posh schools and the networks bound together by their ‘old boy’ ties, Orange Lodges and the armed forces.

Traditionally scattered between Labour, Lib Dems and Tories, this section of the Scottish electorate rallied around the Union Flag in the 2016 Scottish parliamentary election – which took place just 20 months after the independence referendum – and voted for Ruth Davidson’s Tories, taking them from 14% to 23% of the vote: enough for a friendly media to celebrate.

But Davidson wasn’t cheerful for long. The next month saw what one man in Northern Ireland would later describe to me in a Freudian slip as ‘England’s referendum’.

The break-up of Britain

The familiar idea of Britain emerged at some point in the late 1940s as Clement Attlee’s government downsized from governing India to dabbling in nuclear weapons, founded the NHS and built ‘homes for heroes’.

The British Empire – whose conquest had been the purpose of the union between Scotland and England’s governing classes – was breaking up. A new, archipelagic nation staggered out of the wreckage and, slowly, into the rehab unit for former colonists, the European Union.

But by the time England chose to check out of the programme in the hope of reliving its glory days, it was already pretty clear that that version of Britain had gone. The welfare state had been slashed and sold off. The banking system that North Sea oil had powered had followed the fate of its fuel, and gone up in smoke.

If the 45% ‘Yes’ vote in the 2014 independence referendum was a coalition of, on the one hand, those who most strongly identify as Scottish rather than British and, on the other, the radicals I started this essay with, who have concluded that the British state provides an unlikely path to a fairer world, then Brexit seems to have added another group to that mix: ardent pro-Europeans, and everyone horrified by the lurch to the right that Brexit seemed to represent.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

The SNP, the most electorally successful party in modern Britain, has a simple solution: independence from the British state. UKIP blamed the EU. Johnson encouraged people to vote politics away, to “get Brexit done”, and leave the market and the old ruling class to get on with it.

However, none of this works for Labour which, over the last century has become deeply embedded in the leather benches of the Palace of Westminster and is only really rooted in working class communities in the sense that it sucks energy out of them – as the people of central Burnley attest.

While the Tories can rely on the power and mythology of the ruling class, Labour depends on its promise to use its mastery of the British state to deliver material benefits to its voters. And that strategy frays as soon as people stop trusting your pledges: using politics to improve lives doesn’t attract support if people have lost faith in the political system.

In a patchwork of places across the country, the Greens have been able to show up, fresh-faced and recently re-energised by the collapse of Corbynism, Brexit and the school climate strikes, and step from outside that system and into this void. Just as the SNP found when they started seriously campaigning in Labour’s former Scottish heartlands 20 years ago, there are communities waiting to be organised.

But there is a risk in all of this.

While radical changes to the power structures that dominate the country may benefit most people, it’s important to understand that there are also conflicts between people’s interests. Those enriched by the current economic system need to be made to pay more tax. Oil executives need to have their businesses shut down. Male power and white privilege need to be challenged, and you can’t break up a heteronormative world without upsetting those who snuggle comfortably under its assumptions.

Avoiding other parties’ pitfalls

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Liberal Democrats built up bases of support across the country, representing the beliefs and interests of an increasingly broad array of different communities. And then, in 2010, they discovered that those communities thought radically different things, and that they had been saying increasingly divergent things to them in order to get elected.

When these contradictions came under the pressure of decisions about real political power, it’s no surprise that the rich and powerful won out. The result was disastrous, both for the party, and the country.

For Greens to avoid this fate, the party needs to embrace these conflicts rather than hiding them away. It needs to understand that pissing off the powerful is part of its job, that there are some suburbs in the stockbroker belt that it can’t honestly represent.

And as well as being honest, embracing conflict is also politically sensible. Too often, Greens are afraid of being attacked by the right wing press and other outriders of the status quo. But in reality, the opposite of being controversial is being ignored: a fate Greens have too often embraced, for fear of a fight.

The Green Party also needs to learn from the mistakes of Labour. It’s too easy, as a party gains power, for it to be inducted into the establishment. Ralph Miliband documented how this happened to early Labour MPs in the 1920s, as they were toured around London clubs by the cleverer members of the ruling class, allowed to represent their voters so long as they played by the rules.

We see a version of this in today’s Labour Party. As the Murdochs and Rothermeres move against Johnson, Starmer seems to think that if he quietly waits in line with a neat haircut and follows all of the rules, then eventually he’ll be allowed to govern. But in reality, that’s rarely how it works. In the British state, the next in line to a Tory prime minister is almost always another Tory.

For England’s Greens to have any hope of actually changing the country, the party needs to be definitive about not wanting to become part of the establishment. Instead, it needs to rip apart the unwritten rulebook whose codes, laws and lores are at the core of why people think the British state is dysfunctional and corrupt; to secure for England – and, probably independently, Wales and Scotland – more genuine democracy. As I’ve argued before, the Greens should campaign to abolish Westminster. The aim is not to become the establishment, but to disband it.

A vision for the future

For Natalie Bennett, former leader of the England and Wales Greens and one of the party’s peers, it’s also important that the party has what she calls a “coherent political philosophy”.

Once you accept the resource constraints of a limited planet, she said: “There’s two obvious ends of the political spectrum.” Either, you believe “there’s enough resources for everyone if we share them out fairly” or, you have “a far-right authoritarian government which says, ‘It’s a difficult, dangerous world and you need a strong man to protect you’”.

The former, she says, is “a vision of hope and empowerment”, the latter, “a greedy philosophy built on fear”. And because her party has what she sees as “a unified vision”, it is less at risk of falling into the same trap as the Lib Dems. She said that for this election, that vision is paramount.

“What’s really clear is that we are in the last zombie days of neoliberalism,” she said. As a result of the pandemic, “people are saying the old answers just don’t work any more… [they are] looking round for something different… for profound change. The nearest historical comparison is the 1970s.”

A Green wave?

In the last few Scottish elections, the Greens have polled relatively well early on, and then suffered from a SNP surge at the end. It’s almost a week to go until polling day, so everything could change. But, if anything, the opposite appears to be happening. As voters make up their minds, it does seem like more are walking the other way along this familiar path.

Pay homage to data wizards across the political spectrum, and they’ll whisper their predictions. And one of this year’s secrets is that the Scottish Green Party is expected to enjoy a significant increase in their tally of MSPs.

In London, polls show that the English Green’s co-leader and mayoral candidate, Siân Berry, is on course for her party’s best ever result, perhaps picking up an extra Assembly seat on the way. Meanwhile, the two polls for West Midlands mayor have put the party on 8% and 5% – hardly a revolution, but a respectable figure for a party which, a decade ago, could expect 1-2% outside a short list of target areas.

This summer, I’ll have been a Green member for 20 years. I’ve lived through more dashed hopes and election night tears than triumphs. And of course, this year could be another one of those. But two things are striking.

The first is that, despite all those setbacks, the steady progress led by senior members such as Chris Williams and Natalie Bennett has meant that the party is incomparably bigger and more impressive than the one that we joined in the 2000s. And the second is that many of the ideas that it promoted then, which were treated as marginal even on the Left, have become popular demands across the country.

In politics, change happens gradually, then all at once; quietly, then bang. For British political journalists obsessed with the gossip of Westminster, the local election successes of England’s fourth party are unlikely to make front page news. But these are the sorts of quiet seeds from which great trees can sprout.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Speaking to openDemocracy, Barnard said that it was “frustrating” to be accused of blackmail for the common campaign tactic of threatening to protest if a demand is not met.

He added that, while being questioned in relation to this allegation, a senior officer said “you’re not a proscribed organisation yet – don’t you think your actions are akin to terrorism?”.

A spokesperson for LaSalle said the company is “aware of a number of incidents” that have occurred at various of its offices and online, adding: “The incidents have been referred to the police for further action.”

Speaking about her arrest in Holyhead, Ammori accused officers of making assumptions about her based on her race.

“They said if I didn’t answer their questions I’d be charged under the terror act,” she said.

“They asked me a load of racist crap. They asked about my family in Iraq, they wanted to know about all my family in Iraq, all my aunties and uncles.

“They asked if I was Sunni/Shia, I said I’m not religious. They asked if I was Jihadi. It’s very frustrating, being asked if I’m a terrorist.”

Ammori faces trial in Stafford Crown Court on 17 May, charged with criminal damage at a different protest in Shenstone, Staffordshire.

Threatened with proscription

Last week, activists from Palestine Action peacefully occupied the roof of an Elbit factory in Oldham, Greater Manchester, and poured paint over the building, shutting it down for 12 hours.

Milly Arnott, a member of the group who was arrested after the action, says she was told by officers from the Metropolitan Police that the group faced being listed as a terrorist organisation, despite its actions being non-violent, on the grounds that their protests had done ‘more than £2m of damage’ to the arms company.

Arnott, a full-time charity worker, was inspired to take action after studying Arabic for a year at An-Najah university in Nablus, in the West Bank.

“I had my British passport, I was white, I could pass through checkpoints without being worried about being shot,” Arnott, who lived with a Palestinian woman in Jenin during her time in the West Bank, said.

“My Palestinian friends couldn’t leave the city without fearing they would be shot,” she said. “When I thought of my childhood, it was a childhood. They were deprived of that.”

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In 2017, openDemocracy revealed that Ross had said during an interview with Double Down News that his number one priority were he prime minister for the day would be “tougher enforcement against Gypsy/Travellers”. He later apologised for saying it would be his top priority.

Earlier this week, openDemocracy also revealed that, while Ross was a local councillor and chair of Moray’s planning committee in 2013, he ran a campaign against a Traveller site on private land in Moray. When the Scottish government approved the site, he said: “I am disappointed and frustrated that we seem to have to bend over backwards for this ethnic minority.”

In 2010, Ross voiced opposition to a different Traveller site on the grounds that it was too far from urban centres, saying “I have concerns about the ability to manage and control the site if it is in a more remote and rural area.” But in 2013, his committee ruled that Traveller sites would not be allowed within a kilometre of existing settlements, a policy described to openDemocracy by Tammi as “apartheid”.

However, the newly released emails show that Ross continued to use his power to target Travellers after he was elected an MP.

“To see this correspondence in black and white is truly shocking,” said Davie Donaldson, a Traveller from Angus, in east Scotland, responding to openDemocracy’s latest revelation.

“To request the physical eviction of families solely based on their ethnicity and the fact that they are ‘visible’ is heart-wrenching beyond measure.

“Gypsy/Travellers have lived, worked and contributed to Moray for centuries – they have as much right as anyone to be ‘visible’.”

He added: “It is an MP’s role to represent all of their constituents, especially those already marginalised – not to further exclude and stoke the fires of prejudice.

“Sadly this correspondence is telling of the often institutionalised prejudice held toward Gypsy/Travellers”.

Donaldson also praised a Moray Council staff member who replied to Ross’s email, saying that the email exchange “also shows a local authority standing up to bigotry”.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Jess told me that the school was established because the settled parents refused to have their children educated alongside Travellers. It’s a story that is sadly resonant to this day.

“My granddaughter was badly bullied because she’s a Traveller,” said Kathy Townsley McGuigan. The problem is so significant, she added, that it’s the main reason why a large number of Traveller children leave school early. “The children [are] so brutally bullied at school, the parents end up taking them out,” she said.

A spokeswoman for the Scottish government told me that they don’t keep statistics on literacy rates in the Traveller community “as many Gypsy/Travellers do not go on to high school”.

Forced settlement

Kathy stopped living in bow tents in the 1980s. “Social work came to us”, she told me. “They didn’t make it as a threat. They do it in a roundabout way – ‘we’re going to have to keep visiting you’, ‘you could end up fighting for your kids’ – I was just a young mother.”

Her family moved into a council house in Perth. “I hated it,” she said. “It was really hard for me, because I had never been in a house. I missed my parents, I missed my family, I missed having all these strangers around me – it was traumatic”.

Many Travellers I speak to say they’ve faced the same threat from police trying to move them on: “do as we’ll say, or we’ll arrest you, and then your children will be taken off you.”

Often, this puts Travellers in an impossible position. Scotland used to have a patchwork of Traveller sites, some of which families had used for centuries. But in recent years, most of these ‘greens’ have been built on or blocked off.

Partly, this is because farmers need less seasonal labour now that machines bring in much of the harvest. Partly, it’s because of legislation.

The 1865 Trespass (Scotland) Act was introduced to keep Travellers off their traditional camping grounds. The 1984 Roads (Scotland) Act bans camping near a road. The 1994 Criminal Justice Act bans six or more vehicles from camping together, proscribing cultural gatherings. The 1986 Caravan Sites and Controlled Development Act restricted the size of caravans and forced Travellers to conform to the norms of settled holidaymakers.

Selling door to door – a traditional Traveller job – has been heavily regulated. In theory, you need a licence. In practice, it can be very hard to get one: Kathy was told by her local police in Argyll that they didn’t exist, and had to travel to another county to get one. And even if you get one, signs have been glued to doors across the country, saying peddlers aren’t welcome.

Freshwater pearl fishing – an ancient Traveller trade – was banned in the 1990s after pollution and overfishing from scuba divers nearly wiped out the mussels that produce the pearls: a rancid environmental injustice.

Metal recycling, a traditional Traveller trade, has also been restricted. The vast bubble in house prices has unleashed an obsession with land value and ownership, replacing ancient negotiations over land use with moral panics when camps show up.

Often, traditional Traveller greens have been turned into tourist caravan parks, and the invention of enterprise zones in the 1980s and 1990s encouraged industrial estates on the edges of cities, transforming what were once Traveller sites into grim concrete jungles. Often, Lynne Tammi points out, you still see caravans outside warehouses, as Travellers have nowhere to go but their now-grey greens.

The overall effect of these changes, said Davie Donaldson, has been to sever the bonds that did exist between the Travelling and settled communities. In the past, when the powerful tried to inflame fear of Travellers, there were too many settled people who had worked or played alongside them for panic to take hold.

More recently, it’s easier for tabloids and right-wing politicians to spread fear, as has been clear since The Sun’s 2005 “Stamp on the Camps” campaign, says Davie.

‘Neither land nor master’

In most of the world, for all of recorded history, nomadic and settled communities have lived alongside each other. Sometimes, there’s conflict over resources and prejudices. Sometimes, there’s mutual learning and respect.

There is more wisdom in the latter approach. After all, for those of us from settled communities, there is much to learn from nomads, whose environmental impact is much lower, who pass through land rather than pouring concrete into it, and for whom the act of moving is often an effective form of resistance against the systems which oppress so many of us.

The first piece of Scottish legislation I can find which criminalises Gypsy/Travellers, from 1575, also targets “others neither having land nor master”.

Much of Traveller society is built on the idea of commons: greens are shared between families. The skills of tinsmithing are shared within the community. Pearl mussels were harvested sustainably. For centuries, this has enabled Travellers to transgress both feudal and capitalist systems.

It’s that act of transgression that many in the settled community – and particularly those with power – seem to resent. It’s harder to exploit workers if they can easily leave. You can’t jack up the rent for someone who can take to the road.

“A population that travels from place to place, a population that doesn’t pay mortgages, [that] lives off the land, it doesn’t really lend itself to a capitalist agenda,” said Davie.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

But it didn’t really work. Rage at the Dominic Cummings affair, the government’s mishandling of the pandemic and COVID-cronyism (a term we believe openDemocracy invented) swept over the government. If it weren’t for a flaccid Labour leader, the fury could have capsized Johnson.

The establishment was temporarily saved by a different British institution; the NHS took control of the vaccine roll-out. The reassuring hands of tens of thousands of nurses got a grip of the situation, and the polls bounced.

But the ruling class is clever enough to understand that a year of lockdown, sickness and death means an ocean of pent-up energy. ‘Kill the Bill’ protests across England and riots in Northern Ireland are likely to just be the start of a long, hot summer of post-lockdown protests.

And so for them, Philip’s death was timely. It provides, they seem to hope, an official outlet for grief, a space to construct a national moment where we can all cry together and mourn together and then move on; a symbolic end to a disastrous year and a chance to unite with those who chose to risk our actual grandparents’ lives for the sake of their donor’s profits.

But it seems that they’ve misjudged it. Of course every death is a tragedy, but in a year that nonagenarians have been sacrificed to the gods of the market, a 99-year-old dying in comfort doesn’t feel any more tragic than every other death. Where are the John Lewis banner adverts for everyone else’s grandparents? Where is the week of mourning for the country?

The same ruling class has got this wrong before: they tried to downplay the death of Diana, and faced a revolt. They tried to enforce a victory parade after WWI, and faced off a revolution. It doesn’t surprise me much that a group of people whose defining childhood experience was being sent to boarding school doesn’t really have a feel for this sort of thing.

At some point in the coming days, the UK will pass 150,000 deaths with COVID on the certificate. Each of those lives was special and important. And Philip – equally special, equally important, but no more so – wasn’t a metaphor for any of them. When this is over, we do need to grieve as a nation. But we also need to be able to feel our anger, and direct it at those who deserve it.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

Brian Smyth, a youth worker and Green Party councillor in North Belfast, put it simply: “We can’t keep cutting corners, then wonder why young people are getting sucked into disorder, when community infrastructure has been dismantled over years of austerity. We need to invest in our working-class communities, children particularly.

“I look at the opportunities I had as a working-class kid in the 1990s growing up in North Belfast, with a decent youth service and network around it. It let me meet others from different backgrounds, travel to places I never imagined. It broadened my horizons and gave me a sense of hope and optimism.

“I benefited directly from the peace process… as a young person, with the investment and funding that flooded into youth work. Without it, I could have ended up in a paramilitary organisation, in prison or dead.”

For generations, the mostly Catholic nationalist communities faced discrimination, banned by paramilitaries from jobs in the shipyards. And they responded by encouraging their young people into formal education.

Young people in working-class Loyalist communities, whose parents and grandparents had been rewarded with well-paid, skilled manual jobs, tended not to be encouraged in the same direction, community workers on the Loyalist Shankill Road explained to me in 2018. One in five Northern Irish adults has ‘very poor’ literacy skills, and that’s heavily skewed to Protestant communities, they said.

“The stranglehold of paramilitaries in working-class Loyalist communities is so strong, I don’t know how you get out of that. [Young Loyalists] are not being treated well by the people who represent them,” Ní Mhuirí adds.

Building the bonfire

And then came Brexit. Those same Loyalist communities had been encouraged by their leaders to vote for it. Fearing the growing Catholic population and an increasingly unappealing British state was making a united Ireland more likely, the Democratic Unionist Party had gambled. Leaving the EU was, they thought, a way to sever north from south.

But the English leaders who had campaigned for it had a different idea. It’s pretty clear that Boris Johnson and those around him hadn’t considered the challenge of the Irish border before the vote in 2016. When a friend raised the subject with one prominent Tory Brexiter before the election, he blinked and said, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” Johnson was more than happy to resolve the difficulty by placing a customs border down the Irish sea.

There is a pretty strong argument for looking at the partition of Ireland through economic as well as identitarian lenses. One hundred years ago, the majority Catholic areas of the island were mostly agrarian, and wanted to protect farming from free trade and cheap imports. But the mostly Protestant area around Belfast was industrial, and so its leaders wanted unfettered access to the imperial market.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.

In late 2019, an organism on the edge of life appears to have made the journey from the body of a bat into the bloodstream of a human, and shut down the global economy. Whatever else we may have learned from the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it has taught us that, before anything else, we are biological beings. Our lives and deaths are bound to the beings around us.

This lesson isn’t new. As capitalism has drilled into the boundaries of the life systems of our planet, we have had numerous reminders in recent years that we are not just individuals. All creatures on earth depend on each other.

As the novel coronavirus was starting to spread through Wuhan, Australia was under siege from bush fires. Thirsty marsupials found a new source of water: wombats used their burrowing skills to dig wells, which saved whole ecosystems of creatures.

In previous years, flood-struck communities in the UK had reintroduced beavers, so that their dams would hold back increasingly heavy rains, preventing drenching downstream and creating rich wetland habitats for hundreds of species. And scientists started discovering how, under each forest floor, there is a complex of fungi, transmitting nutrients between trees: mycorrhizal networks, sometimes known as the “wood wide web”.

One extinction affects all

Life on earth isn’t just an assortment of organisms. It is a rich system built on billions of connections, most of which we are only just beginning to understand. In this context, every extinction isn’t just the loss of a beautiful species. It is the annihilation of every connection between that form of life and thousands of others with which it shared an ecosystem, connections that have evolved together over millions of years. And every species loss makes all of us more vulnerable.

To understand how life on Earth is dying, and how to revive it, we need to go beyond cataloguing individual creatures, cute and furry or scary and scaly as they might be. We need to understand systems and relationships, co-dependencies and collaborations.

The same is true of our own species. Too often, the environmental crisis is broken down into questions about personal moral culpability (“Is it better to eat local beef or Amazonian soya?”; “What’s the greenest washing detergent?”) or technological possibility (“Is there enough lithium in the world for us all to have electric cars?”; “Is renewable energy too intermittent to supply the whole grid?”).

Of course, these things all matter, and thousands of brilliant engineers and scientists have dedicated their careers to finding answers to them. But the question of the future of life goes deeper. Ultimately, it is this: can we organise ourselves into a society that can flourish without plunder?

And that isn’t just a conundrum for a small band of technological whiz kids and engineering geniuses. It’s a matter for all of us. It’s a question about how we organise our civilisation. It’s an issue, ultimately, about power.

Are we the kind of society that chooses to invest the wealth produced by our work into building the green infrastructure of the future? Or are we the kind that works hard to create billionaires with private jets? After the pandemic, will we allow a tiny minority to accrue vast wealth with their machines of death? Or will we build a society that loves life? The answer depends largely on whose voices are heard. It depends on how democratic we are.

Unequal countries are dirty

Measuring the distribution of power across a society can be hard. But there is one simple proxy: money.

In 2011, a team of German academics pulled together the data on income inequality versus carbon emissions across 138 countries from 1960 to 2008. They found some clear correlations. In the developed world, it turns out, the more unequal a country is, the more it contributes to climate change. In fact, the correlation between inequality and climate impact is so strong that, as the paper put it;: “for high-income countries with high income inequality, pro-poor growth and reduced per capita emissions levels go hand in hand”.

When explaining their remarkable finding, they cited another paper: “In more unequal societies, those who benefit from pollution are more powerful than those who bear the cost.” With more traditional kinds of pollution, this is obviously true.

Landfill sites and dirty factories tend to be located in poorer communities, air pollution is usually worse in poorer neighbourhoods and poisoned water tends to blight only the poorest areas. This is an old story. It’s also the reason why, in many British cities, expensive postcodes are in the west while poorer areas lie in the east – the prevailing south westerly wind carried the filth from Victorian factories over the numerous East Ends and into the lungs of those who had migrated to the cities to operate their machinery.

But the causes and consequences of climate change are more global, and longer term. While those who are less well off in the global north are certainly at greater risk from the effects of dramatic weather events than their wealthier neighbours, those in the global south will suffer the most.

This difference is reflected in polling on the issue: a 2015 YouGov survey of a sample of countries in Europe, Asia/Pacific and North America found the nations least worried about climate breakdown were the USA and the UK, while the countries with the highest levels of concern were Malaysia, Indonesia and China.

Similarly, a poll published in January 2020 asked people in ten European countries whether the environment should take priority over the economy. The poorest country in the sample, Romania, featured the highest number of people who considered the environment to be more important.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.