Policied to Extinction, Part 3
Think Tanks wanted the canary in the coalmine dead. Now we’ll all asphyxiate.
Read Part 1 and Part 2 first.
Part 3: The enemy of the people
The scale of business influence over Westminster means it is almost impossible to imagine the end of the industries that are killing us: oil and gas. And yet we must transform or end them urgently and effectively if we want to survive as a species.
Perhaps more importantly, if you’re me, the sophisticated political strategy the think tank industry has implemented for decades is a threat to the idea that politics as we (thought we) knew it exists at all.
Politics as we thought we knew it (or had hoped): politicians honest enough to not lie too much, to be held to account for standards in public public, to actually represent our needs in representative systems according to our preferences as a citizenry, and to accept losing elections.
Politics as it is: politicians who lie as a strategy, who flood the zone with shit, who have given up on standards in public life, who are grifters earning millions out of their positions of power, and who routinely, almost as if it’s second nature, prioritise the wants of a superrich elite, major corporations, shareholders, donors, lobbyists and think tanks, over the needs of the ordinary people of the country.
Many good analysts have given their careers to exposing the corruption in politics that has left trust in politics at an all-time low. Nearly six in ten of British people say they “almost never trust politicians of any party in Britain to tell the truth when they are in a tight corner”.
But I want to focus on the political processes and beliefs of the think tanks. Because the kinds of politics Policy Exchange practice are the same model: putting the interests of who funds them first: on climate, they think they know better than the 70-80% of the public who desperately want to tackle the climate crisis.
And because the think tanks know how politics works — through lobbying, influence, money, the revolving door of hiring former politicians and special advisers, cozying up with a political class focused on holding power, rather than using power for good — they know how to get their funders’ wishes into law, against this public opinion.
So the question is not if our government has a plan for the climate crisis… The question should be this:
how are we letting corporate power use its strategies, pipelined through the slick think tanks, to sustain itself as long as possible, whilst being the cause of the crisis that is threatening all of us?
If political structures are inert in the face of this manipulation, backed by enormous amounts of money, and all we’ve got is a bunch of students and pensioners who are willing to give a few years to a jail sentence… then of course they’ll win. If we don’t have any sense of values that matter, or any shared facts that matter, or shared sense of morality or common decency… then of course the money-grubbing strategists will win.
And if that happens, we descend into authoritarianism for the sake of the friends of Policy Exchange, because they would prefer that outcome. They win, they keep their power, money, and corrupt system. And all we get is to know this: our collapsing world? They caused it, on purpose.
The shady, shambolic cowards of Policy Exchange are afraid of the love that we coalesced in the climate movement. These oil-slicked lobbyists are set up to simply interfere with democracy — which means interfering with our collective will for who we are as a country. And they do this the most effective point: through legislation. They are the enemy of the people. We should recognise them as such. We should know who funds them — we should know which schools and universities they influence, which ministers they meet with, and which journalists regurgitate their press releases.
Futile or Not?
It’s not surprising that lots of people feel there’s nothing to be done in the face of the nexus of influence running through the mainstream media, the printed press, Tufton Street, Policy Exchange and ministers.
Last year Policy Exchange wrote another report, this time called “Might is Right?” about protest, suggesting that the nonviolent masses expressing their desire to live rather than die was somehow terrifying – and terrorizing.
Because, argued Policy Exchange, from their cold seat of lovelessness, who knows what else the masses are capable of, if we’re allowed to turn up on the streets in large numbers? Where we show love for each other, and could actually be noticed and heard in any meaningful way? Absolutely terrifying… for the cowards.
The dedication of the ‘masses’ stems from a desperation of seeing that we are moving squarely in the wrong direction as a global community. The dedication comes from being committed to asking us all to prioritise keeping this tiny slither of atmosphere on the only known habitable planet, liveable. The dedication comes from love.
It’s remarkable to me how politics pretends that non-disruptive actions have any force or power for gaining attention. As Emily Maitlis described in her lecture a few years ago as she exited the BBC, the mainstream media is also guilty of a vast array of false equivalence. Just Stop Oil’s actions have been very effective because they have been very well designed. Yes, a few of them have caused extreme disruption, but most have only inconvenienced a relatively small number of the population.
This is in contrast to what the global community are collectively doing, which has been to put their feet firmly onto the accelerator and increase the problem.
It’s also remarkable to me how so many people can be caught up in the prison system, with the United Nations calling the UK a “nation of concern for the scale of its political prisoner problem”, and yet nobody in the mainstream media or politics is managing to capture the essence of this crisis. So it is not surprising that some people do choose to go underground with their actions and become non-accountable, because the costs become too high. This is a strategic win for the opposition. They wanted this, and they’ve got it.
We may be accused by these right wing neoliberal organisations as “woke” or a “bunch of snowflakes”. But what is it that makes them so afraid of us? So terrified, that this think tank says sitting in a certain place at a certain time for a certain duration is somehow an extreme threat to freedom and to The British Way of Life?
They are terrified of our love. So to take back our country and our politics from the cowardly and corrupt, it is love that we have to kindle.