The climate election (or Why I'm voting Labour because, for me, there is no choice)

First, a disclaimer of sorts.

 A lot of issues barely touched on here are, I hope, to be taken as read, about the damage the Tories have done to the country, about what they're hiding, about the catastrophe Brexit will be, about billionaires vs poor people and, fundamentally, all the basic stuff which makes a left-winger left wing. I've pretty much always voted Labour, apart from the one time I voted Socialist Labour on a whim because I was in such a safe Labour seat, plus I voted Green in council and local elections this summer, in a certain amount of despair. But I've always been a Labour person, so all of that is sewn up and implicit before I start.

Yet, this election, I acknowledge that, in a way I've not experienced before, anyone voting Labour, or in a way that may somehow help Labour into power, has to be able to defend their choice on a profound level.

So, here I go, then.

Climate Change is a euphemism, just as Global Warming was a euphemism. Even Climate Emergency is, to an extent, a euphemism. I don’t know what’ll happen, no one does, but the average predicted outcome is worse than anything else that could possibly happen to the world in the next few decades (barring full scale, immediate nuclear meltdown).

It should be the all-consuming topic, every political promise and article should hinge on it, and yet, to most who make their living practicing or talking about politics, it is not. Even this year, when it’s finally forced itself, kicking and screaming, close to the forefront of the popular consciousness, there is a staggering amount of material that simply doesn't mention it ... most of that material is, of course, from the Tories.

Those talking about the future of Britain on a macro-scale, who do not tie the Climate Emergency in with every detail, every policy, are simply not to be taken seriously. I don’t want to read what they have to say anymore.

They are, let’s be honest, mainly men over 40 who are broadly oblivious to the horrors ahead because they (wrongly) think it won’t affect them, or because they (even more wrongly) think it is the alarmist wittering of kids and loonies, or simply, and more universally, because they have lost their sense of what to accurately prioritize.

Perhaps those in the latter category can be forgiven. That’s all of us, really, when it comes to almost all things. It always has been. That's the tragedy of it.

“Global warming” was something I was first made aware of in the early 90s, at school. The Ozone layer, melting ice, sea level rising. Sure, it was alarming, but it wasn’t much in the news for the decade after that, so I think I was able to keep it in the back of my mind. The world seemed mainly an OK place, relatively speaking, through most of the 1990s, after all. “The end of history”, wasn’t it? Indeed …

It was around 2002/03 that I read a number of things which brought it to the front of my mind that cataclysmic climate change was not just a possibility, but a certainty, that it might well happen far sooner and far worse than most people realised, and, most strikingly, that a powerful reason it would happen was that the human race overrated its resistance to the power of nature, its ability to collaborate, to face full-on and  master any catastrophe facing it.

That was 2003 – Labour were still very much in power, the banks were still full of beans, there were still miserable, sunless summers, frightful winters, and not all that many freakish weather events. The world didn’t seem to be on the brink of collapse, or even the brink of the brink of collapse. Bad shit had certainly started to happen – we were in the grip of Bush and the wars in the Middle East, but most people would not yet have sniffed “the end of progress”.

Me? I’ve probably thought about climate change every day since, to some extent or other … Really? That sounds unlikely, doesn't it, as I’ve hardly talked about it, and in any case, that sounds like the path to insanity … and what's more, surely I'd have got out and done something if I felt so strongly? You'd have thought, eh ...

I did feel emboldened to talk about it for a while (and even did make some low key ethical decisions which i either did, or more often, didn't, stick to), but you know, at the time “the world’s gonna end, progress is a lie, hope is a waste of time” wasn’t great chat, and was actually very hard to express in a serious and coherent way. As humans, we find it easy, all too easy, to put things in the background and not truly, truly believe the worst is going to happen until it does.

That is still the case, even as the evidence becomes irrefutable (why, even Jeremy Clarkson accepts it now, though not without an egregiously nasty dig at Greta Thunberg), even as the genuine cost adds up and nation states like the Marshall Islands are already explicitly fearing for their future.

The very presentness of my fear has grown year on year. It's always been there, but for a long time, it was possible to keep it well hidden, even from myself quite a lot of the time. Just the odd thought before bed or so ... what will it be like? A quiet existential dread ... not a persistent horror.

It’s a cold sunny early winter’s day in Kent, it’s been a wet autumn, and the world that I can see seems normal and beautiful. But every day is a battle in my head for a reduced version of hope which is, in itself, inhumane and horrifying. I know millions will die, cities will be swallowed, but will what I love survive in some form? That's all. All I hope for. It is still possible the scale of the catastrophe is up for grabs, though it may not be.

The truth is, I was a fellow without many attachments in my 20s and my natural outlook is best expressed as something like pessimistic acceptance (let's call it ideological laziness). On a personal level, that is a decent attitude to have. I have maintained my sanity and developed a fairly sanguine approach to life and the world … mostly … The right kind of hopelessness can be good for the temperament.

But things change. As things have got worse, so blatant that even the most corrupt and most pig-headed have been forced to see some version of the truth, paradoxically a certain kind of hope has crept in. Which has sprung, I suppose, from a need.

When you’re a parent, you need to hope. You’ve got no option.

So this election is about hope. The last hope.

But here is the crux of it, the glaring flaw in supporting "hope" wholeheartedly. The problem with it. 

Voting Labour has been described as morally unconscionable not just by political opponents,but by quite a few Jewish writers whose natural position is to the left of centre. This cannot be ignored.

It has been a crushing crisis for Labour, one they are nowhere near escaping from, and one they have mishandled from the start with an “incompetence” which cannot simply be dismissed as incompetence.

If I’m to vote Labour on 12^th December, or if anyone is to cast their vote in a way that may lead to Labour holding power in the coming years, we have to be able to imagine ourselves, in good conscience,  in front of Jewish people in two years’ time, five years’ time, ten years’ time, saying “I made that decision, it was for the best, for me and my family,  for you, for everyone. I believed that then, despite it all, and I believe that now”.

And that is how it is. Are Labour more of a threat to Jewish people than the Conservatives are? Are they more of a threat to anyone? Everyone has to ask themselves those questions in conscience, wherever we fall on the scale of that argument, however we weigh Labour's crisis against issues the Conservatives have, and have always had, with every every form of prejudice. The Climate is offering devastation on a scale never seen before. And though that devastation WILL discriminate to start with, hitting the global south first, it will eventually be indiscriminate.

We can see that there is antisemitism in Labour, we can see that Jewish people are scared, we can see that Jeremy Corbyn is an extremely unpopular and stubborn leader across many parts of the country (I should say that my own opinion of him is probably less negative than most. I have many, many times, thought ... "you know, he's really not that bad" .... ringing endorsement, i know) , we can see that there are unpleasant forces holding great power within the Labour movement.

So, somehow, to vote Labour, the Conservatives have to be worse. And a lot worse. A left-wing individual might, faced with the fears and anger of Jewish people across the political spectrum, address that by voting for another non-Conservative party like the Greens or, more speciously, the Lib Dems (of course, voting Lib Dem tactically, where they have by far the strongest chance of beating the Tories, is a different matter, and to be encouraged).

In the summer Local and European Elections (which had different electoral systems and different priorities), I voted Green … I guess as a protest vote, as an attempt to be part of a movement to tell Labour to get its act together, and because the antisemitism issue is one which, whatever one thinks of each individual detail, is utterly demoralising.

I had thought I would vote Green on December 12^th. In some ways, that would be the easier path. Green issues are the most important facing us, and the Green party is making sense on most issues under the sun, and is not consumed by a racism scandal.

But that is not what my conscience is telling me to do, there’s the truth of it, since conscience is the matter in hand. A vote for anyone but Labour here is a vote which enables the Conservatives, and I bluntly believe that if the Conservatives win this election we have very little hope left.

Very little hope left on truth, on services and welfare, on relationships with other countries, on helping the worst off, on balance, on prejudices, on stopping the far right from growing, above all very little hope on being part of the vast and swift movement the world needs right now to have any chance of averting the worst-case climate scenarios. No hope if Johnson wins, no hope if Trump wins.

I think the Conservatives will be slow and indifferent on Climate Change (I mean, that's their explicit policy and attitude and they'll be far worse than their policy, right), and that is the main thing, but I also think there is a greater risk to all minorities, including Jewish people, in the validation of a far-right government. I think a lot of things about these Tories, most of them unprintable.

And what of Brexit? This Tory disease which political commentators still find a way to blame Jeremy Corbyn for? To so many the most important issue of our age, and understandable that it appears so. But above all it is a disaster of wasted time and wasted focus. We’ve spent four years babbling on about this bullshit, time which should have been spent on building a national and international consensus for climate solutions. That's what I've always thought. All Brexit has ever really brought from me is "oh, for fuck's sake" ...

By the way, though it has undoubtedly been frustrating at times, I think in the fullness of time Labour has got their Brexit policy about right. However much we millions want it to just go away, the consensus would have needed to shift more for it to seem invalid ... there has needed to be a bigger shift in the demographics and polls, more clarity on the illegality and foreign interference, more certainty that it is an impossible policy with no good outcome. None of those outcomes have been won enough by remainers for Labour's policy of respecting Leave voters not to make sense. And here we are, and Labour, right now, offer the greatest hope of getting out of it after all.

I’ve never heard a good case for Brexit. Never, not once, from no one. Which is odd, because in some sense, on a brutal, genocidal, inhumane level, one exists. It appears close, but is crucially different, from the case sometimes made to the basic "too many immigrants" starting point of Brexit.

I have never heard one Brexiter say “the mass migration caused by climate change will require this country to lock itself away from the rest of the world just to survive”. Because they don’t think of it in those terms, either explicitly or implicitly. I have never, not once, heard a Brexiter use the Climate catastrophe as a factor. Obliviousness, arrogance and carelessness inhabits their arguments, fearlessness when fear should be the driving factor. Climate change has been irrelevant to the substance to their anti-immigration rhetoric. That's just a demographic fact. 

Let me get this clear, I don’t think Brexit will help anything to do with anything, it has and will accelerate every danger we face, as people in Britain, as people of the world. Without Climate Change hanging over us, I would think that even more strongly. It is a nation's history of self-satisfied contempt coming home to roost. We should be so far past it.

Hope is in collaboration and in swift international action. Labour winning doesn't necessarily mean that, but it offers a glimmer of possibility. Just as Brexit was seen as a key precursor to the election of Trump, the defeat of this manifestly corrupt, small-minded and oblivious Conservative government might provide a ray of light.

A decade ago, hope might have seemed like it was in moderation, in common sense, in "centrism" in the Obamas and Blairs. But the time for sweet moderation to be heart of this nation has passed.

That's the frustrating thing so many, with their "learn from history" and "find the middle ground", don't grasp. We're such a long long way past that. Corbyn's Labour cannot fuck things up worse than the Tories have already done and will do. We're staring in the abyss. But the party which declared a climate emergency, which has a genuine bold plan for doing something about it, hopefully in collaboration with a genuine leftist leader in the USA, might just get the juggernaut turning enough, and save hundreds of millions of lives before it's too late.

See that last sentence, which sounds like ludicrous exaggeration ... it's not.

It’s a big risk for many to vote for something that make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister. Too big a risk, understandably, for some who have been alienated and isolated by some of the machinations of the Labour left. Labour has lost votes it shouldn’t have lost, lost friends it had, irrevocably.

I know there are many many people who would feel far easier supporting Labour if they had a different leader. And, sure, I'm one of them. 

But right now, it's a binary choice – The Tories must be thwarted, continually and by any means necessary. They are the greatest danger to everyone – (they have been throughout my lifetime, which is why the persistence of the narrative of them as the safe pair of hands is so ludicrous). It’s so much later than we think. Whoever you need to explain your decision to in ten years' time