The REAL Brexit agenda?

FACEBOOK - EROEI - BEYOND PEAK OIL

Well over two years on from Brexit we still don't have the first clue what it's actually about. There is no point to it. It's clear that if it happens the UK breaks up and the economy tanks. The Tory 'Fuck Business' party seems perfectly happy with this. The 'opposition' seems to have morphed into some sort of toff's club for remembering a mythical lost age of socialism and the Lib Dems are criticized for not stopping the entire Tory manifesto EIGHT years ago, by the two parties who are currently poised to destroy gleefully everything all decent Brits hold dear.

The brexit elite clearly sniff a reduction of rights and controls that could bring them in even more cash despite a tanking economy. The far right see it as an opportunity to spread their drivel by using the Right Wing Propaganda Media Machine. The far left sniff anarchy, decline and some mysterious rebirth of sympathy for a political idea that was stale when created in the 1840s.

But the VAST majority of Brits don't belong to these weird groupings. We just want to get on with our lives without too much crap from politicians and without stuff breaking down. That's all been snatched from us. Why do politicians take the risk?? Why on earth do they want the UK to fall apart?? What's the benefit?

I don't believe in conspiracies or conspiracy theories. I believe in science and logic, common sense if you will. This is all bollocks!!

But what if these fuckers, this self appointed elite, are aware of what's happening over the next few decades. They all know about climate change, dipstick Trump and his idiot band of hangers on have already concluded that climate change can't be stopped and we should just get on with enjoying the next few decades, with all the damage and danger that will cause if we don't address things. 

As for energy constraints, they must surely be aware (as we are) that the rapid decline in supply and rapid rise in price of fossil fuels will undermine everything that we currently take for granted.

Perhaps they've concluded that governing through madness, illogic and myth may keep a lid on social unrest? Perhaps they've concluded that it's far easier to control lots of microstates than a few superstates, and letting us all break up will make their lives easier? Who knows. But something is up, something big, and the future may well not be small communities fighting back against climate change and peak energy, but individuals rocking gently to and fro wondering what the fuck happened ...

The life without money conceit

It's one of those sad little ramblings you see every now and then 'Imagine a world without money'. It's usually said by somebody who clearly a) doesn't understand how money works and b) has fucked up their life to such an extent they think that money is the cause of it all. It isn't.

The elite and their sheep are trying to push us towards a cashless society. That should set off warning bells right from the start! Why do they want to restrict our access to REAL money? Simple, control money and you control people. Our life's struggle should be to foil that plan at every opportunity. Not roll over on our backs and issue them an invite to do just that.

But the hardcore 'Imagine a world without money' types go a lot further. They want to outlaw all money. Now, think about this. What would happen on the very first day without money? Well I wouldn't bother to get up because I'd no longer have a business to run. If I couldn't sell I couldn't buy. So I could have a nice lie in, then pop down the shops to just grab everything I want  it's suddenly all free remember. But that lie in will be my downfall because everyone else will have beaten me to it and all I could grab would be a copy of Take a Break and perhaps some exotic herbs - everything else will have gone. And within a few days no new stock would come in because the companies that used to provide everything will have shut up shop because their cash flow will have suddenly vanished.

If this situation prevailed soon a self declared elite will simply allocate stuff according to their whims, favouring people they like and withholding from the rest of us. The rapid economic decline will resemble Brexit ...

Money is a unit of account, a store of wealth and a wonderful barrier against being forced to do what you don't want to do! It's probably the second finest tool we ever invented, after the plough. To hear people want to get rid of it chills me to the core.

We live in interesting times. How soon before some dictator somewhere puts this on their 'to do' list, and revisits the Khmer Rouge era, the only time this madness ever happened for real? 

The EU - a love affair without end

(All pics Leysin, Switzerland, 1987-8, copyright Steve Sainsbury)

FACEBOOK - FLASHBACK - LEYSIN

I was brought up in a rough part of LA in the 60s. The very idea of going abroad, even on holiday, was just a pipedream. Dawlish Warren was the best we could hope for. We were just ordinary folk, and we were to know our place.

The EU blew that mentality apart and the UK joined - at last - on 1 January 1973. I first got to travel abroad (as we used to call it) in summer 1976, taking advantage of an Interrail card. It was hard. I took food with me, cheese sandwiches, enough for a week. I went on my own of course, working class kids simply didn't go abroad. I slept on the trains, when I could. I started to see a bigger world, one that had been totally hidden from me by my protective family and peculiar community. I loved it. The foreign languages, the odd money, the colourful people. Their teenagers weren't like ours. They were outgoing and friendly and luckily spoke English.

Just five years on I did my first road trip round Europe with my brother, who'd managed to survive meningitis just a few months before. We did the south of France, Austria and Switzerland. 9 weeks of freedom. Fantastic and mad and so different from home. We did it again the following year. Then other stuff happened and the long summer trips stopped. But in 1987 I went away for four months in the summer, came home for a few months (catching the 1987 'hurricane') and then did a winter season in Switzerland. I made loads of friends from all over the world and got a hot summer followed by a snowy winter. Perfect.

THIS is what Europe's all about. This is what being in the EU is all about. Widening our horizons, getting more out of life. NOBODY is going to take that away from me! 

I think this brush with madness will soon be history. We'll not only remain in the EU but embrace it much more. Joining Schengen will be a first little step, and I'm sure that will be the 'price' we pay for continued membership. ALL of us, not just the young or the educated or the rich, need to see Europe as our home and our opportunity. Perhaps our six months of madness will, in the longer term, be the thing that finally welded us forever to the rest of our continent ...

The Cats Out at the Bag!

(All pics 20.1.2016 copyright Steve Sainsbury)

FACEBOOK - PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF BRISTOL

Bristol has a cat pub! It's all very low key but if you know where to find it it really is a great place to while away an hour or two! It was my first visit yesterday and it didn't disappoint! Wulfric came along too and absolutely loved the cats, particularly the little tabby mum who spent the whole time on the window sill next to him!

The pub is the Bag o' Nails. It's worth visiting even without the cats as it's a classic old fashioned pub, with a very odd range of beers. Mine was 6.6% proof but tasted stronger. Music is supplied by a record player in a corner. The pub was full when we visited, on a Wednesday lunchtime.

The biggest bonus was there was a 'kitten in training' next to us, and a black one at that!

Bag o' Nails Facebook page

To save the planet first you must embrace capitalism

FACEBOOK - CAPITALISTS AGAINST CORPORATISM

Oh, don't splutter into your green tea. You know as well as I do that the future - constrained and damaged and poisoned and violent - will not be built on grand centralising dreams of the authoritarian bureaucrats on the left and right, but on individuals doing it for themselves, their families, their communities and the planet.

The socialists - the nostalgic liquidating death cult - are dancing in the ashes of the world that's leaving them, leaving their dreams of control, order and artlessness dead.

The corporatists - socialists and tories by another name - are on the front line of liquidation, feeding off each other, trying to grab more and more, and wasting years developing high tech security and surveilance systems for a low tech future.

The sheep - those barely educated, materialistic little drones are just swept along by it all, loving Alan Sugar and Jeremy Corbyn in turns, flapping around for something solid to hang on to, whilst everything falls to the floor around them, shattering on their highly polished parquet flooring that's so last year.

There's only one ray of hope. That the economic system that guarantees freedom if not success, that punishes and rewards in turn, that promises nothing and always delivers more than that, is so wonderfully adaptive, so quick to act, so neutral, is something that we can hang on to through all the trials that are coming. That in a world where nothing seems to stay the same there is one solid, permanent feature that we can be sure will help us as things fall apart.

To build a better world you need do just two things - ignore what egotists try to push you to do and embrace capitalism.

illusions and omega males

FACEBOOK - GREEN PROGRESSIVES

It's been an interesting couple of weeks as we watch Britain's political system implode, leaving just a nasty smell and a mass of irrelevance.

Cameron is finished thanks to his adventures with ham, the LibDems have a long way to go before anyone will bother even acknowledging their existence and, worst of all, Labour have decided to go for the unelectable yet again.

We've seen this happening all over the world. Complete stupidity and irrelevance taking the place of discourse. People with a huge sense of entitlement - just because of where they've been born - have a queue of nonentities lining up to sell them snake oil. They are lapping it up. The USA has its Republicans, a gang of people so stupid it's impossible to parody them, throughout the Middle East tyrants in and out of government slaver away cutting off heads and destroying hope, in Greece a smarmy cult won power and immediately did everything they said they wouldn't, and then got re-elected!

But in the UK we wanted to go one better. Let's find the least talented, most uncharismatic, pointless individual ever. A public school twit who has never known real work or poverty or danger - and then feeds the entitled drones around him ridiculous dross that wasn't even workable when the economy was growing, let alone now. Socialism - for fuck's sake!! If the glove fits though ... socialism was an invention of the middle and upper middle classes to keep working class people under control. It's a liquidation cult - let the decent people make the money, then steal it from them. Great for a year or so ... until all the entrepreneurs have moved on and suddenly the economy is fucked.

And all the time we have great swathes of unfortunate people escaping the disgusting chaos caused by one lot of psycho bully scum for the supposed delights of western Europe, not realising for one minute that if anything they are throwing themselves into an even greater disaster in the making.

It's not easy going for the 100% neutral approach to life. It's not easy going against the flow, telling people the facts and standing back whilst the bullshit is flung at you.

But realistically it's our only hope for the future. We need to stop feeling entitled, we need to stop finding scapegoats and we need to start building the sustainable communities that are our ONLY hope for the future. We should perhaps all have 'CUT THE CRAP' tattooed on our hearts. I have.

UKIP - Greener than the Greens?

FACEBOOK - GREEN BRISTOL

Well I've still not got it together enough yet to write a big piece on the election results, and things are still settling down out there.

I will say that the result has had the affect of turning almost the whole country against the so-called 'government' and it looks like most people are now looking locally at last.

One party existed purely for entertainment and humour and that was of course UKIP. As expected by most of us they won just one seat, but I think Dummy Nigel's after election cabaret did surprise most of us. He has of course now destroyed whatever political career that he thought lay in front of him.

And the 'party' itself seems to be in terminal decline, with the tories stealing many of their maddest ideas and presenting them as if saying something means it will happen. In/out referendum, bringing back foxhunting, trying to ban EU citizens living and working here etc etc. Mad stuff that wouldn't be believed in a work of fiction ...

UKIP's sole MP Douglas Carswell started flirting with the Green Party soon after winning his seat, suggesting we had a common issue over the way votes are counted, that we smaller parties should push for AV or whatever system is currently fashionable, so that small parties can get an appropriate amount of seats. (Of course the stunning SNP victory proves that a small party CAN win under FPTP, but he seems to have missed that).

It got me thinking how UKIP and the Greens resemble each other. Well the Greens aren't absolute supporters of the EU in the way that the big parties (and Labour) are. But our reasoning is completely different to the Little Englander drivel spouted by the kippies. I'm sure that eventually the EU will collapse under its own weight but for now the ability to live and work anywhere in Europe is esomething we don't really appreciate it - until some idiots threaten to take it away and force us to live in this bland little island!

If we did leave the EU we'd take a huge hit to our economy - I reckon anywhere between a 10% and 15% fall in GDP. Even the Greens don't want the economy to shrink that fast, but UKIP do! Greener than the Greens ....

And their other bete noire, immigration? Let's think about this ... why does immigration exist? The answer is simple - growth and demographics. Corporatism and consumerism is based on endless growth. Yeah, I know WE know that's impossible and unsustainable, but the less bright parties - all of 'em - don't. And demographics - we've an ageing and not particularly fertile population and if governments are going to continue to be able to pay pensions and benefits they need a supply of young, fit and employable imported people. UKIP wants to close this door so we have to imply that they also want to start reversing growth - and they plan to do it far quicker than we ever could. Again, UKIP, Greener than the Greens.

You couldn't make it up ...

positive negatives

FACEBOOK - EROEI

It was announced today that UK inflation is now 0.1%. We economists fear deflation, its inevitable effect is to delay consumption in the hope that prices will fall further. Companies lose sales, workers lose jobs, the economy falls further.

But wait - isn't this a good thing from a Green perspective? Surely we WANT the economy to slow down, for consumption to fall.

And this cuts to the heart of the irony in a Green worldview. 'We' want to stop austerity which means we want the economy to expand. But we don't want an expanding economy, we want a contracting economy that eventually evolves into a steady-state economy. So we should be supporting austerity, which should result in falling GDP. Falling inflation or even deflation. Falling interest rates. Falling savings. Above all falling consumption and investment.

My answer? You expect too much - which is both a cop out and an answer.

Becoming Green, becoming a citizen of a steady state economy state isn't going to be easy. The only way we can ease it is by bringing it in gradually. Step by step. A genuine free market would of course make this process so much more straightforward, but no nation on Earth has a free market. Every nation has the dreaded scourge of politicians, desperately fishing for votes and baiting the hook with bigger and bigger promises of more, more, more. And the little voter fishies fall for it every time. 

We've had permanent 'teaser' interest rates now since 2008, and they're not going up any time soon. Now deflation makes the issue even more complex. As energy and resources continue to stutter on the cliff edge of rapidly falling EROEI and raw materials perhaps we finally have the real first harbinger of the contracting economy, just as we gain a fresh new government that doesn't even know about these issues, and even if they did would ignore them as they bait their rods ready for 2020 ...

7th May 2015

FACEBOOK - GREEN PROGRESSIVES

Well we're there - General Election (UK) 2015. All I will say is vote Green.

I do think it's going to be a groundbreaker, as it's the first election where the 'smaller' parties are the key and the big parties (Tory, Labour, LibDem) are on the sidelines. There's been growing disillusionment with British politics for years now, something that started in Scotland and Wales and has now spread over the whole country. That's no surprise. The Scots have felt disenfranchised for decades now, and the SNP have cleverly moved into the vacuum. It's a little different in Wales, but I think that confidence is growing there too, having a language isn't enough any more! The Cornish are forging ahead and here in Wessex we're starting to think of ourselves more as a nation than just a region, and why not?

The other important thing is of course the heady and deadly blend of climate change and falling EROEIs that are going to change absolutely everything for every one of us. Yet listening to the parties, with the small exception of the Greens, you'd think we were heading towards some sort of utopia where the economy will continue to grow, where miraculous new (and cheaper) energy sources will appear and where illness, poverty, discrimination and disatisfaction will all be consigned to the history books.

It isn't all grim. This very change in our political structure gives hope that as the old toff mafia starts to vanish into history community based politicians with a gift for the hard sell will slip into the positions of power and influence that need to be handed over to people with a clue what's going on. The fracturing of the old UK will make this transition so much easier as the governed and the governers get closer to each other.

This'll be an election that does get into the history books but over the longer term the reason for that will change. It's the first small sign that we are beginning to 'get' what's almost upon us, and that we're not going to just roll over and be dead. 

We've got this!

pragmatism and fragmentation

Pic copyright Steve Sainsbury /Bristol Camera

FACEBOOK - GREEN PROGRESSIVES

Just a few weeks to the election - and probably the most intriguing one for decades. The UK is still reeling from the independence vote in Scotland last year. We are also watching with interest the winding up of UKIP, probably the only political party in the world that wants to return a country to a non-existent past. We have a Labour Party that looks down on working people and makes no attempt to understand or represent them, and we have the tories who as always see politics simply as a career choice and a way of networking amongst the self-appointed elite. We have super confident Scottish nationalists on the verge of getting freedom from this dying union with less confident Welsh and Cornish nationalists picking up speed in their wake. We have a far right that has mistakenly hitched a ride on the back of the ridiculous UKIP, bringing them and themselves down in the process. We have the shellshocked Lib Dems wondering what hit them ...

... and then we have the Greens.

We live in confusing times. The country has been in economic shock since 2008 and there's no obvious way out. There is the sterile austerity/not austerity gambit - which as Greens we know is nonsense. There is pandering to 'Britishness' but not the wonderful multicultural and crazy Britishness that we all know and live, but a weird media-based filmic hybrid of the 50s and the 90s, which none of us know or live.

The primacy of myth and magic over reality and science suggests real issues at the heart of the psyche of this country. Why has this happened? I suspect it's closely linked to the economic crisis, which is clearly a harbinger of our future low-growth, no-growth or negative growth declining energy economy. Nostalgia is taking over at the same rate as we are losing our senses ...

... and then we have the Greens.

The Greens are close to a breakthrough, that much is clear, though whether that breakthrough will be in 2015, 2020 or even 2025 is anybody's guess. But even the Greens have their problems, their clinging to nostalgia and a more comfortable if backwards-looking view of Britain. The party is still infested with extreme lefties and marxists who moved away from Labour as the toffs took over, and saw the Green Party (correctly) as a soft touch. Some 'Greens' still see no irony or shame in describing themselves as marxists or even trotskyists. Is there any greater nostalgia? How exactly do these 'Greens' imagine the future of low energy, low resources and localization will sit easily with their dream of the big state, compliant workers, disrespect of the environment and class war (with the middle classes as always being the winners)?

The Greens need to sweep this rubbish under the carpet and start building a REAL Green Party to take power in the coming decades. It needs to appeal across the board, not just to a few middle class academic and soulless lefties. It needs to show those members who run businesses (and there are MANY of those) that the party supports local capitalism and will help businesses establish themselves under the new sustainable paradigm. They need to push the positives of a species that works in cooperation - rather than against - nature. They need to bring joy, light and humour into the whole process. Because, believe it or not, the time for government is not now far off. As Greens we need to become the people that can help run a country, to listen to people and to announce our motto from the rooftops ...

Be kind and have courage!