Time to Relaunch the Love Crusade

If you caught Lovely Ed's acceptance speech you will notice that he isn't afraid to use the word 'love'. We greens were onto this way ahead of you, Ed, having launched our own political love crusade some 20 years ago now. The reason why this works so well for us is illustrated by a two-dimensional graph of where the UK parties stand that you can find on the political compass website.

Of course we greens prefer to inhabit multi-dimensional space and live in a constant awareness of the whole system (man), but even two dimensions is better than one, and when we first discussed this in the regional council strategy group some 20 years ago we thought of the east-west axis as being about justice and the north-south axis as being about love vs. fear.

If you see it this way you reach some interesting conclusions. First, it doesn't appear to be possible to be loving and not concerned about social justice - hence the empty space in the lower right quadrant. But perhaps more importantly, we concluded, the way to gain more members for our party was to love them into submission. We need to bring them down across the horizontal line with an excess of free-flowing affection.

At that point, as I recall, Labour found itself well into the upper left quadrant, but I suppose that by now most of the members that kept them there have already left and joined us, or one of the other parties that is in the upper left quadrant. The love crusade was not a great success, but as a political strategy it was more fun than marching for jobs or fighting cuts. Perhaps we should revitalise it before Ed becomes the housewife's choice and takes up all the love space himself. I can't see that message going down well with the unionists who put him into power, but it could be fun to watch. Tweet

Ethical Deficit

I was shocked to read such a blatant example example of casual racism in this week's Sunday Times, which I foolishly picked up out of interest while on a train. It made me realise the slide in standards of analysis and morality that the Murdoch ownership of the Times brand has provoked.

This assault on the good people of Greece by those with extended waistlines back-balances that contrast with their atrophied moral consciences reveals the worst aspects of the UK Establishment. The intention of such writing is that, once we have satisfied ourselves with stereotyping and insulting our Mediterranean brethren, we will apply our own shoulders to the wheel with renewed vigour lest, perish the thought, we might be confused with people who enjoy leisure time or seek to lead the best lives they can with the minimum of effort.

In the battle for hearts and minds that will ensue once the ballot boxes are put back into their locked cupboards we will witness the return of two of capitalisms most unsavoury cheerleaders: the Fat Controller and the Calvinist preacher. If Rod Liddle represents the former then Gordon Brown has always been haunted by the latter: the musty smell of the manse that hangs around him is the main reason that we have never taken him to our hearts.

How far distant we are from the Greeks remains to be tested over the coming months. Will we really buy the line that we should work harder to pay for the bankers' bonuses? Has the work ethic survived the years of debt-fuelled plenty? A common cause of grievance is that we have been deprived of a democratic opportunity to choose how the economic crisis should be tackled - as in Greece, whose politicians also sidestepped the issue in their legislative elections in October last year.

The lazy and dangerously divisive journalism from the Murdoch scandal-sheets should not divert us from the issue that is at stake: how the value in our economy is shared between working people and those who control capital. On a more personal level, I leave it to readers to decide who are really the pigs. Tweet

Vote for Baudrillard

Electoral politics has been moving along the path towards Baudrillard's simulacrum for a number of years, with a growing sense of unreality and the increasing resemblance of party leaders to characters from Thunderbirds. We have now reached the final stage where, as Baudrillard put it, the simulacrum masks the absence of the reality. The more we hear about choice and change the more we know that things will stay the same and that the distance between the parties we see performing is smaller than ever.

What the Nick Clegg phenomenon demonstrates is the way that the forces of the corporate media totally control our political system.* I have seen this impact in a devastating fashion on my own party, so that we tailor our message and our internal structures to fit into the corporate vision of Britain. It was the decision to include Nick Clegg in the TV debates, so that voters finally learned who he was, that caused the increase in his vote. Had Caroline Lucas or Nick Griffin been given airtime the effect would have been the same.

And what about the policies? Listening to the election coverage is little help in working out which party is proposing the sorts of changes that you might actually wish to vote for. When they are given that opportunity, as in the Vote for Policies website, their selection is quite distinct from what we see in the closed, forced-choice questions of the pollsters.

Perhaps the greatest evidence that our democracy is now little more than a sham is the way that the forms of democracy we impose on Iraq or Afghanistan are designed to more accurately link the wishes of the people of those countries with the political power exercised on their behalf than is the system we labour under here.

The Wikipedia entry on Baudrillard's work refers to a story by the superb Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges called 'On Exactitude in Science'. An oppressive and obsessive empire decides to map its territories at an exact scale, so that the map becomes as large as the territory itself. When the empire crumbles only the map is left. In a similar way, a closer look at our self-proclaimed mother of parliaments reveals it as a crumbling ruin.

*An article in today's Guardian suggests that the Murdoch strategy of deliberately sidelining the Liberal Democrats may backfire Tweet