A reply to an invitation from Baroness Helena Kennedy to join over 1000 other people at the 'No Turning Back' Conference in London on June 13th.
Dear Helena,
You won't see me there on June 13th because I will be somewhere in Brazil on that day. Moreover, if my experiences of earlier attempts to recharge the life-less batteries of the democratic left are any guide, I know that if I were there, few of those present, and certainly none of the main speakers would want to listen to what I have to say.
However, reading your 'invitation' I think it is worth commenting on the inadequacy of the Conference Agenda in light of the lethal dilemmas facing our societies at the start of the 21st Century.
Of course, 'mass unemployment and growing poverty .. and an erosion of our civil liberties' are very serious issues.
So too, for policy-wonks, are the questions of “root-and-branch reform of parliament, a written constitution, proportional representation, proper funding of political parties, a real curb on commercial lobbying, extended powers for select committees and fewer powers for the whips, a proper pay structure for MPs, ...and a re-ignition of local government...'
The agenda also lists 'the threat of climate chaos' and an issue I also believe to be really important: viz "more participative democracy" but have you and your colleagues attempted to define "participative democracy"? And, I note the interesting use of the word 'more' in that context. Does it mean a lot more? a little more? a tiny teeny-weeny bit more?
But, the threat of climate chaos and the need for a genuinely participative democracy aside, all the other items are second, third, tenth order issues, in relation to the unprecedented challenges that face our societies in the 21st Century.
In light of those challenges, surely the political issue of our time is the obsolescence of the core purposes, concepts, processes and structures of the quasi-18th Century political-economic-technological system which is destroying the natural world and de-humanising our societies.
As far as I can see, on June 13th, there will be no opportunity to explore our political-economic system's disastrous disconnection from the Gaian Systems on which all of our futures depend. Nor why the complex, poorly-understood closely entangled "wicked" issues you list cannot be tackled as if they were linear, well-understood distinct "tame "ones. You and your colleagues have failed also to recognise that complex ecologically-vulnerable human societies can no longer be governed as if their primary purpose was to sustain the debt-money system through unsustainable economic growth. They are also blind to the incompatibility between the traditional Command and Control model of Leadership and the need for extensive use of participatory processes of system change.
The Conference Agenda shows that the Democratic Left is as unaware as the most benighted neo-con or Marxist or Islamist zealot of the need to develop a whole new political vocabulary and syntax for the 21st Century. The limited language of our current system does not permit the members of our societies to learn how to respond to the vast range of challenges they, their children and their grandchildren will have to tackle in the coming decades. I could go on but you get the picture.
In short, the items on your agenda for June 13th. are not separate issues needing distinct policy-initiatives. They are components and emergent properties of a system whose would-be leaders - as your agenda shows - are incapable of imagining, still less initiating, the sustained learning and sustainable processes of systems change that surviving the 21st century will entail
If we can learn how to co-create democratic systems that fit the needs of the 21st and 22nd centuries, then, as that great cybernetician, Stafford Beer, said, 'the problems of the old system will not need to be solved because they will be dissolved'.
When the Democratic Left is ready to address those fundamental, systemic, questions, do give me a call.
Roy
