My thoughts and responses to some of the events at the

Hay Festival 2024.

 

First impressions

 

Hay Festival this year has changed. There are less stages I think and definitely more ‘retail experiences’ of the sort selling locally sourced organic cold coffee liqueur and British handmade hats and aprons. There is also a League of Lexicon stall. No me neither. Prices for the talks have gone up a lot. £20 for Gary Lineker anyone? The average is about £13. Not quite so many colourful ’arty’ shirts this year - apart from mine of course. Compared to previous years there is a much more diverse ethnic mix this year. Actually that’s not true - it’s still as white, senior and upper middle class as usual. Like me. The first Thursday is usually the day when school groups attend and this year there seemed more than before. Which is a good thing I think. But by 5pm they had gone and it was a quiet time sitting outside the bar doing a bit of people judging and enjoying a pint of Butty Bach.

For several years now, the only cask ale available at the Hay Festival in Wales has been Doom Bar. From Cornwall. But now after tireless petitioning on my part pointing out that Wales has numerous wonderful breweries - including the excellent Wye Valley Brewery only a few miles from Hay - the festival organisers have finally seen sense and have started to serve Butty Bach on cask at the festival bar. Brilliant. Obviously all down to my efforts. Yours for a mere £6.80 a pint!

 

Fragile Moment

 

Michael Mann’s last book The New Climate War showed how fossil fuel companies have waged a thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change. In his latest book Our Fragile Moment, he emphases the crucial need for immediate action to avert further devastation to our planet.

In his critique of the ‘bad actors’ who do all they can to frustrate meaningful action on the climate emergency, Mann identifies an attempt to weaponise past extinction events claiming that the current level of global heating is nothing new and hence nothing to worry about. But past extinction events have happened only very slowly in geological terms (over thousands of years) and our own extinction event is happening at a million times that rate. And unlike any previous period, eight billion people are living lives based on a climate that is rapidly disappearing.

 

Another 'bad actor' tactic is to make us to believe that tackling climate ‘change’ is always down to people making individual choices. Which it isn’t. Its about political, economic, social and cultural systems. Another tactic they use is to claim that individual sacrifice is an inevitable consequence of action to address the climate crisis. But that's wrong too. The playing field isn’t level but if it was we would be talking about benefits and gains and not sacrifice. Taking the government’s hand outs to fossil fuel companies out of the equation, green energy would be way cheaper than fossil fuels and a green economy would be a gain not a sacrifice.

 

Another tactic is to claim that the cost of sourcing new fossil fuels is always ‘investment’ whereas the cost of green energy is called just that, a cost. That dubious (if clever) distinction needs challenging. There is probably a 12% cost to our economy already of climate change - compared with the 1% frequently touted by the fossil fuel lobby.

 

Another more recent tactic is to weaponise peaceful protest that demands systemic change as a deflection away from the object of these demands. Dan Rowther also identifies this "determination to cast the people pointing out the problem as the real problem".

 

Mann also argues that 'Climate Doomism' has replaced climate denial. Doomism wants us to believe it is already too late for meaningful action on the climate emergency. Which it isn’t. This ties in with what Katharine Hayhoe has called the “five flavours of climate denial”: 1. It’s not real. 2. It’s not us. 3. It’s not bad. 4. We can’t fix it. 5. It’s too late.

 

Doomism is doubly dangerous as it targets precisely those of us who are those likely to be at the forefront of the fight against climate breakdown. Which is why it is so potentially pernicious and why it needs challenging. We have to fastidiously call out the bad actors. But who is 'we', and how do 'we' do it? Journalists? Think tanks and lobbyists? Politicians? But there is an insidious and opaque interplay between these - see below.

 

Mann asks why politicians act in the interest of the powerful instead of in the interests of the people - the people politicians are actually elected to represent? Ideology and money he answers. Politicians still hold onto the belief that the pro fossil fuel standpoint will keep them electable. But they’re wrong. To get them to act in everyone's interest, we have to remove special interest money from politics, make donations to politicians and so called 'think tanks' utterly transparent and limited (again, see below), and ban short term incentives like the discount rate in economic policy. We need more and quicker action. Dangerous climate change cannot be prevented because it’s already here. But we can act to stop it getting any worse and we have only a fragile moment to do that.

 

Mann believes that the collective action of individuals will tip the balance to make systemic change happen. For example, the Hay festival has a policy and an action plan on cutting greenhouse emissions (but tellingly, this doesn't extend to the carbon footprint of visitors getting to the festival). And action by a group of writers to call for an end to the sponsorship deal between Hay festival and Baillie Gifford (who invest in fossil fuels - but actually only 2% whilst 25% of their investments are in green energy) has resulted in the sponsorship being discontinued. Whether this is a good thing or not is open to question given the level to which oil and gas are embedded into our economy - see Nils Pratley in The Guardian, 4th June, 2024) Personally, I think that the campaigning writers and the Fossil Free Books organisation should be careful what they wish for - there are significant unintended consequences of this type of purism (as are unintended consequences of carping from far left purism about what Labour is or isn't doing).

 

Bad Advertising

Every day we’re sold a dream life through adverts: sun-soaked holidays, beautiful interiors, perfect home-brewed coffees, ethical investments! We consume goods like there’s no tomorrow, and if advertising continues as it is, that might indeed become true. Leo Murray and Andrew Simms, authors of Badvertising: Polluting our Minds and Fuelling Climate Chaos, raise the alarm about an industry that is making us both unhealthy and unhappy, and that is driving the planet to the precipice of environmental collapse in the process.

 

Murray and Simms want to problematise advertising. It is selling us lifestyles that are eroding the life chances of millions. It is a peddler of false promises. It maintains a culture of overconsumption and promotes a way of life that is wrecking our life support systems. It helps create ecological overshoot - the date at which a country or region over-reaches the earth’s available resources. In Europe it is May 3rd. We need to stop promoting our own self destruction.

Advertising creates the cultural world in which we live. It produces endurable, indelibly etched memories, much of it created subliminally such as unnoticed exposure to logos and even sounds. The research is unequivocal on this.

 

Murray and Simms focus a lot on cars, especially SUVs the great majority of which are registered to urban addresses. The Chelsea tractor isn’t a myth. Cars are marketed as freedom and car advertising frequently relies on imagery of the open road - which is a fallacy. And recognising this, SUV advertising idealises an escape from the entrapment of snarled traffic jams to the alleged freedom of the off road driving experience. There are no off road driving opportunities in Chelsea. And these adverts also present the world as a dangerous place to which the SUV is the protective answer, ignoring the deadly irony that SUV’s are 8 times more likely to kill a child than any other car. (And so the obvious solution to this is to criminalise so called dangerous cycling - another performative Tory disgrace).

 

Whereas cars are the ultimate positional commodity, so flight is the ultimate positional service. 15% of us take 75% of all the flights. There is no magic technological fix to the climate damage that flying does and nothing is appearing anywhere on the horizon. And so there is no other answer than flying less which is why Murray’s ten years old proposal of a frequent flyer tax is such a good idea. Not all flights are necessary and research shows that not advertising flying reduces these non-necessary flights. Banning tobacco advertising worked and so would banning flight adverts, they claim.

 

Advertising regulations are incredibly weak and there is a need to address this. And social media advertising isn’t regulated. At all. But regulating to stop advertising our own self destruction is the most obvious low hanging fruit.

 

More generally than the specific examples of SUV’s and air travel, I worry about unrestrained commercialisation of everything everywhere, and the cumulative effect - a saturation people are becoming immune to (hopefully) or a density that people are being influenced and brainwashed by (more likely).

 

And there are also worries about the ‘badness’ of advertising ranging from the inappropriate to the misleading to the deliberately disingenuous, and about what regulation applies, how well is it policed, and what new regulation should apply? And why do TV adverts always have to include people dancing? I think there is a real need to examine what standards we want to accept for political advertising (the leave campaign, Johnson, and now Sunak following suite). Wales is currently progressing a law that would make it a criminal offence for politicians to lie - how much better life might be (without Brexit and five dreadful prime ministers in quick succession) if that law had applied since 2010.

 

Just Transition

 

Whilst the Westminster government continues to deliberately reject any systemic change to tackle the climate emergency, Wales has not. It is the only country in the world to have future generation legislation recognising that failure to act on the climate emergency now leaves a legacy to future generations that is ethically unacceptable. It aims to reach net zero by 2035. A panel of Welsh academics and engineers discussed Wales’ global responsibility to tackle climate change, the effects of climate change on Wales’ population and what Wales can do to reach net zero by 2035.

 

Gavin Bunting is Professor of Civil Engineering, Karen Morrow is Professor of Environmental Law and Jennifer Rudd is Senior Lecturer in Business Innovation and Engagement, all at Swansea University. Eurgain Powell is a Sustainable Development Programme Manager for Public Health Wales. Stan Townsend is Secretary for the Wales Net Zero 2035 Challenge Group.

 

A central theme of the discussion is the idea that only a planned transition to net zero by 2035 can be a just one. It is absolutely unacceptable to repeat the Welsh history of unjust enforced transitions for example, away from mining and steel. Transition can’t be left to markets because there is too much of a gap between the old jobs dying and the new ones coming along - as anyone except a Tory will easily appreciate. We have to have decarbonisation in ways which don’t put people out of work. If we don’t fix it our kids won’t have the chance to. But we need to make sure future generations don’t repeat the same mistakes that we are making.

 

A planned, just transition has to consider institutions, funding, connections, law and policy, communication and involvement. For example, food policy in relation to the climate emergency is not just about agricultural emissions but also needs to intersect with sustainability, security, nutrition, access and affordability, wildlife biodiversity, food in schools - menus, curriculum and gardens and cooking. Similarly transport needs to intersect with connectivity, access, health, inequalities, social isolation, loss of green space, as well as moving away from a car dominated environment through initiatives like replacing short trips with active travel or public transport, car free city and town centres, and school streets.

 

One interesting idea is that responses to the climate emergency need to be glocal (horrible word) meaning that nation states are both too big and too small. All the good things are happening at sub-national level. Perhaps the only example where the comparator 'the size of Wales' is actually useful.

 

The panel concede that involvement and participation are not being done enough and that this is leaving people disengaged. Echoing Michael Mann (above) the panel wants to emphasise co-benefits of climate action instead of always going on about costs. One example is that low carbon housing provides local skills, jobs, and affordable housing, as well as low carbon results.

 

The Welsh approach is asking searching questions as to how the country can produce and maintain prosperity without growth. They want a transition from a monetarist to a well-being economy, and this idea is taken up in the next talk.

 

Sustainable Economy

 

What would a sustainable economy look like, and how could we live within our environmental means? Dieter Helm is the author of Net Zero and The Carbon Crunch, and is Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford.

 

In his latest book Legacy: How to Build the Sustainable Economy , Helm argues that the current system is not sustainable - which means that it will not be sustained. That is, it will end. His main point is that borrowing to invest is fine so long as it really is investment in new assets. But we are not doing that. By calling everyday capital maintenance ‘investment’ what we are actually doing is placing debt onto the next generation to pay for the mess that we have created and the broken things that we have failed to fix through everyday revenues ie taxes. For example, the Tory government want to pay for the infected blood scandal out of the capital budget. Meaning the next generation will be the ones to pay. That isn’t fair or just. But no one is going to vote for tax rises because no one is being honest with them about why they have to happen. (Although this maybe beginning to change and increased taxes are falling into the area of policy people are beginning to find acceptable - the Overton Window, see below). People have got to get used to a lower standard of living, consuming less and paying more tax. And to afford that, Helm argues that everyone needs a universal basic income.

Owning Nature

 

Not unrelated to the discussion on a sustainable economy is the debate about sustainability in nature. A panel asked how can we live the lives we want without despoiling the environment we hold so dear. And how do we balance the competing demands of public access, farming and wildlife against the backdrop of the climate and nature crises?

 

Tayshan Hayden-Smith, former professional footballer turned gardener, Kate Humble, farmer and TV presenter, and Paul Whitehouse, actor, writer and comedian, talked to the Chair of the National Trust, René Olivieri, about how we rediscover the power of connection with nature.

 

Haydn-Smith talks a lot of good sense about community action which is fine. But maybe although necessary it is not a sufficient response. Surely it has also got to be about local democracy, council funding, national legislation, regulation and leadership.

 

Humble talked about growing up in a 1960’s rural idle but I think she over-romanticises this. She has an unnecessary go at health and safety. She drags out the argument that over population is the problem - conveniently forgetting about over consumption. And similarly she criticises food waste (but has no data to back this claim) and says nothing on the more impacting issue of over consumption especially of meat (No one mentions dog food in relation to this which I find astonishingly blinkered). In other words (her farming) business as usual, just adjust the edges. She claims that the cost of food is too low and rightly points out that as a percentage of income, spending on food has fallen (but ignores why that might be so - the increasing cost of housing and energy for example). Are we prepared to pay more? What about people who can’t pay already? Her answer seems to be for people to budget better and spend less on non-food items. The audience were overly charitable and let this go unchallenged.

 

She thinks we have enough access to land in England and Wales because we have good OS maps (she thinks they are cheap!). Because she thinks there are a lot of unused footpaths, that this equates to having sufficient access. Rubbish. And people clapped!!! (Paying far more attention to the messenger than the message is surely part of our problem - the obsession with Farage for example rather than calling out the utter tosh (uncosted, racist, evidence-free) he drivels out). Humble conveniently forgets that only 8% of land has open access - not hers I assume. She also trots out the usual over-played trope about litter and how some people treat the countryside badly. Which some people do but this conveniently obscures that the damage done by a few individuals is absolutely miniscule compared to the environmental wreckage due to farming and the water companies. She wonders if we should de-privatise the water companies but has no idea that the cost would be prohibitive. And why should public taxes be spent to buy out shareholders who have already made a fortune out of legally (and quite possibly illegally) polluting our rivers? Why not have not for profit water companies? Again it’s regulation that’s needed. We’ve allowed and designed Ofwat to be toothless and useless. And what about proper funding for local authorities and the Environment Agency? What about decent regulation and the will and the resources to prosecute when it is flouted?

 

The panel discussed how we get young people to engage with nature and avoid the 'yuck' response. No one mentions the barriers on parents and schools to help with this. The national curriculum is mentioned but no one addresses the problems with the costs of school trips, the reliance on overworked teachers, the selling off of school grounds, and untended school gardens. How can schools possibly afford this after 14 years of Tory austerity?

 

To create and maintain a sustainable environment there are lots of issues and potentially lots of things that can be done ranging from individuals to communities to politics. But for me the focus has to be on politics - on leadership and regulation.

 

The talk left me feeling that there’s something about the Hay audience that is insulated from the crap. They are part of the problem they simultaneous tut tut about. We've got to stop consuming beyond 3rd May, but how are we going to be persuaded to give stuff up? People like me need to accept that our standard of living has to decrease and we need to consume less and pay more. Many people in the UK have no choice - poverty is already forcing them to do this. Many of us have become too used to getting what ever it is we want simply because it’s available and we can afford it. But can the planet? We haven't given enough consideration to this. We know the cost but not the value. But that needs vision and leadership both locally but especially nationally.

 

Humble’s advice on appreciating nature is to lie on your back in the grass thinking how we live in such a wonderful world. But she does so from an unacknowledged position of immense privilege and sadly, dreadful blinkered-ness.

 

 

Leigh Day

 

At the other end of the awareness spectrum, I had a really interesting discussion with two young articulate and well-informed solicitors who were staffing Leigh Day’s exhibition on pollution in the River Wye along the Herefordshire - Welsh border. They are representing local people and businesses affected by the pollution and are bringing legal action against the chicken factories who are almost certainly causing the pollution. More details here.

 

There are 23 million chicken in factory ‘farms’ in the area of the heavily polluted river Wye.

 

Comfortably Numb

 

This was a discussion between historian David Olusoga, Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester, economist Kate Raworth, senior associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, and Roman Krznaric, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing. It was chaired by writer and journalist Sarfraz Manzoor.

 

Olusoga described various features of dictatorships including appeals to nationalism, an emphasis on masculinity and militarism (and even the forming of militias), and attempts by wannabe dictators to portray themselves as the ordinary person, a representative of the 'true' people (unnervingly described by Ece Temelkuran in her book on Turkish politics, How to Loose a Country). What James O'Brien calls baby steps towards totalitarianism. To that can be added persecution complexes, the capture of state institutions of information, law, and education, and the promising of simple solutions to what in reality are complicated problems. Then there is the degradation of language, the shutting down of nuance, critical reflection and fact, abandoning the rule of law, and curtailments to human rights the right to protest. In their place are offered a ill-defined optimism, a jingoistic nationalism, a beguiling and comforting version of the national past (what Svetlana Boym called a 'restorative nostalgia'), an assault on 'degenerate' cultural forms and pluralism, and an organisation of the 'masses from below' (Eric Hobsbawm). And eventually, even an over-reaching ambition to control internally and invade externally.

 

All of these are too clearly visible across Europe and the rest of the world. There is a fear that in western democracies, we have been too readily taken in by some if not all of this. Perhaps we have become a bit too blasé about it and a bit too comfortably numb. Which raises questions for me about how opinion and belief are created, multiplied and concretised.

 

In this regard, Olusoga mentioned the Overton window of political possibility which is the range of ideas the public is willing to consider and accept. For example, not long ago re-nationalisation of rail and water fell outside the Overton window whereas slowly but surely, this view has crept within it. The same is true for higher taxes to fund the NHS. One idea mentioned in another talk that is so far firmly outside the Overton window is the need for a rationing system for carbon use and also consumption of red meat. You can imagine the outcry either of these would herald in the press but I would have thought this return to the spirit of the 1950's would be exactly what Tories would want! After all, they've rationed virtually everything else.

 

It is argued that politicians do not create this range, but identify it and then pitch policies that fall within the window. So if politicians can only locate the Overton window, this leaves think tanks, the media, and social movements to be the ones to shift it. On the other hand, there is the argument (much rehearsed in relation to Kier Starmer for example) that politicians need to lead voters to move from outside the window into it. They must convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it.

 

But because of the rise of a dark and incestuous relationship between government, media and certain think tanks, both of these interpretations as to how the window can be moved are existing at the same time. Or rather, the boundaries have become blurred. This dangerous and ultimately anti-democratic development is brilliantly exposed by James O'Brien in his book How They Broke Britain - 'they' being Murdoch, Dacre, Neil, Elliott et al. And that's before you get to Farage (pronounced Faridge - rhymes with garage), Cameron, Cummings, Johnson and Truss with a significant helping of Corbyn. He maps the web that connects Tufton Street's so-called 'think tanks' (no one knows who funds them) to Downing Street, to journalists complicit in misleading the public, and to media bosses pushing their own (or their mates') agenda. The result (epitomised by Brexit (below)) is unnoticed micro aggressions, deliberate falsehoods, cries of betrayal and accusations of unpatriotic behaviour. We no longer have opponents but enemies. We can no longer respectfully disagree.

 

A good example of this them and us mentality is shown in a book I saw at the Festival bookshop. Entitled How to Argue with a Meat Eater and Win Every Time. I though this might be interesting. But then I thought, this shouldn’t be about winning. Winning an argument is not guarantee that the other person will ‘come to their senses’ - far from it. Instead we need to understand why they are holding the position they are from their point of view. And try not only to find common ground but to value it and embrace it - like George Monbiot and Minette Batters completely failed to do at last year's festival. I'm still cross about that. Facts won’t change emotions. We have to learn How to Be Wrong, another excellent book by O'Brien.

 

And on top of all this is the impact of social media which amplifies hate and division sown by the people eviscerated in O'Brien's How They Broke Britain book. And this is being done deliberate because hate, scandal and conspiracy sells - it is a business model employed by the tech companies deliberately monetising hate. Which we allow to happen. Regulation conspicuous by its absence. Again.

 

Some have argued that there is no need to over-react to all this. After all, the combination of the legal system, investigative journalism and parliament stopped Johnson. It worked, but only just. Next time it may not. And we should worry about how someone like serial liar Johnson - a man consumed by his own astonishing hubris and arrogance - ever got into a) journalism, b) politics and c) Downing street in the first place.

 

 

Political Competence

 

This theme of basic competence for politicians was explored by Michael Sandel. Not being a habitual liar might be a good start. He points out that only 10% of MP’s don’t have a degree even though around 70% of the general population don’t have one. Sandel asks if that is acceptable? And does it matter what the degree is in? Should potential politicians have to pass a qualification in politics in order to be a capable and qualified politician, as other professions do? It’s a legitimate question. Certainly the Oxbridge PPE degree doesn’t seem to be any sort of adequate entrance exam.

 

I think there is a wider argument about whether MP’s should be representative of the population they are serving, and in what ways. Sandel seems to want to prioritise educational attainment as the most significant marker yet there are other important factors such as diversity of experience, emotional intelligence or emotional empathy.

 

Rather than exploring these points, Sandel’s main argument concerns meritocracy. His latest book is titled The Tyranny of Merit. Part of the problem with meritocracy is that we don’t live up to it. But even if we did, would that create a good, just society. No says Sandel because the ideal of meritocracy is flawed. He claims the problem is that in a widening and unequal society those at the top have come to believe they have got there through their own efforts. And conversely they believe those who haven’t succeeded deserve their lot. That’s quite a bold and questionable generalisation I think. But if true, it leads to hubris and forgetting indebtedness (and reiterations of Victorian tropes about an undeserving poor). And this feeds populist anger because many people feel looked down on and excluded. There is an implicit insult in the ‘work hard and you’ll get on’ messaging - what he calls the rhetoric of rising. The result is a populist politics of grievance and anger and resentment. (Like Gove’s ’had enough of experts’ tosh (but clever tosh)). As a result voter loyalties have flipped - labour and democrat voters are now the ones with the degrees. A new humility is needed to acknowledge the good luck some of us have to live in a society which just happens to valorise and reward what we're good at.

 

Sandel argues we should focus less on meritocracy and more on raising standards for everyone, and valuing the dignity of (any sort of) work. And valuing the fellowship and community that work can contribute (but very often has had these values deliberately or accidentally engineered out). The aspiration should be dignified employment on decent pay for all helping everyone feel that they are a contributor. The rubbish collector (or the tax collector) the same as the doctor. Inequalities is a problem of fairness but it’s not going to be solved by simply redistribution - distributive justice is needed as well. Society and politics need to respond to the need to be needed, valued and esteemed.

 

Political Cancer

 

It can be argued that these needs are needed in spades in the UK but more so in the US, and it’s election year in both countries. The panel discussed the notion that in the UK, we will we see that after the general election the politics of bullshit and bad faith might be coming to an end. Carol Cadwalladr (the Observer journalist who uncovered the Cambridge Analytica scandal), Sarah Churchwell (American historian), and Matt Frei (Channel Four News America correspondent) talked to Mathew D’Ancona (Guardian and New European writer). There is a reserved optimism that a political reset might happen. Perhaps they’ve forgotten there will be a Tory leadership contest.

 

Churchwell says that in the US there has been a very rapid breakdown in a shared belief in the structure of reality, and that is there is huge polarisation and no common ground between republicans and democrats. Frei argues this has been driven by Fox News which was established by Murdoch under a regulatory framework (set up to ensure balance and fairness) thrown away by Reagan (mercifully not copied by Thatcher although she did allow foreign ownership of UK media letting Murdoch grub his way into our national life. Thanks). The result says Churchwell is that USA has political cancer.

 

In another talk, Channel Four's Matt Frei paints a detailed, compelling and a similarly depressing picture of the US. He has lived there for eleven years in the Bush era. He has interviewed five presidents, including Trump. He is qualified to know. He says that America is now locked and loaded. Trump has dispensed with bi-partisan politics and replaced it with a binary view of the universe. There are gated communities of alternate facts. There are even early instances of violence between the opposing political factions but not yet a civil war - Frei thinks this won’t happen until the country splits even further and the army takes sides.

 

Whoever wins the November presidential election, Frei thinks the result will be challenged by the other side and there will be huge instability and tension. He argues that if Trump wins, we have to play him at his own game with transactions he understands. He thinks he will get on well with Sir Kier Starmer (Trump loves the 'Sir' bit) although he thinks Starmer’s given name is Keith.

 

I don’t think it is fanciful that Trump's cancer could take hold here. It already has. And I think there is at least the possibility that a similar rapid breakdown of a shared version of reality (based on the rule of law, tolerance and plurality) could happen here. There are already too many people infected by misinformation and conspiracy theories and there are the resources (American money) and mechanisms (unregulated social media) for that minority to reach a tipping point. There is no reason to think it couldn’t happen here or that Britain is somehow immune to the virus of nationalist populism. We know from the referendum vote of 2016 that it is not says Martin Kettle in The Guardian. There already are American influences (Steve Bannon) and dark money of unknown origin (the Tufton Street so called ’think tanks’). We need transparency about where the money is coming from. The BBC should not be hosting ’think tank’ spokes people without it being perfectly transparent about who funds them. GB News is currently being allowed to get away with undisguised bias as Fox News was. (Non of these two can in any sense be called ’news’ organisations - why do we allow it?). And even if this stops now it won’t matter. The damage has already been done, if not by GB News, then as James O’Brien points out, by the Daily Mail. We are perhaps guilty of over-emphasising the clownish buffoonery and serial incompetence of the Tories which, although obviously true, also serves to disguise the fact that rather more serious and competent forces are at work in the background. After all, most people thought Trump was a clown in 2016 and that he would never become president. And people in the early 1930’s thought Hitler was a joke too.

 

A worrying line of argument repeated by Churchwell and others is that given Labour are going to win anyway, they can afford to be more radical, adventurous and exiting in their policy announcements. This is dangerous complacency. The Tories might be suicidally tearing themselves apart but they’re not dead yet. It’s vital not to give any ammunition to them and their right wing supporters in the press. I’m fed up of commentators who only have to produce copy twice a week, not win the most important election in years. Owen Jones, Andy Beckett, Kenan Malik et al should wake up and smell the far right stink. The disgruntled left are helping do the far right’s dirty work. And I think those who agitate for more progressive policy forget that it is impossible to counter emotion with rational argument. (It is also impossible to deliver progressive policies in opposition). Again, such attacks don’t have to be true, they just have to be said. There is an appetite for regressive belief that I don’t think is being sufficiently addressed. What is needed are not facts but hope. And stories.

 

Alternative Englishness

 

This was the main theme of an interview with Caroline Lucas, the UK’s first and only Green Party MP. She was greeted with the longest welcoming applause I have ever heard at Hay. (The same people who applauded Kate Humble?). Stories help us create our identities including our national identity and English nationhood. Lucas points out that this is nowadays dominated by cheerleaders for Brexit, exceptionalism and imperial nostalgia. Focusing instead on stories of the English people’s radical inclusivity, their deep-rooted commitment to the natural world, their long struggle to win rights for all, their sense of fairness, Lucas sketched out a story of an alternative Englishness: one that we can all embrace to build a greener, fairer future.

 

 

The centre left need to be better at story telling because we let the right get away with being better at. For example, who is challenging the ‘work-shy’, ‘shirker’ myth? Where is the counter narrative? In another example, Will Hutton wrote that “David Cameron and George Osborne, Thatcher’s spawn, chose to describe the calamity (of the 2008 financial crisis) as a result of New Labour’s excessive public spending – perhaps the biggest economic misdiagnosis in our island history” (Observer 16/06/24). And the resounding counter narrative from the then labour chancellor, Ed Balls to this plainly false invention was precisely nothing. But to be fair, he would be howling into a gale set up by the overwhelmingly right wing press. Which makes the task even more important.

 

There is an argument that the printed press hold less of an influence than it used to, and that we still cling to the notion that the world is shaped by what was mainstream media. We are the analogue old guard. There is some merit in this (but it can be easily over stated) as digital and social media have become the new mainstream for many and unlike print media, it’s very hard to monitor in real time. The key task now is to understanding what and who is driving (and funding) social media influencers. There is a lot of conspiracy theory and misinformation about and I don't think we have sufficient idea as to how or when this can tip over into something much worse.

 

Tipping Point

 

In a number of talks the idea of a tipping point cropped up. For example, in Michael Mann's talk (I think) there was mention of the current climate emergency tipping into uncontrollable climate and natural breakdown. Another tipping point imagined the tipping of the social zeitgeist from what is now impossible to what becomes inevitable. In climate science, the levers and mechanisms needed to trigger irreversible and irreparable climate breakdown are very well understood - and almost universally ignored. It is interesting to consider what levers or mechanisms are needed to trigger changes in the social world - what factors move policies and issues into the Overton Window, and are these the same factors that move policies and issues out again? I don't have any answers to this but it seems to me an important area to gain some understanding of. Some have claimed that changing the opinion of a relatively small percentage of a population is sufficient to turn a minor concern into a majority consensus. Which is encouraging if you are hoping for a concern held only by a minority like keeping oil in the ground into a majority consensus to ditch fossil fuelled transport. But equally, there is a worry about how little it might take - indeed how little it has taken - for a minority fascist posturing to tip over into a majority-backed dictatorship. Another reason for understanding and acknowledging tipping-point factors better than we do.

 

One last point on this, is that following Matt Frei's depressingly accurate lecture on this year's presidential election in America, it occurred to me that two separate tipping points have already been reached - one by the Republicans. one less resiliently by the Democrats. The result is, as Frei said, two 'gated communities of alternative facts'. And I think that the seeds of these two mutually excluding communities are visible in the UK - a 'them' and an 'us', leave and remain, Tory patriots and traitorous judges. It may well be the case that tipping points have not yet been reached, and hopefully, we will have enough sense not to let it happen, but that isn't to deny that they could happen and if the did, it would be unexpected, rapid, irreversible, and tragic. Without doubt, social media would play its part.

 

 

Social Disinformation

 

This issue of social media and its role in misinformation was discussed by Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist and TV producer, Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of the Filippino online news site Rappler, and Oliver Bullough, author of Butler to the World.

 

Against a familiar analysis of our present situation - democracy on the retreat, the rise of Putin, Trump etc and the rise of the far right in much of Europe, the discussion focused on the role of fake news and disinformation and the power of social media in all this. For example, when a meta narrative such as ‘all journalists are your enemy’ appears on social media, it never goes away. It doesn’t have to be true it just has to reach people who have an appetite for what they are being told. Social media is massively increasing its influence driven by the commercial agenda of tech companies (reiterating a point made by Olusoga above) and then dictators appropriating it for their own purposes. And there are similarities between social media and dictators in their methods. It is an unholy (and unregulated and unquestioned) alliance. One important regulation should be to stop surveillance for profit.

 

But as well as the supply of disinformation, there is also a demand side often based on fear, conformism and a conscious, wilful choice to ignore the truth. Why do people go along with this? Despite Labour's consistently high lead in the opinion polls, around 20% of the population still say they're going to vote Tory. Why? There are lots of rationalisations and manifestations of denial, and many iterations of excuses to flee reality. There is an appetite for blanking out truth, and stories are so much more convincing than fact - the point made by Caroline Lucas above. Many people using social media have learnt that if they incite hate and misinformation you can reach many more people. And when such a person gets a following they are giving followers permission to be their worst self. And if a growing number of people begin to feel this way, they become a group and a group identity is created. They then become the 'real people' - the first of Temelkuran's seven steps in How to Lose A Country.

 

The panel asks what can be done in response and in particular, how generalisable are good examples such as the defeat of Bolsano in Brazil and the success of Tusk in Poland?

Firstly, anyone engaged in fighting back can expect to get attacked even more. Second, fighting fake news with fake news doesn’t work and creates more chaos which is what the fakers want. You have to start competing for an ‘all’ or a group of people with shared values. The people objecting to new anti-abortion laws in Poland found their political voice in Tusk’s party for example. You have to be fastidious about facts, truth and trust because these are interdependent - as we are seeing to our cost in the UK.

 

At the start of the discussion I thought there were three areas that deserve some attention in order to tackle the growing tide of misinformation. Regulation of social media companies and a law (as proposed in Wales) to prosecute politicians from lying would be a start. But these were not mentioned except right at the end. Neither was the role of education discussed except once by a questioner. And the issue of freedom and transparency of information was only mentioned in passing.

 

 

Weaponising Law

 

In common with Maria Ressa in the last talk, all the participants in this one have been targeted by law firms for their investigative journalism: of ‘systemic theft of Africa’s wealth’ (Tim Burgis), exposing Cambridge Analytica’s role in mass-harvesting data to influence elections in the UK and US, (Carol Cadwalladr), and Britain’s role in channelling money and influence for kleptocrats and oligarchs (Oliver Bullough). They have all suffered when people in powerful places don’t want the truth to get out. And they are not the only ones. English law firms are prosecuting law suits against journalists all around the world. When investigative journalists come under scrutiny and attack, the first tactic appears to be to inflict repetitional damage through social media and the press. Stuff doesn’t have to be true it just has to be said. It’s all about discrediting someone personally, and individual people, especially women, are easier targets than organisations. This is followed by letters threatening legal action, very often based on insubstantial and bizarre accusations. But however absurd, the damage has been done - the feeling is created that individuals are being targeted by players with far greater resources and knowledge of the system.

 

The panel say that to a far greater extent than we know, our courts in the UK are weaponised by rich people, oligarchs and corrupt states to defend the version of reality that they want to believe in. Ordinary people and investigative journalists can’t fight against their overwhelming financial might.

 

This is because the costs and legal fees of the big reputation management law firms are unregulated (who knew!) and so they are free to charge huge sums. This effectively weaponises costs as a threat to investigative journalists and others because they can’t ever afford it if they loose a case and are ordered to pay costs. (Law firms acting on behalf of government and government lawyers themselves are using this tactic in cases brought against them by the Good Law Project).

 

This is effectively a form of deliberate suppression of free speech. Disgracefully Cadwalladr was not covered by the insurance policy covering other journalists working for the Guardian and Observer despite having worked for them (as a freelance writer) for nearly twenty years.

 

Another approach that is increasingly being used concerns strategic lawsuits against public participation (known as SLAPPS). These tie up journalists’ time and funds to stop their work and represent a misuse of their original purpose. Anti Slapp legislation is being proposed.

 

The solicitors’ regulative society has done little in controlling law firms who are doing this work and charging so much for it, but this might be changing. Again, sloppy or non existent regulation allows players like law firms and their clients to act against the public interest.

 

Comfortably Lying

 

Weak, non existent or blatantly flouted regulation clearly played its part in the run up to the 2016 Brexit referendum. Peter Forester and James O’Brien argue that like their predecessors, current politicians on the right have "become accustomed to the comfort of lying". The scene had already been set before the referendum with politicians being ‘economical with the truth’ and wholesale, systemic mendaciousness exemplified by the cover-ups and gas-lighting by the establishment in their responses to the miner’s strike to the Hillsborough disaster, and to the war in Iraq. As more and more people discover that the Brexit they were sold was based on falsehoods, the Financial Times public policy editor Peter Foster’s book What Went Wrong With Brexit and LBC’s James O’Brien's How They Broke Britain explode the mythology around Brexit and map out the web that connects so called 'think tanks' to Downing Street, journalists complicit in misleading the public, and media bosses pushing their own agenda.

 

In reality, Brexit is perhaps best seen as a vote to impose economic sanctions on ourselves and to require us to negotiate a trade deal worse than the one we already had. With a side order of unintended consequences like reduced freedom of movement, threats to peace in Ireland, and the loss of international influence and prestige. During the referendum campaign, almost no one (certainly no journalist) considered the position of Northern Ireland, Fintan O’Tool excepted. Alleged EU red tape became red white and blue tape thanks to Brexit. The Tory version of Brexit was ever a fantasy and a thinly veiled tactic for cutting back the state. It was a commando comic jingoism driven by nothing else than by internal Tory party factionalism (and Cameron’s cowardice to face down the eurosceptic loonies such as Bill Cash and the rest of the hopelessly inappropriately named European Research Group) topped off by Johnson and Gove's immense hubris and selfish ambition. And Brexit has made every other national problem worse. Manoeuvring by Sunak in the Windsor protocol should not be applauded because it it only fixed what the Tories had already broken. As O'Brien said, this is only needed now because of what your lot did then.

 

However, slowly but surely the reality-based world is parting company with the Brexit unicorn. People have been dragged up to the sunlit uplands and discovered a car crash. Opinion polls now show consistently that a majority of people believe it was a mistake to leave the EU, reports Patience Wheatcroft (The New European, 29/05/24) and so, on this view, it is safe for politicians -she has Starmer specifically in mind - to talk about Brexit. But this argument tends to ignore the mindset of a good number of voters who voted for Brexit in 2016, the Tories in 2019 and who Labour need to vote for them in 2024. Lots of people don’t like to admit they were wrong and like it even less if they’re being told they were wrong. Might the country ever face up to what has happened with Brexit? O’Brian thinks that it will slowly become a given in the press that Brexit has been a disaster and never could work. And there are already signs of that even in the Daily Torygraph. But he also thinks that this should go further and that we deserve an apology. Rejoining the customs union and the single market will, he thinks, eventually happen and be discussed and reported in entirely in uncontroversial language. Forester is less sure. So am I. Replacing Bill Cash and Michael Gove et al there are a whole set of evidence-free, unreconstructed fantasist fanatics like Braverman and Truss grappling for what's left of the soul of the Tory party - if it ever had one.

 

The issue of Brexit was discussed by Michael Hesletine who was a Cabinet Minister in various departments from 1979 to 1986 and 1990 to 1997 and Deputy Prime Minister from 1995 to 1997. He is an enthusiastically pro-EU Tory - a vanishingly rare occurrence in British politics.

 

He says the forthcoming General Election is the most dishonest of modern times because non of the main parties are willing to talk about Europe. Probably for understandable reasons - the Tories because they know Brexit has been a disaster but dare not admit it, Labour because of the leave voting red wall seats that they must win back from the Tories, and the Liberal Democrats who must have vivid memories of getting stung by their overtly pro-European pitch at the last election. But Britain has always been a European power. And not for the two (three?) main parties not to talk about it is dishonest says Heseltine. Economic growth is and will be forever undercut because of Brexit.

 

Heseltine argues that what underlies anti European parties like UKIP and Reform (and at least amongst significance sections of the Tory party and membership!) is unashamedly racism. The fear of the other and of foreigners. Michael Sandel had talked about how a fear of others is being driven by a creeping separation in public places - libraries, parks, transport. All undervalued and underfunded. And this leads to separation and a lack of experience of others. And this has been deliberately focused (weaponised) by Murdoch, Dacre, Faridge et al onto the issue of immigration.

 

But if there is a current 'problem' with immigration, we haven’t seen anything yet. The climate emergency is going to ramp up migration to levels we haven’t even begun to imagine let alone plan for. The World Bank expects that there will be 260 million climate refugees by 2030, and as many as 1.2 billion by 2050. We do have to have some control but this has to be on a European scale. Heseltine says we should pool the aid programs of Europe into a Marshall aid program to help people want to stay where they live. Clearly we need to re-establish the full foreign aid budget so needlessly and viscously cut by the Tories.

 

European War

 

As well as this weaponisation of migration, another panel discuss a range of pressing issues facing Europe at this uncertain time. Misha Glenny, journalist and Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna talked to Ivan Krastev, political scientist, and Rafał Trzaskowski, Polish politician and current city mayor of Warsaw.

 

Europe is surrounded by a necklace of crises from Ukraine via the Middle East to the Maghreb. There is also the psychological impact if the far right make significant gains in EU elections in June (they did), the impact of demographic change, the reactions of the global south to America’s hypocrisy in relation to Gaza on the one hand and Ukraine on the other. There is almost no bi-partisanship. No courage. No explanation to the people. If we don’t cooperate and unite in Europe then Putin etc will be those calling the shots. Populists are today's flat-earthers. Yet populism is on the rise in Europe (as the June EU elections showed), even if Poland did reject right wing populism in its spring elections. There is a need to talk to the people and work more at the grassroots. There is a lack of European leadership.

 

Europe has been signalling that it must play a more active role on the global stage, but it has sat passively as China and the US direct the course of events. As we approach the US presidential election, does Europe have the strength, ability and will to assert itself against an unpredictable mixture of populism, war, technological advance, climate emergencies and economic uncertainty?

 

The biggest European success has been the pacification of the European mind but now that time is over. We have become too used to living in peace. Too comfortably numb. That is the most threatening of victories.

 

 

Why Write?

 

One of the best sessions at this year's festival and certainly the most entertaining and uplifting was with the poet Lemm Sissay. He says he doesn’t write for other people. He writes for himself. Which is for him and me the main purpose. I think John Lennon once said something similar. But it would also be nice if others read this stuff, especially if it changed minds and made a difference. You never know.

 

Hay Quotes

 

"To travel far there is no better ship than a book". Emily Dickinson.

 

"In a world of division let’s celebrate different". Hay Festival

 

"A book must be the axe to the frozen sea within us". Franz Kafka.

 

"Wealth creation is inequality creation". Roman Krznaric

 

"Dictatorship calls for a sullen population and nationwide jubilation at the least word from its leader". Mikhail Shishkin

 

"To change the world you have to look at it differently". Hay Festival

 

"Last year, saw the hottest summer in India that there has ever been and the coolest summer there ever will be". Nandini Das.

 

"Embrace what you’re most afraid of so you rob it of it’s power". Maria Ressa

 

"Populism is masquerading as change". Michael Heseltine

 

"You can’t throw facts at emotions". Mathew D’Acona.

 

"I just think we need a bit of kindness back, a bit of empathy, rather than attacking all the time.” Gary Lineker

 

"Like many countries in Europe we are moving to the right. It also means that we are moving away from the arts.” Martina Halsema talking about The Netherlands

 

“I would argue that an astonishing amount of public ‘debate’ is driven and defined by people who have …. constructed personas of denial and projection designed to show the world a facade that bears little resemblance to what lies within” James O’Brien.

 

"Many people have learnt and internalised stories that they think serve them well and cannot conceive of any alternative ones". Me.

 

"The time to act is now". Hay Festival