Young ladies didn’t make relationships with each other.

I always hated being lied to.  I hated it at school when we were told that young ladies didn’t cross their legs, or whistle, or get decent jobs… and certainly didn’t make relationships with each other.  Screw being a young lady, then.  I hated it in college when we were told that it was pointless to try to take care of farm animals because they were never worth the cost to the farmer.  Screw farm practice. I’m not playing that kind of game.  And recently, I have discovered how much I really, really hate it when politicians stand on platforms, on television, on talk shows and tell us a) that it’s all someone else’s fault and b) only they can fix it.  Screw that.

Austerity is a con. It’s always been a con.  And the suits selling it to us know it.

Particularly screw that when you’re telling me that government spending is the problem and that stopping it will fix everything. Honestly, do you think we’re made of gullible?  Austerity is a con. It’s always been a con.  If you read the awesome ‘Adults in the Room’ by Yanis Varoufakis, you’ll know that even the suits peddling it know it’s a con.  So when smooth-faced liars like George Osborne or, more recently, Phillip Spread-Sheet Hammond, tell us that reducing the deficit is the only thing that matters in the economy… it does really bad things to my blood pressure.

But the personal has always been political. It always has been, just that people are told they exist to pay bills and then die and that questioning this is out of bounds. Because this is not, never has been and never will be true, I thought I could educate the entire country. With the help of some stalwart others, I set up a conference in our local market town called ‘Breaking the Austerity Myth’ and thought that if I could only persuade the good denizens of England that they were being comprehensively sold a whopper, then the news would spread. I failed, clearly – this was the year before the election called by Theresa May where Jeremy Corbyn almost, but not quite, became Prime Minister.  2,500 votes made the difference.  But the establishment had been scared and, as we all know now, it was determined to fight back.

Kate Raworth’s book ‘Doughnut Economics’ will change the world. 

Failing had more personal consequences though. Just imagining the conference, I’d become so completely impassioned by countering the massed fibbery, that I ended up taking a Masters degree in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher college, part of the Dartington complex in Devon.  This was easily one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever done.  It was good to spend a year with a couple of dozen (much younger) people who were committed to regenerative change. It was even more good to be at a college where the whole premise was that the current system is broken and we needed to find ways to fix it. And what was completely beyond good was meeting Kate Raworth, who has to be one of the brightest people I’ve ever met, and whose book, Doughnut Economics takes apart all the old models of the economy and shows up the flaws that led to ‘austerity-think’ in the first place.  If she doesn’t get a Nobel Prize for this, it’s because the neoliberals gang up to stop it.  But she will.  Kate’s made it her life’s mission to educate the world.  So if you do nothing else after you read this, go find her TED talk, or her talk to the Royal Society of Arts, or the panel discussion with Positive Money or anything else you can get to – and listen to her speak.  Then go out, and change your part of the world.

Nothing less than total systemic change will work now.

When I came home, the world was a different place. I joined the local Labour party and Momentum and there were a giddy couple of years when I thought we might actually change the system. Clearly this failed, but in the meantime, Faith and I had moved house over the hill to a tumble-down smallholding that faced southwest instead of north east and where we could begin to put into action some of the array of things I’d learned at Schumacher: regenerative agriculture (the real thing, not the min-till with added glyphosate the death cult would have you buy into); community action…and we started the Accidental Gods membership programme and the podcast.  Because if the Corbyn years taught us anything it’s that the system is designed to perpetuate the system and it’s not going to allow much by way of transformation from the inside.  There are things we can do and I wholly support those around the world who are working from within the so-called ‘democratic systems’ of our time to bring about change.  But things are urgent now.  More than anything else, we need to find a peaceful way through to a different way of doing things: a way of bringing power to those with wisdom and wisdom to those with power (Daniel Thorson of the Emerge podcast said this first, but it’s true).  Which is where everything is aimed now.  If the horror in Gaza and the Middle East has taught us anything it’s that those who pull the levers of power, who shuttle missiles around the world to help their friends, are wholly unaccountable to the collective intelligence of the people. Our governance systems are no longer working for the betterment of people and planet – if they ever were.  We have, as EO Wilson so famously said, Palaeolithic emotions, mediaeval institutions and the technology of gods and it’s time we levered the immense potential of the latter to change the nature of our institutions. But we’ll only do this if we’ve grown up in our heads, if we’ve found the emotional and spiritual intelligence to be the best of ourselves all the time.  It’s not impossible, we just need to make it our priority.

If we cast Ghost-Trails across the landscapes of tomorrow, will you walk their paths? 

This is what life is about now – finding how to bring about total systemic change in time to avert species level extinction.  The novel, Any Human Power outlines one route towards this, but really, all we’re doing is throwing ghost-trails out across the landscapes of tomorrow, believing that if enough people follow them, they’ll become much-trodden paths and we can build on their foundation.

If this sounds good to you, then please do join us – read the book, listen to the podcast, join the membership… or just do whatever works best for you.  What matters is that we abandon the old paradigm and embrace the new. Just do it.