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The old paradigm is breaking apart. The new one is still not fully shaped.
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Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible, and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And my guest this week probably counts as a friend of the podcast, because we spoke to Natalie Bennett as part of our election specials back in the summer. Back then, she was one of three Green Party members in the whole of the UK Parliament; two in the Lords and one (Caroline Lucas) in the Commons. Now there are four in the Commons and Natalie is still in the Lords; Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle. And if you listen all the way to the end, we find out where Manor Castle actually is. For those of you who haven't heard of her before, Natalie led the Green Party of England and Wales from 2012 to 2016, and then she moved into the Lords. She is also the author of the book Change Everything; How We Can Rethink, Repair and Rebuild Society. And that's what we're going to be talking about today. This is a genuinely Thrutopian book, as in, it starts exactly where we are and walks us through, towards that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
Manda: Everything in the book has been tried and tested somewhere in the world, and Natalie is bringing it all together. We don't go chapter by chapter through the book, partly because I think that's dull and partly because Natalie has such an agile, widespread, thoughtful mind that is capable of really stitching things together. And it's not often I get the chance to talk to a politician who is capable of thinking at the scale of total systemic change, but Natalie definitely is. And so we explored the changes that we need and how we might bring them about, as you would expect for this podcast. We did have some quite exciting technical challenges, and the sound quality remains not quite what I would have liked. Alan has done his best with it, but I apologise in advance; give your ears a break afterwards. But I definitely think this is worth listening to. So here we go. People of the podcast, please welcome Natalie Bennett, author of Change Everything; How We Can Rethink, Repair, and Rebuild Society.
Manda: Natalie Bennett, Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle. At some point I want you to tell us where Manor Castle is. But I know from our previous conversation that calling you Baroness Bennett is probably just a bit over the top because you're one of the most relaxed politicians I have ever met. So thank you. Welcome. How are you and where are you? Here it's an extremely wet Wednesday morning.
Natalie: Well, I'm in London, in my office in the House of Lords, and I'm looking forward to having an oral question at 3:00 this afternoon and looking forward to a busy week. There's three private members bills I'm speaking on on Friday, including one particularly environmentally focussed from Lord Krebs, the crossbencher. So lots going on here in London at the House of Lords.
Manda: Excellent, brilliant. So the private member's bills, the Lords have them, because a friend of mine who basically a year ago decided she needed to be an MP and got elected as, as a Lib Dem, but you know, she's a very green Lib Dem. Came third in the House of Commons ballot and is bringing up the Climate and Nature Bill as a private member's bill. But do Lords get private member's bills as well?
Natalie: Yes. It's pretty well a parallel process. I mean, there's some minor changes. We had, I think, a ballot for the first 21, and I was lucky enough to get my biocides bill as one of those. Actually, it might have been 25 and I think I'm number 21. And they proceed through the house, they may be passed by the House of Lords, just as within the Commons it's only if they get government backing that they're actually likely to become law. But it's very much a way of raising issues, of getting discussion about issues. It's very important, I think.
Manda: Brilliant, excellent. Okay. We'll try not to be too arcane because quite a lot of our listeners are not in the UK, but that's a bit of political process that I hadn't got my head around. So last time we spoke was four weeks before the general election, and at that point there had been one green MP and two of you in the House of Lords, and now there are four green MPs. That's a 400% increase. And however Big Labour went in the same suit, different tie notion of change, a 400% increase is really quite good. Are there also two of you still in the House of Lords, or are there going to be more?
Natalie: That is something that's entirely within the gift of the Prime Minister. We would obviously welcome. We've democratically selected in the Green Party, Molly Scott Cato, who used to be our MEP from the South West region. She would be the person who came in if the Green Party was offered a seat. But that's something we have literally no control over at all. I have a hashtag, #no way to run a country, and having a House of Lords which the composition is decided at the whim of the Prime Minister, is no way to run a country.
Manda: It really isn't, is it? But they are, as I understand it, abolishing the hereditary portion of the House of Lords, which has to be a step in the right direction.
Natalie: It's a very small step in the right direction. I mean that anyone should have a place in our political system and a decision making place as a result of who their father was, and all of those 92 Hereditaries are male, is obviously in the 21st century, totally indefensible. But what that does mean is that you're leaving it essentially to entirely a system of patronage, with the Prime Minister deciding, certainly in both the two largest parties and the Lib Dems, the leader of the party decides who gets those seats. Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalists, like us actually have have an election process that's binding. But other than that, it is really 18th century style patronage. We're back in the era of the Napoleonic Wars really.
Manda: Right. But then that applies to most of our politics. So. Change Everything; How We Can Rethink, Repair and Rebuild Society, which is brilliant and everybody needs to read it. That's a given. Besides which, my name is in the back because I was one of the supporters on unbound. And at some point we're going to come back and have a look at why you chose to publish on unbound, because I think that's really interesting. But in the meantime, this book seems to me to ask the question, what are we here for? And how do we get there? Because I don't think a single human being on the planet wakes up in the morning and really looks forward to going to a job that is meaningless, where they will be crushed, where they will have very little agency, and they have to do this in order to survive. It's not how we evolved. So tell us a little bit about what you think we are here for and how we get there.
Natalie: Well, I think there's something very important that we've rather lost sight of, which is the fact that we are human agents with a great deal of power and capacity, if not always as much power and capacity as we sometimes think. To shape a society which is a collection of human beings according to the way we want to democratically decide for it to be shaped. And I hold a lot of concern about, if we go back to where things really started to go wrong, there's many places to pick, but if you pick the the mid 1990s and the fall of the Berlin Wall. And there was a scholar called Francis Fukuyama who came up with a theory of the end of history. And the idea essentially was that how people were living in the United States of America in the mid 1990s, was the absolute peak of human existence. That had been the way we'd always been meant to end up, and everyone would eventually reach that standard. And that idea left us with a sense of, this is the system we've got, and we've just got to elect people to manage the system however they might decide.
Natalie: And I think we've got to recapture the idea of human capacity, human capability, human possibility. And a great way to to start to do that is to read a brilliant book by David Graeber and David Wengrow called the Dawn of Everything. And we've been as a human species on this planet for roughly 300,000 years. We've lived all sorts of different, amazing, some of them looked like really strange ways; but we can choose to live in different ways, and we don't all have to, around this one planet live in the same kind of way. And in fact, we know from ecology that all of us living in the same way, using the same kind of phones, wearing the same fast fashion, getting all our furniture made in China; all of those kind of things, building horrible glass fronted office blocks everywhere; all of those things we can do things differently in different places according to the local ecology, working with non-human animals and the natural environment. And we can as humans choose to live in different kinds of ways, and it's really important that we do.
Manda: So if you were to close your eyes and imagine that we had got to a way that works; human flourishing within a flourishing biosphere, what do you think would be the value system that would underpin this? Or if that's something that you've not thought about in great depth, how would you feel when you wake up in the morning, that isn't how we feel now?
Natalie: Well, I think that the key thing here is that we get away from thinking about we're all here to serve the economy, and turn that around and think that the economy and the way we live is designed to meet our needs, to meet the needs of the natural world, to produce something that's healthy. One of the things that's extremely unhealthy at the moment is the way in which people work extremely long hours, often commute long distances. Their entire life is built around trashing the planet. My foundational point is that there's enough resources on this planet for everyone to have a decent life, for us to look after climate and nature, if we share them out fairly. And that can actually give us, as human beings, a far better life. One of the obvious, simple ways it's easy to understand is we've seen a great deal of growth in the idea of a four day working week as standard, with no loss of pay. And that means 20% reduction in working hours. A few years back, the New Economics Foundation was looking eventually towards a three day working week as standard with no loss of pay. And if you think about the kind of balance that would create, the chance for people to do creative things in their communities, to build much more public art, to have wonderful gardens, to grow really healthy local food. All kinds of different activities that are not serving the economy but are making a decent life and looking after the natural world and fitting in with that natural world. No one lies on their deathbed and goes, I wish I'd spent more time in the office.
Manda: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So David Graeber, sadly, is no longer with us. One of his previous books was Bullshit Jobs, which I just think anything written by David Graeber; he could have written a telephone directory and it would be worth reading! And he really questioned the concept of the difference between jobs and work. Work is what we do as a vocation. It's what we do because it makes our heart sing. It's that amazing ikigai interaction of what pays, what makes our heart sing, what does the world really need, and what am I good at? And you put all four of those together, and you get that kind of central point where it helps me to live, I flourish, the world flourishes, I do what's mine to do. Jobs are what we do because we live in an economy that insists that we have some money in order to survive. How would you help people shift or help the system shift from needing hamsters turning on wheels in order to make the economy grow, to an economy where, to quote Kate Raworth, we live within the boundaries of the living planet and we meet everybody's needs. What are the structural changes, if you were given power over the government tomorrow, to begin to affect the system change that we need? What would you do?
Natalie: Well, addressing that is a really practical question, sitting here at the heart of government. What we have to do is stop chasing growth. We can't have infinite growth on a finite planet; that's not politics, it's physics. But what we also have to do is deliver human needs and the natural world's needs. And my case study for this is the New Zealand government. Recent New Zealand government under Jacinda Ahern and their treasury was given the challenge not of pursuing growth but of a living standards framework. And essentially that was a traffic light system that said there are certain measures, in terms of the economy, there are certain measures in terms of society and certain measures in terms of the natural environment. And we're going to aim to keep all of those above the red, you know, disaster really bad, don't want to be there level, and as close to the green as we can manage, while acknowledging that there's trade offs between the two. So New Zealand, as in the UK, was greatly concerned about the state of its rivers, so cleaning up the rivers was a real priority.
Natalie: In terms of society, I would say no child hunger. I Would say we should make it that we shouldn't rest until the last food bank closes because of lack of demand. In terms of the economy it means giving people who want meaningful work that pays, making sure that's available to them. And I think one thing that I would challenge slightly about that work/Labour division, is there are some things that we need doing in society. And my case study for this is in the book is always sewer cleaning. Now, it might not immediately appeal to you as an obvious creative endeavour, but it's something that we very desperately need doing. And so people can get satisfaction from doing jobs that are really serving society, doing things that are needing doing. But because they're doing something so essential, it should be very well paid. It might be if we had a universal basic income and people didn't have to go to work to meet their basic needs, maybe you'd have to pay sewer cleaners very well. Maybe you'd pay sewer cleaners more than you paid bankers.
Manda: Wouldn't that be good?
Natalie: I would suggest we should pay sewer cleaners more than we pay bankers.
Manda: Well, we don't have an economy that's growing. Then most of the investment bankers would cease to exist anyway, wouldn't they? I mean, their jobs would cease to exist, they themselves might still tick over.
Natalie: Well, there's a whole chapter in Change Everything talking about how we have too much finance.
Manda: Way too much.
Natalie: And we've financialized things like care homes, aged care homes, children's care homes. We've turned everything into something that makes profits. We've seen this happen to our NHS. We've seen it happen in our education system.
Manda: Water, transport. All the basic things.
Natalie: Yes. You're right. You know, we would have a much smaller financial sector and it would be a financial sector that was again providing the essential service of moving money around to where it was needed, to serve the real economy. Not being essentially a giant casino, which puts the security of all of us at risk because of its fragility and its lack of resilience.
Manda: Brilliant. And where I get to quite fast with this is that for things like sewer cleaning and moving money from A to B, can be done by automated systems now in ways that they couldn't have been in Fukuyama's 1990. I would posit that the catastrophe started about 12,000 years ago, when we broke from the natural world in our little Western hegemonic culture. But leaving that as a bigger question, if Fukuyama was positing that late 20th century America, with all of its predication on consume, destroy, pollute, was somehow the epitome of being, and that all we needed was to get the entire world there; that was ignoring the fact that they were eating six planets worth of energy and materials in the process to get there, and that's not possible to spread widely. So we could definitely, I think by now, we might not be very good at self-driving cars, but we could almost certainly create self-driving sewer cleaners. Particularly since the Victorians, certainly in the UK, gave us rather good sewers that are still functional in a lot of places. We could also, definitely, AI could shift money around without effort, tomorrow. We would go back to a bank being a local bank manager, and she gets to know the people in her environment and she's there to create financial help for small businesses.
Manda: We would still need an economy that was not predicated on the commodification of capital. As one of Polanyi's three modifications, land, labour and capital were what created capitalism, and it seems to me that de-commodifying land, labour, capital and as you have it in the book: time, are essential to how we get there. And Jacinda Ahern is a brilliant case study because she did amazing things and was then the subject of quite an effective character assassination onslaught by the neoliberal, whatever we want to call it. And yes, this is probably me getting paranoid, but it did seem very effective. People that I know quite well ended up hating her. But why? Because she's actually doing really good stuff. But they poisoned every level and she lost the next election. And it seems to me that in order to get the economic changes that we need, we need political and narrative shifts. The legacy media needs not to be owned by 60 people, if Donnachadh McCarthy is right, all of whom are heavily invested in business as usual. And we need an electoral system that gives people the agency that you said and creates a different framework for sorting out governance. So you can pick either of those: media or governance. And let's drill down into how you see things changing if we were able to.
Natalie: Well, there was a lot in what you just said. I'm just going to pick out the artificial intelligence for a second, and point out that what we have now is not artificial intelligence, it's big data. There is no understanding in any of this generative so-called AI. And I think there's an enormous amount of hype and an enormous amount of puffing up, financial puffing up, going on in that. So I think be aware and as you said, thinking about banking, you came back to the local bank manager. And she's knowing people. People to people relationships cannot be replaced by AI. Just like the idea that the Japanese sometimes appear to be indulging in, that we'll have an ageing population and we'll just let the robots care for them. Robots cannot care in any meaningful sense. So just to park the AI on the side, on the government side, basically I believe enormously in human capacity, human ability, people getting together. But we have a situation at the moment where we have a handful of people making decisions for our society. We do not have a democracy. So practically, in the British context, Sir Keir Starmer got 100% of the power in the House of Commons, effectively 100% of the power in the government, with the backing of 34% of the people who voted.
Manda: And 23% of the actual full population. It's not good.
Natalie: Exactly. That's right. So this is not a democracy in anyone's terms. If you look at the most successful countries in the world, you know, Finland, whether it's the education system, whether it's the fact that there's essentially no homeless people in Finland, Finland is a very successful society. It's also a highly democratic society, both with a parliament that reflects the will of the people, but also with very strong local government. So power is not focussed in the centre in nearly so much of the way it is in the UK. The UK is the most centralised polity in Europe and that's one of our other problems, as well as the as the lack of democracy in the composition of parliament. So what is the answer? In one word, the answer is democracy. And that means making decisions locally by the people affected and only referring the power upwards when absolutely necessary. And also making sure there's the resources at the local level so those local decisions can actually be implemented. So the answer has to be democracy. And I once debated a guy called Brennan, who wrote a book called Against Democracy. He came to the University of Sheffield. And his case studies were the US and the UK, and they hadn't worked out so we should give up on democracy. And my response was, before you give up on democracy...
Manda: These are not democracies!
Natalie: Maybe you should try democracy before you give up on it.
Manda: Right. So let's drill down into this, because I don't often get a chance to talk to people who really thought about this. Although Audrey Tang has agreed to come on the podcast for our fifth anniversary edition, so we'll go in Audrey Tang directions if we can, and then I can follow up with that in December. Let's assume Keir Starmer has a brainstorm and asks you how to devolve his power outwards so that he doesn't have 100% control over everything that happens in the country, because he recognises that's not useful. How would we, if we were to set it up from scratch and make it work, what does it look like, the new democratic system?
Natalie: Well, this is requiring a very large exercise in Imagination, I have to say. But let's think about, say, Yorkshire, for example. Yorkshire is roughly the size and roughly the population of Scotland.
Manda: It's littler.
Natalie: Let's start from villages, communities, something like a parish and have at each one of those a local democratic structure there with a significant amount of resources to do what they want to do. They might decide we want to block cars out of the centre of our town, turn lots of parking spaces into community gardens, into playgrounds for the small children, so people can see the children playing outside their front window. All of those sorts of things. So you've got the resources at that level going up to a town wide level, eventually going up to a Yorkshire parliament. Now the Yorkshire Parliament probably won't do foreign affairs and defence, but it will do practically everything else. It will run services, make decisions for Yorkshire and it will refer things to London when they need to be referred to London. But most things will be decided locally, starting at the parish, going to the town, going to the Yorkshire Parliament.
Manda: And how are we electing people? What's the electoral process? Because if we have first past the post and we continue with media disinformation and misinformation at the rate we've got it just now, this is not to suggest that Yorkshire would go this way, but we're watching things... We have states in the US which have a more devolved system from the federal government and some of them seem to be going full on fascist. What is to stop that happening in anywhere that we decide to give more federalised local government possibilities?
Natalie: Well, as you rightly identify the first past the post, of course you wouldn't have first past the post because it's not a democracy and it opens the way to the fascists. Basically if there's only two parties and the fascists take control of one of them, then when you have a seesaw type system where power swaps between two sides, then the fascist end up in control eventually. So people often say that PR will let the Brexit Party/Ukip/Reform, whatever they're called today, in. But what actually lets people like that into running our government is the first past the post system. If there's a great deal of dissatisfaction and anger, maybe there'll be ten, 15% of people who will vote for parties like that. But most of Europe has what's known as a cordon sanitaire. The other parties say they're beyond the pale, we're not going to work with them, we're not going to form governments with them. That means people are still represented. So you don't get the extreme anger that comes. I think the Brexit referendum result was a result of first past the post. The winning slogan was 'take back control', and people felt like they hadn't been in control of their lives, their communities, for decades.
Natalie: And they were right. You know, many of the people who voted for Brexit were in very safe Labour seats, that it was just assumed that Labour would be in power there forever and it didn't matter whether you voted or not. So it's a matter of giving people a range of options, a parliament or a town council or whatever it is that reflects the will of the people. And a range of views are represented and people can hear themselves represented and see themselves represented. And that's a way that you take away a lot of the anger and the frustration. And in terms of the media, I mean, obviously media ownership reform is something I've been banging on about forever. But the good news is that mainstream media is less and less important every day. We've got to take back control of the social media, stop that running wild in the hands of another few right wing media tycoons. But social media offers enormous possibilities, which we need to recapture and are still usable. I mean, one of my favourite stories from this is The Sheffield Street Tree campaign, Save Sheffield Trees. In New Delhi a similar group was formed because they were inspired by Sheffield and that, of course, was transmitted entirely through social media.
Manda: Oh, fantastic. And last thing I heard, and it is probably a couple of months out of date, Audrey Tang had got together with a billionaire who isn't trying to stop us all thinking, and they were looking at a community buyout of TikTok, to turn it into We Talk, which was then going to be run along similar algorithmic lines to Audrey Tang's social media that the government set up when she was digital minister in Taiwan. And it basically didn't amplify the hysterical screaming at the margins and did amplify people who were endeavouring to build bridges across social and tribal divides. And that's effortless to code. It just means you have to start with the social media system that isn't designed to make a small number of people very rich, and does so by hijacking our amygdalas and hijacking our attention. So it's not hard to imagine a social media system that would work. It's just making it happen in an economy that is predicated on growth. So everything, it seems to me loops back to the system is not fit for purpose, and yet the system is designed to perpetuate the system.
Manda: I'm kind of interested in our hypothetical autonomous county, whatever we call it. I'm worried about naming Yorkshire because then I'll get lots of emails from people going 'but Yorkshire's not like that!'. So Autonomous County doesn't have foreign affairs, defence. We currently have our health system and our food and farming systems don't talk to each other. Our health system doesn't care about food. Our food and farming system doesn't care about health, as a result of which our food and farming system is totally hijacked by big companies that are feeding us UPF's (Ultra Processed Foods). I'm trying to get those renamed as mechanically produced semi edible substances, and then people might eat them less, but they're still designed to give us diabetes. And the health system doesn't care because most doctors get half a day on nutrition in six years of training, and it's not about the fact that what we're eating is killing us. Would each autonomous unit also be running its own health service, its own food and farming policies, or would they be national as well?
Natalie: No, I think in terms of food, you might be eating very different things in Cornwall to what you were eating in Yorkshire, to what you were eating in northern Scotland.
Manda: Because it's locally produced.
Natalie: Well, to be clear, I'm not talking autarky. I do like my morning coffee, and we're not going to be growing in coffee in Britain anytime soon. But if you think about a meal and what's on your plate, the bulk of what's on your plate, you know, you might have thrown in some imported spices or some special flavours or something, but the bulk of what's on your plate will be coming produced locally. So a ring of market gardens around towns and cities, and that's something again, this is where we come back to the whole system thing. Land reform is something I think we'll be talking about quite a bit in the next year or two. Scotland has already made some progress in this area, but land reform in England that says the town, the village has the right to establish that ring of market gardens, to get the land from people who've got plenty of land and use it well and use it for those productive kind of purposes. And of course, that's environmental as well, because actually for nature, some of the best environments of all are actually allotments. They're actually brilliant environments for nature.
Natalie: So market gardens with a whole mix of vegetables and fruit in them would be great for nature. They'd be great for human health. We're talking about stuff that's affordable in a way that an ultra-processed terrible diet is about a third the price of a healthy diet now. So you're going to have that healthy diet there. So you're reshaping things and they'll be different in different places. I mean, I think at the centre, if you think, say for example, about the health service. The centre would say, well, we think there's these certain minimum standards that you should maintain and those are the minimum standards we want to make sure. You know, let's say, for example, sexual health. You want to make sure that there's a certain level of sexual health services everywhere. And the centre would have some control over that. But if an area says, well, we think this is really terribly important and we're going to put a lot more resources into this area because we think this is important. So it's a question of having a baseline from the centre. But then different areas will prioritise different things according to their needs.
Manda: Brilliant. Ok. I'd like to take a step backwards to something we already discussed. Electoral systems. I know obviously the Green Party wants PR, but I'm never clear what sort of PR or or how it would really function. And before we start, I'd like to throw into the mix Forest Row, I have friends who live there and their parish council is huge. It's 21 people. It's bigger than Frome, which is a town. And what they did was to stand a bunch of independents; I think they stood in 19 out of the 21 possible wards; to say, we are not going to be the decision makers. We will implement decisions made by a citizens assembly that we will set up. And here, come along to a people's assembly and and we'll show you how this works. And they won every seat that they sat in as far as I can tell. So they now have 19 out of 21 seats. And one of the first meetings they held was, let's invite back all the other councillors, everybody who works with council, anybody who wants to come and let's talk about what we need. Let's talk about everything that we need and how do you feel about the process we just went through? So that seems to me that it was first past the post, but at least it was operating in a way that gave the local people agency. How would you structure parish to local devolved towns, to local devolved areas and then up to central government, how are we going to structure the ways that we get people involved so that we don't end up with a small clique of the people who shout loudest, bullying everybody else into submission.
Natalie: Well, first of all, I want to mention another book. Because if people don't know it, a little book called Flatpack Democracy, which explains what they did in Frome. And anyone who's feeling like doing something like this in their local community, it's a beautiful little book and well worth reading.
Manda: Essential,yes. And Peter McFadzean, who wrote it, is coming on to the podcast in about a month. So yes, we'll talk about that.
Natalie: Okay. Well, yeah, I just wanted to get that in because if people are thinking, how do I do that? That's a great place to start. I mean, I very much believe in people's assemblies. And if you ask the question about how we should draw up a new modern, democratic, functional constitution for the UK, I would say that a people's assembly is the way to do that. A constitutional assembly made up of a representative group of people from around the country. And if you think about it, we could have a great national debate and there would be plenty of debate on social media. There would be a huge amount of feed-in, people thinking about this, but feeling like they are in control because it's a group of people doing this. And for those who don't know, I mean the great case studies for this, the Republic of Ireland, where both in abortion rights and equal marriage, the people collectively were far braver than the politicians would ever have been left to themselves. And I think the people would be far braver than that. But some people say, I don't hear them much these days, but I'm sure they're still around, people who say, well, we don't need any politicians, we don't need any elected bodies. We'll just decide everything by, you know, you go home in the evening and vote on 27 measures for the day.
Natalie: I think that what we should do is keep the people's assemblies. We're asking people to dedicate a significant amount of time, energy and effort thinking, we should save those for the big issues. The issues that really matter, the issues that people are going to really care about and want to get engaged in. If you're going to, as we might in the House of Lords, debate the regulations for controlling breweries to make sure they're currently sufficiently sanitary, I'm not sure that it's either a good use of time, or that people really want to debate the fine details of how you're going to regulate breweries. So I think for answering the big questions, tackling those big issues, people's assemblies is absolutely the right way to go. But I think you still need, whether it's the parish council, whether it's government in Westminster, you still actually do need that detailed work to be done by people who are engaged in politics. It's a mixture. People sometimes say, should we make the House of Lords a people's assembly? Well, I think we should probably have a third chamber that would look at the big national issues. Think about Brexit, for example, how different that might have been if we'd actually had that kind of process when Brexit was put on the agenda.
Manda: A process then to tell us what Brexit meant and how it might work through?
Natalie: Well, if there's a government that says we think we should do this, let's put this to a people's assembly. Let them explore the issues. I was at a festival and there was a young woman speaker from the Institute for Economic Affairs, and she was asked, what about Northern Ireland and the border down the middle of the Irish Sea? And she was a young woman and she just kind of went, oh, well, I don't know the answer to that. And the crowd wanted to jump on her, and I stopped the crowd jumping on her and said, no, don't jump on her.
Manda: It's not her job to know the answer.
Natalie: There is no answer to the border down the Irish Sea, middle of the Irish Sea problem. You cannot answer that question. And had that debate been had by members of the public, you know, asking questions, starting off by saying, I'm not going to claim I know all of this I just want to ask the question. Then I think we would have ended up in a very different place, and people would have actually understood what they were voting on, in a way that was very clearly... You know, I told off the media, at one event I did with David Cameron during the referendum, I stepped up off script. I could hear all the press people screaming behind me and basically told the media, stop reporting this like this is a leadership contest between David Cameron and Boris Johnson. That was how the media was reporting the Brexit campaign. And I said this is a crucial issue for the future of this country. Let's report about what's going to happen to the environment.
Natalie: I mean, I'll be in the house now soon talking about how our chemical regulation is getting further and further behind chemical regulation in the EU. Our environmental standards are declining. And we were trying to point out these risks at the time, and we just couldn't get any airtime, any traction. But I think in a people's assembly, you know, someone would have said, well, I'm really concerned about PFAS and my children. Tell me more about this. Can we get an expert in to talk about this? And the issues would have been explored in a way that the mainstream media totally failed to during the Brexit campaign.
Manda: As long as it's reported. I'm watching the American election like watching a very slow motion car crash. And this morning there was a poll with Kamala Harris five points up, which the fact that it's only five and isn't 50 is beyond me. But there are still, depending on the poll, between 11 and 16% of people undecided who say they don't know enough about the candidates to make a choice. And I could rant at length about how deliberately uninformed are you for that to be the case? But it remains the case. And added to that question, anyone whose primary source of media news is Fox News and Truth Social, which is Trump's social medium, is getting entirely false news. They have been assaulting the FEMA operatives in North Carolina because they think they're going to take their houses, which is insane. But I watched much the same happening to Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand, with relatively otherwise sane people getting sucked into conspiracy theories which ended up with her losing the election. How do we sanitise the information that people get? How do we help people with their sense making in a world where it seems like there are what I would define as bad actors deliberately poisoning the sense making waters?
Natalie: I think it's worth coming back to talking about Change Everything, the book. The second chapter of that is on education, and I doubt there are very many sort of mainstream political books that education is the second chapter in. And that's because education in critical thinking is absolutely crucial. And America is a bit of a special case. I mean, America has essentially been under developing itself by deliberately destroying its education system for decades. That's a long term process in America and I'm going to park America, because that's that's a bit of a special case and there's many issues in America.
Manda: Sorry to half of our listeners who are from the US, but yes.
Natalie: Well, big money controlling American politics that has deliberately destroyed the public education systems in the US is a huge issue. But I'm going to focus, because it's the one I know best, although what I'm saying also essentially applies to the US in terms of turning it around; is we have an education system in the UK that's focussed on exams. That's focussed on here are the ten things you have to put down in the history exam to get an A star, a maximum possible mark. Now I've been doing a lot of work in the House on online safety bills, online harms bills, discussion about all of that. And lots of people will agree yes, we've got to teach people to critically look at what they see on social media, but I don't think you can just have 'right, here's a critical thinking lesson, look at social media, think about it critically, question everything. Ask what the source is.' Right, children, we're now doing the history lesson; here are the ten things you have to recite in the exam, don't read anything else, don't learn anything else, don't ask me was it really Henry the Eighth? Should we really talk about him that way? No. This is what you have to say in the exam.
Natalie: And so it's impossible. We have an education system that's trying to turn people into obedient workers who follow the line. And so education is part of it. But I also think, you know, as I said during the Brexit campaign, lots of people are absolutely despairing about the state of their lives, the future for their children, the future of their communities. And there is a very human, natural and not even wrong reaction to say, this is a disaster. Let's just knock everything down and see what happens from the ruins. And there is a very strong impulse that you see across lots of that far right: knock everything down because it's such a mess. And our job, for those who are offering an alternative form of politics, and this is offering the message that system change is possible, we need a world where everyone makes politics what they do not have done to them. You can do politics. We want to give you the space, the time, the energy, the resources to do politics and so you can build something else. If people don't have that option available to them, then the knock everything down principle is understandable. And in some ways you could almost say not even wrong. My case study for this, the Guardian reported a homeless man in London who went to great lengths to get across London so that he could vote for Brexit, just on the basis that he wanted to break down the system that had made him homeless. And I understand that, and we have to acknowledge that. And it's really important we don't say these people are stupid. We don't say these people are totally delusional; these people are desperate and we have to understand that desperation.
Manda: We do, definitely. And I'm going to ease us back to America again, partly because I do know we've got quite a lot of listeners here, but also because it is in a very tumultuous time just now. And I read a very interesting blog post yesterday by a young man who's generation Z. He's in his early 20s. He's a climate scientist, and he's standing for election in Congress in the area 12, in Florida. And he was reporting that somebody who had previously been a Republican voter had come up to him and said, we've just had two hurricanes, obviously climate change is a thing, so I'm going to vote for you because then you're going to fix it. So for those only listening and not watching on YouTube, Natalie just made a horrified face, because this seems to me we're in the middle of a poly crisis, we need total systemic change. And you've just said systems change is possible. We're both quite interested in the planetary health check, which is looking at the planetary boundaries. Johan Rockström's planetary boundaries, of which seven have now been breached and an eighth is about to be. And they're very hard to rein in. I'd like to talk to those in a minute, but we're back to, much as I would love Kamala Harris to become the first woman president of the US, and much as I am horrified by the idea of Trump, they are both within a system that is predicated on the extraction and destruction of most of the living world.
Manda: And if people vote for Harris thinking she's going to fix stuff that no human being on the planet can fix, unless all 8 billion of us decide to fix it together, they're going to go the other way next time, exactly as you said. Because they have a seesaw system that we tried the blue ties, and now we want the red ties, or the other way round. I'm still quite interested, because you're the only politician I know who's really thinking about this in any depth, of how do we affect system change in time? When it seems to me that the key to the systems change is a massive ramp down in our power and material use. We need to stop the consumer society. We need to move to a place where there is enough for everyone's need, not for everyone's greed. Gandhi said that nearly a century ago. If there is enough for everyone's need, how do we create the system that lets people know that and gives them what they need and stops them wanting what a century of advertising has told them will make them beautiful and fit and happy and wealthy and all the things that they're being told they're not? Systems change in a couple of sentences, please, Natalie!
Natalie: Okay. Well, first of all, I will pick up that point about advertising and say that we're seeing some real progress on this. For example, the city of Sheffield has actually banned, on all the billboards the city council has banned gambling adverts, crypto adverts, large fossil fuel adverts, overseas holidays, all sorts of different things like that. So there is real activity happening there. And based in the city of Bristol, there's the AD Free Cities campaign. And so there's real progress being made in that advertising. And I think advertising is very important in terms of practical measures. But to address your bigger point about system change and political change, political change doesn't happen slowly and gradually. Political change happens in big jumps. So the last real change in politics was the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Ronald Reagan in the US. We've had 40 years of neoliberalism, neo Thatcherism. In Britain, Blair was the child of Thatcher, Cameron was the child of Blair.
Manda: Starmer is just a really dull person who's having his strings pulled by people with money.
Natalie: Boris Johnson was... We'll just park that one. But um, Sir Keir Starmer is the child of Blair. But if you look back during the period before that, when there was a social democratic consensus and you had both Labour and Tory in the UK and in the US, similar governments from both hues that saw state ownership, control of markets, services ensuring that the state met people's needs, that there were benefits for people who needed them. I mean, there were some things like single mothers, particular moral things in that period. But generally speaking, there was a social democratic consensus in the UK, the US and Europe that to varying degrees, got replaced by a neoliberal consensus for 40 years. Now, during that that period of social democratic consensus, there were a whole lot of neoliberal people running around doing what we've been doing as Greens now. Writing papers, they weren't recording podcasts then, but holding radio shows that no one was listening to, holding public meetings, writing books, doing all those kinds of things to establish the new neoliberal consensus. And when that changed, it changed really fast. When I first got into politics, in party politics in 2006, there was the idea of slow, gradual change. But actually politics changes in those big, sudden disjunctions.
Natalie: And if you think about it like a tsunami, that if you're standing on the shore and the wave is rising, then you can't see, you know, from the shore, it doesn't look like much until the tsunami rises and then breaks. And so political change is coming. I think it will either be our way, the people who say there's enough resources on the planet to have a decent life, if we share them out fairly. Or it will be the far right. Centrist politics is dead because centrist politics means leaving things much as they are, and that's not a viable option. So, I don't know that we're going to win, but the one thing I do know is that history is not pre-written, but made by the actions of people. So that's why I come back to everyone making politics what they do, not have done to them. And another phrase that comes to mind is I've chanted on many a rally platform: we are the many, they are the few.
Manda: But they have the money. I mean, part of the reason that the Chicago school was able to do what it did was that it was incredibly well funded. And the Chicago school is what pushed the neoliberal thing. There was a huge amount of money behind creating a network of think tanks that were allegedly separate entities, and the BBC could get somebody from think tank A, B, C, down to Z and pretend they were all from different places and they were all saying the same thing, because they had very, very big money behind them. And it strikes me in my highly radical change everything concept, that actually we need a whole new monetary system, because the day the dollar ceases to be worth anything, people who got trillions of dollars are not the people who have the power. That's a separate issue.
Natalie: I will just make one point. The point I made about New Delhi Street Tree group being inspired by Sheffield Street Tree Group, that wouldn't have been possible 50 or 60 years ago. So although we focus very often on the negative impacts of social media, it does also mean that everyone has has in their pocket a potentially hugely powerful tool that can organise and bring people together. Before, if you wanted to send a whole lot of letters to people, you needed a lot of money for stamps, right? Lots of those things are not true anymore.
Manda: Okay, okay. Connectivity is a thing. Definitely, yes. So we have two ways we can go. I am looking at my screen at the Planetary Health check data that came out recently, which is the planetary boundaries and where we're at. And it's absolutely *expletive deleted* terrifying. Let's go with that. Because my other enquiry, I would be quite interested in your views on how we avoid limbic hijack when we're trying to teach people critical thinking, but that's probably a tad too philosophical for a Wednesday morning. Planetary boundaries. It's a while since Johan Rockström's group in Stockholm created the concept of the planetary boundaries. We are now, I am looking at the graph now. We have breached seven of them. The oceans very, very close. Ocean acidification. I know when we spoke last, you were really concerned about novel entities as as being one of the planetary boundaries. And when I look at introduction of novel entities, it is the one that's not.. They have safe operating space, increasing risk and high risk zone and introduction of novel entities is so far off the high risk zone that's not even on the graph anymore. Tell us a little bit, because I know this is a field you're interested in. What are novel entities and what can we do about the fact that they're off the scale?
Natalie: My shorthand for this is plastics, pharmaceuticals and pesticides, which is three PS, which gives you a nice, easy, memorable phrase. It's a little more complicated than that, but let's go with those for the moment. And I think plastics is the one that is probably easiest to understand, and that I think people have the highest level of awareness of, and we can use that to talk about the broader issues. You know, David Attenborough, the picture of a turtle with a straw stuck in its nose. People are aware of that, concerned about that. People are starting to be aware of microplastics. And so that's most of the enormous quantity of plastic that we've made in the past few decades, most of it still exists, and most of it is breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces. Eventually, microplastics too small for the eye to see. Microplastics are now in human testes, in human placentas, in human breast milk and just a very recent study, they autopsied a number of brains and found they were 0.5% plastic. Still not quite sure how it's getting across the blood brain barrier. But we are putting these materials that are potentially hugely dangerous everywhere in nature and everywhere in our bodies. And there's a disease called plasticosis, which has been identified in one species of seabird. Now one species of seabird because that's the only place they've looked. And it's basically taking those particles coming down through its digestive system, causing irritation. So they named it after asbestosis because we know what asbestos does to our bodies. And there's a very high risk that plastics are doing the same kind of thing. There's also the issue of antimicrobial resistance. So that's the impact of pharmaceuticals. And we've just had a UN high level meeting on this issue at the General Assembly. We're at risk of losing all of our modern medicine as a result of essentially pharmaceutical pollution and other pollution as well. But there's a sort of bigger thing here in that we're talking about living within the physical limits of this one fragile planet. And one of the things that concerns me. I mean, last week I was at an event, the KPMG Fairer Taxation Group. And everyone was talking about climate. And I was pleased that everyone was talking about climate. But just focusing on climate doesn't talk about nature, doesn't talk about all these other planetary boundaries.
Natalie: And my case study for this is the so-called Dieselgate. When people were told governments who broadly thought they were doing the right thing said, let's switch from petrol to diesel cars because they emit less carbon, without consideration of the polluting, dangerous health impacts of diesel cars. And so what we have to do is stop just picking on one figure, one statistic and saying, right, we're going to look at carbon emissions. We're just going to look at climate. People are starting to talk quite a bit about nature now, but we can't even just talk about climate and nature. We have to look at that complete picture of planetary boundaries. And so I'm doing antimicrobial resistance, I'm doing plastics because they're issues that people can can understand, can see, you can immediately see the threat to your children, the threat to yourself, your own health about this. But it's part of an attempt to create that broader picture of saying, well, we have to do everything within the planet's boundaries. We all have to come back to one planet living, fast. And also to say that that makes a far healthier world with people having better lives. It's not a case of giving up some wonderful utopia. What we have now is an extreme dystopia, we're trashing the planet and creating miserable lives and societies. Turning this around, it's that living standards framework. It's doing everything decently for all the living beings, the living systems on this planet.
Manda: And are you seeing an understanding of that? I mean, the idea that KPMG is looking for fair taxation, that feels so Orwellian to me. But leaving that aside, I spoke a few podcasts ago to Jenny Grettve, who's an architect in Sweden, and she was telling us about the fact that she'd been at a big conference and five separate people from the platform had said, we need to be coming from a place of love. And I thought, that's really nice. Was it a really eco green conference? And she said, no, no, these were Norwegian hedge funders. Wow! That wouldn't have happened five years ago. And she said no, that wouldn't have happened last year. And we don't know what they mean by love and we don't know what a hedge fund looks like when it comes from a place of love. But men stood on a platform and said this and did not expect to lose their jobs the next day. However, they're not involved in policy change, and you're in the midst of where policy happens in the UK. And I'm not terribly impressed with the general bandwidth of the Labour government, as I see it. Quite low threshold there. Are you aware of people who have the capacity to make decisions that will change things, who get that we're in a meta crisis and that we need total systemic change? Or are they just tweaking? Donella meadows bottom row of her levers of change and making minor policy decisions that look good?
Natalie: I'm afraid we're talking minor policy decisions, but I think they come back to something that was what made me join the Green Party in the first place, which was the feeling that we have to stop electing the wrong people and hoping they'll do the right things. I joined the Green Party on the 1st of January, 2006. It was a New Year's resolution to do something about the state of the world. I could have joined Greenpeace or War on Want or organisations like that, but I thought it's where the decisions are made that really matters. And you need people coming into those places with the mindset. And I meet sort of junior and even relatively senior civil servants who do get this. But unless you've got the political control at the top, that's empowering those people... it's not that there aren't people there who don't get it, but unless they are empowered in a system that will allow them to operate and to act in that way, they're not going to be able to act in that way. I was actually in the house last night, and we were talking about the infected blood scandal, a terrible disaster in Britain. And someone was trying to say, oh, it's all the fault of the NHS and the civil servants. And I very much came back quite hard and said, you know: political responsibility. It rests with the politicians. They are the people who are setting the tone, setting the direction. And you cannot expect civil servants to creep around behind their politicians back.
Manda: And make things happen.
Natalie: And do the right thing, because, you know, sooner or later they will get sacked.
Manda: Yes. Sooner rather than later. Alrighty. We're probably heading towards the end. First of all, is there anything we haven't asked that you'd like to talk about? But if there's not, let's go back to Natalie given total power tomorrow. You've spoken about how you would change the governance system, what else would you change to enable the right people to be making the right decisions? Because it seems to me the next election is five years away. I'm not sure we've got five years. What can we do? Actually, that's a better question. What can ordinary people listening do that is constructive, that would push us towards the systems change that we need in time, in your view?
Natalie: I would say do what you're passionate about, do what you're interested in, do what you feel you have the skills for. I think people often ask me, how do I get involved in politics? And first of all, there's a question of what is politics. And my definition of politics is getting together with other people to change things. So organising a litter pick on your street, that's politics.
Manda: Stopping the council chopping down the trees.
Natalie: Stopping the council chopping down the trees. But maybe you're not the person who feels like you can stand underneath that tree and hug the tree and risk getting arrested. But you might be able to do other things. My case study for this is always the anti-fracking movement, which was a very successful long term campaign that lots of people put their bodies on the line for. But there were also lots of people who supported in other ways. So at Blackpool, the anti-fracking camp there, there was a woman who I think for years every Tuesday she baked a car full of quiches and fed the camp. And everyone went, oh, Tuesday, it's quiche day!
Manda: Fantastic.
Natalie: She was contributing in the way that she was able to contribute to that effort. So it's a case of doing something and what that something is, I'm not going to say you have to do this or you have to do that. All of these things make a difference. And the key difference is showing to other people, showing to yourself, that it is possible to make a difference. And whether that's a lovely, clean street, whether that's then saying, well, we've done this litter pick and we've noticed that um, it's a whole lot of bits of plastic that are coming from this takeaway. How about we go and talk to the takeaway? I was on a beach in either North or South Tyneside, I can't remember which one it was now. But there were lots of those little plastic sticks. And I was with a whole lot of people, it was school holidays, parents had come along and were doing the litter pick on the beach. And they wouldn't believe me when I started off saying, these are all from plastic cotton buds. They said, no, no, it must be like those lollies on with plastic sticks or something. But we found so many of them, they were eventually convinced these had to be these plastic cotton buds. And then they realised they were all blue, I think it was. And there was only one shop in town that sold those plastic blue cotton buds. And so a group of young mums were going off to the shop to talk to the shop about not stocking plastic stick cotton buds anymore. That's people starting with something, a litter pick, and then saying there's something wrong here. We're going to try and do something about it. And it's those steps along the way and people feeling like they can do something that is the key thing that needs to change.
Manda: Brilliant. Excellent. Okay. I think that's a really good place to leave it. I will also take my pen out and hold up your book, change everything. It's a really good read. And as you said in the introduction, everything in this book has been tested somewhere. Everything that you put in there, works somewhere in the world. We just need to bring it all together and make it work in our communities insofar as we can, and picking up whatever it is that makes our hearts sing that we're going to be good at, and keep doing it, I think that seems to be the important thing. Is you get involved and you keep being involved because the world is changing too fast not to be. Brilliant. We didn't get to Manor Castle. Where is Manor Castle? You are Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle. Where is Manor Castle?
Natalie: So Manor Castle is the S2 area of Sheffield in Yorkshire. And it's unfortunate that it kind of sounds posh, but actually anyone who knows Sheffield knows S2 is the very opposite of posh. And the way I explain it to my fellow people here at the House of Lords is the last person with a title living in Manor Castle was probably Mary, Queen of Scots, because she was being held captive in the castle. So we're talking many hundreds of years ago.
Manda: She didn't end well. I'm not sure you want to be named after that, but there you go. Okay. Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle, also Natalie Bennett of the Green Party. Thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. That was a lot of fun. And yeah, we'll definitely talk again.
Natalie: Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. And make politics what you do, the final message
Manda: Thank you. Well done. Excellent. And there we go. That is it for another week. Make politics a core part of your life, I would say. We are so close to so many tipping points of the planetary boundaries. I have put a link to the Planetary Health check website in the show notes. Go when you're feeling resilient. But people, we are in a point of crisis now. Honestly, whatever every one of us can do to make a difference really, really matters now. Business as usual is over. Please, if you have any spare time in your life that isn't just about surviving, find what it is that makes your heart sing and that is what the rest of the world needs. Find the intersection of these two and do whatever you can to make it happen. I have also linked to Natalie's book, Change Everything. It's definitely worth reading. It's really well thought out. It's a really easy reading style. It's not full of academic phrases that you'll find hard to get your head around, unlike some of the books that I sometimes mention. And she has got a structured idea of how we can make stuff work. And she's right. Politics is a seesaw, and this is notionally a left wing government. The fact that it isn't is irrelevant if people want something different, the only thing on offer next time around, if we cannot make changes happen, will be something so far to the right it makes Donald Trump look normal.
Manda: And if you're in the US, you've got an election coming up the week after this podcast comes out. I am also going to put a link to the congressional race in Florida, where that young Gen Z climate scientist is running. If you've got any spare money, I would say putting money towards his capacity to get into Congress seems to me a really good thing. So I'll stick that in the show notes too. Wherever you are in the world though. We are now at a moment of crisis. We need things to change. We need to understand that change happens within each of us first. That finding the ways to connect to ourselves, each other, and the web of life is now critical.
Manda: So also, if you're listening to this when it first comes out, we are running the Dreaming Your Death Awake gathering on the last Sunday of October, 4:00 till 8:00 UK time. I think if we can really come to grips with our own mortality, learn to fall in love with living, then we are much, much more likely to be able to do things that connect us with the web of life, and allow us to act as a node of the web with agency, such that whatever we do acts in harmony with the rest of the web of life. Which has to be what we're here for, right? At least it's what I think I'm here for. So I am offering it to you. There we go.
Manda: That's it for another week. We'll be back next week with another conversation. And in the meantime, as ever, a huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot. To Allen Lowell's of Airtight Studios for the production. And heck, this week Allen was working overtime! Thanks to Lou Mayor for the YouTube, which I guess this week is also going to be complicated. To Anne Thomas for a transcript that I hope will be straightforward. And to Faith Tilleray for all of the work behind the scenes that keeps us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know anybody else who wants to know how we can change everything, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.