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George Monbiot@georgemonbiot.bsky.social |
11749 followers 61 following 443 posts
Ungainly on land
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Whether the far right talks and dresses like Russell Brand or like Nigel Farage, it leads in only one direction: The persecution of minorities, scapegoating as a substitute for policy and the triumph of capital over humanity.
0 replies 16 reposts 62 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Biden is the physical manifestation of the incapacity of the old, liberal order, as it confronts a reinvigorated extreme right. Mumbling liberalism was never going to be enough. Without a radical, uplifting left politics, we stand to lose everything.
1 replies 22 reposts 77 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Last night’s debate reminds us that we can afford no tepid or faltering response to the resurgence of oligarchic power. Defending democracy against plutocracy demands steely determination and a powerful new story. They are lacking almost everywhere. 🧵
3 replies 6 reposts 65 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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In 1945, the Allies understood that facism, imperial conquest and mass murder all arose from oligarchy. They went to great lengths to destroy it in Japan and build a political and economic democracy to prevent its resurgence. Now the same nations open their doors to oligarchy.
1 replies 6 reposts 42 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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If we want to sustain even a modicum of democracy, equality, fairness and a functioning state, we need not the accommodation with economic power that Starmer seeks, but the mother of all battles with it.
2 replies 2 reposts 28 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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The lessons from history I discuss are hard and unpalatable. But unless we learn from them, the arc of the moral universe will keep bending towards injustice. The default state of political systems is oligarchy, and fierce resistance is needed to arrest its resurgence.
4 replies 8 reposts 48 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Timid measures of the kind Labour proposes won't stop the rise of a new oligarchy. Instead we need a political and economic programme of the kind that General MacArthur oversaw in Japan.
This week's column.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
7 replies 44 reposts 130 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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But it contributes to our massive blind spots and blatant double standards. Through its Assured scheme, it actively promotes animal suffering. If you care about animal welfare, support organisations like Animal Rising, which exposed the latest horrors promoted by the RSPCA.
2 replies 4 reposts 28 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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In aggregate, animals would be better off if it ceased to exist. I see the purpose of the RSPCA as being to make us feel better about ourselves. If we see someone abusing their pet, we can report it and consider ourselves a better citizen.
1 replies 3 reposts 16 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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What’s the common thread in these extraordinary omissions and commissions? Power. It will take on the little guys: the pet owners and smallholders mistreating one or a few animals. But it won’t touch the people doing it on an industrial scale.
4 replies 3 reposts 29 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Type the word “pheasant” into the RSPCA search bar, and you will see just two returns. 1. Pheasants are included on a list of birds that might suffer avian flu. 2. There’s a report that briefly mentions their mistreatment: not in the UK, but in Chinese markets.
2 replies 2 reposts 10 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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How about the 3rd biggest - industrial shooting? Some 30 million pheasants and 10 million partridges are released for the sole purpose of being blasted with lead shot every year in Britain. Many are wounded, and suffer long and painful deaths. RSPCA response? You guessed it.
2 replies 2 reposts 17 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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The second biggest must be industrial fishing, trashing entire marine ecosystems, leaving vast numbers of non-target species dead or dying, while the target species slowly asphyxiate on board. What does the RSPCA have to say about it?
1 replies 2 reposts 17 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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So, on the biggest animal welfare issue of all, industrial agriculture, the RSPCA not only fails utterly to campaign against the abuse of tens of millions of animals, but actually promotes and encourages it. What about the other big issues?
1 replies 2 reposts 28 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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How Britain’s oldest animal welfare charity became a byword for cruelty on an industrial scale.
My column on the RSPCA's astonishing betrayal of its principles. It now does more, in my view, to promote animal cruelty than to prevent it. Plus bonus🧵
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
6 replies 33 reposts 78 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Philip Adams, one of the greatest broadcasters of our age, is about to retire. This is one of his last ever interviews for ABC. Please do listen.
www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...
0 replies 14 reposts 40 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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The Israeli government's devastation of Rafah and its people intensifies, yet Joe Biden, having promised to cut off the supply of weapons if it went ahead, still equips Netanyahu's administration with all the deadly arms it needs to pursue genocide in #Gaza.
2 replies 12 reposts 54 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Our joint column on what's good about Labour's manifesto, what's bad and what just isn't there.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
3 replies 11 reposts 23 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Everything that Labour ought to stand for - but doesn't - is in the Green Party manifesto. My column.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
4 replies 31 reposts 76 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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How do we tell a new political story? My interview with the wonderful Ayeisha Thomas-Smith for the New Economics podcast: neweconomics.org/2024/06/how-...
2 replies 6 reposts 25 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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In some ways, elections are the opposite of democracy. But these two entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. The result? Oligarchic rule continues, regardless of which party wins. It's time to explore better ways.
My column.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
5 replies 29 reposts 68 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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The persistent trick of modern politics is to disguise economic and political conflicts as cultural conflicts. The media faithfully reports the diversion, not the manoeuvres; the noise, not the signal.
2 replies 39 reposts 111 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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#IDThought 7: Nigel Farage and his ilk are human smoke bombs, generating a camouflaging cloud of xenophobia and culture wars. What are they hiding? The economic warfare waged against us by the predatory capital which funds their campaigns.🧵
3 replies 44 reposts 127 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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My talk in Oxford on Wednesday is sold out. But don't worry - now I'm doing another on Thursday, at Wolfson College. Do come if you can: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/george-mon...
0 replies 6 reposts 35 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Many thanks to Peter Geoghegan for this very kind review of The Invisible Doctrine. www.theguardian.com/books/articl...
2 replies 13 reposts 42 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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There are many different ways of doing it, and I don’t intend in this thread to be prescriptive. We explore some of them in The Invisible Doctrine, but hundreds more are available. But the key takeaway is: WE DO NOT HAVE TO BE GOVERNED LIKE THIS.
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Once we have real democratic power, these examples show, we take it seriously and use it responsibly. Short-term thinking gives way to long-term thinking. The results tend to be much fairer, greener and more responsible than the results of representative democracy alone.
1 replies 1 reposts 11 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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You may scoff, but a remarkable property of deliberative, participative democracy is that it works much better in practice than it does in theory. As we have seen in places such as Rojava and Porto Alegre, it transforms people into democratic citizens.
1 replies 5 reposts 16 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Representative democracy should be tempered by participatory democracy. If we are going to have two chambers, one should be the House of Commons, the other should be the entire population of 67 million people.
1 replies 0 reposts 14 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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But that’s not enough. Today, we have a wide range of tools for making democracy a real and living proposition. They enable us to refine our choices and engage directly in politics whenever we wish. I’m talking about deliberative, participatory democracy.
1 replies 3 reposts 20 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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I don’t believe we should do away with representative democracy altogether, though we should improve it through proportional representation and radical campaign finance reform, both of which have been demanded here, without success, for 160 years.
2 replies 3 reposts 34 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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I don’t believe we should do away with representative democracy altogether, though we should improve it through proportional representation and radical campaign finance reform, both of which have been demanded here, without success, for 160 years.
5 replies 8 reposts 43 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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This is an 18th-century political system, designed at a time when only the richest and most powerful people could vote. It is used in the 21st century to protect capital and established power from the challenges that real democracy would present.
1 replies 8 reposts 39 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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We are also given no choice but to submit to governance by a remote authority, surrendering our will to people we have never met, but who nonetheless claim to speak with our voices and represent our views. We all know this is a fiction, but we have to go along with it.
2 replies 0 reposts 21 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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There is no means of refining our choice, of accepting some items and rejecting others. With one decision, we are presumed to have consented to thousands of further decisions. We do not accept the principle of presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?
1 replies 2 reposts 31 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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It’s not that different from the cross or thumbprint with which indigenous people were asked to sign treaties with European colonists, which in some cases they were unable to read. It arises from the same mode and style of governance.
1 replies 4 reposts 31 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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#IDthought 6 At every general election, we are faced with a binary choice. With one cross, we are deemed to have signalled our agreement everything in a party’s manifesto and everything else – if it wins – it can ram through Parliament over the next five years. 🧵
10 replies 22 reposts 61 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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It's part of a pattern of appointing extreme rightwingers as "independent" policy reviewers. The kind of thing Victor Orban does in Hungary. Now standard practice in the UK too.
5 replies 13 reposts 61 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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How many of you know what happened yesterday? A new "independent" review for the government, proposing that the last rights of left-wing movements to protest are terminated. Blatantly partisan, dictator's powers, yet scarcely any coverage. My column. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
5 replies 107 reposts 174 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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You might be surprised to see interest payments on this list. But interest is the fee you pay to rent money. That's why financialisation - the intrusion of the financial sector into ever more aspects of life - makes the rich richer and the poor poorer.
2 replies 4 reposts 41 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Rent, in other words, is a form of extortion: the payments we must make when capital has us over a barrel.
1 replies 7 reposts 35 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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That's what rent means: the entry fee you must surrender, over and above your payment for services received, to those who have captured the essential resources you need to survive and prosper. Rent is a kind of private tax, that the poor and middle must pay to the rich.
2 replies 9 reposts 37 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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I don’t just mean housing rents. I mean all *access fees* to essential services that have been captured by private wealth: water, energy, health, railways etc. And the interest payments arising from the financialisation of higher education.
1 replies 8 reposts 36 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Why? Because trade unions were crushed. Because tax rates for the very rich were slashed. Because any regulation that big business viewed as constricting was loosened or eliminated. And, perhaps most importantly, because *rents* were allowed to soar.
3 replies 11 reposts 63 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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#IDthought 5: Until the neoliberal era, inequality declined for some 60 years. From the 1980s onwards, it returned with a vengeance. Since 1989, America’s super-rich have grown about $21 trillion richer. The poorest 50 per cent, by contrast, have become $900 billion poorer.🧵
3 replies 48 reposts 106 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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So when the BBC, when introducing a guest, describes the Tufton Street dark money junktank they work for as a "free market thinktank", it misleads its audience. This happens almost every day.
1 replies 11 reposts 54 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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In reality, it’s about who dominates whom. Neoliberalism is a tool used by the very rich to accumulate more wealth and power. Neoliberalism is class war.
1 replies 17 reposts 78 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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As for “the market”, when used in the neoliberal context this term disguises a host of power relations. It becomes a euphemism for the power of money. When ‘the market’ decides, it means those with the money decide.
2 replies 11 reposts 65 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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#IDthought 4: It is simply wrong to define neoliberalism as ‘free-market economics’. It's nothing of the kind. The ‘freedom’ that neoliberals celebrate – which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms – turns out to be freedom for the rich to exploit the rest. 🧵
6 replies 35 reposts 93 likes
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George Monbiot
@georgemonbiot.bsky.social
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Could we please stop denigrating wild animals by associating them with the worst possible human traits? I'm thinking in particular of loan sharks, weasel politicians, wolves in sheep's clothing and Laurence Fox.
7 replies 19 reposts 136 likes