Category Archives: Politics

Putin, Paranoia and Populism

Putin’s reckless and brutal invasion of Ukraine is looking increasingly like it has failed. It has certainly failed in the sense that a quick and relatively bloodless takeover of the country has not happened. Putin has made a massive error. The situation could result in military failure in Ukraine, possibly the break-up of the Russian Federation and for Putin personally, either death or the International Criminal Court in The Hague. On the other hand there could be some kind of eventual Russian victory and if so Putin could remain in power for years to come. Of course these are dangerous and uncertain times. We could end up having a nuclear war, or a random missile could shatter a nuclear reactor. The current situation is resulting in terrible suffering on a daily basis for the people of Ukraine. This week we have on show the best and worst that humanity has to offer.

The EU has found a renewed sense of unity, a spirit and an ability to cooperate and lead on sanctions and practical support. Ordinary citizens in Poland, Germany, Moldova and many other member states are opening their homes to Ukrainian refugees. The spirit of the Ukrainian people has been galvanized and in Volodymyr Zelenskyy they have found a leader who is inspirational, heroic and humane. In June 1940 Churchill stood up to Hitler’s overwhelming military superiority. Now Zelenskyy is standing up to Putin’s massive military onslaught, and he might yet succeed.

Putin embodies so much that is evil, bad and outdated. Putin’s background in the KGB trained him in the ruthless pursuit of the power of the state and preparedness to eliminate any opposition. As he rose to power he used a wide network of mafia style groups to exert power and create a class of wealthy oligarchs who bore him personal loyalty. The ordinary citizens of Russia remain remarkably poor, given that Russia is nominally a superpower. It is a hollowed out economy, massively dependent on oil and gas exports. It has a big military, yet Russia’s total economy is only about the same size as Italy’s.

Putin represents a real danger to peace and democracy everywhere. His influence is extraordinary. He has played a long game, destabilising and weakening western democracies for decades. He funded and backed the whole Brexit process from start to finish and he was instrumental in getting Trump elected. Many in the Conservative party have been financed by him and his network of fellow Russians, who have laundered vast quantities of money in London, and now own much of London’s prime real estate. (Do watch this video)

Putin has a long history of brutally suppressing any opposition. Climate and pro-democracy activists are frequently arrested and imprisoned. A few days ago a group of small children and their mothers were putting flowers outside the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow and they were arrested and imprisoned, with children as young as seven locked up and separated from their mothers. He has intervened militarily, for example in Chechnya in the 1990’s, Georgia in 2008, in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and in Syria from 2015 to the present. In recent months he has been propping up unpopular tyrants in Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Sergej Sumlenny, a former director of the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Kyiv, sees a Russian collapse as potentially imminent, and if this were to be the case breakaway movements in many regions of Russia would likely rebel against domination from Moscow. Much of the Russian military equipment is in poor repair, the invasion force lacks food and fuel, and the soldiers are unprepared, confused and poorly motivated. Morale on the Ukrainian side is strong and determined, and their equipment just about adequate to hold back the larger Russian forces.

On Twitter I now follow dozens of Ukrainian journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens giving excellent on the ground commentary. I also follow a number of academics well versed in the region and thoughtful in their analysis. Many on the left of politics in the USA and UK seem to attribute blame for Putin’s actions to Nato for what they see as it’s expansionist agenda. Janne M Korhonen is a Finnish writer and researcher at Aalto University in Finland, and his Twitter thread posted two days before the invasion I find a compelling rebuttal of this view. Putin’s motivation is primarily a fear and hatred of free open democratic government, and the striving for it in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia and further afield, in Syria and globally. Tied-in with this is his dependence on oil and gas exports. He has been one of the key blocks against strong climate action.

Putin’s action has made all of Europe, but especially his neighbours, keen to strengthen their defences. The EU offers a very different model of governance. It does not have a single person or country leading it. It is a complex collegiate system with many countries, political parties and networks of empowered local and regional governments, linked together in collaborative structures. Traditionally the EU did not focus much on defence. In part this was because Nato existed to resist external threats, and partly because of a strongly held belief that negotiations and cooperation were the modern way forward.

Putin’s actions of the last ten days have changed all this. The EU is acting decisively and taking a leadership role. Biden is playing a role of background support, but it is the various institutions of the EU that are leading. The EU looks stronger and more united than ever. This week Ukraine and Georgia have both applied to join. Switzerland and Sweden have abandoned their traditional neutrality and moved more in-line with EU common action. Many people in Belarus and Russia would love a more democratic system, and to join the EU and to join in with action on the climate. All of that becomes possible for Russia and Belarus, but only in a post Putin era. That era may be sooner than many commentators think.

Putin is becoming ever more paranoid and delusional, as people who hold too much power for too long often do. Ben Judah argues that personalized dictatorships are more erratic and dangerous than collegiate autocracies. There are now very few if any checks and balances on Putin, allowing him the freedom to act on a whim, but increasing the number of people, possibly including some among the oligarchs, who would like to see him gone. The longer the war drags on, the more casualties and the more economic collapse occurs the greater the desire to end the Putin era is likely to become.

German & Norwegian Elections

Annalena Baerbock, leader of the German Greens

Norway had a general election on Monday 13th September and Germany yesterday, on Sunday 26th September. Similar and rather positive trends seem to be emerging in both countries, with Conservative governments falling and probably being replaced with more left leaning and Greener coalition governments.

In Germany the SPD (Labour) emerged as the largest party, winning 206 seats in the Bundestag, a gain of 53 seats. The Greens won 118 seats, a gain of 51 seats. The only other party to gain more than a single one were the FDP (Liberal) who gained 12 seats to bring their total to 92.

The big losers were the CDU/CSU who together lost 50 seats bringing their combined total down to 196 seats. The far left Die Linke party lost 30 seats, reducing their total to 39, and the far right AfD lost 11 seats, reducing their total to 83 seats.

I think a new government will be dominated by the SPD and Greens, but to form a majority government they will need the support of the FDP, or the FDP plus Die Linke. Other possibilities do exist, but seem unlikely to me.

Meanwhile in Norway a very similar pattern is emerging with the incumbent Conservatives losing power to a broad left coalition, which again is likely to be made up of at least three parties, and probably more. The Labour party has 48 seats, the Centre party 28 seats and the Socialist Left party 13 seats, which would create a government with a 9 seat majority in the 169 seat parliament. The Norwegian Green Party increased their seats from 1 to 3, a gain of 2. They would be natural partners in such a coalition.

Chloe Farand, writing on the Climate Home News website points out how this new Norwegian government might be good news in terms of reducing emissions by curbing new oil exploration and extraction. The new government in Germany is also likely to be bolder on reducing carbon emissions than was Chancellor Merkel and her CDU/CSU government.

So, expect small steps forward in terms of the climate-ecological-social crises in these two countries. Still action on the streets will be needed to urge greater speed and boldness, but these two election results are certainly cause for a small celebration.

The Green Party, reflections & hopes

Yesterday, on the day that polling opened for the new leaders of the Green Party, I voted for Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsey to be the new co-leaders. To explain why I voted for them I want to take you back many decades.

As a child in the 1950’s and 60’s I was intensely aware of the damage, pain and suffering being done to the natural world and to people, and as a teenager I became fascinated by those trying to create better, more peaceful, less polluting, more socially just ways of doing things. This became a lifelong quest.

I followed the very early developments of the Ecology Party in the 1970’s. I eventually got around to joining the party in 1982, the same year we formed a new branch of the party in Herefordshire. For the next couple of decades we struggled to get our message heard, and as this graph shows we did gradually and very slowly increase our tiny number of councillors. Mainly we fought elections knowing we would lose, which was quite frankly dispiriting. Gradually in odd places the local parties started getting very much better organized and winning seats. One of the leading places was Norwich and one of their first councillors was a very young Adrian Ramsey, first elected in 2003, and he was part of the team that helped Caroline Lucas get elected in 2010 in Brighton. It seemed in rather hip university cities we could indeed win seats.

Chris Williams worked with Adrian and brought this ‘target to win’ model of organization to the West Midlands. Gradually we got better organized and over the last decade or so the Greens went from three to sixty council seats across the region. Chris Williams winning socially deprived Chelmsley Wood and later Ellie Chowns winning in rural Bishops Frome and Cradley showed we could win anywhere, as long as we had a great candidate, a good sized team of activists and excellent organization.

If delivering leaflets and canvassing where you know you are going to lose is dispiriting then doing the same when you can feel the momentum swinging your way is energizing and empowering. In Herefordshire we went from decades struggling to get or retain one councillor to winning seven seats at the last election in 2019. We are now part of a very creative coalition of Greens and Independents and are running the council.

In my years of trying to influence our local Tory MP’s Jesse Norman and Bill Wiggin I have come to the conclusion that they are both unable to hear our messages however we express them. The only way to change policy is to replace these MP’s with Greens who understand the scale of global system change that the School Strikes movement and Extinction Rebellion are rightly calling for.

Politically things now seem possible that only a few years ago were the stuff of dreams. The Green Party now has 454 seats across 143 principle authority councils in England and Wales, a dramatic increase from the 173 seats we held in 2018. Last May Bristol Green party, lead by Carla Denyer, made a breakthrough and are now level with Labour, each with twenty-four seats. It seems to me that Adrian Ramsey and Carla Denyer have the experience of being councillors and the skills to organise effective teams and win elections. I think they would be the best leaders of the party and that is why I voted for them.

Creating global system change is essential to combat our interlinked network of crises: climate, ecological, social and political. A better future may or may not be possible, but our best chance of securing that is a complex mix of massive changes that I shall be trying to describe in a book I’m writing, and in the upcoming Millichap talk I’m due to deliver via Zoom on 22nd September. One of those changes has to be to change our elected leaders at every level, everywhere. I can see with Adrian and Carla leading the Green Party we might just win a lot more elections, and replacing Bill Wiggin with Ellie Chowns would be amazing, as would replacing Jesse Norman with Diana Toynbee. Do please join the Green Party, and for those of you in Herefordshire come and join our rapidly growing and highly energized local team.