Richard, this is very helpful and illuminating. Thanks so much.
However, you and I are on the left and I'm a Christian eco-socialist. The people, the public, the electorate are on the right. This is seen by the popularity of newspapers like the Mail, Telegraph and Express that are right-wing and most unrighteous over what they want. It is seen by Conservative governments ruling the UK for very many more years than less right-wing governments of the Labour Party.
Democracy is no friend of you and I because we can never get our way through the ballot box.
In 1914, after decades of peace between the European nations themselves, the First World War broke out with great enthusiasm from the British public. In other words, democracy won. The people spoke, they agreed with that war enthusiast, dear Winston and we had the most stupid and unnecessary war in the history of humanity. It led to the 1939 war, followed by the Cold War, followed by the West's takeover of almost every former USSR satellite state - much to the ire of Russian nationalists like Pariah Putrid. And now, from 2014, the ecocidal, almost a civil war between Ukraine and Russia but, fueled by the taxpayers of almost every country in the West and, Russia.
Democracy is no friend of you and I because we can never get our way through the ballot box.
The public want flash, impressive, prestigious projects that are gloriously expensive and wealth flaunting like Metro trams and the 150 miles of tramlines, both overground and underground. In 2020 the 150 miles was estimated to cost £15 BILLION. This, only one year after they had piously declared a climate emergency and, four years on, still fail to act to cancel the W Mids Comedy Authority's most climate-damaging project after High Scam 2 - now four years of blatant hypocrisy, and rising!
The people want and love Metro but, like High Scandal 2, they make all our ecocidal behaviours and problems worse. Hence, democracy will never work for you and me. Only through lobbying have I seen off the KBH and WOM (motorways), the upgrading of towpaths and cycle-walkways, the DfT 'Restoring Your Railways' project and the abandonment of one mainline railway being converted to tramline. I failed over two mainline railways that are lost to trams because that was democracy - what the public wanted. Still, not a bad record!
All you and I have is the power of the pen and voice and, reducing our hypocrisy quotient by being model eco-citizens, leading from the front, by example. Hence my pretty low-carbon, low-impact lifestyle. "Be the change you want to see in the world" Gandhi
Being left and socialist is being left out but, on the side of the poor, the disadvantaged and marginalised in society (re-read the Sermon on the Mount).
Tim Weller
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