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All communities, except self -sufficient farmers and hunter-gatherers, have to rely on the acquisition of wealth for survival; companies sell goods, states levy taxes and families depend on wage earners. Communities that provide a service to their members, such as charities, member-owned golf-clubs and religions, rely on membership subscription. How this membership subscription is gathered, matters.

To ensure they serve their communities, Buddhist monks are not allowed to own personal wealth.  In villages in Laos, monks collect food in begging bowls from local villagers. In return they provide education to the children and religious support to the village. Just like all non-profit making communities, those that provide the funds are entitled to have a say in its running and enjoy some of its benefits.

There was a time when the main source of political party income was member subscription. Quite early in the twentieth century the Labour party became excessively beholden to trade-union funds. As a result, the trade-union political agenda had a large influence on Labour policies. Similarly, the Conservative party became more dependent on business donations, and wealthy business men who funded the party gained access to ministers and were rewarded with honours. Both developments  eroded the influence of the general membership over party policy and gave a small number of individuals outside government a say in the way the country was run.

In the last three decades there has been a trend for right-wing parties to rely increasingly on income from a few rich individuals. These individuals are libertarians who want low taxes, minimum state control and are against all forms of cross-community support. This happened first with the Republican party in America and is spreading to Britain. Peter Geoghegan in his book Democracy for Sale tells the story about how this occurred during the Brexit debate and its aftermath.

This trend towards a few individuals having an excessive influence on the Conservative party has accelerated under Boris Johnson’s leadership. We now live in a country run by ‘Access capitalism’, where the rich pay money to get the ear of the Prime Minister. The Pandora Papers ( https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/05/access-tory-party-tycoon-funders-pandora-papers)  have recently revealed the extent to which the Tory party is beholden to off-shore funds from Russian oligarchs, corrupt business men and tax exiles. We now have the situation in which Boris Johnson, no longer reliant on funds from British business, is now blaming his former partners for the post-Brexit difficulties the country is now facing. At least in the old days trade-unions and businesses were British based organisations who had some interest in the health and wealth of Britain as a whole. We now have the situation where a few non- residents and foreigners are manipulating British policy for their own interest. The health of democracy in Britain has reached a new low ebb.

In the Future of Capitalism, Paul Collier makes a practical attempt to move economic theory forward from nineteenth century views of humans only being driven by self-interest and greed. The neo-liberal ideas, that this distortion spawned, are to blame for the 2008 financial crash and the huge divisions in society that exist today; the UK is a nation divided between an affluent, educated city-based elite and disaffected town -dwellers left behind by the effects of globalisation.

A key to his thesis is to recognise that belonging to a community is vital to man’s sense of identity. Most people gain their sense of identity from their family, their job and their nationality. The educated elite take pride in their profession, travel widely and place less emphasis on nationality. For the less-educated the situation is different. The rise of one-parent families, insecure jobs, Covid and many other issues has put immense strain on family life. Jobs for the skilled working class in manufacturing have disappeared as a result of globalisation and have been replaced by low-skilled precarious work in services and logistics. With both pride in the job disappearing and the pressures on family life, nationhood has come to be even more important in defining the identity of the less-well off.

This division became clear in the Brexit vote, which represented a failure of the radical left to engage and understand the disadvantaged. As Paul Collier says:

By eschewing shared belonging, and the benign patriotism that it can support, liberals have abandoned the only force capable of uniting societies behind remedies. Inadvertently, recklessly, they have handed it to the charlatan extremes, which are gleefully twisting it to their own warped purposes.

The election of Trump in the USA and the collapse of the red wall in the UK have been the result.

Paul Collier advocates that supporting communities needs to become central to economic thinking. He has developed ideas that support young disadvantaged families, that refocus businesses on developing a stable and skilled workforce, and that build and support local communities.

It is a good start, but only when economists fully understand that it is community development and memetic evolution that drives society forward will a more complete set of beneficial policies emerge.

Rational decision making in democracies is becoming increasingly difficult due to the tide of misinformation launched by social media and lobby groups. There are those that support climate change denial, refute the seriousness of hospital admissions due to Covid, anti-vacs’ and many others. The purveyors of these mistruths are a danger to society and themselves. George Monbiot writing in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/27/covid-lies-cost-lives-right-clamp-down-misinformation argues that ‘claims representing a danger to life’ should be prohibited. Few would disagree.

However, misinformation is more than a danger to life, it is a threat to democracy itself. This has been demonstrated with the election of Trump and the continual loyalty of his supporters, despite his lies, and his illegal and narcissistic behaviour. Trump has gathered a xenophobic tribe of followers who cherish his opinions, irrespective of their validity. This is a common characteristic of dictators.

Anne Applebaum in her book The Twilight of Democracy writes:

Authoritarians need people who will promote the riot or launch a coup. But they also need people who can argue that breaking the constitution or twisting the law is the right thing to do. They need people who will give voice to grievances, manipulate discontent, channel anger and fear, and imagine a different future. They need embers of the intellectual elite, in other words, who will launch a war on the rest of the intellectual and educated elite, give voice to grievances…. [by] betraying the central task of an intellectual, the search for truth, in favour of particular political causes.

Pseudo-scientists that give validity to false and dangerous ideas are a serious threat both to life and democratic institutions. It is they that have given credibility to climate change denial, vaccination scares and downplaying the Covid threat. Taken up by unscrupulous rumour mongers with their own political agenda they manage to confuse arguments, obfuscate the truth and warp decisions.

The BBC, for all its virtues, has given time and credibility to these agents of disinformation in order to give a ‘balanced view’. Contrarian arguments, however bizarre, make for entertaining listening. We all have the right to speak freely but there are limits. The freedom to disseminate misinformation has been exploited by rumour mongers in a way that is dangerous to society.

Lobby groups and malicious organisations who deliberately distort the truth do not support the principles of eco-humanity. It is hard to overstate the danger they represent to our society. We need to take more direct steps to protect ourselves.

Evolution drives change in the natural world. Human ‘progress’ is also an evolutionary process. It is driven by competing individuals and communities all trying to obtain wealth and improve their way of life. As a species we have been spectacularly successful. However, all species have environmental limits to growth. With the effects of climate change, environmental destruction, dwindling water supplies and pollution beginning to bite hard, it is clear that human activity is now approaching the limits that the Earth can support.

Humans are unique animals; we can reason and we understand many of the laws that determine the workings of the universe.  Scientists have been warning for decades of the perils of climate change. Many people believed them, but the issue was too big for individuals to tackle and too nebulous for them to demand action from politicians. I naively thought that when the adverse effects became clear and obvious that attitudes would change. That the human race would see climate change as a genuine emergency and begin to tackle the issue with urgency.

I was wrong. Images of Australia burning seem to have little effect. You’d think that Australians, in the front line of catastrophic droughts, floods and fires would, by now, be demanding that their government front up to the problem. You’d be wrong. Writing in the Guardian Lenore Taylor reports:

… despite the widespread sense that the fires are a tipping point, despite global outrage at the self-defeating stupidity of our policies, despite the world’s largest fund manager ditching thermal coal, despite the wave of grief and anger from around the world – even from James Murdoch – it’s still not clear that Australian public opinion will force this government to change.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/17/if-the-bushfires-wont-force-climate-policy-change-we-need-to-circumvent-scott-morrison

How bad does it have to get before we act? It is already clear that the global temperature rise will surpass the 1.5-degree target set in the Paris Climate Change accord in 1916.  We are certainly on course for at least a 2-degree rise. Will we act when the rise exceeds even this? For the first time I am beginning to have my doubts whether the human species, despite all its cleverness, is capable of altering the path of evolution

It’s not just our politicians that are failing us, it’s the whole political system of government.

The UK’s democratic processes were forged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This was a world in which the pace of change was slower, the welfare state had yet to be born and emperors and monarchs exercised real power in many countries of the world. The complexities of governance that our leaders face today are many times more challenging than 2 centuries ago.

In business, candidates for job vacancies without a relevant track record would have little chance of success. In the UK, ministers are often catapulted into managing government departments for which they have no practical knowledge. As a result, they often act in an amateur knee-jerk fashion responding to each crisis as it occurs. Education and the National Health Service, in particular, have suffered greatly with ministers micro-managing according to their own pet ideas. Political ability is no guarantee of any management ability.

Listen to what Rory Stewart has to say about his own ministerial experience:

Our terms are absurdly short. I held five ministerial jobs in four years. Just as I was completing my 25-year environment plan, I was made a Middle East minister. Just as I was trying to change our aid policy in Syria, I was made the Africa minister. Just as I was finishing my Africa strategy, I was moved to prisons. I promised to reduce violence in prisons in 12 months, and violence was just beginning to come down – when I was made secretary of state for international development. How can this be a serious way to run a country?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/06/rory-stewart-hope-i-got-out-of-tories-before-it-was-too-late

Surely leaders of state institutions need to be selected on their proven ability in office? We need leaders of our education systems, transport infrastructure, tax collection systems, health care and all our other major offices of state  who can build on expertise to construct world-class cost-effective institutions. This can’t be achieved by part-time appointees with little relevant experience.

Greta Thunberg’s speech to the UN summarised perfectly our moral duty to preserve the planet for future generations.

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight? You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil and that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in ten years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees and the risk of setting up irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Fifty percent may be acceptable to you, but those numbers do not include tipping points most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution, or the aspects of equity and climate justice.

They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us. We who have to live with the consequences. To have a 67 percent chance of staying below the 1.5 degree of temperature rise, the best odds given by the IPCC, the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on January 1, 2018.

Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just business as usual and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 that entire budget will be gone is less than 8 and a half years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today because these numbers are too uncomfortable and you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us, but young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this, right here, right now, is where we draw the line. The world is waking up, and change is coming whether you like it or not.

The Articles web-page is launched today.

It will aim to a library of articles and books that show the development of human evolutionary change.  It will show how global warming, the destruction of the natural world, the headlong pursuit of technological development and economic growth combined with the misuse of political power is creating a divided world that is destroying the planet