Pages and pages

Only one book in the post today - Jean Mitchell's Storm and Dissonance: L. M. Montgomery and Conflict, bringing my spend on Anne of Green Gables books to £200+. Oh dear.

Luckily, my friend and colleague Sarah has looted the 'university shop' (a marketing thing in the local shopping centre) of all the good second hand books it has on sale. She's presented me with a tour of 1980s Conservatism called Thatcher's Britain: A Guide to the Ruins which seems remarkably current, leafing through their current manifesto, and a beautiful Penguin Special, Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit's Trotskyist Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (1968). Daniel Cohn-Bendit's still around, as a Green MEP.

Move along, it's another politics and environment post

Being a rcalcitrant anarcho-syndicalist with Trotskyist leanings, I'm a huge fan of Ken MacLeod, the Scottish Trotskyist-ish science fiction author. He's a brilliant writer and stunningly intelligent.

However, I'm also very, very scared about what we've done to this planet and consequently what we're doing to its poor, mostly black inhabitants, none of whom have done anything to bring the eco-apocalypse down on our heads.

The problem is that the hard left has always seen industrialism as the solution to dragging the proletariat out of its suffering. Being green, to them, equates to being a smug, selfish and hypocritical bourgeois git. And you know, they're right - there are lots of Tory landowners taking long-haul flights to paradise islands, or weekend breaks, while telling the rest of us to recycle.

BUT - it's the poor who'll suffer first. Anyway, back to Ken MacLeod - here's his solution, expressed in his admiration for a techno-fix approach proposed by a learned professor. It's very appealing, and is also a fantasy of the climate change-denying right. The problem, of course, is that it's never this simple, consumption just is damaging, and the benefits won't extend to the poor.

For me, a highlight of a very engaging and informative weekend was a talk by Prof Colin McInnes, DSc FRAes FInstP FRSE FREng, titled 'Random Thoughts of a Techno-Utopist Running Dog'. The usual conception of sustainability, Prof McInnes argued, was a dangerous idea. Technological stagnation only means slower resource depletion. We need continuous technological progress to make new resources available. The idea that we should use less energy is outrageously inhumane and regressive. Most of humanity gets its energy from burning wood and dung. We need a vast increase in energy production. That means nuclear power, including new kinds of nuclear plant such as the Thorium Energy Amplifier. Nuclear waste is just inadequately burned nuclear fuel. We need to find ways of burning it all. Most reycling schemes are feel-good rather than do-good, condemning us to pre-industrial, manual rooting about in rubbish. We need plasma torches and mass spectrometers to really recover all the useful stuff in our waste. 'Humanity is the singularity. We are self-replicating smart matter.' To campaign against cheap flights to Prague while jetting across the world for eco-holidays in the Galapagos is naked class warfare. With synthetic genomics we can have carbon-neutral aviation even cheaper than today's travel.

Free the Tarnac 9

Well, after that bracing holiday, I'm back and raring to lacerate someone with mildly barbed commentary. First up, the French.

No, not on the usual lines (garlic, surrender, strikes, arrogance). I like those aspects of that country. When de Gaulle despaired of being able to govern a country with 300+ cheeses, I thought he was mad - why would you not want to? I like French bloody-mindedness, their concern for food and quality of life (lunch with red wine or an e. coli sandwich at your desk?)  and their love of an old-fashioned, all-in demonstration or riot. 

Which is what brings me to whinge about our cousins now. In the past, they've had a healthy hard left shading into revolutionary factions. They even gave sanctuary to various Italians who'd had, shall we say, an interesting 1970s. But now, the party est finie. The freelance left may be coming back but the French government has decided that under the guise of 'extremism', they can nick everybody who doesn't want to go to Disneyworld Paris - even the inoffensive anarchists of Tarnac who allegedly delayed a train and may (or may not) have had a hand in writing 'The Coming Insurrection', a rather sweet neoTrotskyist tract which shares some values with my mother's terrorist sect, the Women's Institute. 

What the Tarnac 9 seem to have done is lived The Good Life - gone to a depopulated area of France (Limousin) and joined the remaining locals in making their village viable again - which seems rather in keeping with the new spirit of the times, given that globalisation has allowed the stupidity of a tiny élite of financiers to push the entire global economy into recession. In return, the police judiciaire swooped in full anti-terrorist gear and kidnapped nine of them: the Swiss sitcom actor, the clarinettist, the archaeologist, the student nurse and the grocer amongst them… dangerous criminals all. I bet their veg boxes were packed with loads of subversively-shaped goodies. Perhaps even a sausage hiding the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies…

However, Sarko is determined to prove that he's a forward-thinking rightwing global capitalist like… er… Tony Blair just in time for the New 1930s. Hélas

Some of the Tarnac 9, plotting another fiendish outrage