On the Election

and Afterwards

This has been anything but a climate election.

Deliberately so.

The Conservative manifesto does mention climate change, but mainly to suggest it can be dealt with pragmatically and technologically, and Labour want above all not to come across as ‘the political wing of Just Stop Oil’.

Reform are dismissive, and The Green Party get almost no airtime.

The pollution of the UK’s rivers by privatized Water Companies is a doorstep issue, but strangely separated from all the other forms of pollution - air pollution, plastic pollution.

In a few years, I think we will be amazed and appalled how absent the most basic environmental questions were, in the run-up to this decision.

How will we adapt to increasingly violent weather? How will we feed ourselves? How can we avoid an ecological health crisis?

I could blame the right wing media, and the timidity of the BBC, but there’s a general wish to look away. I’m very aware, it feels better not to look in that direction — unless it’s David Attenborough talking abut it, and saying there’s still hope if we band together.

This avoidance culture has been fostered by all those who are invested in business as usual. At its best, this is because most popular culture — most culture — doesn’t want to risk turning off even a small percentage of its audience. There may be some throwaway jokes about climate in mainstream movies, but it’s kept as peripheral.

At its worst, this is down to the likes of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the Institute for Economic Affairs. The interrelated lobby groups and think tanks who shorthanded as ‘Tufton Street’. They provide talking points — objections to slow down moves toward economic sustainability. In essence, they dictated Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s catastrophic mini-budget.

Usually, I avoid being so direct — but I think about this stuff all the time.

How does this relate to what I usually cover here? Writing, and improving at writing.

Well, many of the writers I know, the first thing they do when they sit down to write is resume their climate rant. Pages and pages of despair. Some don’t get any further than this. They ask themselves why not enough is being done. They wonder what’s wrong with the good people who make up their hoped for audience. They think about how they could do more themselves, in their fiction or non-fiction, to bring about the necessary change. And they become immensely dispirited, and burned out, and depressed.

If there isn’t even going to be a books industry in five years’ time, what the point of starting this novel?

If you can’t love and respect your readers, how can you continue to write for them?

My hope is that this election the moment when the whole debate shifts. The culture wars are a self-harming distraction. Writers shouldn’t be scared of being attacked for addressing the subject of care and concern — for creatures of all amazing sorts.

One of my friends from Writers Rebel, Jessica Townsend, became a founder member of MP Watch. They want to give UK constituents the chance to find out who their elected representatives take money from.

They’ve also compiled a list of the Top Ten worst Climate Deniers.

It’s worth sharing.

Please do vote. Please do vote tactically. And please do vote as if this had been a climate election.