SPIRE: School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy @ Keele University

By Dr Stephen Quilley

No Portillo moment then…just a bitter Lembit. I can’t imagine that Edward would have had the good humour to appear on Have I Got News for You on the night of his political Waterloo (But then he was never nearly married to a Cheeky Girl). The strange thing is that this is all turning out to be pretty interesting. Here I am staying up late every night, glued to New 24, sucking up the punditry, shouting at the TV. I can’t help myself. This really is as good as the X Factor.



It is certainly compelling human drama. And with the Euro-crisis and all, Shirley Williams is perhaps not wide of the mark referring to a ‘phoney war’ and the ‘calm before the storm’. There appears to be no doubt that another economic meltdown could be just round the corner and that a great deal depends on how ‘the markets’ react to the new government, when it finally appears.


So is Britain really facing its most dangerous crisis since 1940? Well that very much depends on your time horizons. Since individual Britons rarely live longer than 100 years, it is perhaps reasonable that the box marked ‘possible crises confronting Britain’ includes wars, trade disputes, political implosion, ‘loss of seat at the high table’ – but systematically excludes processes working on evolutionary or geological time scales ( e.g. the next ice age). Since ‘Britain’ as a political entity goes back a couple or ten centuries depending on your history book, it is perhaps less reasonable that the political memory struggles to extend back 50 years and that the habitual S.W.O.T. (‘strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats’) analysis framing even the most strategic decisions of our political elders and betters, never extends beyond the next election. A political-anthropologist from a more patient and longer-lived species, perhaps reporting on the election for a Galactic version of Panorama, would surely point out that whilst the imminent unravelling of the pound might be big news over the electoral cycle, it is not the only nor the biggest black cloud on the horizon. Within the life-time of first time voters, demand for energy is likely to outstrip supply, and the end of cheap energy is likely to present our global petro-civilisation with an enormous and conceivably terminal shock. It is not at all clear that technology will deliver us from this problem. What certainly is the case is that with economic growth in Asia and Africa driving demand for energy to ever more precipitous heights, it will be very difficult (Lovelock says impossible) to prevent the burning of every last gramme of available fossil fuel – from China’s enormous reserves of dirty coal, to the tar sands of Alberta. Now if that happens, we may learn the real meaning of crisis. So coming back to Shirley Williams and the rest of the arm-chair pundits (of whom by the way Portillo is one of the best, and the nicest – Is it possible that Edward missed an opportunity for redemption of some kind?), the problem is not just their time horizons, but the unit of analysis. The real crisis affecting Britons will not be in their capacity as citizens of a nation-state, but as citizens of an integrated but vulnerable global civilisation, and possibly in their capacity as human beings. If human activity triggers rapid climate change of more than 3 degrees, it is quite possible that civilisation will crash; possible that humanity might disappear in its wake; and possible even that life on earth may not be sufficiently resilient to recover [read the last chapter in Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees if you want to kill yourself].


So why then, I hear you ask, do you give a figurative fig about the outcome of this election? Because as Will Hutton said, this really is the most important event in our political history for the last hundred years. If Clegg holds out for Proportional Representation then it is possible that we may end up with an electoral system in which radical diagnoses, ideas and prescriptions at least get an airing. We may end up with a political culture mature enough to deliver bad news. It might be that we get not just one Green MP, but half a dozen, perhaps even a couple of competing green parties, representing very different policy options. Imagine different green caucuses in Parliament, making rhetorical alliances with different bits of the Labour, Liberal and Conservative Parties and engaging in a real debate about whether we need a crash programme of nuclear power generation and geo-engineering projects to buy some time for a more fundamental accommodation with the biosphere and the climate. That is what young folk used to refer to as 'heavy'! But it is this sort of practical forward thinking that should occupy every waking hour of our political class. Currently we can’t have that kind of debate because Westminster is an exclusive club in which members are chaperoned and arguments pre-scripted. Imagine Parliament sitting in 1938 and Churchill being unable even to mention a possible crisis brewing in Sudetenland. Imagine Hitler being banished as an item for discussion with MPs forced instead to consider the price of eggs. That is the situation we are in now with regard to climate change. So let us pray that Clegg holds his nerve and blows the system open.