Joe Salmon, 07 April 2024, Tags:
DISCLAIMER : THESE ARE ONLY MY OWN THOUGHTS AND DO NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF THE WIDER LOCAL OR NATIONAL GREEN PARTY AND ONLY MY OWN (Joe Salmon's) IDEAS AT TIME OF WRITING
Just a quick trigger warning, I do talk about suicide briefly in this blogpost. This is a bit of a word salad as I cover a lot, my video here is much shorter and easier to digest
So below are the issues / topics to be covered at the humanist husting coming up on the 13th of April 2pm at Moordown Community Centre.
Issues which are specific to humanism and secularism include:
Humanists are also interested in creating a good society which works for the common good so that everyone can live a flourishing life. Specific issues may include:
There is no way I’ll be able to cover all of this at the hustings given how little time I’ll have to speak so I will do my best to cover all 15 different issues in this blog, which I’ll follow up with a video blog.
Me and Kate had a humanist wedding ceremony where we also gave our adopted children middle names and guide parents. It was very frustrating we had to do the legal admin bit days before at the town hall. Totally support.
Again totally support. I would replace the house of lords with a proportionally elected body for the whole country and then have constituency MPs selected by ranked choice preference voting. Very sad to see Labour always drop their commitment to an elected house of lords or reforming the house of lords when they get a sniff of power.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65978167
https://www.ft.com/content/e7935e2e-acd9-4f61-bc6d-f0b3b5c07357
Again I am fully supportive of this. I’m very uncomfortable with children being exposed to religious ideas unquestioningly at a young age. This can only be harmful developmentally.
Ditto, there simply should not be religious schools funded via public money, or as an alternative to mainstream education for the sake of social cohesion. I am also against the two tier system we have of state schools and private / grammar schools.
Absolutely support, but this can only exist when access to healthcare is universal across society, and that includes social care. I would be worried to see euthanasia become less taboo and decriminalised while families still have virtually no practical access to care for elderly relatives with conditions like dementia or other difficult to manage chronic conditions, and when waiting lists to help with mental health issues are so long and the engagement with those services potentially gruelling.
I’ve lost friends to suicide, and still have people in my life I care deeply about who have made unsuccessful attempts. We cannot be too careful about how easy it is to access these services. Ultimately the root cause of the problem is how heartless society has become under rampant capitalism, addressing this will help.
Humanists are also interested in creating a good society which works for the common good so that everyone can live a flourishing life. Specific issues may include:
I’m going to cover these three questions together because I think they are very closely linked. I am a big believer in the economic analysis done by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in the Spirit Level, and advocate for the policies put forward by the equalities trust. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/the-spirit-level
I am also a great advocate of Ecological Tax Reform (ETR) shifting the tax burden away from wages and profits and onto raw materials as close to the point of extraction as possible.
Finally I have previously blogged about income tax and the laffer curve, and the need to recognise we have 7 figure salaries in this country which need to be tax appropriately.
When it comes to more specific areas such as housing and employment I think we need to implement a comprehensive housing strategy that combines both supply-side and demand-side measures to address the root causes of the housing crisis.
We must strengthen rent control laws to protect tenants from excessive rent increases and ensure stability in the rental market. If you want to see an example of how broken our politics is just look at how landlords have stopped legislation passing that would have done this through their legal bribes to the Tory Party through lobbying.
The government also needs to provide data driven subsidies and tax incentives for developers to build affordable housing. The implementation of regulations to discourage property speculation and land banking cannot come soon enough either.
Labour and the Tories both failed to address the housing crisis as it began. This has led to soaring housing costs and increasing homelessness. If we fund social housing projects through the taxation of hoarded wealth and property we can provide affordable housing options and stimulate economic growth. Initiatives like land trusts are certainly worth exploring as well.
Finally we have to talk about Universal Basic Income. It’s an idea that’s time is long overdue. The increases we’ve seen in productivity should have made this kind of policy a reality before now. I think David Grabers stuff on Bullshit jobs is worth considering when you think about how there are still so many people in work today, and yet so little of what actually needs to be done gets done. UBI though has been shown again and again to work, both in theory and in practice, it needs to happen now.
I would want to see the success of these policies measured by examining things like what percentage of households spending more than a given percent of their income on housing (based on ONS data maybe?). Other useful measures would be the number of new social housing units built per year, rental prices and the time on the social housing waiting list. One key thing would be to see the gap between the percentage of income spent on housing between renters and owners close up with that paid by renters coming down
https://www.statista.com/statistics/755883/income-spent-on-mortgage-or-rent-england-by-tenure/
I’m interested in the word in this question, ‘some humanists’?!
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/should-we-change-our-current-british-voting-system
Unless the humanist demographics and ideology are very different to what I understand them to be, the reality is that MOST not some humanists support reforming our broken voting system and bringing the house of lords out of the 15th century.
Labour wasted opportunity after opportunity to rid our country of the kind of corrupt politics our first past the post and unelected house of lords gives us while they were in power, and they are gearing up to do so again, against the wish of electorate. This is what we always see from Labour, they’re fiercely critical of the government out of power, and are willing to engage with proper solutions, but once they get a whiff of power all of this goes out the window to keep Murdoch and the rest of the ruling class on side
Anyhow, yes yes yes, I fully support STV for constituency MPs and PR for an elected house of lords. I’m no voting nerd though, and I would imagine there are some people who will be at the hustings who can explain the difference between ranked choice and STV or whatever and why one is better than the other.
Aside from this I’m in favour of lower the voting age to 16 to engage younger citizens in the democratic process.
I think we’ve got to look at funding as well. I would put a cap on spending and donations for political parties. The real scandal of Frank Hester isn’t his racism, (abhorrent as it is it his attitude is no different to that of most Daily Mail columnists or People you’d find out on a fox hunt) it is how he legally bribes politicians into maintaining a broken set up within the NHS which allows his company to make millions by providing crap IT systems. This just shouldn’t be legal.
ETR is key, the extraction of raw materials and their disposal is the driving factor in UK pollution. I think we have to be honest about where we are though. We cannot now simply reduce our carbon footprint radically and still see our ecosystems function as they have done for hundreds of years. We are going to experience climate change, cross tipping points and see feedback loops emerge that wreak devastation on not just the UK’s wildlife, but the human population and infrastructure. We need to be adopting a ‘Total Climate’ economy just as we adopted a ‘Total War’ economy in the world wars. We cannot wait a second longer to do this, and frankly we may be too late even if we start tomorrow. If we do pass the point of no return it is highly likely we won’t know when it happens until generations later.
https://zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-ice-figures/
https://beneaththepavement.substack.com
No they are not. People talk about the death of the high street and how this is down to the internet and things like that but one thing that really isn’t addressed enough by politicians from the traditional parties is the impact of globalisation. Transnational corporations are successful because of regulatory capture and tax evasion. Local and national businesses simply cannot compete, and we must regulate these entities out of existence. I found Joel Bakan’s documentary on the topic years ago very interesting, and https://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/RootCauseAnalysis.htm is well worth checking out on the topic.
While I’d take issue with some parts of their arguments, they make a very compelling case for simply legislating the private for profit limited liability corporation out of existence.
Clearly Amazon, Google, Uber and the like don’t pay their fair share of tax, and we cannot expect them to. They are geared to constantly undermine efforts to make them ‘play fair’ and it is naive to think we can tax them fairly any more than we can domesticate a hurricane.
By doing things like increasing the marginal tax rates for high-income earners, closing tax loopholes and cracking down on tax evasion and avoidance as we do on benefit fraud we can properly fund high quality local services rather than the bargain basement approach we’ve taken. Again I must stress as well the introduction of a wealth tax on assets above a certain threshold is key, and Labour’s inability to embrace such a simple and uncontroversial idea shows they’re little more than controlled opposition.
Again I love the use of the term ‘some’ here, migration is a major concern in the UK.
This is one of the topics where our political discourse has really let society down. The way the traditional mainstream left has talked about migration has always been to conflate criticism of migration with racism, and to understand racism not as systematic or institutional, but an individual problem of being irrationally hateful towards a certain group. This coupled with the right constantly playing on people’s fears of ‘the Other’, change, and the strains migration can put on public services has created a quagmire of pointless arguments, straw men and bad faith actors.
I think it’s important to very quickly define a few things. Racism can mean different things depending on the context the term is being used in. For the sake of clarity I am going to say there are 4 different types of racism:
Emotional - This typically occurs at an individual level, it occurs when someone has an irrational feeling about members of a particular ethnic, cultural or religious group. These are most prominently negative, but can be ‘positive’, such as the assumption that all Ethiopians are brilliant runners. Obviously we’re all agreed that this type of racism is bad, but it isn’t the only kind of racism that exists.
Cultural - This is the belief that some cultures are superior to others, while others are inferior or problematic. The idea that cultures where men and women are not segregated are superior or those that don’t eat meat are more moral would be examples of this. Unpacking this idea is complicated, as I personally do not believe in moral relativism, and would agree for the most part with the arguments put forward by Sam Harris in ‘The Moral Landscape’ but also recognise there are problems with this line of reasoning. Anybody who believes they can identify which cultures are better than others is lying to themselves and everyone else, and it is amazing how often their analysis somehow ends with the conclusion it is by some miracle a culture that they have been part of since birth or that they have a material benefit in seeing spread that they always conclude their culture to be superior. Reminds me how during the Reformation all those various kings and lords thought long and hard about things like Mass, Latin and the nature of sin, but always came to philosophical conclusions which led them to support the faction of the church that lined up with their material interests.
Reverse - This is where in an effort to curtail unconscious bias an organisation introduces specific policies such as quotas for a certain percentage of their workforce to have a particular ethnic background or gender. I think there isn’t a simple answer to whether these policies are a good thing or not. I think all in all however ultimately they can only ever be tools to move in a particular direction, not the destination itself. Much as medicine should only be used temporarily so should such policies. We need to unpack the cultural and structural issues that lie at the root cause of these problems, rather than look to fix them once they’ve occurred. Within the Green Party we don’t do women-only shortlists or anything like that for candidate selection, because we don’t have an internal culture where women can’t compete with men in an open selection process. In my opinion if you’ve got to have quotas to be diverse then the diversity you have will always be token, and lead to feelings of resentment and imposter syndrome.
Institutional / Systematic - This type of discrimination is inherent in an organisation's rules and processes. Sometimes this is directed specifically to a particular race or ethnic group, like the treatment of Palestinians in Israel or Black people in Apartheid South Africa. It can also be indirect (and unintentional), like a company giving time off for some specific religious holidays but not others or only having meat options for food at a meeting.
When criticisms are made of migration from the mainstream right they are mostly rooted in incantations of cultural and emotional racism. At times there is a recognition that our society will struggle to cope with this influx, but this critique always fails to look at why our society cannot cope with this influx and what is driving migration in the first place. The root causes and structural problems of migration are ignored by the right in favour of ‘moral panics’ around particular types of migrants. From the left these arguments are always dismissed as either cultural or emotional racism, and any discussion of structural problems is also shoved aside with stats and graphs that show (correctly) that overall migration has a net benefit to things like GDP and taxation.
This misses that people are not really concerned that migrants will harm GDP, but instead are concerned that their child’s school now has a majority of pupils who have English as a second language. The traditional left will only ever discuss emotional and cultural racism, as will the right when it is politically expedient. The right will only ever point out that our public services cannot cope with the influx of foreign workers and/or asylum seekers, not examine why they are so broken. We need to be able to have a serious conversation about this issue, but politicians and the media have made that next to impossible.
The amount of migration to the UK in relative terms to the rest of Europe is very low, especially when it comes to refugees and asylum seekers. This will not be the case once the impacts of climate change really kick in. We are likely to see billions of people displaced around the world and global-scale famines. Within that context we need to be moving towards a politics where we can have adult conversations about how we will handle that (I personally think the way some of the issues are explored in ‘Beggars in Spain’ by Nancy Kress is very insightful, if you are a speculative fiction / sci-fi fan it is well worth a read).
The discussion we need to have right now though is much more straightforward thankfully. Two things need to be done.
One - we need to fix our migration and asylum systems and clear the backlog. We cannot have people housed in temporary accommodation where we lose track of them and waste billions on things like the Bibby Stockholm. There was an inexplicable ideologically driven policy to make the departments handling these things crap as if that would somehow help. It’s as if a company had decided it was getting too many complaints so they decided to make sure their complaints team was awful to discourage complaints, totally missing the driving factor.
Two - address the criminal economy fueling illegal migration. Most people when they are concerned about migration are really concerned about illegal migration. There are two major factors driving this, drug dealing and modern slavery. The legalisation of drugs, with addiction treated as a public health rather than criminal matter, with even the hardest of drugs available through regulated legal means as alcohol and nicotine are currently would see one of the major draws for migrants to the UK removed. Ditto with the legalisation of sex work, which would also help tackle modern slavery. Ultimately however businesses which exploit illegal migrant workers should be severely punished. It simply shouldn’t be worth the risk to employ people like this.
If we did not have such a booming industry for sex and drugs, and an underground economy where businesses that look to take advantage of and facilitate the flow of illegal migrants into the country we simply would not have that flow into our country.
In a nutshell as practical ideas this means ensuring there are pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who meet certain criteria, and maybe a period of amnesty while we clear up the backlog and problems that have been allowed to flourish by Labour and the Tories.
After that we’ve got to streamline the migration / asylum application process, reducing bureaucratic barriers, making decisions quickly and then deporting unsuccessful migrants back to their countries of origin.
Investment in integration programs to support the social and economic integration of migrants is also key, and cannot be neglected as has happened during austerity.
No. Like I’ve said I think we need to move to a ‘total climate’ economy. We must recognise that we need a military who are able to cope with the kind of scale of local ecological disasters we have locked in with years of climate change.
One thing I’ve noticed this hustings is short on is ‘Zinger’ questions or topics on things that the candidates will find it hard to answer either because the topic is hard to answer or their own party is torn on the issue or has taken an unpopular stance. I think the questions I’ll find hardest to answer would be the questions on nuclear power and weapons.
I’m a big advocate for disarmament, but I think it’s very hard to be first, and that the climate in which I see that being possible just doesn’t exist at the moment. I also think that there is a strong case for nuclear power as part of a green energy solution. I will confess to having very little understanding of nuclear physics. Ultimately this is one of those topics like whether Lewis should have won the 2021 Abu Dhabi GP or if Messi is better than Ronaldo, you sit me down with someone well informed enough on the topic and they’ll be able to convince me they’re correct.
At the moment I’m not in a position where I have to make a choice on keeping our nuclear arsenal or investing in nuclear as opposed to an alternative energy source, but if I was I’d be led by the science on the topic. I understand there are reasons to be very sceptical about claims from the nuclear industry, but also that theoretically nuclear power could be a key part of our survival as a civilisation.
Finally though it is important to recognise that information and ‘remote’ warfare are going to be more revolutionary to how wars are fought than gunpowder, chariots, rifled barrels or RADAR were. We must invest in modernising our defence capabilities to address security threats like cyber warfare and terrorism.
I think to properly answer this question we have to define what the purpose of our prisons actually is. Is it crime prevention alone, to keep people safe, or is there some ‘moral’ function to impose justice? Are those the same thing etc etc.
My personal position (much as I am a very black and white thinker) is that there is no ultimate higher moral truth beyond the human experience. I don’t believe people have free will, only the illusion of it. I see no point in punishment for the sake of punishment or justice. If someone was to commit a terrible crime against me and my family I would hope that if I was in charge of choosing how they were punished I would be able to choose the punishment that best ensured the crime was never repeated again, rather than the one which satisfied my sense of anger and justice.
Ultimately, I think prisons should only exist to keep us safe, and have no desire for them to operate in any way other than to produce the best possible outcomes for society. If that means long harsh sentences, I’ll support them, and indeed my gut feeling is that our sentencing is far too light for driving offences (although I’m not sure I’d want to see longer prison time, and instead just permanent driving bans and fines relative to income and wealth). However I think all the evidence shows that prison as a tool of prevention is very poor, and instead most prisons in this country function as ‘Universities’ for crime. You go in with an A-level in shoplifting and aggravated assault, and come out with your BSc in Armed Robbery, having made all the connections you’ll need for a lifetime of crime. I also think we need to have some hard conversations about what works for unpleasant crimes like sex offending and how we manage those risks.
One of the big problems we have is that our government bureaucracy takes the opinions from some particular institutions unquestioningly, while dismissing the opinions of the public if they don’t also match. If a planning decision to have a new bail house or wet house is proposed on your street at the moment it doesn’t matter if there are 3 or 3,000 objections from the public, if the police or whoever don’t feel there is a valid concern and have submitted something to that effect to the planning committee, the committee is bound by planning policy to ignore the concerns of the public. We need to be scrutinising these kinds of decisions much more, as often the evidence base is very poor. Maybe the opening of a bail house doesn’t cause an increase of crime on a street in general, but this is only the case when there is not already a certain rate of anti social behaviour in the area and this has been overlooked or simply ignored when the response to the planning application was made.
If you want to lose sleep at night you want to look at the quality of some of the investigations and reports into decisions taken by the government. The standard for some of these documents is lower than for my daughter’s phonics homework. I can’t help but feel when many of these assessments are carried out by ‘independent’ professional bodies who are dependent on the people paying for the current study coming back for more business in the future that there is an incredible incentive to always give particular answers, rather than follow a robust process.
Anyhow, my approach to crime is more totally focused on public safety and rehabilitation rather than any kind of retributive ideas of justice or punishment. I think social reintegration through evidence-based crime prevention and prison reform measures are the only way to achieve that, even if it isn’t particularly popular with the ‘bring back the death penalty and castrate paedos’ crowd. This means investing in community-based interventions and diversion programs to address root causes of crime, such as poverty, unemployment, and substance abuse.
I’m also hopeful of the impact programs of restorative justice can have, these seem to be a genuinely effective way to repair harm caused by criminal behaviour and to help facilitate rehabilitation. We can’t ignore that mental health and addiction are a big driver for crime, and our criminal justice system needs to provide solutions to this. I can’t remember if I’ve covered it already, or if I cover it later, but the legalisation of drugs cannot come soon enough.
I also favour expanding alternatives to incarceration, such as probation, community service, and electronic monitoring, for non-violent offenders if it can be demonstrated this works, and doesn’t simply shift the risk onto vulnerable communities. I really feel like the observations of Ulrich Beck in ‘Risk Society’ are ones that never sunk in for policy makers, or perhaps they just don’t care.
Finally on the topic of prisons we’ve got to look at how again, like everything - schools, healthcare, council services - the marketisation and outsourcing just hasn’t worked. Provision is dreadful, even if we were aiming to implement data driven best practice when it comes to crime and crime prevention our current setup is unable to deliver. Anyhow, I’ve gotten far too rambly, let's move on to the next bit.
I’m always suspicious of ‘AI’ anything. AI is just statistics and ‘if’ statements. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. These clever language models are little more than clever search engines. They can’t create any insights, and only highlight statistical trends and anomalies, which still require human real world understanding to turn into genuine insights. The prospect of AI generated media and content is not as exciting as people think. Criticism of this idea is best summed up by asking the question: “Why would I bother reading something someone can’t be bothered to write?”
The prospect of AI generated images and videos being used irresponsibly is a major problem however in some sectors. Revenge and deep-fake porn is a problem, as is simply using this technology to create fake political materials and attack ads. The root of this problem however is the difficulties created by anonymity and how we prove validity online.
I personally think a lot of these problems would be solved straight away if people knew they could be more easily held to account. It shouldn’t be possible to send unsolicited dick pics, conspiracy theory nonsense or racist death threats anonymously on social media networks. The “know your customer” requirements for these sites should be virtually identical to those of a bank if they want to operate in the UK.
Anyhow harnessing the positive potential of existing and new technology will only be possible with a functioning political system, which we don’t currently have. I think I’m probably already at risk of writing something too long to expect people to read and honestly now I am going to start repeating myself. The solutions to the impact of AI and other new technologies on jobs are UBI and reform that cuts out the disproportionate influence for-profit transnational corporations have over democratic institutions and instead empowers the general populace.
Blimey I’ve hit 5000 words. I’ll call it there, as ever any and all thoughts welcome.
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