Chris Till

Tag: Communism

  • UK Defence Strategy written by a Degrowth Communist

    A destroyed tank
    All tanks are as useless as this destroyed one in modern warfare

    As with my previous articles in this series; this one will seem very shocking if you’re used to consuming British mainstream news coverage. All you tend to see in the establishment discourse are calls for yet more military spending (where the follow up question is never “how will you pay for it?”) Along with that, you just get warmongering about Russia, and fearmongering about China and Iran.

    Military spending and outdated weapons

    If I was writing our military strategy right now, the first thing I’d do would be to immediately slash the military budget by more than half. The latest target the Labour government have set is for 3% of GDP. Initially due by the end of the next parliament, but it seems that they now want to pull this forward by a handful of years. The current amount is something between 2.3% and 2.5%. I would cut that to around 1% of GDP to start with, and switch focus to be on defensive weapons rather than offensive. There’s no reason to have jet fighters, aircraft carriers or tanks in the present day, when we have such advanced automated weapons such as drones and ballistic missiles. It would presumably be extremely easy to destroy an aircraft carrier or a tank these days, so to me they come across as toys, for lack of a better term. I think it’s very clear that in 2026, the types of weapons bought by militaries is led by nostalgia as much as it is by the bloodlust of warmongering (overwhelmingly male) leaders.

    There’s very limited reason to have ground troops either, outside of perhaps special operatives like the SAS. Yes, it’s fun to run around shooting people in online FPS video games. But in real life, you’d logically just send in a drone, fire a guided missile, or use a sort of defensive missile system that automatically intercepts incoming fire. We can redeploy the vast majority of ground troops to do infinitely more useful jobs that aren’t going to leave them suffering with PTSD. Very much the opposite. Building renewable energy, EV buses and associated charging infrastructure. Maybe simply building homes. The types of people who end up as ground troops in the military are likely to be very capable of being trained as builders, mechanics or engineers for example. There are a lot of things they could be doing that would clearly benefit the country over what they’re doing now.

    I would extend this to all troops including those stationed in overseas military bases. I would close all of the overseas bases entirely. Our military should have no presence outside of the UK. Same with the US and every other nation. Unless you wanted to go down the route of having a continental army or global alliance, which I’m not opposed to. Perhaps that would be a good way to reduce costs in the next few years even further than what I’m envisioning. It could be a decent compromise between fully getting rid of the militaries, and continuing as we are now, for people who don’t feel comfortable (yet) with my kind of strategy. But I think doing it in a continental organisation would be difficult if you have strongly differing politics within the allied countries. It would make more sense to organise it based on ideology.

    Nuclear Weapons must go

    I would retire nuclear weapons. Our current nuclear submarines don’t work, and we require the USA’s permission to fire their nuclear warheads. Not that we should keep nuclear weapons even if they did work and we fully controlled them. But the current situation is particularly absurd.

    People will say that getting rid of our nuclear deterrent leaves us exposed. At the end of the day, any kind of nuclear war means the end of humanity as we know it anyway. And we wouldn’t be any more exposed than we are currently, even if the world wasn’t going to end in the process. In fact, we are about as exposed as it’s possible to be. To reiterate; we rely on a fascist dictatorship currently threatening to invade (or has already invaded) various countries, to use our broken nuclear weapons. We’re also not a part of the EU, so we’re not going to be a high priority for them to defend if it came to that. Anyone who is actually serious about national security should be talking about rejoining. And NATO is under threat due to Trump’s threats over Greenland too. I agree with Zack Polanski about NATO. In the current paradigm, I would look to replace it with a European or World alliance with countries who aren’t fascist. I think that’s only likely to be sufficient for a few years; so I wouldn’t seek to go in that direction personally. I’d want a global alliance specifically for true world peace and disarmament. But it would be preferable to the current situation at least.

    Emissions of war

    Militaries are never going to be sustainable. Just the idea of war powered by green energy is laughable. Destroying things in a sustainable way can never happen. This is a big reason why military emissions have never been included in national emission reduction targets, or talked about at the useless UN COPs. It is estimated that 5.5% of overall global emissions are attributable to militaries. But this crucially doesn’t include the emissions of warfare itself, or the emissions involved in clearing up the destruction and rebuilding. Nor does it include the long-term health implications of the lingering toxic chemicals remaining in the environment. Human and animal lives are just collateral damage.

    I think it’s safe to assume based on the data I was able to find that we’re probably looking at closer to 10% or more of global emissions. That’s a lot. And we can cut it.

    The warmongering neoliberal leaders we’ve been stuck with for decades knew that militaries will always be inherently polluting, and they didn’t care to do anything about it. We need a world where we focus only on looking after people and things, and stop putting so much energy into poisoning and destroying them.

    Pacifism is necessary

    In the end, a world in which militaries exist at all is a scenario where genuine climate action is practically impossible. When governments are spending significant percentages of GDP on deadly weapons, and they’re boasting about how that’s good for growth; while healthcare, education, housing and transport are all severely underfunded and struggling; where utilities are privatised, failing, and unaffordable; you know you’re dealing with a society with its priorities backwards. And I didn’t even mention climate action there. The sentence was already far too long. And it more importantly reflects the reality that the preservation of our world is practically always the last thing people think about.

    Pacifism is necessary in my view. Can you imagine a world in which we actually take the climate crisis seriously, and all countries genuinely work together, while we still have militaries? I can’t.

    Maybe you do think we can have militaries and deal with the climate in a serious way. Maybe you think that the issue is the size of the militaries. With smaller militaries, and a more friendly overall global perspective and desire for co-operation, we’ll be able to do it. Perhaps you’re right. I just think history suggests we would have done so by now if that was going to be the case.

    Feminism’s role

    There’s clearly a gendered element to this. We still live in a man’s world; and you don’t get equal and happy societies, world peace, or climate action without gender equality first. It’s the root of everything going wrong. Obviously, there are exceptions; but I would say in general that women are most often involved in nurturing and building things, and men are almost always the ones involved in destroying them.

    I think this tendency is visible in politics too, where in recent UK polling, we see the far-right Reform UK polling higher among men, and the left wing / centre-left Green Party polling higher among women. I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Degrowth communism and feminism are inseparable. We need a more compassionate, intelligent society in which we prioritise all the things neoliberalism has left to rot, while dismantling the one thing they care about building up; the armed forces.

    Things are already bad enough under the supposedly centrist Labour government; and the fascism of a potential Reform replacement will dramatically exascerbate the existing damage to our precious public services. More people on the left need to be willing to stand up and say the kinds of things I’ve outlined in this article; no matter how insane it makes us look in our extremely disingenuous, reactionary media. It doesn’t matter if they laugh, as long as the idea of pacifism is planted in their minds.

    I don’t necessarily think the Greens have to go as far as I’m going. I think you need a more extreme flank and a more mainstream friendly party like the Greens are right now. Roger Hallam is definitely right about that. But I do think Zack and co need to seriously challenge the bloated military budget as a starting point.

    There is a real threat of fascism materialising; with their toxic politics being amplified daily by a media that is clearly biased towards misinformation, hate, pollution, destruction and division. We can’t let the bullshit warmongering narrative go unchallenged, and we have to offer a totally different perspective. Let as many people as possible know that things don’t have to be this way. The military doesn’t have to keep growing. It can shrink and change. Or it can disappear entirely if we want.

    Similarly to how Labour are more scared of the Greens than Reform; they’re also more scared of peace than they are of war. Think about that.

  • UK Energy Strategy written by a Degrowth Communist

    I’m getting increasingly fed up of hearing so much bullshit in the media, and even from many on the left. So I’m going to lay out my personal energy strategy for this country (presumably can be applied to your country as well). So here’s what I’d do if I were Ed Miliband or equivalent useless dwebe from where you live.

    My kind of solar housing

    I’m having a hard time figuring out which would be the most important thing to start with. I think probably heavily subsidising the cost of solar installs for all properties and commercial, municipal buildings. And for those who live in apartments, I’d give them an equivalent subsidy off their energy bill. The energy bill subsidy would only need to be in operation for a year or so. Just until the other policies listed below had come into full effect.

    Next, I’d ban new nuclear energy (including the establishment’s new favourite bullshit talking point, SMRs (Small, Modular Reactors). This would be a priority because these things could cause huge headaches for a long time to come if they actually get built. So we need to make sure they don’t.

    I would also ban any kind of new coal (did they build that coal mine?) oil or gas development. We sometimes see oil powered grid backup sites, which are insanely polluting; and could obviously be replaced by grid battery storage. And we could do this very quickly. The only types of energy that I’d allow to be built would be Solar (domestic, municipal, commercial roofs, solar parks, farms etc); Wind (onshore and offshore as required, and as recommended by experts); and some other more niche renewables. For example: Geothermal, Tidal, Pumped Hydro and so on, where they would be more suitable than wind or solar. I don’t think they’d be used much, but there’s no reason to fully rule them out of the energy mix.

    The next policy would be to nationalise the National Grid (private company with misleading name), and the energy providers. Or I’d shut down all the energy providers except Ecotricity, and designate them as the UK’s sole nationalised energy provider.

    I would of course change the absurd policy that exists right now, which ties the cost of electricity to the cost of gas, so that we get actually affordable renewable energy. This is something Dale Vince constantly talks about, but is completely ignored by the media and our shitty establishment politicians. Including of course his beloved Labour Party. I’m sure they’ll get it together in another year or two Dale. Keep the faith…

    I would regulate that all new buildings be built to the highest environmental standards for insulation, energy generation and so on.

    I would ban new detached and semi-detached housing. Everything would be small apartment buildings and terrace housing. Everything much smaller and more energy efficient; built for people and nature to coexist in harmony. I don’t want to get any further into housing or other areas of policy though. I want to stick with specifically energy as much as possible.

    I would plan to have a mixture of domestic, municipal and large grid battery storage sites. Most homes won’t require it, but other types of buildings would benefit from battery backup.

    There would be a plan for the gradual phasing out of existing oil, gas and nuclear energy infrastructure. Gas would be last to go, because of the potential extended use of domestic gas boilers for heating. It’ll depend on the rollout of green gas, how hot it gets in summers, as to whether AC becomes a necessity; and if Heat Pumps start to make sense for mass adoption; which could happen with these policy changes. But this is an area where there are different potential paths to explore at a later date. There’s no real rush to settle on one technology. Especially when there’s so much else to do in the meantime.

    Wasn’t that nice? Considering what it’d be like living in a country with sane leadership that wants to solve problems.

  • The Future of Tech in the Climate Crisis

    Why battery life matters

    This is going to be the screen tech of the future in everything.

    I talked in my last post about the end of tech capitalism, and its search for ever more power and graphical capability. Now I want to talk about my vision for tech, and especially consumer (hate that word) devices in a degrowth communist society. Power and graphics are clearly going to be less important, if not entirely irrelevant. Energy efficiency, battery life and the ability to function in times of crisis when disruption of power grids is common will be crucial. The ability to live off-grid, even just for a few days with a few solar panels, small wind turbines and battery backups will be important around the world. Even in rich countries.

    Devices with adequate or poor battery life when they are first manufactured become useless as they age. Especially in an era where we will increasing covet longevity and reliability. E Ink devices (like e-readers) and DSLR cameras, are great examples of tech being entirely usable even after many years of battery degradation. An original Kindle probably still works like new, and I know personally that a 14 year old DSLR keeps going no problem. You also see this in the youth trend for buying and using old digital cameras. We need to focus on this type of tech. Stuff that’s really useful, built to last decades, repairable, and ultimately recyclable.

    Even EVs fall into this category. Things like electric buses could be refurbished and kept in service for many years. You could also imagine EV buses or coaches being used as emergency shelters during extreme weather emergencies. Their huge batteries being able to power the basics for a number of people for multiple days. They could also be used to power buildings, like we’ve seen with vehicle to grid technology in cars. Especially in Japan where they see it as vitally important during potential earthquakes and similar events.

    Going back to consumer devices, I think we will see an increase in the use of E Ink screens in phones and tablets over the typical LCD and OLED models we’re all used to. They’re already being deployed in some advertising situations where screen refresh rate is irrelevant, and it allows a huge reduction in energy use.

    E-paper screens, as they’re known, only refresh when something changes on the screen. So, if you’re reading a book, it only refreshes when you turn the page. This is in stark contrast to traditional screens which refresh 60 or more times a second. You just don’t notice it. This is massive for battery life as you can imagine. It’s why your Kindle or other E-reader lasts for months in standby mode, and weeks even if you use them often. It would make so much sense for battery life, longevity of the devices, reducing overall energy consumption, and for potential emergency situations for many of us to switch over. Not to mention reducing strain on our eyes. Perhaps not for video and fast moving games, but the technology is continually improving. We already have various impressive colour screen options, and I can imagine refresh rates fast enough to watch videos smoothly coming along in the next several years. Perhaps we’ll see TVs and large video screens using E-paper.

    Even in the somewhat unlikely event that they don’t improve, I occasionally find the thought of replacing my phone with a black and white E Ink model with a slowly refreshing screen very tempting. Part of me would very much like to switch off from the nonsense you see every day on social media. Especially the climate denial and far-right bullshit. But also any other stupid and unnecessary arguments and hate from people; who are clearly mentally unwell and are taking their stress and anxiety out on others. Many of whom probably have similar afflictions themselves. The further we go into our future of climate chaos, the more tempting it will be to escape from social media. Or at the very least be incentivised to use it less because of the less than ideal screen for Instagram, TikTok etc.

    There are so many other areas of technology where we can simplify, focus on reducing energy use, use better materials (anything other than plastic) and so on. We need to investigate as many possibilities as we can as soon as possible. It’s quite an exciting prospect, because for so long the emphasis of technological and design improvement has been the opposite of the new philosophy we need. When we actually try to do things better; logically, you’d assume that there’s a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of avenues for innovation that haven’t been tapped into at all yet.

    I’m not saying it’s going to save this current disastrous economic system and global civilisation as we know it from collapse. But as we try to mitigate and adapt as best we can to the climate chaos that’s already here and on the way, these principles will definitely help. Even if we ultimately fail in creating a new system that works with nature. It’s better to do things right at some point than never. I’d rather we go extinct, if that’s what happens, having first tried everything we can to live in a far better way. And failing us doing it together as one humanity, I’ll just get that phone and ignore all the idiots fighting amongst themselves over pointless shit.

  • Does Cycling have a future in the UK?

    Considering that the already paltry cycling and walking budget just got slashed by two thirds; you might expect me to throw my hands up in exasperation and head on down to the nearest SUV dealership (that’s pretty much what they are these days) and place an order for a trendy Ford Puma or equivalent from any other brand.

    Shockingly though, I’m not going to do that. Our future isn’t to give up and fit in. And here’s why.

    Thankfully, this isn’t our future. Photo: Vauxford

    This latest budget cut and effective middle finger to cycling for transport in the UK just reaffirms my strongly held belief that we need to ban private cars and use the roads as bike lanes in the very near future (as in now). I already felt that time was too short with respect to the climate crisis, and that half-decent infrastructure change, built over decades, would be grossly insufficient to make any real impact. But now, not only do we know that slow, incremental change will be completely ineffectual in any relevant timescale; but we also know unequivocally that there will not be any significant infrastructure change at all, even in the medium term. The dream the eternal optimists in my local cycling group had of ubiquitous, Dutch style infrastructure is completely, utterly dead.

    Having said that, it probably still won’t be enough to deter these people, which is partly why I decided to stop involving myself in the local advocacy. Metaphorically banging my head against a brick wall in those meetings and Facebook groups was growing a bit tiresome, to say the least. So, I guess they can continue lobbying the town council that has no money and no power to do anything about the roads anyway; and the county council, that is openly trolling us about cycling, and one of the handful of counties across the UK rated as 0 out of 5 by Active Travel England. Not that they have much funding to give out after this first tranche anyway. I hope they wake up, but I’m not so sure they will.

    Either way, I think I’ll stick with offering ideas that might actually lead to achieving something in short order, rather than next century.

    We’re never going to get infrastructure. We need to empty the streets of cars.

    So I suppose you could almost call these cuts a good thing? That may be going a bit far. We do need some infrastructure to separate bikes from the vehicles that do remain after we ban private cars. There will still be buses, coaches, trucks and some vans (although no doubt many of them will be replaced with cargo bikes). But the good news is that this kind of infrastructure wouldn’t be hard to add later on. With so few vehicles on the roads, and buses not getting stuck in traffic, there would be no road rage and bikes and bigger vehicles would be perfectly able to share the mostly empty space.

    The other type of infrastructure – my favourite kind, the LTN, or Low Traffic Neighbourhood, is so cheap, quick and easy that it almost doesn’t need to be mentioned. But just as a quick refresher, you put some bollards at the ends of a road to stop through traffic, and that’s it. It’s so simple, even a Tory could understand it. I don’t think they want to, but still.

    Speaking of Tories, I’ve been thinking recently about the Highway Code changes, where vulnerable road users have been given priority at junctions and so on. It changed over a year ago now, but I still see Highway Code trending on Twitter almost every day. I know the rules changed before Boris Johnson got booted out of office, so on first glance it wouldn’t appear that a pro-cycling PM would want to stoke increased tension on the roads by changing the Highway Code rules and then not publicising it very well. But it’s not as if Boris Johnson was ever that supportive of quality infrastructure. Like most Tories, he told people to cycle, without actually providing any infrastructure to do so. Other than the public hire bikes (operated by private company Serco of course). And he didn’t even implement that. It’s commonly known that Ken Livingstone, the London Mayor before him, green-lit the project.

    When you consider this, it does seem more plausible that the Tories could have been planning all along to turn cycling into a big culture war topic at the next election. Seeing what Sunak and his cabinet are willing to do in terms of demonising asylum seekers, underfunding the NHS, disrespecting and underpaying striking workers while refusing to come to the negotiating table with serious offers; going after “woke cyclists” seems like an obvious next step. The Highway Code change may have been a happy coincidence for them, but it’s irrelevant. What matters is it sets them up perfectly.

    So what can we do? I guess the first thing would be to just stop thinking about Dutch style infrastructure projects. As I’ve mentioned above, some people are a bit beyond help in this regard; but those of us in the real world need to focus fully on three aspects. Banning cars, bike parking, and LTNs, as previously mentioned. These are all things that can be and are being delivered to varying degrees by progressive councils (or even moderate councils) for very little cost. Banning cars is the most difficult to achieve in total, but we do see some towns and cities banning cars from historic centres, or introducing low emission zones, which I think are over complicated and not worth doing personally. I’ll talk more about banning cars later. As far as parking and LTNs, town councils can’t build bike paths, but they can get rid of car parks and replace them with bike parks. That’s certainly the biggest tool available in a situation like here in Worthing, where the town council is pro-cycling and the county council is about as oppositional to cycling as it’s possible to be. In other places where the councils in charge of roads are more amenable to our demands, LTNs can be introduced rapidly and make a huge difference in making areas feel safe and welcoming for people not in cars. They can start with temporary schemes to test how they would work before being made permanent, which is incredibly useful. If your local council has the power to remove street parking, then that can also be a quick way of making progress by replacing spaces with Bike Hangars for example. There’s also the potential for town councils to turn vacant town centre shops into indoor bike parking. So there definitely are ways you can push your council, even if they don’t have control over roads or bike lanes.

    We can achieve a lot through those three avenues, but to ban private cars entirely, you need central government to play ball; and that is where you encounter that familiar problem which tends to come up when you want to do anything good in society. It’s Capitalism, and the urgent need to dispense with it in favour of Degrowth Communism. This is partly why I haven’t been posting as much recently. Every time I come up with an idea for a problem that needs fixing, ultimately it always comes back to the economic system. The ultimate solution is always the same, whether it be cycling, public transport, inequality, healthcare etc.

    However, we do at least know what is officially no longer on the table, and that is a very helpful thing in my view. With this government (and probably the next one too), we’re only going to get some tarmac shared pavements and some paint. Once we all (or most of us) accept that, I think we can become a lot more effective in terms of potential protests and making a real impact. I’m thinking along the lines of the Just Stop Oil slow marching protests, but on bikes. I can definitely see that kind of thing being the result of the anger and desperation people who want a cycling future are feeling at the moment. It’ll be interesting to see if it happens before or after the government officially start their anti-cycling culture war push. But either way, I think it’s inevitable at this point.

    When you look at the EU pushing for e-bikes and cargo bikes, with the uptake being so strong in those countries; the damage Brexit has done to cycling imports and exports; and you see us going backwards from a position most people didn’t think we could go backwards from; you can clearly see how untenable this situation is. It can’t be allowed to go on any longer. It’s time for very targeted campaigns and mass protest.

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