Of course, I don’t mean you, I mean the species homo sapiens, the big-brained primate who makes complex tools and is fully self-conscious. I would argue we’re tools alright, having carelessly and casually trashed our planetary home like wanton teenagers at someone else’s party. The clean-up, if it can be achieved amidst our continuing death wish to wipe each other out, along with all the other species, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria (think about your personal gut health, swamped with ultra-processed food), will be long and hard. It may prove impossible.
When Pandora chose to open her box (no sniggering please at the back), she was offered by those rather exotic, wonderfully bickering family of Greek gods, whose antics mimicked human relations, one tiny positive, among all the ills she also wantonly released. It was a dose of optimism amid the despair – hope. Hang on to that thought; as the saying goes, hope dies last.
I’ve grown to believe that if we took ourselves out of the planetary equation entirely, all would be well once more and reasonably quickly. Perhaps Gaia, the late Jim Lovelock’s inspired concept, is already fixing that, by producing more and more pandemics; although the truth is likely to be more prosaic.
We’ve created huge opportunities for our own demise by the way we have behaved, and continue so to do, by jamming ourselves too close to the rest of the natural world, allowing too many chinks in our immune armour. It facilitates trans-species viruses and, much more potentially deadly, fungal infections the easy leap from, say bats or birds, to ourselves, providing plenty of opportunities to infect and kill us. Their minute size in the scheme of things allows them to evolve far more quickly than we can in order to combat them. Covid19 was an easy test; we failed in so many ways and we appear to have learned little, to prepare for the next pandemic. It could have already begun.
If – and it is a mighty big ‘if’, we’re smart enough we might pull through the next couple of centuries, emerging out of the present mess, diminished in number (half, three-quarters fewer?), much humbler, far less hubristic, more in tune with our animal, plant and fungal relatives, willing to live alongside them in a new harmony, and never to consider ourselves superior in any respect.
In any case, that ‘superiority’ has only manifest itself (biologically speaking in one respect: killing off any and all rivals. Half a million years ago, we shared the planet with a number of other hominids of which Neanderthals are, perhaps, the best-known example, and who we either by design or intention wiped out, having interbred with quite a few. Eventually, we saw off, by fair means or foul, all our non-ape primate cousins becoming, to the planet’s cost, the only human species.
Religion has a lot to answer for (we’ve been ‘created’ in some fantasy deity’s image, to rule the earth). What a joke that is, now being played (and not for laughs) against ourselves. So-called human culture is the other fly in the ointment. We’re animals, with big brains and (for roughly half of us) small dicks, acting every day like dumb, demented dickheads. Maybe it is just the male line; we’ve lost the understanding so ably put by Darwin that the only things that count are birth and death. And only the female line can create life. Right now, death appears to be firmly in charge. We’re destroying everything we profess to cherish, in the name of that abused word ‘progress’.
All progress means is forward movement; in a twist of irony the ancient Greeks would appreciate, we’ve allowed ourselves to believe progress means things will inevitably get better. Take a good look around: we’re progressing alright, straight into oblivion, hour by hour, day by day.
Rochdale: once a name to conjure hope; no more
For those of you whose memories are long, you’ll recall that Rochdale was the birthplace of the co-operative movement, the Rochdale Society of Pioneers who, in 1844, set up a shop to counter the notorious ‘truck system, whereby factory owners, instead of paying their employees’ wages, gave workers tokens to exchange for over-priced adulterated food in their own seedy emporia.
A full 180 years later and that inspired idea, still extant in Co-Op shops up and down the country, is otherwise forgotten. Today, the town is mired in an altogether less edifying sight, a description of which I pass over to my favourite columnist, Marina Hyde.
She writes: ‘Full hazmat kit, please, for the Rochdale by-election, where the chaos and cast of grotesque characters says so much about the state of British politics. All of it bad. This is one of those by-election campaigns that makes you yearn to immerse yourself in sheep dip just from reading about it.
‘Assuming you’re now suited up, here’s a recap of where we are. This weekend, the Mail on Sunday revealed that the Labour candidate, Azhar Ali, had claimed the Israeli government deliberately permitted and enabled the slaughter of its people by Hamas terrorists on as cover for military action. It was too late to take Ali off the ballot. Yet his selection alone was now eye-catching, as was Keir Starmer’s clear inconsistency.
‘For instead of immediately withdrawing support for him, the Labour leadership explained Ali had apologised, wasn’t anti-semitic, and had just fallen for some repulsive conspiracy theory he had read online, which was wrong but the sort of thing it was evidently excusable for putative members of parliament to do. Senior Labour figures went out to defend this line.
‘Then last night Starmer’s office announced that “new information” had come to light. Further comments by their Rochdale pick had apparently surfaced, casuing them to withdraw support for Ali, who will now be on the ballot as Labour’s candidate but is formally disowned. Labour’s national campaign coordinator, Pat McFadden, explained this decision was “tough but necessary”, which is politics for “late and messy”. There was a whiff of the Boris Johnson playbook, when senior Tories were forever being marched up the hill in defence of something indefensible, only for the leader to belatedly reverse ferret. But more on Starmer’s U-turn in a bit.
‘First, back to Rochdale’s cursed election. We haven’t got time to meet all 11 candidates (all male), though the Green party guy has decided to withdraw over historic social media posts criticising the Islamic faith. He too will appear on the ballot, as it was too late to change him. All this is grist to the mill of George Galloway, the former unitarded Celebrity Big Brother cat who has fought even more seats than he’s had wives, and is running in Rochdale on a specifically anti-Starmer, pro-Gaza ceasefire ticket.
‘If you’re wondering where Galloway last had a crack (at a seat, not a wife), let me take you to Batley and Spen, where he came third in the 2021 by-election that saw Kim Leadbeater, elected by the constituency formerly held by her murdered sister, Jo Cox. Something to put matters into perspective, there – yet the morning after this rancorous by-election found Galloway standing outside the count incanting self-pity for the news cameras.
‘Oh, do buck up, you ridiculous tit. Earlier in the campaign, Galloway had told Owen Jones in an interview that he would “eat my hat” if Labour didn’t come third. As indicated, they won that one, but I see he’s still wearing the hat. And let’s be very clear: a man in public life who wears a felt hat inside these days is alerting you that he’s one to swerve. Medieval leprosy bells were obviously cruel; modern indoor trilbies are not. Heed their warnings.
‘Even so, Azhar Ali’s situation gives Galloway a further poll boost in Rochdale, as it does to a rather lesser extent Simon Danczuk, the disgraced former Labour MP for the town, who is re-contesting the seat for Reform. Reform is the party founded by Nigel Farage, while Farage was of course endorsed in 2019 by Galloway. There’s more horseshoe theory in Rochdale than a state-of-the-art stud.
‘And so to Danczuk, speaking of a chap no one bar himself could describe as a state-of-the-art stud. And he probably has, in one or other car-crash public outing. I still have flashbacks to a joint newspaper interview he did with his last-but-one wife, Karen, in which she offered various thoughts on why she had to keep getting her “ding-dongs” out in pictures, while Simon reiterated the theory that a faulty phone charger was responsible for his account “favouriting” hardcore pornography accounts.
‘Anyway, Danczuk was suspended from the Labour party in 2015, when it was discovered he had been exchanging explicit text messages with a 17-year-old girl. Yesterday, Simon contacted Keir explaining that Azhar Ali was “damaging our town, democracy and community relations”, which was fairly explicit in the other meaning of the word. Though this time it took the form of a letter and not a text.
‘Perhaps Starmer should have treated the Azhar Ali problem as a simulated training exercise for the constant vagaries of government. Taking at least 36 hours to call it (and probably 48, given when the Mail on Sunday would have gone to him for a comment) is a hard fail. This was not a tricky choice. The branches of this particular decision tree were not a vast and densely woven thicket through which Sir Keir needed exceptional knightly skill to slash. It was basically a three-step flow chart. 1. “Did the candidate say something wholly unacceptable?” YES, leading to 2. “Is it fine for would-be MPs to say wholly unacceptable things if they think they’re true just because they read them on Facebook?” NO, leading to 3. Bin off the candidate.
‘I guess we are where we are. And what if that place is Rochdale? Neither Galloway nor Danczuk could be accused of campaigning with a story of hope – but perhaps Rochdale could be forgiven for no longer expecting that. It was represented for 20 years by the “larger than life” Liberal politician Cyril Smith, a hideous establishment paedophile who was never charged and whose crimes were ignored for decades by local police and council figures, among others.
‘Later, Rochdale was one of the towns to become notorious for another child abuse scandal – the rape, abuse and exploitation of underage girls by local, largely Pakistani-heritage men, with the council and police again accused of ignoring it, with many believing the issue and the institutional failings it exposed remain active.
‘It was [also] Rochdale where Gordon Brown was unwittingly overheard calling Gillian Duffy “a bigoted woman”, and thus a Rochdale that will now be associated with ominous tensions between Labour and sections of its voters. The pathway to what should be the goal of politics – making life better for its townspeople – is a long and hard one. And it recedes even further into the distance with a by-election like this.’
Just remember: we’ve got a General Election soon: I’m still betting on May. The shenanigans of this week, to my mind, make that a racing certainty.
This week: Tim watched Into the Ice on BBC iPlayer available for eight months. It follows the intrepid expeditions of glaciologists, exploring the endangered Greenland Icecap, and abseiling deep into fissures in it, over 600 feet down, to try to establish how much ice-melt there is, a possible explanation for why glaciers all over the world are speeding up in their descent to the sea. The increase of fresh water the Greenland Icecap releases into the Arctic Ocean may soon cause the failure of the Gulf Stream. You all know what that will mean; we’ve been bathed in its warmth since the last Ice Age. It’s allowed us to develop, but it is, and always has been, a gift that might not keep on giving. Well worth a watch.