As Cumulonimbus clouds swirled above northern skies last October, members of a
fringe political group gathered in Manchester. Present amongst the truth seers were
some of Britain’s finest minds, the descendants of Enigma codebreakers and perhaps
our only true advocates for liberty in times of increasing authoritarianism. Ruthless
crackdowns on our hard-fought freedoms have become a fact of life, but most ‘sheeples’
are too distracted by the woke phantasmagoria of our cultural haze to notice. Isn’t it
great we have a real-life Indian in charge? Maybe Ru Paul will replace Alex Jones (no, not
that one) on the One Show? Seemingly, no one is doing anything to stop the assault.
Except these guys. As one of their chief protégés warned them of imminent plans to
remove meat from the national diet and turn us all into tofu-eating loons, a more
established initiate sent chills through the enlightened masses with details of the plot to
confine us all to our homes. There will be no cars in the 15-minute city, no trips to
Maccies or even Barnard Castle - unless you’re lucky enough to actually live in it. The
crowds response grew vociferously as the speakers outlined their strategy for fighting
the globalist cabal. Some nodded their heads and murmured approval; others stomped
the floor to an irregular syncopated beat. One man at the back, inspired by the poetry
and will of these resistance fighters, rose to his feet and flung his arm straight into the
air, fingers flowing forwards at a 45° angle, until his wife hurriedly tugged his shirt and
ushered him down and out of his trance state.
Somehow, this meeting wasn’t a public talk by Piers Corbyn, Jeremy’s conspiratorial
sibling shadow. It wasn’t even an impromptu Trump Rally. This was the Conservative
Party Conference.
This blending of hard-right rhetoric and the lore of conspiracy into a new political mass
is a relatively new phenomenon. Naomi Klein’s new book ‘Doppelganger’ describes this
configuration as a ‘diagonalist alliance’, a place where grandchildren of the flower
generation and exponents of extreme wellness rub shoulders with the likes of Steve
Bannon in the digital ether. Until fairly recently, it had been reserved for the strange
hinterlands of the American subcontinent.
But last year, it reared its ugly head for the first time in the mainstream British political
landscape. Within it, unsubstantiated but familiar fears of a migrant “invasion” stood
next to paranoid ramblings about meat taxes and 15-minute cities, as the Tories’ death
rattle appropriated a newer, much darker timbre.
This political blending could easily be dismissed as expediency, a desperate lurch by the
Tories to attract fresh voters and prevent electoral disaster later this year. But recent
research by The Guardian suggests that exaggerated concerns about the 15-minute city
have already led to a shift in transport policy. In the Government’s new ‘Plan for
Drivers’, pedestrians have been side-lined, walking and cycling schemes curbed, and the
right to drive and pollute favoured over pleas for cleaner air and greener communities.
What began as an innovative town planning concept based on access to local amenities
within easy walking or cycling distance, an idea fleshed out by the Urbanist Dr Carlos
Moreno, has morphed into a furtive ruse for population control too ominous even for
the brainiacs at Number 10 to ignore.
The influence of these “theories” on our mainstream politicians is a damning indictment
of their critical faculties, but what’s more concerning is how they are fuelling a new
wave of climate change denialism at a critical juncture for humanity. Anyone who
watched the recent edition of the BBC’s flagship nature programme ‘Planet Earth’ can
testify to the worldwide interlinked crises of biodiversity, habitat loss and ecological
collapse. This is happening everywhere, from the Amazon rainforest, where a section
the size of Wales is lost each year, to the UK’s unique but critically depleted chalk rivers.
But caught in a vice grip of deep mistrust and paranoia, an affliction that has perhaps
understandably grown since COVID-19, an alarming number of people have turned their
back on reality. According to YouGov, as many as 22% of respondents to a 2021 global
poll believed the climate crisis was a hoax.
At home, this is visible in recent campaigns against the London ULEZ where some
protesters, deploying rather dubious techniques, rejected decades of scholarship and
scientific rigour with the simple flick of an air pollution meter in a battered van driving
through Bromley. Though understandable concerns about the scheme’s rollout do exist,
the movement’s conspiratorial turn has effectively equated climate science with a
subterfuge for population control, which has encouraged a growing number of vigilante
groups to commit acts of vandalism and damage to TFL cameras, road signs and traffic
lights. The Conservatives’ selection of Pro-Trumpian, anti-ULEZ Susan Hall as their
candidate for London Mayor suggests they intend to continue fanning the flames.
Yet there is something in this strange, distorted mirror, an uncomfortable truth that the
left is perhaps unwilling to confront.
The climate crisis is getting worse. Extreme weather events and the unpredictability of
seasonal changes will soon lead to mass habitat decline, rising sea levels, food shortages
and climate refugees on an unprecedented scale. No country, no matter how prominent
or developed, is untouchable. On the west coast of Wales, the villagers of Fairbourne
have already been told they will need to relocate due to a high risk of flooding.
So when conspiracy “theorists” bang on about imminent measures of control to subdue
our freedom of movement and way of life, they are actually tapping into a very real
threat which increases with every day of non-action. Very soon, top-down interventions
will have to be implemented to keep our consumption at sustainable levels and within
the earth’s fragile parameters.
However, disseminating and promoting misinformation about the reasons for this will
only allow for our current conditions of planetary exploitation to be reproduced.
Conspiracies can seem fantastical, light-hearted, even funny. But at their historical core,
they have always been a convenient distraction technique; a tool that allows the system
it obfuscates to continue turning whilst placing the blame for its darker machinations
on small groups of scapegoats, ethereal beings or mirages. And the more people that
buy into the lie, the more opportunity there is for the real villains, oil companies, large
corporations, arms manufacturers and intensive agriculturalists, to profit from
ecological destruction.
Crucially though, as more time passes there will be less opportunity to solve the crisis
through meaningful democratic consensus. And the recent work of environmental
scientists and advocates, in projects as variable as the London ULEZ, Yellowstone Wolf
be demanded and implemented. But the real question, as the late cultural theorist Mark
Fisher put it, is whether we act now to demand that these are “collectively managed, or
whether [they] will be imposed by authoritarian means when it is already too late.”
Unfortunately, as recent studies suggest, time is running out. And if we continue to deny
the reality of our fragile climate, to delay these already known and much-needed
solutions out of misguided fears of an imminent Orwellian world, then a much darker,
much more real dystopia might emerge in the future.
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Joe Barnes works in Outreach for a homelessness charity and is based in West London. When he isn't rewatching the Sopranos, he likes to blog about football and neoliberalism, urban space production, the rise of conspiracy culture, and our increasingly precarious ecosystems and habitats.
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