Paul Kingsnorth

Everyone keeps asking me my opinion about Zac Goldsmith and his recent public conversion to the Tory cause. They keep doing this because I worked for him for a couple of years, as deputy editor of The Ecologist, which you should be reading if you're not already, particularly as it runs my monthly column about allotments in it.

The short answer is that I'm not terribly surprised, and neither am I as shocked or horrified as some people seem to be. Zac is a friend of mine for a start, so I'm afraid I'm not going to say anything horrible about him. This is for the simple reason that I both like and respect him. Having worked with him closely over a long period I can testify that he's principled, honest and clued-up about green issues. Some people continue to get exercised about the very large amount of money he inherited from his father, and certainly it was not - how shall we put it? - well, all obtained from ethical sources. However, since he spends much of it on the Ecologist and on funding radical eco-projects around the world, rather than on yachts and cocaine, I can't see what the complaints are about. It's not as if the green cause couldn't do with both a financial and a publicity leg-up, both of which Zac has proved excellent at providing.

I'm not surprised about the Toryism because Zac has always been a small-c conservative green. People who find this surprising or contradicatory don't know their history. Much of the early green movement, in this country and elsewhere, was a conservative one. It was framed in terms of protecting both the natural environment and the best of human tradition (small villages, slow ways of living, connection to the natural world) from the juggernaut of techno-industrialism. In later years, the green movement has shifted to the left - sometimes too far in my view - and has become associated with all the strengths and weaknesses of the 20th century left-wing agenda.

In my view, greens should be above and beyond right and left, just as environmentalism as a philosophy should be above and beyond industrialism (read this book if you want a better explanation). But either way Zac, like his uncle Teddy, who founded The Ecologist thirty years ago, has always come from that conservative green tradition. I don't always agree with him- we had some very productive rows when we worked together- but I know he believes what he says.

Which is ironically why I don't think Zac will make a very good politician; he's too honest. I also think he's naive in imagining that the neoliberal Tory party could ever be a friend of small shopkeepers, family farmers and widlife. Having said that, I also think that that green movement as a whole is naive to imagine that the Green Party or a few campaign groups are going to force society into the sort of shift that's needed. By the time the Greens manage to get themselves even one MP in Britain climate change will have melted both ice caps. I doubt very much whether David Cameron is any more than hot air - but why not push him and see. If nothing else it gets the key issues onto the front pages.

My friend Mark Lynas has been scrapping with our local Green Party about this very issue recently, and he makes some good points on his blog. I don't like the Tories any more than I like Neo Labour - but anyone who's serious about tackling the global ecological crisis before it's too late surely can't be too choosy about their allies at this point. As Billy Bragg so memorably put it: 'wearing badges is not enough in days like these.'

We have a problem.


The problem is this: less than three weeks ago, on 30th March, the Identity Cards Act 2006 became law. For some reason, there was no rioting in the streets, though it would have been appropriate, for this is the biggest and most draconian step yet in Britain's long march away from liberty and towards autocracy.

Exaggeration? Pah. This law will create the biggest state database of information on private individuals anywhere in the world. Once on the National Identity Register (NIR), you will be required to tell the government where you live, what you do and what your movements are. Your irises and fingerprints will scanned onto a national database. Every time you move house or change job, you will be required to inform the government. They will know where you are, and what you are doing, anytime they want to. And if that isn't the beginning of the end of liberty, what is?

Now that the Act is law, this is coming our way very soon. There is one way that you can at least delay your numbering, however, and that's to renew your passport. The new law lets the Home Office turn your passport into a ‘designated document’ for its ID card scheme, which means that it will refuse to renew your passport unless you attend an official interview and agree to be fingerprinted, scanned and relieved of your personal details.

Well, fuck them. Their law is not yet in force, and this gives us a loopphole - renew your passport now, and you won't have to put yourself on the database for ten years. With any luck by that time either we will have seen sense and abolished the whole thing, or the world will have ended, thus making it all seem rather trivial anyway.

I've just this minute renewed my passport online, which you can do here. You should also visit this site for more on this scheme, why it matters and what the implications of passport renewal are. Do it now, or get numbered for life.

I do have a sore throat this week, and I feel tired. I'm racking my brains to try and remember if a bird has coughed on me in the last week or so.

If it has, this may be my last blog. So I shall spend it recommending some artistic and cultural highlights which I really think you should experience:

1. Jerry Springer: The Opera
I went to see this in Oxford last week (it's on tour) and it was great. Better than I expected in fact, and with the added bonus of a dozen loony Christians gathered outside, waving banners saying things like 'Blasphemy!', which made it seem much more of an event.

2. Ringleader of the Tormentors
This is Morrissey's new album, and it really is excellent. Don't be put off by the fact that David Cameron is currently pretending to like it.

3. The Decemberists
I am furious about this. My favourite band of the moment is doing a small, and rare, UK tour in May and I am going to be OUT OF THE COUNTRY. Sob. Don't deny yourself the opportunity that has been denied me: see them, and die content.

That should keep you going until He Is Risen. Happy Easter!

Aaaaargggh! Run for the hills! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Or perhaps not. Perhaps it is, after all, just a DEAD SODDING BIRD. Perhaps we could calm down enough so that when I switch the news on I am not confronted with 40 minutes of coverage of the fact that the swan is dead, the swan remains dead and that NOTHING ELSE HAS HAPPENED.

And perhaps when we do calm down we can start asking ourselves why every TV journalist in Britain had to fly up to Scotland last night to do live pieces to camera in front of the slipway on which the dead fucking swan got washed up eight bastard days ago. And perhaps the editor of the Today programme on Radio 4 could explain to me why his journalists were coming on like half-crazed souls in the cellars of Dresden this morning.

Here are the facts of the matter: a bird got a cough. A bird died. Other birds may or may not get coughs and die. If we're very unlucky, a bird may cough on a human and he or she may subsequently die. This has happened 100 times so far, in the ENTIRE WORLD, in TEN YEARS.

But these are facts and thus not interesting to us. For we are The Media and we like SCARY STORIES. We like them almost as much as we like stories about Tony fighting with Gordon, and we like them only slightly more than we like stories about small children being brutally murdered by psychopathic paedophiles. Come on; give us a break! Here we are, sitting in some dingy studio drinking stewed tea out of foam cups or staring into computer screens clawing about for 500 words to write about putting folic acid into bread. Of course we want some excitement! We're only human! We want to keep it going! We're BORED!

Christ! Another one! Surely this calls for a Newsnight Special?

And what's THIS woman up to?


Should she be BANNED? Is she setting a BAD EXAMPLE FOR OUR KIDS? Should she be SHOT for her OWN GOOD? Lines are open now, so give us a call! We want to hear YOUR STUPID, PIG-IGNORANT, ILL-INFORMED VIEWS because we've exhausted our own already!

Excuse me; I'm going to leave the country for a while, and not because I'm worried about coughing birds.

This is what you'll want to be doing tomorrow night, if you don't want to be, like, right out of the loop:

Which weirdo wanted a rear view? Own up.

I was late getting out of bed yesterday and I found myself, through a semi-sleepy haze, listening to Radio 4's Book of the Week. This week, with a ruthless ability to cash in which I had assumed was beyond the staid managers of Radio 4, the book is The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. You'll recognise the name, as these are the guys currently suing Dan Brown in the High Court for stealing their idea and using it for the Da Vinci Code. Good luck chaps; you'll need it.

Anyway, the bookhighlights, and claims to 'investigate' a familiar Christian conspiracy theory: Jesus wasn't crucified at all. He survived, married Mary Magdalene and had kids. Said kids emigrated to southern France, for some reason, where they established the Merovingian royal Dynasty, which ruled France from the fifth to the eighth centuries. The Catholic church knows this and will do anything to keep it secret. Also in the loop is a mysterious secret society known as the Priory of Sion. The Priory - which does actually exist - is supposedly dedicated to the reinstatement of the Dynasty to the throne of France, and preferably Europe too. Oh, and Jerusalem. Finally, and best of all, the Priory of Sion is so influential that it counts major politicians, Royals and statespeople as members. Basically, it runs the world, and we don't know it.

This is, of course, nonsense. The Priory of Sion does not rule the world. Everybody knows that the world is ruled by shape-shifting lizards. Like this one:



Or if not lizards, then Freemasons. Or Illuminati. Or the Trilateral Commission. Or the Bilderberg Group. Or possibly Jews.

All of which is, of course, nonsense too. You and I are rational, intellectual types and so we reject all of this sort of thing. We are clever and realistic, and we all apply the principle of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usally the right one. We don't need conspiracy theories to explain why everything is such a disaster. There are no lizards or freemasons in charge of it all, because no-one is in charge of it all. The planet is run, badly and chaotically, by carbon-based bipedal life forms descended from apes, who have evolved far enough to invent cluster bombs, aeroplanes and global retail chains, but not far enough to know how to control them. This explains why everything is so fucked up, all the time.

Or does it? Half-asleep, listening to the radio, I did actually begin to wonder. What if the conspiracy theorists are right? What if you and I are helpless, sheepy dupes, smug in our intellectual soundness but actually completely wrong? It would explain a lot. It would explain, for example, why every government ever elected promising change ends up just like the one before it. It would explain why every revolution ends up making things worse, or just as bad. it would explain why capitalism and war just won't go away, whoever's in charge.

Perhaps it's really like this: you're elected to power, promising radical change. You sweep into your office or presidential palace, determined to end hunger, poverty and injustice forever. And the first thing that happens is that you are led into a small dark room, in which are sitting the ten people - or lizards - who actually rule the world. They give you your orders and explain what will happen if you don't carry them out. You walk out of that room a changed man. Six years later, you invade Iraq.

It's a tempting thought, isn't it? I think I'm going to keep listening.