How the left and right must unite
We’re in this together. So let’s stop fighting each other and start solving the problem we all care deeply about.
I’m lost in the memory of a sunny, windy Thursday afternoon.
It’s exactly two years ago and I’m walking across Waterloo Bridge, witnessing a momentous event: Extinction Rebellion has forced central London to a standstill and blocked several major sites, including this bridge. A temporary woodland grows hopefully across the river, saplings and banners flying in the strong breeze. I feel at once hopeful and a little uncomfortable. While I’m pleased that such direct action is happening, I feel on the fringes, set apart from the crowd.
A few days later I march alongside colleagues, in step and in sync with the broad message: that enough is enough and we must work harder together to combat the ravages of climate change. Yet my feeling of unease grows. This act of solidarity feels instead like selecting a political tribe.
If you side with the Rebellion, you eschew any / all the values of conservatism, relegating more than 50% of the electorate to “the other side”. I had multiple conversations with community organisers over that period, who spoke about the importance of winning 3.5% of people over to the rebellion’s viewpoint. Yet this was also tied up with a universal line of thinking that we need to break everything, dismantle the capitalist system and emerge with something beautiful and new. While I found this idea appealing, I could also see how utterly alienating this was to anyone leaning right of centre.
How the hell are we, as a species, going to overcome the single biggest existential threat to all of us if we make this a partisan issue? And, quite frankly, where have all the good conservatives gone?
Conservative principles include taking personal responsibility for your actions, practising good stewardship and preserving land for generations to come. Why am I not hearing these people talk about their side of the climate story?
Conservation is deeply conservative. So how has the left taken the preservation of our planet as their own cause, to the exclusion of the right?
It’s so frustrating, from a pragmatist's point of view, to see climate change become a partisan pissing contest, with people on the left demonising conservative values so stridently that the inevitable reaction from the right is a wholesale rejection of everything that climate activists are fighting for.
Why are we not focused on finding the common ground and looking at the most expedient routes to reaching net-zero by 2050 together?
If there’s a market-based mechanism that accelerates change within the existing system, (take the Tory-backed wind farm auctions that galvanised huge investment in UK offshore wind over the past decade) let’s do that!
If there’s a way to instigate rapid, systemic change, like changing linear business models to bring about the circular economy, let’s do that.
If global agreements at the supra-national level bring us closer to zero, let’s do that too. The situation is too urgent and real for there to be room for in-fighting.
These are the thoughts that led me on a fruitful search to discover where all the good conservatives had gone. We don’t read the same news outlets, we don’t get served the same ads and we're increasingly losing sight of each other. While I really struggle with many right-wing views, I am encouraged to discover how much common ground we share.
We’ve spent years living within our hermetically sealed echo chambers, every internet search, product purchase and article read defining what we believe is a shared reality. In fact, it’s the digitally perfect construct of our own biases. The same views keep bouncing back from the walls of our chambers as we fervently agree with ourselves. I’m sick of this. I have a rising urge to go hug a hunter and buy them a beer. To find out what their life is really like, discover what values unite us and understand what we both hold dear.
