Letter: Why we need big change to disentangle our world mess

With so many things going wrong, it’s no wonder the word ‘change’, both wide and small, has become the new political popular mantra for politicians the world over, from Trump’s dangerous madness to Starmer’s steadfast slow progress.

In line with my Green Party’s Zack Polanski, we need and must have big change, both in systems and narratives, to have a real chance of defeating today’s biggest existential dangers:

• The ever-increasing super-rich led inequality – from billowing billionaires to crisis cost-of-living foodbanks everywhere.
• Increasing vast resources devoted daily to murderous militarisation, on all sides of current obscene global wars, with UN law disregarded, especially in nuclear war capacity; plus rapidly increasing emergency threats to essential global diversity’s life-and-limb through runaway climate change, with still exploding population coupled with resource depletion (now urgent need for UN update and treaties to restore global security, peace and disarmament).
• Yet more harmful, unregulated AI and social media internet technological changes are being made, with the threat of replacement of work and more harm to mental health and behaviour.
• More movement away from badly needed updates in constitutional democracy (e.g. still no PR voting, nor cap on big money donations, takeover of parties, nor abolition of Lords in elected Senate) and now movement to the far-right in the US, UK and others in the EU.
• More need for humanist, republican philosophy of religion and politics with a serious decrease in ‘old scriptures old man god’ and monarchy-based irrational beliefs, driving dangerous community conditioning and worship.
• Need for a general global moral and constitutional renaissance, via a big update to the UN Charter of Human Rights to promote a new move away from embedded materialistic, nationalistic capitalism and self-indulgent “having and doing things” outside natural resource capacity, towards much more self-sacrificial development to new lifestyles centred on nature and human minimalism.

All of these demand deep-down reforms in a badly diminishing global democracy and global life’s present and future very perilous sustainability prospects.

Big change must happen in the next couple of decades, driven right now by us all pledging new year resolutions to stop the rot of renewed capitalism’s ever greed-ridden demand for yet more over-exploitation: and yes, under Farage’s renovated fascistic imperialism with “his new billionaire few, enslaving us foodbank many”?

Sincere seasonal greetings to one and all,

Alan Debenham