quiet manifesto

The coming revolution...? Abolition of the monarchy. Free public transport, free education, free healthcare, universal basic income. Ownership of motorised vehicles subject to strict licensing (on basis of needs assessment). Health and social care paid for by escalating income tax; stringent tax on land, and property above a certain level. The revolution to be feminised, in the broadest sense, insofar characterised by kindness and generosity. Nevertheless...

Proportional representation as a first step towards a fuller and open-ended participatory democracy; soft republicanism nationalism (broadly on the Scottish model) with minimal jingoistic fuss, a declared direction of travel towards federalism and post-nationalism - the abandonment of the flag and every trapping of royalty being the chief symbolic buy-in here. Radical demilitarisation on the basis of 'nothing to defend'. A few show trials will be inevitable.

'Leavers' were correct in their inchoate desire to overturn some 'system', some 'authority', yet wholly wrong in their targets; approximately correct in their yearning to go back, but left facing 'backwards' at entirely the wrong angle, like a blindfolded child spun around by sadistic bullies. In the main, they will come around (or die off); nothing in modernity would have ever satisfied them, at any rate. Reproduction will lose much of its remaining allure, and the continuing ecological trends will do the rest, given time But we must square things as best we can with a bloated and hurting population in the interim.

It is not a question in any event of envisaging a future. Rather of being creative and kind in the face of the exigencies of historical process. Without Marx or Jesus, yet with heavy lacings of each. As the planet shudders, questions of reform versus revolution will doubtless persist, then fade to irrelevance as the vomiting impulse expands.