Things are falling apart: where to look for leadership?

…. in the most unlikely places.

With acknowledgements to Dan and Hilary Edelstyn.

Life - both at home and in the wider world - has made me grimly miserable lately. The sort of misery that can immobilize a substack poster. Driving my anguish are : the world’s hegemon, led by fascist-leaning bigots is on a destructive, lawless rampage; the far right is winning everywhere; the arctic is melting, and medieval-style religious wars lead to the pointless slaughter of innocents. Life for millions of beautiful, creative and loving people is hard, brutish and short.

The need for progressive, inspired leadership has never been more urgent. Yet we are offered only the stupidity, inanity and moral vacuity of politics both here in the UK and in the US. Escaping Trump’s flooded zone is hard, and profoundly enervating. We have politicians with no vision for tackling the grave political crises we face, and with little capacity to build the ecological resilience and economic renewal now urgently necessary. Instead as Rutger Bregman argued in his Reith Lectures, politicians prefer to perform than to govern. Few have the courage, integrity or gift of sound leadership. To paraphrase Keynes: as a class, and with rare exceptions, politicians are not intelligent, they are not beautiful, they are neither just nor virtuous - and worst of all: they can’t “deliver the goods.”

Compounding that is the macroeconomic defeatism of influential economists and central bankers who comprehensively fail the leadership test. Western economic and monetary policies serve only to feed the fascist beast. That the most influential economists and commentators routinely overlook the imminent risk of biospheric collapse is both depressing and debilitating. Their confident and repetitive whine that - “there is no money” - condemns society to dependence on ever-shrinking supplies of savings/taxes with which to finance the rapid dissolution of the fossil sector, the decarbonisation of the economy, and the construction of new forms of energy, resilience and security. (As an example see the latest from Professor Dieter Helm, an expert on energy policy and Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford and Fellow in Economics at New College, Oxford).

Life at home

At home life has been difficult and frankly, scary. Like millions of families around the world, mine is coping with the scourges of cancer and mental illness in people we love dearly. And like most of my generation I face the humiliation of ageing. My body was always expected to stand me up, and to keep my show on the road. Bodily engines were not expected to stutter nor moveable parts to deflate. But stutter and deflate they do - at a time when there is still so much to be done.

My frailty was confirmed after a recent trip to Accra Ghana to deliver a lecture on the return of the worst-ever sovereign debt crisis that now afflicts the poorest countries of the world. Debt service paid by the world’s poorest countries to much richer creditors (both private and public) absorbs on average 41.5% of the budget revenues of 144 developing countries. Ghana spends approximately 75% of all government revenues on servicing debts owed to both domestic and foreign creditors.

Much as I want to help raise awareness of this predictable consequence of the Global Casino’s generation of trillions of dollars of ‘easy money’ (unregulated credit) lent to vulnerable borrowers, I now feel it is for younger African advocates, supported by allies in creditor countries, to take up this grave issue.

So it was in a grim mood that I dragged my arthritic limbs out on a cold damp night to attend the opening night of a new movie. I was unprepared to find what I had really been looking for: inspirational climate leadership. There it was - in plain sight and in the form of both political action and a documentary made by two beloved friends and artists: Dan and Hilary Edelstyn.

The Power of Art

Dan and Hilary live in a modest terraced house in Walthamstow, London. We had met some time ago when they worked on a project to blow up debts owed by impoverished defaulters.

The exploded shell of a van, with £1M of symbolic debt

Their most recent project is an action-led campaign dubbed The Power Station.

Back in the day they had read The Case for the Green New Deal - a call that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders had echoed and trumpeted across the globe. A call that had such powerful resonance with the public the global fossil sector was forced to react: Donald Trump and his henchmen were enlisted to carry out a sustained campaign to discredit both the call and the reality of a decarbonised world. So grave a threat was The Green New Deal to fossil and financial elites that to this day Trump and his team repeatedly and consistently denigrate the force they call The Green New Scam.

Dan and Hilary carried on regardless. They loved The Green New Deal’s suggested policy for the devolution of energy, a process designed to make citizens energy independent. Every building the GND argued, should and could, generate its own energy supply and become an autonomous ‘power station’.

Our brave couple set about researching costs and suppliers to help build their own solar power station. It soon occurred to them that a collective, join effort might lower costs, share learnings and make negotiations with big companies easier. They began chatting to neighbours and to mobilise as many as possible behind the big idea. Their ultimate aim was that all the residents on Lynmouth Street, Walthamstow would become energy independent.

Hilary designed a poster to be put up by those willing to join in. She used the font adopted by Britain’s electoral authority for ‘Polling Stations’.

It was not long before posters appeared in most of their neighbours’ houses.

Pretty soon the question of available finance for impoverished neighbours and the financially strapped local primary school rose to the fore. The two artists decided to take the lead, make the sacrifice and raise the finance themselves. To do so they would spend winter nights on the roof of their house - until £100,000 was raised to finance the installation of solar panels. Scaffolding was erected over the roof, a double bed installed, with linen, heavy blankets and plastic sheets piled on.

A wonky old lampshade added to the cosiness of the scene.

The making of the movie

Dan recorded it all and turned their turbulent story of fund-raising, struggles with suppliers, and the building of a vibrant community into a hilarious, moving and honest movie. It is now showing in small towns like my own, and in art picture houses across the land. The movie is funny and heartwarming and a charming testament to the power of art to change minds and show another world is indeed possible. The film is Sukhdev Sandhu’s top film of the year.

Dan has made Power Station available for digital streaming for home use in the next few days. If you’re not a paid member, then the link to buy your stream is here :https://streetbystreet.power.film/stream-on-demand?lid=28716

The power of progressive leadership

Despite the left’s longstanding hostility to leadership, Dan and Hilary’s experience shows how essential is sound leadership to the mobilisation of society and the transformation and renewal of energy and economic systems at community, national and international levels. Britain’s new left-wing party - Your Party - is a vivid demonstration of the failure of divisive leadership and of the way in which progressive bottom-up leadership can fill the vacuum.

The search for such sound leadership will not lead to the world’s political and economic elites. Money has corrupted politics - both in the west and (as I learned on the trip to Ghana) in much of Africa. Nor is sound leadership a quality to be found in the halls of academia. While Wall St and Silicon Valley elites are powerful, they are incapable and unwilling to lead society into an era of radical transformation. On the contrary. Tech billionaires are betting more than $1 trillion on a technology – Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) - that promises to usher in an age of abundance, to cure all disease and while likely to destroy humanity’s ability to work and earn a living, and they allege, may also ultimately save the planet. Their gamble is backed by big and small-time speculators that have shelled out $5 trillion on the success of this wager.

Capitalism has always produced daring creative risk-takers and gamblers – those who dreamed of, invested in and built the railways, computers and the internet. What’s different today is that in contrast to railways, computers and even the internet, AGI doesn’t exist. The AGI bubble may just be a vast techno-dystopian power play – designed to put Silicon Valley bosses in political and financial control over a vast, weakened and global labour force. Class war at its most brutal.

In one of the highest-stake gambles of all time, the wealthy are doubling down on fossil fuel emissions - and betting they will survive (perhaps on Mars?) - even if we don’t.

We cannot predict where new progressive leadership will originate, but we must support it when it appears. From impoverished artists, like Dan and Hillary - to the world’s youthful High Level Climate Champions - like Eylül Er, Emma Oliver, Christopher Whitfield and Jonathan Zhao.

Eighty-four year-old Bernie Sanders, once an obscure U.S. Senator from Vermont, proudly called himself a Democratic Socialist and came close to toppling the anointed presidential candidate HIllary Clinton in 2016. He did so by exercising leadership - running on issues that directly arose from the suffering of America’s forgotten working class.

While his campaign failed, his leadership inspired others.

The most striking of those he influenced has become the Mayor-elect of New York - the Ugandan-born, South Asian, thirty four year-old, Muslim American - Zohran Mamdani. Buoyed by his supporters he challenged and defeated New York’s financial elites and its political establishment to win New York’s Democratic nomination

According to Ross Barkan in the New Statesman Mamdani’s idols are not world-historical left-wing ideologues like Che Guevara but “sewer socialists” such as the former Milwaukee mayor Daniel Hoan or Wisconsin congressman Victor Berger, who brought progressive, technocratic governance to their constituencies in the last century, beating back corruption and bolstering the social safety net.

New York’s financial elite are now deeply anxious. Despite funnelling almost $30 million into a super Pac that portrayed Mamdani as a dangerous, Pro-Palestinian radical set to defund the police and to unleash crime waves - they were defeated because.

for the first time in living memory, their money didn’t matter.

Pundits question whether his win can be replicated elsewhere, or whether it is an outcome of Mamdani’s unique leadership skills and the specific circumstances of New York City at this moment in time. I would argue that he has already transformed political debate in the United States and indeed in the rest of the world - with his framing of the political crisis as an ‘affordability crisis’.

Here in Britain Zack Polanski of the Green Party has dared to talk truth to power and to the surprise of many, his popularity ratings now pose a real threat to established parties.

Both Mamdani and Polanski offer profound lessons that sound leadership based on close attention to the needs of society, and on a progressive policy agenda can defeat the money and power of elites - including Silicon Valley elites.

That is the uplifting message I want to share with you this festive season.

Here’s wishing you and your loved ones a peaceful, joyful and healthy holiday: and may 2026 be the year of sound leadership, ecological transformation and national and international recovery.