There is a significant difference between UK Tories in their motherland and the Australia Liberal / Nationals and USA Republicans out on the frontier when it comets how they relate to our planet.
Thatcher closed the coal mines amidst the fervour of young love between conservativism and neoliberalism but even now UK conservatives have policies in line with emission reduction and not fracking their country. I remember Mungo McCullum musing that Abbot had become a socialist when positioning to subsidies coal mines a few years ago. Now Scotty from Marketing has installed an advisory panel stacked with vested interests to justify subsiding the gas industry so it can compete with the every more affordable and sensible renewable energy industry. It is now clear that neoliberalism was not a neoconservative foundation but just a tool to be deployed when useful. Thatcher used it in the age-old war on unions and peasants who dared band together. Frontier conservatives have proven quite agile in abandoning neoliberalism, only trotting it out into targeted segments of our atomized social media public dialogues. Growth for crony capitalist profits is becoming an increasingly transparent foundation for frontier conservatives.
The conservatives’ motherland policies regarding emissions and fracking stand in stark contrast to those on the frontier. Is this just because Thatcher had a science background, Regan was a vacuous actor reading lines from his sponsors and Howard-Abbot were sycophantic subjects of energy empire? I think it goes beyond the character of specific leaders to the differences between these three societies’ culture.
There are two related and significant differences between the cultures of motherland and the colonial frontier that lead to this different environmental policy. First is the bottleneck of colonisation reconfiguring the class structure on the frontier. The second is the subsequent cultural norms that are being conserved. While many leading UK greens have blue blood, the colonies lack significant remnants of an aristocracy with a mythology of noblesse oblige that encompassed the people and the land. Although the phase noblesse oblige has been abused by pompous tyrants using it to justify extreme inequity and privilege there is still much to be said for setting an expectation that power comes with responsibility. The relative rise of the merchants with mobile capital over the landowning class accelerated in period epitomised by the English East India Company where the roadmap for corporate capture of state was laid out. This was when the foundations for our post-colonial frontier nations were laid down. A few years later the energy companies began to grow significantly and muscle their way into the establishment in the colonies while still reeking of the crassness of social climbing Nouveau Riche in the motherland. These trends are not absolute, but the resulting difference in balance is significant.
Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral foundations provides some interesting insights across the ideological divide. ‘Progressives’ lean heavily on care / harm and liberty / oppression issues while conservatives give equal considerations to these but also fairness / cheating, loyalty / betrayal, authority / subversion and sanctity / degradation. In the former colonies what is fair, who we are loyal too and obey and what is sacred is quite different to back in mother England.
In the motherland the culture and social order evolved through waves of invasion and has had enough time to become rooted and mythologised in its landscape. Out on the frontier the culture to be conserved is one of opportunity for those willing to take it and move on, perhaps return to old blighty to flaunt riches and demand respect. As a line in the Gentrified Ferals’ single ‘frontier’ goes: “my daddy never taught me how to be a real man, so I act just like a little boy and take what I can”. Perhaps it is time to learn from the mother how to love and respect this land. This land has not been a frontier for more 60,000 years to its indigenous people and we all need to start acting like we belong in this country and on this planet to have a future here.
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