Chapter Eleven
Across the world, people were changing. Particularly in the western world which had been controlled for so long by money, greed, selfish desires, and businesses so rich and powerful that many of them had profits larger than many poorer countries’ entire economies.
Sadly, many politicians and government ministers received death threats to the point that the Prime Minister and the majority of the cabinet resigned their posts. My name was mentioned in a few articles as a prime suspect, but I wasn’t called in for questioning at all. I could only hope that my ‘terrorist credentials’ were on the wane.
However, this rising anarchy left parliament in such a weak position that a General Election was called.
The main parties began campaigning, arguing about tax cuts and public spending. None of them represented the views of the Gaia Foundation; the only one with anything in common with us was the Green Party. But even then our aims were more finely focussed than theirs. I decided to stay out of Westminster and even local council politics –getting in to government and working for parliament does something odd to principled people. Politicians may initially be ideological and passionate about improving society but, once in power, they become subsumed under the massive, corporate ‘machine’ running the country that removes all their humanity and compassion.
‘We are stronger,’ Ala had always argued most eloquently, ‘remaining as an independent pressure group, advising and speaking out, without becoming corrupted, biased or compromised by greed.’
Gene agreed with that principle. ‘Don’t get lost in party politics. Even if you start with ideals, whichever party you join will soon squeeze out your principles until you become another foot soldier brainwashed into protecting the party, rather than ordinary people. It’s a bloody minefield is politics.’
‘And we all know that politicians don’t really control things …’ I said, using one of my familiar lines. The others joined in with the next three words: ‘… the corporations do.’
So we kept our independence, but came up with a better plan to help ordinary people ensure their voice was heard. It galvanised everyone in the Gaia Foundation and, to my delight, brought Ala back from her travels and teaching abroad. She flew down towards as her hoopoe numen – an exotic bird with pink, white and black plumage, tall crown-like crest, and elegant curved beak.
I welcomed her as a sister and as someone I relied on. Ala, Guy, Gene and I were the obvious ‘leaders’ for want of a better word.
‘You would make an excellent Prime Minister, Falco,’ Ala teased me.
‘No I wouldn’t, and you know it. You’d be tons better than me. You have poise, intelligence and natural authority.’
Ala seemed pleased with my compliments.
‘I’m just a stupid kid.’
I was half-annoyed when neither Ala nor Gene responded to this in the way I’d hoped.
We did a great deal of campaigning over the next few months, particularly Ala, Gene and I. Money continued to come in without our having to ask for it and thousands volunteered to help us in different ways. Whilst politicians from the traditional parties argued the minutiae, we put our alternative ploy into action. It had to remain top secret for now, to work properly.
A week before the election, I had a professional film crew make a podcast, simultaneously broadcast on all UK television and radio channels, YouTube and my own Internet channel, FalcoTV. The audience ratings smashed all records.
‘Good evening, Britain. Thanks for watching or listening today. I have a message which I think could be the most important thing you’ll hear; certainly during this election campaign. As I’ve travelled round the UK listening to people’s thoughts and opinions, the thing that strikes me most is that people are sick of being the victims of businesses and governments who are greedy, selfish and just don’t give a damn about ordinary people who are struggling to survive and who work bloody hard for very little reward.
‘They are sick of everything being controlled by multinational corporations and banks; faceless empires that serve only a few, with massive profit and rewards for that lucky one per cent – who are already rich, but seem to want to become even richer … at our expense.
‘People are sick of the Earth’s resources being plundered and destroyed by profit-making companies who cannot see how they are slowly killing off our planet. The owners of these companies don’t care, as long as they have nice cars, yachts and holidays for themselves and their glamorous friends.
‘Politics, for the main parties, has become synonymous with economics. This country is now being run as if it’s a business. The United Kingdom is not a business; it’s the home of millions of individuals. Political decisions shouldn’t be made based on economics and statistics, but on the ethics of how to protect those most vulnerable. Politicians don’t really care about education, the National Health Service, pensions or the environment – unless by making minimal efforts they can secure more votes. They try to buy your vote with compromise, which is the least they believe they can get away with before surreptitiously shifting things the way they really want them. It’s smoke and mirrors, folks, and politicians have been getting away with it for years.’
I paused, sipped a small amount of water from my glass, and smiled into the camera.
‘There is something you can do about it. We can send a very powerful message to politicians everywhere. We can lead the world in something which is relatively simple to achieve. We need to be brave, stand together, and be willing to challenge the accepted traditions and ways of doing things. All of us are naturally rebellious – just a little bit. Go on. Admit it. You’d like to make a statement that would show our politicians, leaders, corporate fat cats that they can’t just take us for granted. Wouldn’t you? Join me then. Together we can stick two fingers up at the establishment and so-called “ruling class” who have incessantly made decisions for us – wrong ones at that. It’s about time we took things into our own hands. Let’s give power back to the people, and shake things up a little. It doesn’t involve any violence, or breaking any laws. You don’t need to shout or say anything mean to anyone. What you need to do is very simple indeed.’
Music started playing in the background, and my face dissolved to make way for a series of carefully chosen images, while my voice continued throughout.
‘When you go to vote on Thursday – and it’s important that you go to your polling booth for this – get your voting paper as usual with the list of all the candidates, but don’t put an X or any kind of mark in any of the boxes. Instead I’d like you to draw this pattern at the top of the page.’
On the screen a stylised drawing of a bird of prey appeared – a falcon; the wings splayed out like a flattened ‘M’. Above it, the head and hooked beak in profile are turned to the right; below are three tail-feathers, joined up to look like a paw print. The logo also vaguely resembled the shape of the letter ‘F’; effective but simple to draw.
‘This will, in effect, spoil your ballot. So you have used your democratic right and voted, and yet not voted the way they want you to. The Gaia Foundation represents something entirely new with an even higher purpose. Join our movement to give a strong message to these politicians. Let them know that you’re sick of the old ways and that they need to listen to us – the ordinary people. This will send an important message to those in power, to remind them exactly who should have the power in a true democracy. It’s not about them bullying us into accepting the least unattractive set of policies thrown at us, but about us telling them that we’re sick of being pushed around by them.
‘We take the power back into our own hands. It’s vital that we make the effort to get out and do this. In the past, nobody has spoken for us and we’ve felt apathetic and disenfranchised. Finally we have the chance to send the right message and to change things for the better.
‘Take a marker pen with you and scrawl the Falco logo over your paper. Take power away from those who have failed us and let us down for
so many years and let’s take power back and show them exactly who is in control here. This is our chance to make a huge difference now and in the future. Let’s be the generation who changed things for the better!’
More images and increasingly loud music brought the video to an end and would – hopefully – fill the speakers and screens belonging to millions of people.
The political parties and their staff went crazy. The big parties put adverts in papers begging voters not to wreck the hard-won, centuries-old, traditional democracy. They made panic broadcasts, and much time and effort was put in to savage me at a personal level.
‘Who the hell is Falco?’ sounded the war cry. Apparently, I was a ‘danger to society and civil liberties’, according to some. Tragically, I heard reports of peregrine falcons being shot and trapped in the hope of stopping me. Ala was threatened too. Many of my headquarters and offices were broken into and vandalised.
Yet reports suggested that my speech rapidly gained support. Polls showed me as more popular than all the other political party leaders put together. The same old headline reappeared: ‘Falco for PM’. It was flattering, to say the least. We had caused a major wind change in the system. This was a validation of all that we stood for, striking a chord in ordinary people on a scale we could never have imagined.
The main parties panicked and banded together to campaign against both me and the Gaia Foundation, attempting to dig up – or make up – dirt against me, particularly. But it was hard for them to find anything on me. Kiss-and-tell stories appeared in partisan tabloids, including photo-shopped pictures of me inhaling nitrous oxide and smoking crack. My team of lawyers and legal advisers didn’t have to work too hard to win me out-of-court settlements and financial compensation, which gave me greater freedom to focus on spreading my message.
We split up the UK for campaigning purposes, so that I did the most travelling to visit as many places as I could, especially the Midlands and north of England; Gene concentrated on London and the south-east; Ala focussed on Wales; Hudor on Scotland; Vriksha went to Northern Ireland. We worked closely with the regional Gaia communities, of course, and prior to the election Gene had become a major name in the London community, eventually elected as their nominal ‘leader’. Community leaders have no actual power and can only serve for one year, which was a safeguard against anyone abusing or exploiting their position. I trusted Gene to do a good job.
We all got to Polling Day alive and just about mentally intact.
The main three political parties had given an unprecedented joint statement a week before election day, through the mouth of the former Prime Minister, with the opposition leaders standing alongside: ‘We are willing to listen to the people of the UK and join together in coalition by working more closely in a form of compromise, if that is the will of the electorate’.
This wasn’t popular and probably went in our favour. The forecasts and various possible permutations sent the commentators apoplectic. I chose to avoid all the analysis and predictions, preferring to keep out of sight and watch the effects and consequences as they unfolded. If it achieved nothing more than rattling one of the world’s superpowers, then I’d consider it job done.
We told voters not to give away their intentions to researchers doing exit polls. This was another way for the general public to stick two fingers up at the establishment. Power would be in their hands. But it also meant media presenters and political commentators had difficulty making any sensible remarks, which made me very happy.
I stayed in a new hotel room that day and night with Ala, Guy, Gene, Vriksha and Hudor, watching events as they unfolded.
My absence from and passive involvement in the election worked in my favour. Those individuals, famous or otherwise, who became actively engaged in the campaign and voting process for the traditional parties, only appeared to annoy people further. It’s often better to sit back and let others show themselves up. Give them rope and they do the rest. People who want a platform to air their pet hates and prejudices should be given just that. They’ll soon make themselves look or sound stupid.
As the votes were finally counted and reported, we realised that the effect might actually be overwhelmingly greater than we ever could have imagined. We opened the champagne and wondered exactly what havoc we’d caused to the British democratic system and constitution.
Once the last constituency’s results had been announced, it was clear that traditional politics had been annihilated.
This had been the biggest ever turnout for voting since the record was set at eighty-four per cent in 1950. The figure for this year was eighty-seven per cent – an astonishing fact in itself considering the last three elections had turnouts of around sixty per cent.
Then we saw the figures for the overall national votes cast:
Green Party – 7.1%
Conservative – 6.3%
Labour – 5.2%
Liberal-Democrats – 2.4%
Scottish National Party – 1.3%
Others – 0.7%
Spoiled Ballots – 77%
Per cent Seats
Green Party 7.1 200
Conservative 6.3 178
Labour 5.2 147
Liberal-Democrats 2.4 68
Scottish National Party 1.3 37
Others 0.7 20
Spoiled Ballots 77 -
TOTAL 100 650
It made no difference to the number of MPs in the House of Commons – just that some candidates won with only a few hundred votes to their name in a constituency of over 70,000 voters. It was clearly difficult for them to argue that they’d been given a political mandate.
Reports showed that the House of Commons now had two hundred Green Party MPs, which pleased us all greatly, but also two from a racist party, which sadly slipped through. But no one party had enough seats to form a majority government, so the squabbling and negotiating began in the knowledge that none of them were the true winners of this election.
Labour and the Greens began talking about some kind of coalition, but it turned into a ridiculous and undignified ‘bun fight’ in which nobody agreed or was willing to compromise. Finally, a compromise was made that also included the Lib-Dems: a real coalition, for what it was worth. The Gaia Foundation remained officially independent of all political parties and groups, but made it clear that it most closely aligned itself to the Green Party, which boosted that party’s membership massively.
Experts from the media and academic institutions called for a re-election, or even a referendum on electoral reform to seriously consider proportional representation and the use of single transferable votes, which to my mind seemed so much fairer than the outdated system so dominated by two parties. New Zealand and Germany used interesting electoral systems that we could learn from.
‘Falco for PM’. That became the dominant rallying cry from the general public. But it didn’t really make sense. I wasn’t an MP and I didn’t want to be.
Ala and the council began to push me that way. But I didn’t understand politics which seemed way too complicated to me, and dominated by intolerably dull meetings and evaluation of statistics and spreadsheets. That seemed to be the real problem: our country was run by accountants and bankers.
I once read about a brilliant system called ‘sortition’, used in ancient Athens and in Venice in the Middle Ages. It involved selecting random members of the public as leaders, in much the way that people are chosen for court jury service. They couldn’t be any worse than the professional politicians – let’s face it.
Although I didn’t want to be Prime Minister, I made it clear that I at least remained keen to discuss ideas about the environment, as well as about changes to our democratic system, with those in a position to make actual changes. If nothing else, I expressed a hope that this entire exercise might stop the complacency and arrogance of the existing politicians and make them realise that things must change. I felt confident that the message had been delivered, loud and clear.
The soone
r we have politicians in place who are no longer tied down by their party ideologies, the sooner we can have leaders who vote with their consciences and deliver laws that will actually protect our natural world, to keep us all alive.
The message was clear from the Gaia Foundation: this is a great start … but there’s still a long way to go.
Chapter Twelve
My life became dominated by crowds in huge numbers, and I don’t just mean my entourage of security and PR crew. It was impossible to keep my movements secret; either because of insider knowledge being leaked or because I was watched 24/7. A little of both perhaps?
I stupidly thought I’d be able to sneak into Wembley to see England play a friendly against Germany. I was in disguise and had flown to a place specified by Gene, who then drove to the stadium. Everything seemed to be going well as we reached our seats in the private VIP box, which had cost around £40,000. But just as the teams came out the tunnel, I heard a familiar chant: ‘Falco! Falco …!’ At kick-off it felt like more heads were looking at me than at the game. I felt bad that the fans were concentrating on me. To be fair, the game wasn’t that great and it was 0-0 at half-time, but when the second half got under way and the crowd were still calling for me to transform, I told Gene I wanted to leave, and he understood.
Because I didn’t fancy pushing through crowds, I decided to get away as swiftly as possible, which meant changing into Falco and flying off. I think my little escapade may have distracted the home team because, during the cheer as I ascended above the 133 metre-high arch, Germany scored the only goal of the game. Obviously I was blamed on the back pages of the tabloids the next day.
And, to make it worse, the clothes I left behind were sold on eBay for nearly a thousand pounds. I insisted the money went to charity, but the person deleted their obviously fake profile and pocketed the cash.
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