Two cats in the yard
Over the years, I have been in debt to Neil Young, the American songwriter and performer with a social heart. (With David Lewis and Rick Gregory, I once published Trading the Silver Seed [1996] about aquaculture in Bangladesh.) It is time to use him again with "two cats in the yard." Angela, my wife, and I have had two cats in our house in Bath, with an interval between them. Fudge died of old age (19 years) in December 2023; I was in Bangladesh and grieved quietly. We acquired Clover in May 2024; I was in Bangladesh and rejoiced quietly.
But Fudge and Clover tell a story between them. In common, they were both rescue cats, formally adopted by us. Fudge reflected a strong story of security and happiness, including in the garden surrounded by other cats and wildlife (badgers, foxes, squirrels). She managed the cat flap well, so she could choose her outside and inside timings. And she delivered many presents of beheaded rats to thank us for being in her service. Clover, by contrast, was found as a stray, in a sad condition, at just over a year old. She was brought back to physical health by the rescue home before being adopted by us. But was she restored to mental health, after her feral period, abandoned in the streets of Bath? She is intensely wary, highly alert to danger, suspicious of the cat flap to the garden, nervous and on her guard outside, and she needs safe spaces inside for lengthy periods of introversion and sleep—her version of "under the duvet."
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. 
It occurs to me that this feline contrast is an allegory for our times, as we move into 2025 with many heightened uncertainties immediately ahead of us. Security undermined for the erstwhile comfortable, a need to be constantly alert, sniffing the winds, searching for the cues, strategising in the context of political lunacy globally, while watching our more national and local leaders needing to tread a narrowing path of options for our well-being and welfare. Bangladesh is on the frontline of these dilemmas, while the UK is also on a tightrope albeit at a higher general standard of living but with high inequalities and uncertain prospects with dangerous men (mainly men) lurking in the dark shadows of the dark web as well as neighbourhoods and corridors of power. There seems to be an overwhelming desire among near anarchic populations, an outcome of decades of alienating neoliberalism, to do harm to others. This desire in itself reflects inequalities—rich plutocrats controlling media platforms and tabloid newspapers to fire up street-level goondas with oversimple populist messages, to back up their divisive language with envious thuggery, frequently othering racial and ethnic minorities. Sometimes, this process appears as culture wars classifying thought and action between woke and anti-woke, the latter deploying the dystopia of free speech in an uber libertarian sense to attack inclusive common sense. In the UK at present, we are experiencing an exaggerated version of this process through a Californian plutocrat attacking the very people who have done the most to address child abuse over the last two decades, while displaying a weird combination of ignorance and some compulsive desire to disrupt and upend responsible discourse.
As we face this increasing prospect of right-wing autocracism around the world, so it seems these people will treat any part of the world as playthings, acting as bullies in the playground just for self-gratification. Panama, Greenland, Canada—nothing is off the table, just because you can, at the very least, intimidate and demonstrate your menace. Is it just narcissists showing off, needing to impress us with their toys, valorising their wealth, however gained, through anti-social teasing, just because they can? Is it this shallow, or can we find a deeper, more sinister purpose?
To be honest, with global inequality already so high and obvious, I am not sure there is much deeper self-interested purpose to be discerned. But the knock-on effects of these occupants of the pram, sensualising their short-lived power, are of course massively dangerous and consequential for the rest of us. Disaffected and alienated global brownshirts, vicariously living out the plutocratic dream through beating up people and their institutions. January 6, 2021, in Washington DC, was a case in point with no prospect of redress. The US Constitution, designed in a different era of genteel elites (albeit content with slavery or its Jim Crow version) who could never imagine a degenerate in the White House, cannot prosecute a sitting president. Has Donald Trump in effect brown-shirted the US? And does this liberate other puppets and protegees around the world to do likewise? It seems to have already given out that licence. The Southport killings of children in the UK last summer prompted riots all over the UK, mindlessly unconnected to those murders, but hitching a ride on racial othering before the identity of the perpetrator even emerged. Self-appointed vigilantes following plutocratic cues to terrorise grieving communities.
A reinforcing cause for concern is a recent poll among Gen Z and Millennials in Britain, which found that 21 percent agreed with the proposition that the best system was a strong leader without elections, contrasted to only eight percent above the age of 55. And this sentiment is strongest among men than women.
Where might we find the pushback to these tendencies? Where might a renewal of decency be found and nurtured? I have been reading Will Hutton's This Time Make No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain. The reference to "this time" is the incoming Labour and Starmer government with a big landslide—albeit more artificial this time than for Blair in 1997. Hutton writes for The Observer in the UK—a left-of-centre, influential newspaper among socially progressive thinkers and activists (rather like The Daily Star), and has long advocated pragmatic social democratic politics, steering a course between individualist neoliberalism and over-dogmatic collectivism. He is a pragmatist with a social conscience. He lays out the room for manoeuvre in the present world to offer security and decent work with hope via state leadership to invest in productivity while protecting those disrupted by the innovation and changing labour markets, which is embedded in even socially acceptable capitalism. His agenda is the pursuit of the Polanyian critique that while capitalism might provide the bulk of livelihoods, the humane principle of welfare supports for disrupted humans cannot be left solely to the commoditised labour market. There needs to be an element of decommodification through regulation and social insurance.
But as Bangladesh moves further into an industrialised and services economy, described by some like Debapriya Bhattacharya as the Fourth Industrial Revolution and away from the Faustian bargains of pre-capitalist agrarian relations, so the arguments encapsulated by Hutton will have more relevance and force for a country like Bangladesh. I would have his book on the reading list of any social science degree course around the world.
So, despite the gloom of advancing autocracism, I support the complex optimism of Hutton. He writes about the "We" society rather than the "I" society. Let us push these narcissistic disruptive forces to the margins and allow Clover, the new four-legged member of our household, the confidence to venture out with trust in the world around her to give her the secure space to be herself.
Dr Geof Wood is a development anthropologist and author of several books and numerous journal articles, with a regional focus on South Asia. He is also emeritus professor of international development at the University of Bath, UK.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Follow The Daily Star Opinion on Facebook for the latest opinions, commentaries and analyses by experts and professionals. To contribute your article or letter to The Daily Star Opinion, see our guidelines for submission.
Comments