The only game in town – Viva!life 93

The whole world uses the same game plan – bit of a shame, really, because it’s destroying us

Featured in Viva!Life 93/Autumn 2025

What a strange species we are. When the first colonists set foot in Africa, they must have been overwhelmed by what they discovered. The people were black and adorned themselves with shells and feathers, beads and trinkets; their faces bore the neat scars of tribal markings and they were brave beyond measure.

In the savannahs and rainforests, the colonists encountered huge and powerful beasts, the likes of which they had never seen before and it must have filled them with wonderment, you would have thought. Their response was immediate. They sold over 12 million of these ‘godless’ people into slavery and shot the animals in prodigious numbers – so many did they kill that a special railway had to be built to carry elephant tusks down from the interior to the coast for transportation. Such quantity that the land itself was named the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire).

This blood-soaked and moral morass was reflected all over the globe. European settlers killed some 56 million indigenous people in South, Central and North America in a little over 100 years. In Australia, genocide was committed without a qualm and in Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land), colonists were given full permission to kill indigenous people. They turned it into sport as though careening across the South Downs – hunt and kill the ‘abo’.

I once happened across an old photograph in a book that showed a line of ‘gentlemen’ in their pith helmets, Sam Brown belts and jodhpurs smiling at the camera. At their feet were the severed heads of indigenous people, carefully arranged so they were all facing forwards, with an array of grotesque expressions on their faces. That was colonialism and the crime was probably nothing more than defying authority.

It mattered not which country the colonists came from; once they arrived in their captured colonies, they all behaved exactly the same, as if working from a universal template. They dispossessed and beat, captured, killed and subjugated and even dictated what crops should be grown – for Europe, not for the colony. Resources were stripped away and sent back home. Prolific butterflies were almost exterminated to provide a blue dye, beautiful birds were killed for feathers to adorn ladies’ hats, whales were taken to the brink for corset stays and blubber and in an almost Gadarene rush of destruction, animals of every kind were taken to the brink of extinction and beyond. And it continues!

Back in our home country, there was little opposition to this global rape, with parliament, church, crown, judiciary, media, aristocracy and military all marching in lockstep as they built their estates and town houses, financed factories and railways, while cultivating a middle class to administer and manage the processes and proceeds.

The money flowed in – but not for everyone. While the upper layers of society found ever-more extravagant ways to boast of their wealth, the bottom tier struggled to survive – children were sent up chimneys, down mines and into factories for pence or, as ‘apprentices’, nothing. Even skilled workers such as potters could barely stave off starvation and stealing a loaf of bread for your children could lead to the gallows or transportation for life. Labouring people in Britain were no better treated than those in the conquered colonies.

As a lad in the merchant navy, I was on a dirty old freighter in Takoradi when the Gold Coast gained its independence and became Ghana. Its leader, Kwame Nkruma, was demonised by the British government when all he was demanding was freedom from colonial rule. We fought spiteful, dirty little wars in what were Malaya, Rhodesia, Cyprus, Aden and other colonies in an attempt to stave off the inevitable demands for freedom and independence.

In the new Ghana, locals expected everything to change but nothing did as we still controlled their economy. They expected better prices for their cocoa beans and mahogany but didn’t get them. As a result, the families of cocoa farmers starved in a poor season and in a good season they just about survived. Whatever the season, it made no difference to the City of London dealer (and still doesn’t) who traded in Ghanaian cocoa beans. He still lived in the leafy suburbs, sent his children to fee-paying schools and drove a BMW.

So why am I trampling through our blood-stained history, picking off old scabs to see if they still bleed? Because nothing has essentially changed! This smash and grab philosophy has become so inculcated in society that there is no other game in town. It’s why every country’s success or failure is measured by its GDP – how much it produces (consumes), not how much it conserves.

Many of us look at the boorish, grasping, crude Mr Trump with his transparently fractured psychology and shudder, but we shouldn’t. He is us – and all the other colonists who have tried to strip the Earth bare in an orgy of greed. He does it with childish spite; we did it with cut-glass accents, old-boy’s networks and royal encouragement, but the end result is the same.

In front of this almighty, reactionary edifice stand we vegans – curiosities, outliers, oddballs. We are patronised and ridiculed, made fun of or patted on the head like wayward little children. Yet we know that livestock farming is the greatest threat to our planet – but they won’t listen. We know that compassion has to be given free rein if we are to progress as a species – they call that weakness. We know that the world has got it all wrong and change is essential – they call us snowflakes.

They probably know all this as well but their policy of ever-growing consumption, from which they draw their wealth and power, cannot be allowed to falter for if it does, the entire edifice comes crashing down and they have absolutely nothing to replace it with. The whole world has to rethink everything.

As all-consuming as a heroin addiction, they know they should stop but can’t, even though death and destruction may be beckoning from around the corner. And it is within this context that we have to see ourselves.

We are the modern soothsayers, participants in the most important rights movement the world has ever known because it is about survival – of everyone and everything. That’s how right you are, how important you are – and an increasing number of people recognise this. And it’s why Viva! will not give up the fight for life.