THESE aren’t the changes Bob Dylan was calling for. His was a “get out of the way” message from a generation eager for more optimistic, transformative and inclusive change. There’s no such optimism to be found in today’s upheavals. Meanness and madness occupy the centre stage of global politics.

The bully-boy tactics of Donald Trump, JD Vance and Elon Musk are creating a trail of destruction and insecurity that is rapidly trashing “the old world order.” Many would argue it needed trashing, but not to make way for something so much worse. This, though, is the world we are faced with and these are the politics that urgently need a-changin’.

In doing so, if there is one core message to be understood, particularly by Britain’s Labour government, it is this: the answer to a playground bully is never to suck up to them, never to go looking for smaller kids to pick on.

Either directly or indirectly, singly or collectively, you have to stand up to the bully and isolate them. Mark Carney is beginning to do so in Canada. Some of Australia’s and Europe’s political leaders are doing the same. But defiance isn’t enough. New solidarities (and simplicities) are needed. For these aren’t just random acts of vanity.

Project 2025 and the NRx

Behind the daily barrage of Trump’s executive orders lies a scary but well-honed plan. In practice, it isn’t that different from Hitler’s plan in the 1930s. This one, however, isn’t designed to rectify a nation’s weakness but to dismantle its strength. Trump is merely the front guy. Behind him is a group of well-funded reactionaries loosely referring to themselves as the Neo-Reactionary Movement (the NRx).

A little-known character called Curtis Yarvin is credited as being their “thought leader” but, in practice, it is driven by more recognisable figures, usually referred to as the Tech Bros. These IT-autocrats have decided that the democratic state is past its “sell-by” date. It needs dismantling, not reforming. In its place, they offer a model of techno-feudalism, towards which Trump serves as a convenient conduit.

As Yarvin described it, their real aim is “to destroy the nation-state and the constitutional order and replace them with a new privately owned corporate state, to be run by a CEO-dictator. Citizens become subjects owned by the state — ‘state slaves’ — because ‘everything rots when it has no owner — human beings included.’”

Scary stuff. But the whole roller-coaster of Trump’s tariff wars is to accelerate this instability and disintegration. The key is to have an alternative, not an appeasement plan.

Climate crises to the rescue

Perversely, the climate crisis offers the best alternative to neofeudalism. Radically (and rapidly) cutting our carbon emissions means ditching free-trade delusions anyway. Tomorrow’s sustainable economics will have to revolve around locality and reciprocity. And we can be better off for it. Let’s go through a few examples.

Tim Lang (professor of Food Policy at London University) wrote a Guardian article called “How would you cope if the food ran out?” (March 13 2025). His short answer is “Britain wouldn’t.” Free trade fanatics always insisted there was an abundance of food “out there.”

Britain didn’t have to worry about producing enough for ourselves. But now we do. We’ve had a year in which wild weather events trashed everyone’s crops and harvests. Food prices soared, not because of wage inflation but crop destruction. Britain will have to cut a new deal with its farmers; one that increases production and cuts carbon emissions at the same time... a big challenge.

Cutting food miles will be one element. Britain’s regions may have to follow the likes of Liege, whose “food-land belt programme” plans to supply 50 per cent of the region's food needs within the next five years. To do so, Liege has funded the growth of farmers’ co-operatives, delivering a more joined-up approach to security of supply.

Elsewhere in Europe, a raft of cities are investing in innovative urban agriculture schemes, all of which bring food growing back into popular culture. Then the process of storing and sharing begins to spread; first locally, then regionally, then beyond. Britain will rediscover that such security rests within a more integrated, European, culture; one that addresses food security as it also defends democracy.

Back to the future

While this is going on, Britain could turn Trump’s tariff blitzkrieg on steel exports to our advantage. Labour has set challenging new housing targets for every area of the country. But if we aren’t careful, these will replicate yesterday’s housing follies and compound tomorrow’s problems.

Only one new development in Britain has been found to revolve around public transport infrastructure rather than private car ownership. Developers don’t care about all the air pollution, traffic congestion, road accidents and carbon emissions that follow. It doesn’t have to be like this. Elsewhere in Europe, new developments are being planned around public transport infrastructures rather than private car ownership.

Protected rail or tram links are required for new developments, along with localised EV bus services. It is a framework delivering more localised economic activity and more integrated public transport to underpin it. So let Trump tax Britain’s steel exports, we can use the steel better ourselves.

All the skill sets needed for an era of clean, integrated public transport provision would revitalise the economy far more than any misplaced obsession with exports. And if Labour wants to take the 1 million currently unemployed young people into the workforce, let us at least give them decent jobs and skills for the journey.

But how would we pay?

One of the saddest follies the Treasury has saddled Labour with is the notion that, in an economic crisis, the poor must make do with less. The opposite is true. The poor are the most patriotic of spenders. They don’t have offshore bank accounts, foreign property holdings or luxury yachts to sail off in.

Their spending fuels the local money-go-round, keeping others in work (and paying taxes). What the poor don’t have are the job opportunities that allow them to be contributors and not just consumers. To do so Britain needs a genuine Green New Deal, not another round of benefit cuts. To pay for it, you chase wealth, not welfare. The sources are vast.

The top 100 on Britain’s Rich List have seen their wealth increase six-fold in the last 25 years. Amazon gets away with paying next to nothing in UK taxes by using offshore accounting tricks. Polluting industries demand public subsidies to clean up the mess they make. And when profiteers run public utilities into unsustainable debt to feed their hunger for dividends, they call for taxpayers to bail them out. These are the real welfare scrounges Britain should be chasing.

The answer

Go back to the start. How democracies face down Trump, and the more sinister NRx movement, involves a collision with wealth, not welfare. Ignore screams that the rich will all leave if you do. Clear them from the corridors of power. Reconfigure the clarion call — “No representation without taxation.”

And should the rich flee, revisit Margaret Thatcher’s sequestration programme, where she chased miners’ assets all around the globe, claiming them “in the national interest.” We must do the same to the Tech Bros. Today’s isn’t a challenge we can run from. You can’t meet Trump halfway and believe his word has any meaning beyond the moment. He is more transient than transactional.

But the real significance of both Trump and those assembled behind him is their unique threat to both democracy and to climate survival. Some politicians have warned about the former. Climate scientists warned about the latter. But we’ve ignored them all. So we’re left with the starkest wake-up call of all. Common ownership or owned by Musk? It ought to be an easy choice, but, as the man said:

If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you’d better start swimming
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the Times they are a-changin’.