The question is do you want serious cyber criminals, and whatever authoritarian government shows up at some point and starts tearing up the already increasingly authoritarian UK rule book (hi America) to have access to all communications? Should they have access to journalist’s sources, and other activists’ communications? Should cyber criminals have access to all financial data?

You don’t get one without the other. Encryption either works or it doesn’t. And you can certainly assume that dedicated nation state actors (who will and do work with people that do not want a liberal open society in countries across the world including the UK) will quickly develop the capability to circumvent any exploitable encryption.

In this case the increasingly authoritarian/data-totalitarian UK government and secret services has been trying to do it in secret. They want their eyes on everything at all times and damn the consequences for an open society. They sure are doing their bit to end the 20th century idea of a free, open, tolerant society I grew up being told existed.

Then again, I watched some sort of parliamentary enquiry more than a decade ago where somebody from gchq nonchalantly admitted they abuse UK citizen’s human right of privacy as a matter of course and everybody in the room just shrugged. It caused no ripple at all in the press. No doubt the likes of gchq face all sorts of threats we the public are not aware of, but they appear to operate with no checks and balances whatsoever, and they are playing right into the hands of extremists who want to see the end of an open society in order that their extreme views become more acceptable.

It must be said that personal privacy is a cornerstone of a civilised society. You either have that or you don’t. For many people, particularly those that pay attention to this stuff, we have already gone too far. There is a lot an individual can do to mitigate the intrusion of US tech corporations, but destroying encryption, in a world where so much can only be done online, affects everybody regardless of personal choices they have made. To try and do it in secret is even worse.

The biosphere is a metastable system. We are in the process of knocking it out of the state in which we have thrived, to something far less hospitable to human life. In the process so many of these fossil fuel reserves will burn. Various previous carbon sinks are already sources.

There is always a best and worse case scenario, so always a reason to take action, but a great deal of harm is already locked in.

Human ingenuity is a hell of a thing, but forget Musk’s always-an-obvious-con of colonising Mars, there is a much better chance (imho) that humans don’t survive re-colonising this new planet Earth over the coming centuries to millennia than travelling across the galaxy in what is, let’s face it, a Star Trek inspired fantasy.

The paradox of intolerance: tolerating intolerance immediately results in an intolerant society.

There are various paradoxes and limitations inherent to a socially liberal society (not including the obvious issues of capitalism) that have been exploited by billionaires, fascists, strongmen, religious nuts and many others.

You say Europe but your chart says the EU. Let’s not conflate the two.

People of Eastern European origin were used as scab labour, on the red tories watch, to undermine pay and conditions for UK based workers of whatever origin.

Which was a huge part of the anti-EU sentiment (in the Northern city I come from and lived in at the time) that led to brexit.

The bbc and billionaire owned media framed the debate as ‘liberalism’ (do they mean economic or social liberalism? Because they are two opposing things) against xenophobia, while omitting the stories of all of those people who had been hammered be their loss of pay and conditions. Framing and omission are the bbc’s (and other nation state information operations’) stocks in trade.

My guess is that it would take telling the blokes I grew up with “you’re racist” about three time (for complaining about the huge reduction in their quality of life caused by the importation of cheap Eastern European labour), before they turn around and say “ok, fuck you, where is the racist party for me to follow then?”

The sad thing is this response suits the same billionaires and establishment figures that put Farage on tv every week on politics tv shows for years despite having no MP’s in the first place.

“They do the jobs British people don’t want to do”. Actually we don’t want anybody doing those jobs for that pay. If you’ve said that take a look at yourself. Think.

The Northern city I used to live in grossly under-represented their homeless population. The rough sleepers who would try and sleep in the building I lived in fairly regularly outnumbered the official figures.

Why stop at the highlands? There are parts of various places including most of the home counties and London that would be much improved by the reintroduction of hundreds of wolves.

The US has always got the dollar-as-global-reserve-currency out of its military spending, which is a large part of how post second world war America accrued a huge portion of unearned global wealth. Trump, those that voted for him, and those that spent decades creating this situation for personal enrichment are rapidly hastening the end of this situation.

I’m not holding my breath either.

Maybe the way various entities have encouraged the US to embrace its worse impulses might offer a clue as to how global climate activists might be able to try and deal with the seemingly invincible fossil fuel empire.

To elaborate: the second election of Trump, and his and Musk’s actions only a month in have already severely harmed if not destroyed the trust the US needs for the world to continue to use the dollar as global reserve currency.

I don’t think Musk or Trump have the capacity for strategic thinking, or enough of an understanding of geopolitics or economics to understand what harm they have and are causing the US’s prospects over the mid to long term.

There are always best and worst case scenarios.

We are currently comprehensively losing the battle for 3C@2100 (which comes with increasingly harmful-to-devastating impacts in the intervening years and decades: future climate refugees will make the current not-far-off-a-London a decade seem like a picnic. A situation fascists will no doubt exploit).

It looks like the only way to prevent 4C plus and, a future Earth only described in science fiction, is mass civil disobedience.

But the UK government appears to be the worst in any civilised country in terms of squashing dissent, and most of the public appears to be more concerned with not being delayed on their commutes.