Questioning the Politics of Live Earth

On Saturday 7 July more than 150 of the worlds top musicians will be playing at Live Earth – pop concerts on all seven continents which aim to “use the global reach of music to engage more than two billion people in a call to action to combat the climate crisis.”

But James Panton, lecturer in politics at St John’s College Oxford and co-founder of the Manifesto Club, argues that rather than mobilising people in political action, Live Earth - like Live8 before it – is an example of the degraded state of politics today

Writing in this month’s Chatham House magazine, The World Today, Panton argues that politicians who are unable to generate authority and legitimacy through the political process are all too keen to jump on the pop-politics bandwagon.

Although the new prime minister Gordon Brown has recently claimed to be against the politics of celebrity, he was all for such politics around the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit, when the “ageing rockers Bono and Geldof seemed to be engaged in a very successful publicity exercise for Gordon Brown and the other G8 leaders.”

On the forthcoming Live Earth events Panton argues:

• “The problem is that as the realm of serious political debate contracts, pop concerts become a model for how politicians communicate with the public. Attending a charity event, or worse, even watching it on television, becomes a way in which the citizenry is encouraged to become more politically engaged. When the possibility of two billion people hearing a concert on radio comes to be understood as ‘engaging’ those people in a political action, then the Live Earth organisers have just received a quite exceptional mandate for their political campaign.”

To those who think that at least Live Earth will engage people in a political discussion about climate change, Panton argues that Live Earth will do nothing to engage the excluded or re-inspire the apathetic. On the contrary:

• “Pop concert politics is increasingly becoming the model on which all political debate is conducted: the sound bites are short and clear, and the moral message is unassailable, and the engagement required by the citizens is nothing more than nodding our heads and swaying to the music. The more this becomes the norm, the further away we move from practising the kind of politics that might really allow us to resolve whatever crises the natural world throws up for us.”

To read “Pop Goes Politics” and other Manifesto Club articles on climate change, go to www.manifestoclub.com/liveearth

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Notes to editors:
1. “Pop Goes Politics” by James Panton is the featured article in June issue of The World Today. It is available online; or on the Manifesto Club website as a PDF.
2. For media enquiries, or to arrange an interview with Panton, contact the Manifesto Club press office on +44 (0)7792 795 462 or email .
3. The Manifesto Club (www.manifestoclub.com) is a humanist campaigning network