Alternative Editorial: Breaking Free Is Hard To Do
Week 36 of The Shift coincides with the first anniversary of Boris Johnson’s landslide win in the UK General Election. For any of us who need reminding, the promise which swung 43.6% of the electorate at the time was to ‘Get Brexit Done'. We were told that a trade deal was imminently doable with the right political will and that with a leap and a bound, we would be free of all constraints on our genius—Britannia Unchained.
Many, including us, were skeptical. Our sense was that the whole premise of Brexit was false because the voters – and possibly the government too – had not properly considered how it would put the Irish Peace Agreement in jeopardy. Without breaking international law, any new deal would be compromised, certainly falling far short of “taking back control” from Europe.
In addition, there is no such thing as a clean break. When units split up to form new relationships elsewhere, they take their deeply entangled history with them. Finding a new standing in the world is not simply a question of negotiation between two equal partners who care for each other. The energy required to break away successfully is different for the one leaving and the one trying to maintain equilibrium. Both have to become self-interested, in the moment of separation.
Today, just a fortnight away from the final deadline for a trade deal, the headlines show Britain with gunboats on stand-by to protect our fishing waters – gunboats! Having failed to win over the EU President Ursula Von der Leyen with his threat of robbing 40,000 people in the Belgian fishing industry of their livelihoods overnight, Johnson’s next strategy was to try and pick off French President Macron or German PM Angela Merkel in private deals with the UK. He never did understand the principle of unity
Meantime the proposed glossing-over of the border checks that will become necessary between Ireland and Northern Ireland is causing high level anxiety in Ireland and also the USA. Bad luck for Boris that Donald Trump was not re-elected: he loves stronger borders.
Going into 2021, the British people continue to experience an existential limbo. They are internally divided on their new identity, and on the behaviour of their leaders. Somewhat like children forced to support one parent over another in the breakdown of a marriage.
Johnson feeds all the cliched metaphors, as if Britain were an older man wanting to abandon his responsibilities and restrictions, imagining that escape would return him to his youth and vigour. Yet not understanding his interdependency with the family he remains proximate to.
Or is he fully aware of the rationale behind declarations of Brexit “sovereignty”, which is to create an undercutting and deregulated Singapore-on-Thames, buccaneering and prospering off the coast of a stuffy, fearful EU? Or chaotically, a weave of both?
This may seem uncharacteristically party political from The Daily Alternative. Not so. The dysfunctional relationship between Boris Johnson and the wider public is not exclusive to the Conservative Party, but a feature of party politics more broadly. In particular here, we’re drawing attention to ambitious promises made by politicians and their ability to deliver on them.
This is not simply a question of competence and capacity – whether governments are smart enough or have the resources available to fulfil their manifesto. It’s as much to do with their emotional state: their willingness to say whatever is needed to continue leading from the front and keep the crowd. In this they are aided and abetted by a mainstream news media who exploits the battle of narratives within a business model of ‘anxiety sells papers/drives clicks’.
Looking back at the General Election, did the Labour Party also fall foul to this battle of narratives, making promises that were more like dream catchers? Maybe.However, the trick to getting votes, it seems, is to stay within what’s broadly accepted as possible, even if that possibility is an illusion. Because in reality Corbyn’s intention to move towards a greener, devolved, tech-enabled future was – and still is - more do-able than getting Brexit done easily and painlessly. Yet after a decade of austerity, few believed it.
What is the alternative, even at this moment? Is it possible to exempt oneself from the turbulence and forge a wholly new kind of reality as we face the imminent collapse of our security? Or are such moves—towards independent resilience—something that was happening anyway, triggered by the bigger picture of climate crisis and social injustice that has been accelerating over the past decade.
In many ways this move into a new autonomy – whether asked for or not – is being reflected all the way through our system, like ripples in a pond. The Alternative UK’s trajectory starts with taking back control of the media narrative by giving our attention not to the 2% Westminster agenda, but to the 98% social-political agenda outside of party politics.
Within that we see smaller nations – Scotland, Wales – or regions such as Devon forging independent visions for the future. And within that, towns and cities seizing back control of their decision making processes through citizen assemblies, peoples’ assemblies and popular take-overs of the council. And within that, millions of individual people taking back control of their own minds, through meditation, self-development or forging new identities on-line.
But while the move away from the old system has a clear energy of rejection, the challenge of integration with a new one is more complicated. The landscape is less familiar and our ability to be seen and heard within it has to be forged. On the one hand, the many different kinds of move towards autonomy described above are not working together as a coherent whole system shift: they may even look like competing interests to those taking part.
Does a Citizens Assembly, while clearly an enhancement of our current threadbare democracy, create a false sense of participation when it really only requires a hundred or thousand people to be active (perhaps a problem for the Global Assembly to consider, as blogged in the DA this week)? Does direct digital democracy circumvent the vital importance of people coming together to make relationship and build trust? Does taking over the council – as hundreds are planning to do in a Flatpack Democracy campaign in 2021 – diminish the genuine autonomy of the community in regenerating the future?
On the other hand, stepping back from the old deal could also mean releasing ourselves from the zero-sum game altogether. Instead of looking at how one innovation could be better than another, the real opportunity might be to look at each of them as part of an eco-system of changes occurring at different levels, each expressing a different form of agency. While the ideal for some is collaboration or even co-creation, others thrive on autonomy: both co-exist in our society.
What’s more, both kinds of agency exist within each of us personally: autonomy and belonging are both core emotional drives for every human. As we develop our psycho-social sense of ourselves, these two impulses are more easily seen as compatible, even interdependent. We become whole not through simplifying our sense of ourselves, but through better integrating our complexities.
As we move towards the year’s end we’ll be asking some of our co-creators to look back over 2020 and forward to 2021 and invite you to do the same. While you do so, consider how you felt after the results of last year’s general election came in and how you feel now.
Consider that what looked like an unexpected majority giving Johnson the freedom to do whatever he wanted turned out to be a poisoned chalice, making him responsible for every failure of our outdated system. Consider how the shocks of this first year of ‘the most important decade of our lifetime ' could accelerate exponentially as more and more people wake up to our reality and step into the ring, hoping to make a difference.
What is now possible?