Alternative Editorial: Another Reality
Erik Johansson, 'Impact'
Week 37 of The Shift and our world is increasingly surreal. Boris Johnson has turned into that pantomime character that names the one thing it would be impermissible to do – I would never cancel Christmas, it’s inhuman! – and then does it.
Where does that leave the general public? Feeling foolish again, for falling for that same trick – the one that invited us into Johnson’s warm embrace, believing we humans all want the same thing? That whatever happened, the desire for families to be together should be honoured, each at their own risk?
Or are we just anguished that Johnson didn’t think far enough ahead and had to be corrected by the scientific advisors, who are themselves now resorting to ganging up and shouting at the PM.
The more generous will think that Johnson is only ‘all too human’ for trying to make us happy. The less generous will wonder if he ever understood the difference between running a media outlet and running the country. Audience approval and instant gratification is not enough: a PM cannot afford to lose credibility like a soap opera star.
The surreal nature of our current reality has all the marks of a B movie: a party-political system that allowed an undeliverable Brexit referendum to crash at the worst possible moment. Just as Johnson is allowing the possibility of a No-Deal Brexit, against the wishes of the majority of business owners, the COVID crisis has shut down all of our ports one month earlier than even the worst case scenario in December.
What could be more excruciating than the memory of the Leave campaign promising to ‘take back control’, even as the scientists are telling us the virus is ‘out of control’. It’s like the script of an Avengers movie where only a whole posse of super-heroes could step into the breach together to have any hope of saving us.
At the same time, we might be grateful that the drama is playing out before our eyes. Those who have understood the urgency of our environmental crisis might be encouraged by the evidence that, given the spectacle of the human lives at stake, the government is putting them first.
This is not Trump’s America with a government in denial, willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives to gain popularity. Instead, business as usual has been sacrificed for the security of people in their homes.
Because, while the current numbers are shocking, they won’t compare to the numbers at stake when the climate crisis takes hold in the decades to come. We need to remake our economy now, with all that we learnt this year in mind.
But let’s stay for a moment with the thought of this extreme set of circumstances, coming together to illustrate the inadequacy of our systems of care and self-management. Although the virus could be seen as coming out of the blue, giving us a challenge we’ve had to improvise with as we go along, the higher performance of other countries facing the same challenge belies that notion there was nothing we could have done.
The more credible story is that our government played this badly. If this was indeed a movie and you were the writer/director, how would you write the next few scenes?
If you imagine a cavalry riding in now, who would be on those horses? What is there for them to do and how do they get permission and resources to start? How would you describe the route to people’s safety in a way that doesn’t tempt them to become rule breakers? How could you offer them comfort and belonging even when they cannot see their families?
How would you remake relationships with our immediate neighbours in Europe quickly enough to ensure we have supplies of food and medicine to see us through the most difficult of times?
Can any of us imagine a political solution to these challenges? Could Keir Starmer or Caroline Lucas make it better for us? It’s unlikely, given they are part of the same Parliament that has presided over this long drawn out catastrophe: they would still be in hock to the same set of limitations in trying to solve it.
At The Alternative UK we are taking the Buddhist get-out clause: meaning, if we had a better socio-political system, we would never have got ourselves into this position in the first place.
If we had a proportional voting system we would not find ourselves so lacking in the collective political will to face our environmental crisis – in truth, the biospheric source of the COVID pandemic.
If every citizen had a means of participation in the decisions made about public services at a local or municipal level, we would not have found ourselves with the lowest number of beds per head of population in Europe.
If our communities had not been so divided by the oppositional culture of our party politics, amplified by the media, we would have built far more spaces of relationship and trust in which to find belonging throughout the lock-down.
In other words, if each of us as citizens had more responsibility in how we run our lives collectively, we would not now be in the incapable hands of a small group of people who didn’t fix the roof while the sun was shining.
This afternoon we were on a Zoom call with a young Spanish student who was bemoaning the loss of the UK from the European Union. Yet as we were talking, we realised that no amount of treaty ending or deal-breaking going on between the governments of France, Germany and the UK, could threaten the friendship everyone in the call had for each other.
Even as politicians signal the end of an era, there is no end to the relationships between us—any more than a child leaving home means the end of the family. In that sense, at least, each of us remains responsible for our own identity.
Similarly, after a year like this one, where we have been subjected to the net results of the failings of our political system so acutely, each of us is free to continue to be in thrall to that authority—or not. Without deviating from the rule of law and the recommendations from our scientists, each of us is free to take responsibility for the future from now by moving into a closer relationship with our community.
We are free to reimagine and build the alternative sociopolitical system that will give us agency as citizens. One that will steer us away from a much greater planetary catastrophe than the one 2020 will be remembered for.
