Alternative Editorial: 2020 Was A Game Changer

Banksy, 'Game Changer', 2020 Banksy/Instagram @banksy

By Pat Kane and Indra Adnan, Co-initiators of The Alternative UK.

We end the first year of the 2020s as Week 38 of The Shift -  a term that has taken on different kinds of significance over time. Today the media is marking at once the ‘taking back control’ of our national administration from Brussels and the loss of control by our government over the pandemic. Britain is re-entering into the international sphere as an independent agent, bringing its own new variant of the virus with it.

As far as global narratives go, this one is challenging, especially for the four nations within Britain who are increasingly pulling away from Westminster. But is that the whole story? We take the opportunity of this last editorial of the year to look back with an Alternative UK archive to hand.

Covid-19 (or in our preferred tag of the year, coronavirus) shook everyone’s assumed frameworks and norms. A/UK found itself perhaps a little more ready for these disruptive lockdowns than others: we’ve been connecting the power of locality and community, with planetary crises of climate, economy and technology, for some years now. 

In the first few months we reported on how mutual aid structures and volunteer armies were beautifully and spontaneously forming; on how resources - from food to entertainment - were being gathered together as commons and in networks; on how medical tech was being cosmo-locally sourced and micro-manufactured. 

There are already some powerful statements emerging about the lasting “shifts” and “resets” that might be a consequence of the coronavirus. “Looking after each other better, more space for people and nature, living with less stuff”, as one survey put it. Or take the leading answer (by far, well over 50%) in a poll covering responses to the aftermath of Covid: “I hope to change some things about my life and I hope we will have learned about this crisis as a country” (only 9% wanted the status quo ante). 

We tried to capture these shifts in two main initiatives. Firstly, our digital app called Before & Now, which compiled hundreds of comparisons (short but often poetic) from the public, on how Covid was shaping their lives. 

And secondly, in our locked-down, online communing with communities in Plymouth. We used every bit of tech and facilitation we could find, to express the resilience of our participants. This resulted in our report for the Local Trust, A New Story of Us. This contains much rich testimony, which we also mapped to some future scenarios composed by the Long Crisis Network. Both these initiatives reinforced the general sense that communities were finding new strengths in their responses to the pandemic.  

Our editorials—at least in the first half of their text—kept an eye on the dispiriting headlines generated by our current UK government’s (and other administrations’) handling of the Corona-crisis. But in the second half of these editorial blogs, we habitually amassed all the many alternative practices that could serve communities better - like coming together as a whole local system to provide better levels of social and economic security; or identifying already existing community webs as potential CANs (citizen action networks / community agency networks), strengthening ties and pooling services. 

Another response to Covid (and indeed, to the challenge of a broken politics in general), in both our website and our networking, has been to open ourselves up to global inspirations. Indra’s work with various planet-level fellow travellers - including the Bounce Beyond group, building a new paradigm of “next economies - has run like a warm murmur behind our more UK-focused responses. In addition, an ongoing project on the future of politics hosted by the integral group Leadership for Transition has kept us strongly related to our European colleagues.

This global networking has brought us into contact with “neighborocracy” in India, the global conversation of Humanity Rising, the amazing world-level curations of Atlas of the Future. The world is constantly coming up with people-centred solutions to its problems - and we see part of our task as bringing them to these shores, as well as connecting up these communities of practice.

One practice that seemed obvious to pursue, in this shifted and locked-down year, was all the social and conceptual possibilities of the Zoom (or online) video meeting. Our “The Elephant Meets…” series gathered together voices who were united in seeing the need for massive systems change - and had the ambition and tools to contribute their piece. 

As the pandemic intensified around us, and the various “elephants in these rooms” got bigger and more difficult to handle, these Tuesdays produced some intense digital communions. See in particular our talks with wellbeing economist Katherine Trebeck, Black Lives Matter and arts activist Sabra Williams, Civic Square’s Imandeep Kaur, and Open:Coop's finance radical, Olly Sylvester-Bradley.

It would be no surprise if the upheavals of Covid sustained The Daily Alternative’s attention for an entire year. Indeed, when we relaunched the site for our third year almost on the very day that pandemic conditions were announced. But if we look at our category and tag clouds, “environmentalists” and “climate crisis” are either first or second on the list (though as this blog made clear, Covid has very deep roots in our disruption of the biosphere, through extractive agribusiness models). 

Exactly how the drastic urgency of climate statistics are presented seem to have been a concern to us this year - see these examples. We’ve also had an appetite in 2020 for very positive news on renewable energy generation (see this on solar (here and here too), batteries, and oil as a “stranded asset”. 

Suffice it to say that the crisis of politics and democracy that instigated The Alternative UK in the first place has hardly abated since March 1st, 2017 - and certainly not in this year. 

Our advocacy and consultancy around Extinction Rebellion bore fruit in the birth of Trust The People, a development and training body for radical local democrats, instigated by some of XR’s rising talents. They aim to support Flatpack Democracy’s run at a range of local council seats in May 2021, who intend to bring their independent-minded, citizen-oriented political habits to a range of councils (see Peter Macfadyen’s guest editorial). 

“Democratic innovation” is one of our most richly stacked blog categories in 2020. And on that theme, we should alert you to A/UK’s Indra Adnan and her forthcoming book in 2021, The Politics of Waking Up, early blog versions of which were trailed here. We were also delighted to report another literary outcome from A/UK in 2020 - ad-man Phil Teer’s book The Coming Age of Imagination, his creative manifesto for a universal basic income, which was instigated by his presentation at our opening event in 2017. 

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So does all this activity add up to a different outlook on 2021 than what we are reading in the mainstream press? Yes. Less in terms of whether we are feeling positive or negative about the months ahead – like everyone, we are feeling both. More in terms of why we are feeling either of these emotions and where our energies are invested.

No-one can look back at 2020 without feeling grief for those who suffered. More than that, the events – Covid, Trump, Brexit, Black Lives Matter – triggered a much bigger awareness of the pain of decades, even centuries of injustice suffered without acknowledgement by so many. We are living in an era of waking up to the dysfunction of our socio-economic-political systems worldwide that have led us to the brink of self-destruction as a human race.

So we cannot celebrate the prospect of a return to normal behaviours, particularly the call to increased consumption of goods and energy to re-boot the growth economy. Nor the new-found independence of Britain from Europe that may serve to undo the many achievements of the European Union, working together to create peace and shared prosperity over the past half-century.

But we can celebrate a much bigger and wider picture of the accelerating evolution of individual and collective human ingenuity and agency, noticeable on the margins of the mainstream that we’ve been documenting. The evidence of new levels of self-awareness in behaviour and attitude being shared through our social media; the new forms of collective action and community resilience in the face of the collapse of old-school authority: the new conscious story-telling about human capacity and capability - all have been amplified in the Daily Alternative this past year.

Our sense that, at this time, there is something to believe in gets stronger the more we immerse ourselves in the action. We find ourselves working alongside those that either have no choice - or are so inspired by the possibilities they are running with them. Our invitation to you this coming year 2021 is to commit to what is possible – even before it is probable. Without being blind to the entropy of a system we are still occupying, fix your gaze on the better one we see arising.

Help us to keep going – and expanding - by donating the price of a disposable mask every month to our media fund. In return, we will do our best to help you feel what British poet William Wordsworth felt about the early days of the French Revolution: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. But to be young [at heart, we would say] was very heaven.” 

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