A resilient people want a fairer, greener UK after COVID, says Reset report. But will the media even report this?
From The Intercept, “Could a Green New Deal Make Us Happier?”
Some great opinion-surveying being done by progressives and others at the moment. Yet the challenge is to get these sentiments confirmed in the hearts and minds of wider audiences. It’s not easy to do.
The RESET exercise - boasting 55,000 responses to its surveying across the UK, as part of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on a Green New Deal - came out with these kinds of headlines last week:
57% back some form of guaranteed monthly income, and two-thirds a jobs guarantee
An overwhelming majority of the public, more than 82%, think delivery drivers and supermarket workers, should have better working conditions;
More than 90% of the public think that people working in the NHS and care workers should have better working conditions, and more than 70% of the public think that nurses and carers should be paid more
65% of the public want rent caps so that housing is affordable for all
82% of people who were able to work from home full time or more of the time during the pandemic want many of the changes initiated under lockdown to be made permanent: they want the flexibility of working from home where safe and possible
Half the population support a shorter working week so that available work can be shared more fairly;
Participants in our workshops want more vibrant neighbourhoods where their needs can be met without having to travel for the essentials of life;
Participants in our workshops want less traffic and more time to contribute to their local communities;
Participants in our workshops want to be able to give back to the society they feel part of. As one participant put it: “if you give us time, a lot of people would give back.”
More here, and more from the Guardian report.
Also last, our colleague Alex Evans at Collective Psychology produced a survey of COVID social phenomena, aiming to map our “Collective Resilience” - the ways we’ve preserved our mental health and balance during these incredibly testing times.
They point to ten examples:
Arts and creativity – from pop-up public art to TikTok dance trends, and from pandemic poetry to a baking craze that drove the price of yeast up by more than 6,000%, people have found joy and meaning in the arts and creativity. UCL’s study of 70,000 adults’ mental health during the pandemic found that 22% were engaging more with arts during the lockdown period than usual, and that engaging in creative activities – art, gardening, hobbies, reading fiction – was the single most helpful activity for people’s well-being.
Family and relationships – the lockdown forced us apart, but also brought us closer together. In one survey, 25% of parents said the lockdown had brought them closer to their children, while only 5% said it had made relations worse. Young people were the worst hit by loneliness, but also the most connected online. And neighbourhoods became closer knit too: in the UK, 64% of adults felt that their communities had ‘come together to help each other’ during the crisis.
Religion, philosophy and meaning-making – Google searches for prayer reached their highest ever level during the pandemic. Young people reconnected with their inherited faiths through a wave of online religious observance, and one in five Brits say they turned to psychology and philosophy to find meaning during the crisis. All over the world, people came together to reflect on the lessons of the crisis and how it could ultimately lead to positive changes.
Nature and green space – one survey suggested that 63% of people felt more connected to nature during lockdown; a boom in cycling has led to calls for the redesign of cities to make them more bike-friendly; seed shops sold out as people around the world started gardening; and the sudden improvement in emissions and air pollution globally have shown us what rapid cuts look and feel like.
Games and sports – this was the lockdown of gaming, with sales of games consoles so high they had a tangible effect in pushing up UK inflation. People found peace in Animal Crossing, connected to each other with quiz nights, and logged on to online fitness and yoga classes, underlining the extent to which play becomes more important than ever in times of stress.
Volunteering and mutual aid – at least 6,000 new mutual aid groups appeared around the world during the pandemic according to the Mutual Aid Wiki (with the true figure likely to be far higher). They’ve supported people emotionally and materially when governments have failed, played a vital role in helping people to recover from and learn about Covid-19, and given individuals and communities alike a sense of agency and empowerment at a hugely challenging time.
Activism – from public demonstrations of support for key workers to the Black Lives Matters protests, youth-led campaigning on rebuilding after Covid-19, and new activism in schools, the pandemic has provided the back- drop to a resurgent wave of political education and willingness to think very differently about the future.
Education and learning – Over a billion children were out of school because of the pandemic. In some cases, teachers self-organised to provide them with online classes; many more young people turned to informal online learning during the lockdown, with MITx online courses receiving over half a million enrollments. And the pandemic has provoked fresh thinking on further education, which could ultimately help to solve pre-existing problems in student mental health.
Employment – the pandemic has turned our working lives upside down, with millions working from home, many more on furlough – and a rising tide of unemployment, with joblessness in the US alone almost quadrupling from March to June 2020. New approaches have emerged in working patterns, in how companies have supported employees, in a fresh emphasis on work with purpose and in new thinking on work and welfare.
Grief and trauma – people had to develop new ways to say goodbye to loved ones at both the bedside and the graveside, while health workers and Covid patients have faced high levels of trauma. But there was also a renewed sense of meaning and transcendence among health workers: so- called ‘post-traumatic growth’. And the crisis has also created an opportunity for a fresh and more holistic approach to trauma treatments.
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
The report then makes ten recommendations from those:
Looking beyond therapy and medication. We should resist the temptation to pathologise mental health, or to assume that therapy or medication are the only tools we have for supporting it. Instead, the pandemic has shown the value in a both/and approach that emphasises community approaches alongside clinical ones.
Looking for meaning and purpose, not just happiness. In an ‘age of emergency’, we will inevitably face shocks and stresses that test and challenge us. As we attempt to measure mental health, we should look at the potential for living purposeful, meaningful lives even in conditions of adversity, rather than looking exclusively at hedonic measures of happiness.
Taking a whole person, whole society approach. If mental health is about whole-person flourishing rather than just the avoidance of mental ill-health, then we need to recognise that all areas of policy and social life are relevant: not just healthcare but arts, transport, food, education, homes, green spaces, work and welfare, social care and more.
Recognising inner and outer as two sides of the same coin. Cov- id-19 has highlighted the many ways in which external factors – lockdowns, job losses, deaths – impact our inner worlds. Conversely, our states of mind affect the state of the world, too: for instance in how we become more prone to conspiracy theories or extremist views when we feel threatened. These feedback loops between inner and outer are crucial, and too often ignored.
Building bridges between faith groups and mental health. 84% of people globally are religiously affiliated and regard their faith as a key foundation of their mental health. As religious observance continues to decline rapidly in many developed countries, new scope is emerging for a mutually enriching conversation between mental health practitioners and faith leaders.
Deepening links between higher and adult education. Covid-19 offers the chance for a long overdue rethink of what higher and adult education are for and what the sector can offer. In particular, there is scope for more partnerships between higher education institutions and communities, and new emphasis on lifelong learning as a way of building resilience.
Supporting the cultural safety net. The arts can help us find healing, connection and meaning, especially during a crisis. But the economic impacts of the virus are devastating the arts ecosystem. Societies need to find ways to support the arts which reach beyond the biggest and highest profile organisations, and focus much more on local, participatory projects.
Building on the appetite to reconnect that Covid-19 has created. Covid-19 has shown the deep yearning for connection and belonging that exists, especially in the west – and how much positive change can happen when a crisis gives people permission to reach out. This could be the start of an important process of healing and reconnecting if this momentum is maintained and built on.
Making mutual aid the start of something bigger. Relatedly, it will be crucial not to lose the hugely valuable wave of thousands of self-organised mutual aid groups that have sprung up all over the world. Actors who want to support them – funders, governments, businesses – need to start by listening to them, and need to adopt a ‘first do no harm’ approach.
Never waste a good crisis. Covid-19 has created much willingness to think the unthinkable, including in politics – where ideas such as defunding police, ending mass incarceration, or introducing a Universal Basic Income or shorter working week have all gained new salience. All these ideas are deeply relevant to mental health. But there is also a real risk that the political space that has opened up may close down just as fast if this moment of crisis and opportunity is wasted.
Yet what strikes us is how, and where, any of these messages mighty publicly land. With commercial newspapers under such an establishment grip, and mainstream/regulated broadcasters like BBC, ITN and Sky often reacting supinely to government influence (the BBC is particularly vulnerable at the moment).
In the LRB, the political theorist William Davies writes to warn us that if a Fox-News-style service get permission to launch in the UK, it will have its polarizing, culture-wars agenda set out for it:
A British equivalent of Fox News, wherever it may come from, would have its own distinctive character – less evangelism and more Elgar, fewer guns and more poppies – but the commercial and political logic would be the same.
The ratings for Fox News’s live coverage in October 2018 of what Trump referred to as the migrant ‘caravan’ travelling from Mexico exceeded the peak pre-election ratings of October 2016. This year in the UK, Nigel Farage, by dint of the zero-budget method of tweeting from the White Cliffs of Dover, managed to lure teams of news reporters out into the English Channel to capture live footage of asylum seekers in dinghies. Think about what could be done with a dedicated TV news team.
The conservative press and its online outliers (such as Breitbart and Spiked) have already done the job of establishing the issues that suck in attention: traditions being ‘banned’, identities ‘threatened’, histories ‘rewritten’.
The notion of a ‘woke’ conspiracy linking universities, the BBC, the Remain campaign and what the Home Office recently referred to as ‘activist lawyers’ is too popular and too lucrative to be abandoned, no matter what policy reforms may be made to broadcasting, higher education or immigration.
If anything, this monster thrives on an absence of effective policy, which nourishes the sense that ‘the people’ are still having their wishes obstructed by unelected elites.
All the more important, then, to protect and sustain media initiatives like the Daily Alternative. Just about every day since March 1st, 2017, we have aimed to provide citizens and agents with a world of practical, inspirational and viable “alternatives”, to truly take control of their lives and localities.