On June 16th 2016 – just over five years ago - Jo Cox was murdered by a constituent while going about her work as an MP, just a week before the referendum on UK membership of the EU was due to take place. Her murderer cited her decision to vote Remain as the ‘cause’ for his actions, although Europe itself had little or nothing to do with his hatred. That act was the trigger for the birth of The Alternative UK nine months later.

We were not set up as a protest party, angry with the distorted view of humanity that every element of this tragedy reflected (although that might have been a rational response. After all, how else can an alternative view of society be championed if it doesn’t arise within a political narrative and give people a chance to vote in its favour?)

However, for those familiar with the first past the post system we have here, it’s clear we would be wasting our time with party politics). Without a proportional system, where every vote goes towards a fair allocation of seats, even the English Green Party could not get more than one seat after 20 years of trying.

Instead, we set up as a new political platform to invite exploration into the question ‘if politics is broken, what’s the alternative?’ As we saw it, UK party politics is designed to cause division, sometimes extreme polarisation within a nation, a community – in the case of Brexit, even within families. Consequently, one half of the polity is actively invested in the failure of the other half – not a condition that leads to collective flourishing.

But given that this binary, oppositional culture is deeply embedded in our power structures – Left v Right, Us v Them – where could we look for change to begin? This is the central question we were asking when we began the work of CANs.

On Friday, another MP, Sir David Amess, was murdered in broad daylight, again stabbed by one of his constituents. Although very little is known yet about the circumstances and motivation, the news media is quickly linking it to Islamist terrorism – possibly because the protagonist has a Somali background.

Almost immediately Jo Cox’s sister, who recently won the seat her sister previously held, reported that her husband wanted her to quit politics for fear of the constant dangers MPs face by being the image of power in turbulent times. And indeed a lot of the media reaction points at the ‘dangerous public space’ MPs hold their surgeries.

Given our origination, what have we learnt over the past five years that is in any way relevant here? In some ways, nothing that we didn’t know before we started. Namely that ‘the public space’ is a febrile concept: what that refers to, what can be surmised about it, is a political football. The media takes its leads from a political culture that only 2% of the population actively engages in. In this world the ‘ordinary people’ are largely powerless and clueless: the enemy is either the power elites or those beyond our borders, ready to invade.

But what has been growing over the past five years is a much stronger consensus that government, too, is not competent to face the real dangers posed at this moment in history. Whether we are thinking about the climate crisis, economic inequality or physical and mental health, the public has lost faith in the political classes’ ability to intervene effectively. While the Scottish and Welsh governments may be more trusted, their results are not markedly better. Across the UK, the last two years of COVID mismanagement have only opened up a vacuum of accountability, with no opportunity of redress for those who suffered and continue to.

We could imagine ‘the public’ in a trance of avoidance, like the apocryphal boiling frog (appeased by consumerism and the habit of our daily tasks to take any meaningful action). Or maybe more ‘in tharn’ – like rabbits in the headlights, traumatised and unable to move out of the way of the harm that is bearing down upon us. In either narrative, there appears to be little to choose as an option for impactful, collective action. Extinction Rebellion’s brave attempts to fill that space with demands for the government to step up, are too often met with irritation by a public that cannot wake up.

When one man picks up a knife to murder a politician, imagining that he is taking power into his own hands, he only adds to the story that the public that cannot be trusted. When those of us who imagine ourselves more knowledgable vow again to take politicians to task, are we not also adding to the illusion that they have the power in their hands? And if MPs themselves are only playing their part in a dysfunctional system that leaves us all powerless, where do we turn?

In a recent encounter with Bernard LeRoux who, having grown up in apartheid Africa but now in Sweden, has spent his adult life using dialogue to transform social conflict. His work rests on the understanding that while tension is essential for social creativity, violence is a red flag that the social system itseslf is malfunctioning. Like disease in a body, it’s not something that can be fixed superficially, the health of the whole body has to be thought of.

He used an example of violence erupting between two young men in a small town. Through a process of dialogue which included members of the families, school, health professionals and others, it became clear that the lack of opportunity to address mistakes made when one of the boys was absent from school, eventually spiralled into conflict leading to violence.

A core ingredient to that and other similar outbreaks of violence, was the way the local media echoed national narratives about immigration as a problem caused by people from poorer countries wanting to take advantage of the more successful economies of the Northern hemisphere. Little or no connection is made with the source of that wealth, including colonisation, capitalism and the extractive economy which has created climate refugees. The dominant narrative created a cultural hierarchy within the town, wherein even second or third generation immigrants were seen as outsiders. Even small tensions between neighbours were reported as issues of immigration policy that needed mending.

What if our media was designed as solutions-driven journalism, which always responded to events with curiosity and a commitment to understand and offer constructive responses? Not simplistic, with automatic tolerance that robs the event of its necessary impact: that may be the work of a church rather than a newspaper. But always capacious, willing to be in a moment of challenge without reacting in a way that condemns millions of people to a life of guilt by association? And always committed to learning lessons, leading to fresh actions - not just reactions.

Every criminal has a back-story that the broader society can learn from. Not simply to correct itself but to strengthen its ability to self-reflect in ways that every citizen can partake in. How many reading about the paths each of these MP murderers took could, if part of a culture of self-reflection, see the role they may be playing in future outbreaks of violence. Or even see themselves on a spectrum of psycho-social depression that needs attention?

We recall a gathering in Dagenham during the EU referendum campaign when local citizens expressed their anxiety about homeless refugees on the streets. With no plan to house the refugees well and integrate them into society, the locals felt themselves becoming the object of envy to those who had nothing. In that discussion at least, the emphasis was on how to improve conditions for immigrants. But all referenced another similar conversation, held locally, which was dominated by fear and anger about the locals’ own lost way of life: a past that was more predictable and secure. And how can we stop the refugees coming?

What A/UK has observed over the past four and a half years is that citizens lack a well facilitated and relevant public space to actively engage in. Something more than our usual circles of like-minded people is needed: it has to be a place to meet others, to deliberate and get access to solutions. To think through what just happened and whether or not there are new ways of being together in the public space that would make such outbreaks of violence less likely?

There are many examples of this kind of culture emerging in pockets around the world. Empathy circles all over the US. Citizens round tables appearing in towns around Austria. Neighbourhood networks coming alive over Covid. On-line deep listening spaces like ‘Building Belonging’. Often they are part of wider community action networks (CANs) that can pick up the emerging intelligence these discussions generate, share it and develop a different kind of public space for those living there.

This is particularly effective where the community is constituted in a way that the local powers – council or municipality – can learn from the deliberations too. The best of a partner-government model can give rise, ultimately, to a parallel polis in which people feel they have agency. A structure within which people can begin to imagine that they – not those with the money to control outcomes – are shaping their own ‘story of us’ and infrastructure that can respond to crisis.

So in that five years between the murder of Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, we have been busy. Not so much mobilising people to rage against the machine, but prototyping a new media system, one that carries a different story about who we are – personally, locally, globally. One that connects the dots between the growing self-consciousness of the public space and the growing cosmolocalism emerging within CANs. And in turn, how that gives rise to new systems of power that can have a different impact on the planet.

It’s not a small endeavour and one that we only play a part in – but it’s a story of humans reclaiming their lives and having more agency in the face of our multiple crises. Even as we mourn the loss of another respected politician, we know our best response is to be stronger and more fearless citizens, not the opposite.

Alternative Editorial: A Tragic Prompt