Alternative Editorial: Finding Firm Ground
Trapeze artists, in lithograph by Calvert Litho. Co., 1890.
In a number of ways over these past three weeks, the Alternative UK has been participating in the Transition Bounce Forward Summit – a deeply positive gathering of people both within and without the Transition Network (TN) (see here for previous blogs).
The invitation was to re-imagine the future at the very moment we are coming out of the Covid lock-down. Using the three Horizon model (blogged here) participants gathered around three perspectives: What Is, What If, What Next? Inspired by Co-founder Rob Hopkins’ book From What Is to What If our ability to use our capacity for imagination was core to the process.
In the third stage – occurring during what we describe as Week 49 of The Shift – we gathered online to consider and harvest the outcomes of the great efforts made over that period. Although we’ll leave that summary to TN to publish imminently, here are some top lines seen from the perspective of ‘where does the power lie’ (more on the event we hosted in the first week here).
Firstly there was a lot of excitement about the level of new connections being made. People who had not been members of TN were meeting like-minded people often for the first time. This deepening of the localist agenda is leading to a proliferation of commitments to growing food, sharing tools and methods – all the stuff we need for TN’s agenda to take hold.
It was noticeable how many TN participants were joining from different countries - evidence of the ease with which people can move across the realms of I, We and World. Ready to share tools (and jokes) and be in a personal conversation about communities around the globe.
While this signaled some success in reaching out across different activist movements, there was also a clear demand to move away from the 'usual suspects’ and become more culturally diverse – a long standing call which is beginning to bear fruit. With these new voices also comes a louder voice for social justice and something more like a political agenda – although politics is still rarely the topic of conversation. Maybe because the agency being experienced here is almost counter to the more divisive action of party politics and the story of powerlessness that is carried by the political media.
Some expressed their surprise at how successful the technology – mostly Zoom – had been in creating a sense of genuine exchange between people and, over this period of time, a feeling of belonging. From our perspective, this is an important shift: these new platforms that have been fast-forwarded during Covid are breaking through the traditional distrust of technology as a reliable tool for building relationship. At the same time, there is a new wariness around ownership and social tech – who is listening to our conversations? And on community organising, who is harvesting our data and for what purposes?
The sooner we get to a wider capacity for co-ownership of these digital platforms/services – less simple than it sounds – the more confidently communities can move forward together. Only in this way can the essential DNA of movements like Transition Network be kept constant - particularly as they face much bigger and better resourced narratives of change taking place in the broader society. Narratives that may or may not be aiming for the same goals.
For example, when the current government first talked about the post-Covid period, it used the term ‘Bounce Back Britain’ . However, picking up on the mood for deeper changes that has arisen during this period of enforced lock-down it borrowed the more popular term #buildbackbetter. Does this mean UKGov has changed its plans – or just its slogan? Anyone looking at the immediate plans to build Freeports, open a new coal mine and defund the NHS would think it’s unlikely.
Not going along with the ‘positive’ agenda of the government makes any critique offered look ‘negative’ by comparison. At times like that we all need to feel the consistency of a well-connected community around us, helping us to hold true to our own story about what is possible and what needs to be resisted.
Another strong example was offered this week when the government published its report Global Britain in a Competitive Age: the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy – in other words, a statement of intention about our interface with the rest of the world. After three weeks of TN and four years of doing The Alternative UK, we almost laughed. Our version might have been Cosmolocal Britain in a Cooperative World. Their title looked so dated, so macho and, post Covid, potentially exhausting.
We didn’t laugh long as the document is a master-class in looking good, while not changing the fundamentals of a system that has been responsible until now for the state we are in.
No doubt this is aimed directly at Brexiteers needing to make sense of a post-Europe axis – or maybe more accurately, the media machine that took us there.
A very brief engagement with the report offers us this, the italics are our observations of recent events:
an emphasis on openness as a source of prosperity: open to those who will make us richer, closed to most of those travelling from overseas whose livelihoods our growth-economy has wrecked
a more robust position on security and resilience: more nuclear weapons, more entrenching of elites, more imprisonment of protestors
a renewed commitment to the UK as a force for good in the world: good to be interpreted as good for us, not so good for those in need (see below)
an increased determination to seek multilateral solutions to challenges like climate change: multilateral meaning shifting the focus to China and India’s very different climate challenges and leaving a lot of carbon cutting to carbon offsetting while rewriting Europe’s regulations in favour of cutting corners
This is not a knee-jerk negative rejection to one party: we have to acknowledge that we are in this position in 2021 because none of the parties have been able to turn the ship around as it sails steadily towards the planet’s point of no return. As Covid has shown us, climate is not a single issue but a whole system issue that brings together the multiple crises for personal, social and global flourishing. The current party political structure and culture is right at the heart of the problem – constantly fragmenting rather than converging our vital resources.
To give one example that has been lightly covered in the mainstream news: the cutting of our overseas aid from 0.7% of our annual budget to 0.5% – a cut of around £4 billion. For those who aren’t aware of the origin of the commitment, it is not an act of random generosity on our part, but an agreement made between members of the United Nations in 2013. So much for being a ‘force for good in the world’.
When the Johnson government decided to merge the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2020 there was immediate concern for the aid budget. The Government said its December 2020 manifesto made clear that:
we would proudly maintain our commitment to spending 0.7 percent of our national income on development—a commitment enshrined in law and one to which the new Department will honour its responsibilities.
Less than 6 months later it has dropped that commitment. It is this kind of agility with the truth that we have been drawing attention to in recent editorials. Governments who understand the importance of public opinion, saying whatever is needed to get the voters on side, then doing something quite different in reality. It is this lack of accountability – we can only vote every five years – that makes us unstable, insecure. Indeed, it robs us of our psycho-social health.
Again, this perfidy is not restricted to one party – every party has been accused of lying to the public while in office. However, there is another element to the dysfunction of the political system that should be mentioned in this case. While there have been headlines about Tory MPs – mindful of Britain’s soft power – challenging the cut in aid through the courts, and another of five British Prime Ministers (Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May) taking a stand, there is no sign of Keir Starmer, himself a barrister, bringing his own fire-power to this battle.
Yes, the Leader of the Opposition has criticised the direct effect of the cut on Yemen, but prefers to talk about it as the hypocrisy of selling arms to Saudi Arabia. Is that because foreign aid is a ‘red wall’ issue – a belief, probably wrong, that working class people oppose giving money away to poor countries? This is not to question the goodness of Starmer’s heart, but to look again at the way party politics compromises our ability to act clearly in the interests of the most vulnerable.
Could a system which manages to hold the intentions of people coming together across the divides – through CANs like Transition Towns, Citizens Assemblies and ultimately a People’s Parliament – do better? Not on its own maybe, but in a working partnership with the state, we believe it could. Going back to the energy of the Transition Summit, currently with nowhere to express itself at the national level, we can’t see any better way of maximising of our collective resources.