The government has led the UK to the edge of a
precipice – now it’s up to citizens to pull it back
Nesrine
Malik
Things feel ungoverned and unstable. From strikes to
civil disobedience, people are taking matters into their own hands
Illustration
by R Fresson
Illustration
by R Fresson
Mon 22 Aug
2022 06.00 BST
I remember
during the darkest period of the pandemic that there was a feeling the British
government had truly abandoned people to their fate. The daily briefings had
become an insulting game of denial and lies, the death count was rising, PPE
and track-and-trace debacles were unfolding, lockdown policy was clearly
unstudied and the prime minister had refused even to meet the families of Covid
victims. Around the time when those bereaved families began to organise and
campaign for an inquiry, it became clear that the comfort, resources and
momentum for reform that people needed was not going to be forthcoming from the
government. Citizens were going to have to do it themselves.
That sense
of a body politic and government entirely unsuited to crisis has come around
again, and with it the same realisation that change is not going to come from
our politicians, not unless they are dragged into it. England in particular
currently feels like an eerie, unpoliced, ungoverned, unstable country after a
coup. One government is gone but another hasn’t replaced it, and opposition
cannot rise to the challenge. Bureaucracy continues to function on inertia,
with queues and backlogs and bottlenecks. Private capital, already rapacious
and unregulated, grinds on ever more aggressively, extracting profits for basic
services such as water and gas, as if we were living in a war economy.
The
impression of precariousness is not just a feeling. It’s a fact. In a research
note earlier this month, the head of macro analysis at Saxo, a Danish bank,
said that the UK was looking more and more like that dreaded benchmark for a
western democracy, “an emerging market country”. “What Brexit has not done by
itself,” he said, “Brexit coupled with Covid and high inflation have succeeded
in doing. The UK economy is crushed.”
Lockdowns
and a lack of in-person contact during the pandemic smothered anger and civil
action. These are the forces this crushing cost of living crisis is now
unleashing. Another feature of some of the economies of emerging markets, in
addition to trade volatility and high inflation, is a realisation on the part
of an exploited workforce and stretched citizenry that the government will not
deliver. One outcome of that is the emergence of an informal parallel system of
support, one in which people share resources and donate their time to help each
other out.
In some
north African countries, a yellowed, frayed document informally called a
“diagnosis” will regularly do the rounds in offices and with it, an envelope.
Inside, there is a brief summary of someone’s (often a complete stranger’s)
medical need, usually a life-saving operation, and a list of names with numbers
next to them, detailing their donations to the procedure. With these types of
immediate needs – healthcare, food, shelter – people know there is simply no
other alternative that involves waiting for the government to step in, and so
carry on in a sort of resigned solidarity. The fact that people are giving up
on the NHS and begging to borrow money for private healthcare, and the rising
dependence on food banks (none of which translated into punishment for the
Tories), shows that in that sense, the UK has been an emerging markets country
under the Conservatives for some time. Living in what feels like the final
stage of grief, we have long been yoked by a fatalism that things cannot get
better.
Not any
more. Something has shifted. Taken too far, the conditions that make people
give up on politics can jolt them back into anger. People can accept that
government is dead, but that doesn’t mean another can’t be brought to life. The
result is civil disobedience. Reported as “disruptions” and “strike chaos”,
these are in fact a healthy, and to be honest, much delayed, response to the
terminus that the country has reached during a cost of living crisis where
private capital, rightwing government and leftwing opposition have all but
agreed that only over their dead bodies will the state intervene to transfer
wealth from the rich to the poor.
The scale
of this realisation can be measured in strikes, and the number of industries
and regions they span. There are strikes planned in England, Scotland and Wales
across the transport system, logistics, waste recycling and street cleaning,
and Royal Mail. Nurses are also balloting for strikes, and so are
communications workers. These are expected to affect everything from public
transport to supply chains in supermarkets. This is not to mention the wildcat
strikes that began taking place in recent weeks, with thousands of
non-unionised employees walking out at factories and Amazon facilities.
Alongside
organised strike action, informal and anonymous groups are setting up and
sharing plans to put pressure on the government if it fails to address the
energy crisis. More than 100,000 people so far have joined Don’t Pay UK, which
threatens mass non-payment of energy bills if 1 million people sign up. “We are
showing the powers that be that our collective power will force an end to this
crisis,” the organisation says. Enough is Enough, a campaign to fight the cost
of living crisis, launched its first event last week with little publicity and
a shoestring budget. There were queues around the block to enter.
This is
nothing less than a public and workforce on a collision course with a model of
governance that has so centrally embedded weak regulation and small state
ideology that it is heresy to speak against it. The conventional economic
wisdom is a dictatorship of capitalist fictions presented as unassailable
reality. That is why it is only those from outside the political sphere, such
as Mick Lynch of the RMT and the consumer rights campaigner Martin Lewis, or
those who are distant and divested from it enough, such as Gordon Brown, who
have the language, the moral clarity and the sense of urgency to point out that
the emperor has no clothes.
One
plaintive lament in some parts of the media has been “where are the grownups”?
The bad news is that the “grownups” did this. The good news is that more and
more people are beginning to realise that. The result is an opening of space
for the thing we are constantly told is the indulgence of the amateur and the
unrealistic – imagination. The public’s response to the cost of living crisis
is more energetic, promising, compassionate and righteous than anything we have
seen in a long time. If that brings about the kind of disruption we only see
abroad in more unstable places, then that is only because it is the appropriate
response to our own instability. Here’s to being more like an emerging markets
country.
The headline on this article was amended on 22
August 2022 to refer to the UK rather than England.
Nesrine
Malik is a Guardian columnist
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