A new year column brings with it the unspoken obligation to strike some note of optimism and renewal. It’s a tradition, like a pagan ritual, respecting the sacred pause between one year and the next, and making an offering of resolution. To acknowledge that, despite all that seems crushing and overwhelming, there is still some measure of personal freedom to be better and do better.
It is harder this year, though, than previous ones, to strike that note. The war in Ukraine continues to grind with little resolution in sight, fading into a matter of fact rather than the sharp abhorrence that it was almost two years ago. In Gaza, children continue to be buried under rubble, as do the scenes of parents bidding them unfathomable farewells. Israeli hostages and their families are still caught in the bloody melee, as all hope for their release and a ceasefire seem to become more remote.
Domestically, our zombie government is absent at best, ghoulish at worst. It has become reduced almost entirely to a single policy – a fixation on immigration that restricts the right to love and make a family to only those who can afford it, and brings the government into conflict with its own judiciary in its effort to ram through a Rwanda deportation scheme that is expensive, impractical and unlawful. The prospect of a general election brings with it less a sense of relief, more a girding of the loins. The right will run the nastiest of campaigns, already trailed by the deputy chair of the Tory party as a mix of “trans debate” and “culture wars” – a plan that will probably do little to revive the Conservative party’s chances, but will nonetheless make political discourse even more unpleasant.
The Labour offering, both in tone and in substance, is a constant dimming of the lights to prepare us for the fact that not much that is material to people’s everyday lives can change in the short term, because the inherited mess is simply too vast to clean up overnight. Keep your expectations low, we are instructed, because false hope is worse than no hope.
Political realities – war, the cost of living crisis, crumbling infrastructure, child hunger – are presented to us not as a matter of willpower, choice, compassion, imagination and agility, but as a sort of weather front that we must bear until it passes or we adapt to it. The result is an overwhelming sense that politicians are either useless or cannot be trusted to deliver. What comes with that is the continuation of a pattern that has been building over the past few years; reduced voter turnout and an abiding feeling, vexing to Labour but not entirely unwarranted, that “they’re all the same”.
Those who participate in electoral democracy are increasingly concentrated in those classes that have a stake – homeowners, graduates and high earners. Those not in those categories know, with an instinct far sharper than is given credit by the accusation of “apathy”, that as far as they are concerned it is a pointless exercise. As a senior fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research told the Guardian last month: “No matter who’s in power, our democratic machine needs rewiring. If people are once again to be authors of their own lives, and to feel secure, they must sense their influence in the collective decision-making endeavour that is democracy.”
But bear with me, now that I have got the downers out of the way. And well done for getting this far on the first day of the year when appetite for gloom is low.
For gloom is not a given. If you look back over the past two years, there has arisen, to borrow the expression, a movement of authorship of your life. Industrial action has been more frequent than it has been in decades, and more comprehensive. In schools, universities, higher education institutions, public transport, factories and the NHS, workers have gone on several well-coordinated and politically literate strikes. Action is among both unionised and non-unionised workers, taking on not just the government for improvement in working conditions and pay, but private employers such as Amazon, in a sort of bottom-up regulation of pay and hours.
Efforts, though thwarted, were made to create an official Amazon union in a drive to create unionised jobs at a notoriously precarious workplace. The gains are patchy, but they are there. Rail workers won a backdated pay rise of 5%, in addition to job security guarantees. Teachers’ unions accepted a 6.5% pay rise, in a deal that included an additional £900m a year in extra funding for schools. Public consultations on closing of railway ticket offices forced a withdrawal of the policy.
Strikes are perceived by the public, and portrayed by the government, as disruption and volatility, but they are a healthy sign of democracy by other means. Aside from what has been won, there are other positive, secondary, outcomes to large organised action – a sense of community, camaraderie and political volition, a rejection of political and economic arrangements as something that must be passively accepted, and a reversal of atomisation that is so useful to that passiveness. In that coming together, there is also compassion and respect for the rule of law – rarely highlighted – such as that in the actions of high-profile pro bono lawyers, who helped defeat the government’s Rwanda deportation plan.
There is an echo of that in the large protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the refusal of political leaders to call for a ceasefire. Organised with little ambition that things will change, the dedication of hundreds of thousands of people to that cause is an insistence on reality that leaders will not acknowledge. Yes, the moment a large gap opens up between what politicians say and what people see, many will simply check out, but many others will also opt in. In a response to my colleague Aditya Chakrabortty’s report on schoolchildren organising marches for Gaza, reader Keith Flett wrote that in that gap, “politics develops”.
I come from a part of the world where often there is a sort of blissful resignation to the powers-that-be, once revolt and protest are suppressed, either violently or because there is no alternative. It’s tempting to do the same when what can be seen as a stale political consensus here breeds that same sense of helplessness. But I’m telling you that there is still a lot to work with outside that inert consensus.
It may not feel like much. Bills are still high. The NHS is still overwhelmed, schools are still literally crumbling, and the bombs continue to fall. But it’s not nothing. And it all plots a path, albeit halting and jagged, to a future where what we do today may not be decisive in the short term, but can be definitive in the long. Here’s to the gap, and the politics that develops within it. Happy New Year.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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