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we're currently living through the messy
end of a paradigm that has structured
our politics and our economics for the
best part of 40 years and simultaneously
through a struggle as yet unresolved
over what will replace it the drama
engulfing us right now isn't some
mystifying irrational outbreak of
madness on the part of politicians or
indeed voters it's the product of a
deeper crisis a crisis of late
capitalism of a particular ideology and
orthodoxy that has shaped Britain since
the late 1970s and which fractured under
the weight of its own contradictions in
2008 brexit Corbin Johnson these shocks
and surprises
matter a great deal but they are
symptoms of this deeper crisis not
causes and we will not meaningfully
address that deeper crisis by obsessing
over their daily twists and turns this
isn't all an administrative mistake or a
ghastly dream
there is no redemptive liberal Savior
waiting in the wings who will magically
turn the clock back to an illusory
Golden Age of centrist technocracy when
life was calm and sensible and
predictable the foundations upon which
that kind of politics was constructed
have crumbled the battle now is over
what sort of country we will build from
the ruins and with that in mind I really
try to do three things firstly I argue
that to make sense of what we're going
through we need to shift our gaze for
too many journalists and pundits
politics appears to be something that
exists solely within the sw1 a postcode
among the the parties and the
personalities and the parlor games of
Westminster and more so now than ever as
Westminster's traditional structures
implode since the financial crisis
fundamental shifts have been taking
place in the ways we live the ways we
work the distribution of power and
autonomy between us and
stories we tell about the systems that
govern us and about ourselves but until
recently although governments came and
went from Gordon Brown to the coalition
to a Tory majority despite all of those
formal mutations the grammar and syntax
of institutional power in this country
remained the same as through the lens
through which by and large the press
evaluated and reported it and you can
find a parallel to this in the American
South of the late 1930s and 40s when
legions of baseball correspondents filed
dutiful and scrupulously balanced
reports detailing the highlights of each
match that transfers from one team to
another the internal dramas that formed
the backbone of every season and with
very few exceptions none of them ever
commented on the fact that at that time
US baseball leagues were racially
segregated or that the informal baseball
color line was being progressively
undermined by a nascent civil rights
movement that would go on to transform
the country's history the correspondents
operated within the boundaries of the
system they reported under and rarely
questioned this underlying structure all
the wider social forces that were
rendering it an anachronism now albeit
in a very different context something
similar I think has happened in Britain
a massive category error that resulted
in most of our political class
completely missing the bigger picture
that disconnect between institutional
politics and politics as experienced on
the ground explains why when the former
finally caught up with the latter and
our electoral landscape began erupting
so many political experts the ones we
rely upon to interpret and analyze the
political terrain on our behalf we left
confounded it also explains why for all
the noise and fireworks and breathless
24-hour rolling news coverage emanating
now out of parliament and Downing Street
viewers and readers rarely come away
with any clearer idea of how all this
fragmentation and uncertainty at the top
is linked with the changes they've
experienced in their lives and witnessed
in their own communities
any clearer idea of how its enmeshed
with the turmoil below so over the past
couple of years as most reporters were
flocking towards Westminster to
understand why things are falling apart
I've been heading the other way I ended
up sitting in franchised coffee outlets
and nondescript office blocks up and
down the country climbing over
construction sites and factory ruins
wedging myself into basements and squats
and the shadows of glitzy conference
halls spending time with people who far
from being anti politics which is often
the term used to describe popular
sentiment in Britain today are actually
fiercely political but whose energies
have been channeled into movements and
spaces that simply aren't on the radar
of Lobby correspondents at Westminster
and so the second thing is bring some of
those remarkable new political
mobilizations
into the light from teenagers holding
their own radical grassroots education
courses to new unions of private renters
taking on landlords in the street to
insurgent labor movements led by those
on the front line of low pay Britain and
to interrogate the disturbances that
these new political mobilizations are
causing disturbances that will have a
profound impact on us all
and finally and appropriately I think
given that it has grown out of the
collapse of an ideology that sought to
detached grates waves of life from
politics to reconceptualize us all as
political agents capable of collectively
determining our own futures in this
moment when the Kaleidoscope has thrown
all the pieces up in the air rather than
consigning ourselves to a bit part role
in somebody else's and most importantly
for me at least alternative forms of
politics are beginning to materialize I
hope that all sounds interesting but I
hope more than anything else actually
that it does justice to a quote from one
of my favorite writers Rebecca Solnit
who said of our current era the future
is dark but with a darkness as much of
the womb as of the grave
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