Things feel ungoverned and unstable. From strikes to civil disobedience, people are taking matters into their own hands
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
