What is at stake in this General Election?
Last year, I’d been working a supermarket job since leaving university. It was the kind of drudging work that erodes your spirit and hope, eclipses it under a barrage of petty indignities and degradations. I felt defeated after years of fighting and failing in the anti-austerity movement, dejected after grappling with bouts of mental health crisis that ravaged my own life and that of my close friends, devastated at how communities have been blighted by gentrification and bigotry and ailing services, how the torments of Work Capability Assessments and Universal Credit had wrought such misery, how dislocated and trapped so many of us felt as we struggled through poorer, stressed, lonelier, adrift, stultified lives. I still feel the burden of that, as so many of us do.
The tensions of these social and economic crises — intensified manifold by the shadow of climate catastrophe — loom gravely, and impel us all on, at this juncture of historic opportunity during the General Election. I think we should not gloss over feeling the profound, thwarted grief our society harbours after 9 years of austerity, and many more decades of neo-liberal warfare — nor tame the rage at this loss as it incites us onward. Because I also believe in our collective capacity to change the world, despite everything, despite all that turmoil.
This is why ‘rebuilding Britain’ was such a powerful statement, and encapsulates such an important shift in the narrative: it speaks to the human fortitude to rejuvenate our world, even from ruins, through such collective interventions. It resonates with the story of bolstering one another, uniting together, embracing one another in the wake of loss and adversity, even as grief lures us to retreat, resign ourselves to despair, torture ourselves with guilt and regret. It’s the hardest, most magnificent thing — to elect to hope again. And it’s absolutely necessary.
Because when I think about what’s at stake in this General Election, I’m reminded acutely of both the calamities austerity has inflicted and the gravity and urgency of our demand for a better world. For the woman I met whilst working at Sainsbury’s who had lost her whole family and, because our communities are so shattered, had few other people to confide in but the cashiers. For co-workers who lost their jobs in a vicious bout of contract changes similar to those currently being imposed by Asda, their loyalty of decades rewarded by strong-arming them into compliance or else severing their livelihoods, the calculated brutality of ‘business need’, as if they didn’t matter or count at all.
For friends who’ve suffered through the cruelty of the benefits system, who’ve been stricken by mental health crises only to be failed by decimated services, who’ve been forced from one cold, damp, insecure tenancy to the next whilst restricting their food and heating because they’re locked out of work or balancing multiple zero-hour contracts, friends whom you love dearly and agonize over thought of in their absence, separated by a gulf of forces beyond your control. For people like my mum, wearily undertaking damage control in a debt charity call centre, who got a mere morning off work to attend a colleague’s funeral because he killed himself under the strain of the job.
For every person I’ve stood on picket lines and on demonstrations with, desperately clinging to hope and fighting still, despite demoralization, despite defeat, despite the anguish of all this injustice — bonds stitched through every wound of repression and every bruising setback. Drawn together from the rugged threads of all those struggles, this is our make-or-break chance to finally end austerity, to forge something better out of the wake of all this loss and desolation.
Let’s seize it — because our lives depend on it. Because we don’t have to live in fear like this, struggling anxiously on the brink of the boss and landlord’s mercy from pay check to pay check, the ghosts of those murdered clenching our chests as we trudge for miles past dilapidated working men’s clubs and firetrap tower blocks and shuttered high streets to line up and be punished into destitution by the Job Centre. Aching in the limbo of a future ripped ever further away from us, restless and unable to dream for the sprawling web of pressures tugging at you, constricting you, unravelling you — debt, job rejections, care and workloads you just can’t manage, always just one shock away from losing a home that never even belonged to you, an indifferent message in your UC journal which capsizes you with dread, that haunting insecurity and worthlessness. How joy becomes a mask, something you can hardly remember as the world caves in on you in the arrested break between shifts.
Because there’s something more than this — something that drives us in vast numbers out on to the doorstep to quake the streets in the bitter cold of the night. Something nursed and kindled in our clasped hands as the chill light of dawn filters through fraught waiting rooms. Something that rouses us to the picket lines in snowstorms to defend one another. That we can better our lives together. That there’s a future breaking through like a distant flare, blooming in every one of our actions, here, and now. That maybe, just maybe, we can be brave enough to dream again.
