Inertia, interrupted.
Beyond the immediate crisis, we can finally see the possibility of real social change.
In February, when Coronavirus was a mere footnote in the news, I spoke at the launch of our 12th cohort of Year Here Fellows at Toynbee Hall in East London.
In a nutshell I said, as I had many times before: society is facing almighty problems; inequality won’t fix itself; entrepreneurial responses could be the answer; go get ’em.
But that night I asked myself, and the audience: could that all still be true 7 years after the first cohort’s launch? Had nothing changed? Did I still actually believe the words I was saying or was I just rolling out the same lines without belief?
Working through my doubt, I talked about how inequality had actually got worse, not better, since I founded Year Here. I reflected that, while I’ve learnt that it’s an unfairly tough path to follow for many and far from being a panacea, I still see social entrepreneurship as an opportunity to spark social change that’s too good to pass up.
While my moment of doubt passed, it’s worth interrogating. Having spent almost my entire career in social purpose organisations, I’ve noticed this sense of inertia a fair few times — and seen it in many others too. Change is so damn hard to achieve that, from time to time, people who dedicate themselves to social justice lose faith in its actual, real-world possibility.
Change is also scary for people, even for those that profess to want to make a difference. It means a fundamental reordering of resources, of money, of power. Early on in my career my boss at a large charity said “really, we’re here to do ourselves out of business!” with such a guffaw that I knew she didn’t believe what she was saying.
Enter Coronavirus
We’re experiencing the biggest emergency the West has faced since WWII. Millions of people around the world are in mortal danger. Health systems are on the brink of collapse. And, as the world sluggishly coalesces around a common strategy of social distancing and substantial societal shutdown, the wheels of capitalism have fallen off.
While our Prime Minister lies in intensive care and thousands around the world perish on a daily basis, it might seem crass to look for the opportunity in all this. But I think we must.
Beyond staying at home and making sure our vulnerable loved ones are safe we might have looked to help in whatever way we can. Now, with the juggernaut of modern life ground to a halt, we have the opportunity to assess the world we’ve built for ourselves and decide if we want to rebuild it in its previous form — or rethink it from first principles.
If we don’t, the self-serving and predatory forces we’ve become so used to will jump back into society’s driving seat and suffering will continue.
This is a ‘change the world’ moment like no other. But do we have the foresight, the imagination and the courage to pull something off?
Let us not go back to normal
‘Normal’ was wonderful for the privileged few but it was really quite awful for many people in our society — and for the planet.
The UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world. Over 14 million live in poverty, including nearly a third of our nation’s children. The rise of low income, precarious jobs has brought unemployment down to record lows — but not without social and economic cost. Many key workers, who we so cherish right now, are particularly badly paid.
Poverty systematically disadvantages people in every aspect of our daily lives, from education to healthcare. Every stop between Westminster and Canning Town in the East End represents a year lower life expectancy for locals.
Normal life in Britain included a housing crisis, where one in seven Brits didn’t have a suitable home. It bore a social care crisis that, in the face of an ageing population that was increasingly unable to find appropriate support in a means-tested system, was struggling with limited funding and insufficient numbers of care workers. Perhaps most fundamentally of all, ‘normal’ life gave rise to a climate crisis that threatened humans’ very existence on this planet.
The big, ugly reveal of the world we created
Covid-19 has thrown the inequalities of our society into sharp relief. These issues aren’t new. It’s just that too many of us had previously just let them wash over us as newspaper headlines, thinking them abstract and distant. Now they take on new proximity, gravity and urgency.
The huge numbers of people living in overcrowded, temporary or emergency accommodation, or sleeping on the streets, are at far higher risk of contracting the virus and, through no fault of their own, are putting everyone else at risk too.
The 400,000 Brits living in care homes are intended to be ‘shielded’ during the epidemic but the flip side is that they may be left without hospital treatment if they do contract the virus. Reports emerged in Brighton that care home residents have been encouraged to sign Do Not Resuscitate orders making it more likely that they will die if they do get infected. And thanks to social distancing rules, they’ll die alone.
Digital exclusion now means that many older and vulnerable people aren’t able to stay connected to the outside world. It means that some poor children in homes without decent WiFi or functioning computers can’t access online school lessons.
The Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre reports that Black and Asian people are overrepresented in Covid 19-related critical care. In the States, the intersection between race and poverty has been used to explain the gross overrepresentation of African Americans among the victims. Gig economy workers and the low paid — Deliveroo riders, Uber drivers, cleaners and supermarket staff — are more likely to be people of colour. They are also more likely to still be working, less likely to have the security of a stable income if they don’t work and, therefore, are more at risk.
The list of vulnerable groups goes on and on to include people locked up in prisons (described as Petri dishes for this pandemic); people trapped in abusive relationships (anti-domestic abuse charity, Refuge, has received 100s more calls since lockdown began); and refugees who may become destitute as a result of the automatic withdrawal of their support services.
The virus and the economic impact of its mitigation have also dragged more people, who might never have been considered ‘vulnerable’ in the old order, into precarious situations. In the last two weeks of March, almost one million people in the UK applied for Universal Credit – nearly 10 times the average number.
Shit just got possible
Watching a Conservative Chancellor announce that government would step in to pay the salaries of thousands of workers was astounding. Decisions that, just a few weeks ago, would have been unthinkable or fought for over decades before being enacted have been made in an instant.
Sam Conniff put it simplest: shit just got possible.
Of course, many of the government’s measures are temporary but some things will remain. Inertia is at play here too — reversing change may be even harder when we’re out the other side without the driver of urgency propelling us.
So now the status quo really can be challenged. If WWII set the conditions for the welfare state, what foundations are we laying through the Coronavirus crisis?
Of course, there are no guarantees that we will emerge from this in a fairer society than the one we had when the crisis hit. The reaction could equally take us in a regressive direction. In the aftermath of 9/11, Britain and America pursued disastrous wars in the Middle East. After the 2008 financial crash, capitalism was resuscitated with few adjustments to its toxic model — and austerity told us that the recession had been the fault of scroungers and skivers.
There are big choices before us. Totalitarianism or citizen empowerment? Capitalism or Socialism? or perhaps a less statist, decentralised system based on the mutual aid dynamics that sprung to the fore in the last few weeks? In the Netherlands, there’s already been talk of Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics shaping public policy .
Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste
In these days of frenetic generation of news and opinion, the ‘opportunity in crisis’ idea has almost become cliche. But cliches exist for a reason. If Coronavirus isn’t a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reshape society for good, I don’t know what is.
This hasn’t been put more beautifully than by Arundhati Roy:
“It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next …. we can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
I hope we’re ready for that battle. For social entrepreneurs, this means kindling their activist spirit – thinking bigger and bolder than ever about how business can change the world.
This crisis will shine a spotlight on the social change charlatans who, I hope, will become increasingly irrelevant. There can be no more status quo preservation dressed in revolutionary clothing. It’s transparent and, like the middle class kid fresh from his gap year in South America with the Che Guevara poster on his Oxford University bedroom walls, it’s just not a good look anymore. The phoneys will be found out.
The inertia is over. The time really is now for fundamental reform of this beautiful — but profoundly unjust — society we’ve built for ourselves.
So let’s get off the sidelines and give this all we’ve got.
