Sunday 14/4, 8am. Marble Arch.
The overnight coach spits its load of miscellaneous travellers into a London, gilded by the morning sun, full of promise and disparity. Street sweepers work around the less fortunate, who occupy sleeping bags and dirty rags in every other doorstep along the line of empty coffee bars and trendy shoe shops. Nobody stirs in the side streets. Endless Range Rovers and sleek sports cars break the timelessness of the grand wide roads, their owners locked behind the heavy black doorways of the huge terrace. Birdsong cuts through the dense morning. There are parks and green spaces everywhere, but gated, fenced, locked, the private gardens of the wealthy, where they go to be away from the homeless realities of London.
On the way to Hyde Park, I pass two huge monuments to ‘the great war’. They didn’t call it World War One until the second happened. One is covered with wreaths of poppies from the various commanders of various numbered regiments. It’s been 74 years since the end of WW2. There are very few alive who remember any great wars. London is waking up, jogging, ambling to work early on a Sunday, the ever-present rumble of cars is steadily building, yet the power structures are crumbling, there’s a film of life-as-usual over a vat of simmering discontent.
At Marble Arch, the rebellion has not yet begun, and the arch looks small and insignificant beneath the tower blocks and the trees of Speakers’ Corner. A young Italian in a faded pink jacket asks if I speak English. He’s looking for an address, a half-hour walk away. He came from Bologna to find a job here, and now he’s sleeping in Hyde Park, begging for food. I wonder why he picked London. I wonder what land of opportunity he saw here.
I am here to take part in a radical movement, yet the values that brought me here are not radical. I want peace, clean air, good food, a world where people don’t die in the streets in front of empty shops. I stubbornly believe that people are fundamentally good. I don’t see any need for people to go hungry or to struggle to afford a roof and a bed. We have the resources. I am a benevolent person, not a radical. There’s a bizarre dissonance about. So many people quietly support our activist movement against climate change. So many want an end to austerity and inequality. And yet, we drive on towards Brexit, we take benefits from the ill, the poor, the disabled, to fund tax breaks for the rich. We let corporations exploit us in so many small ways and we don’t even blink. I feel like a raving conspiracy theorist for talking about this, yet it’s accepted as the uncontroversial truth. How has society become so perverted against these simple benevolent values?
I am an educated scientist. Damn near all scientists agree that we are failing to sustainably coexist with our planet. We depend on this beautiful and bizarre planet, yet we are doing so much to destroy it. With each year that scientists are ignored, the destruction caused grows, and the changes required to pull ourselves back into harmony become more drastic and society-altering. That the people elected to steward us and safeguard our societies from threats, like climate change, are blatantly ignoring the cries of the very people who dedicate their lives to studying our relationship with the planet, is madness. It makes no sense.
In this country, economic systems are held to be more sacred than ecosystems. We slave away, blindly trusting our economics to bring us prosperity, while they demonstrably don’t. The economic theory that our markets are built upon is outdated, and questioned even by the mainstream of academic economists. Yet it’s self-reinforcing and parasitically intertwined with the political structures which, on paper, are supposed to guide it to work for our society’s benefit.
Those political systems, ancient institutions, are neither working for, nor under the control of, the people they are built to serve. Our first-past-the-post voting system breeds two party democracy, and both of those parties are corrupt and incompetent. They have been failing the people for years: failing to provide the security, abundance, and sustainability that, in my benevolence, I see as the obvious goals of politics. Democracy in name, there is no box worth ticking on the voting slips that represents a benevolent society.