Escaping from the box…

We’re angry. We see the destruction that is happening everywhere. The chaos that is the tip of the iceberg in our NHS , the violence on the streets as the rules of society fail, the loss of cherished services, the dreams of the children of all but the richest being crushed by a crisis that was not of their making.

We’re scared. We worry about our own debt. We live daily through our terror of an interest rate hike raising mortgage costs; fear of yet another rise in energy prices making monthly bills simply unaffordable; worried about another year with salaries frozen and inflation through the roof.

We lash out. At our leaders for not doing all that we want. At the Tories for making the plans we loathe even worse by implementing them so ineptly. At the Lib Dem patsies for allowing this to happen. At each other over minor disagreements.

Fear and anger make us mean and small. They turn us in on ourselves. We question everything, but only in whispers. We save our volume only for howling in anger and railing in fear against the world.

Fear and anger have taken our ideals, our hope, our passion and hidden them from ourselves in a tightly sealed box marked “not for these serious times”. The box is always guarded. We fail to recognise the guard. The guard is our fear, the guard is our anger. The guard is us.

We need answers. We all know that. But we’ve become so stiff while squeezed into this box, we’ve forgotten how to find new answers. So we repackage and reinvent old solutions. But we’re stiff and cold so we can’t sell those properly. We start to ask the right questions. But all too easily, we allow fear and anger to put us back in our box.

We must remember our moral cause, unpack it from the grey and dull wrappings we’ve been keeping it in, reframe it and display it with pride.

We must once again recognise that we can be at once a party of beautiful ideals and practical leadership, a party both of concrete and quicksilver, a party of ethereal ideals and a party of implementation. The NHS, the minimum wage, of Sure Start and The Human Rights Act are triumphs of both. But more, far more than that, we are the party of tomorrow. We have to be. This is what we have already done. Imagine what we can still do.

This is a political moment. It’s not the moment any of us would have chosen but it is the most important most of us will see in our lifetimes. The challenge to capitalism is not being played out through proxies. While we continue to fight the culture wars, the class war – the one the moneyed have been waging against the rest of us – is being spoken of once again. Not just by people in tents, but by people in shops and pubs, on buses and in the gym.

We need to find the unguarded moment; to escape our fear and allow our minds, our rhetoric and our ideals to soar. We need to rescue ourselves from the box. No one else is going to.