Living with two clocks

This essay asks whether our politics is equal to the historical moment we are living through. At a time of climate crisis, ecological decline and growing instability, why does our political culture continue to reward certainty over honesty, and short-term reassurance over helping us face difficult realities together? Drawing on my own experience in politics, philanthropy and systems change, I explore what a different kind of political leadership might look like — and why building it requires us to rethink not just policy, but also the institutions, relationships and cultures that shape what becomes politically possible.

The trouble we have with ‘staying with the trouble’

My youngest daughter was born in 2015. If she’s lucky, she’ll live to see the turn of the next century.

At ten years old, she still spends her days jumping, running, climbing, playing imaginary games, asking endless questions. Sometimes, she cries about things like homelessness and climate crisis: she thinks they should not exist. She wrote to the Prime Minister last year to ask him to give more attention and time to these issues: she still assumes that the adults are in charge and in control of the world she is coming to know.

Growing up in Britain, she enjoys relative security, access to education, healthcare, food and opportunities. But even here, some of what my generation took for granted can no longer be assumed. The shifts in her lifetime will probably be more subtle and cumulative than food disappearing from supermarket shelves, or the lights flickering out. They will more likely be about the stability and dependability of systems we rely on than their total collapse. Supply chain crises, provoked by climate events, will become more frequent. Rising costs will be a standard feature of life. Infrastructure will be stretched — as we are already seeing — by weather it’s not designed to withstand. Uncertainty and volatility will become the norm.

And as these human systems destabilise, my daughter will also witness major, perhaps unrecognisable shifts in the texture of the living world around her. The dawn chorus will become quieter, and common species of birds and animals much rarer. The abundance of insects, birds and wildlife that formed the backdrop of my own childhood will continue to ebb away. She may not even realise this, not knowing what life was like for my generation growing up, or our parents’.

This is the world my daughter is inheriting from us. A world whose gifts of clean air, thriving nature, abundant food, stable seasons, cannot be taken for granted, and will need to be fought for and protected. I think we’re understanding this more and more in the orbit of our own lives: and yet, our politics still behaves as though it isn’t the case.

We’re sweltering and sweating our way through another heatwave as I write this, and at points this week I’ve been overwhelmed by a kind of impotent grief, from the feeling that we have thrown away an abundant inheritance so carelessly that it can no longer sustain itself without extraordinary efforts against all the odds. This carelessness is already costing lives, and this will accelerate unless we act. These are thoughts that feel close to unbearable.

I know it is not just me who struggles. I see how difficult many of us find it to acknowledge that whatever efforts we’ve made, however sincere they’ve been, they’ve not yet been enough. I see how tempting it is to avoid these difficult feelings, falling either into despair (‘this is terminal’), or denial (‘it can’t be that bad’) and consequently freezing our capacity to act. Somehow, we need to move beyond these responses, enough to allow the unbearable thoughts in, to stay with the trouble as Donna Harraway says, and to move from there with whatever hope, love and deep care for each other we can still find. This is the perspective I’ve tried to keep hold of as I’ve written this piece.

While writing through these blisteringly hot days and evenings, I’ve also watched the resignation of one PM, and the beginnings of another arriving. I’ve noticed my own frustration and disengagement from the excitement surrounding these machinations: what difference will it make?, I wonder, as I roll my eyes. Why does politics seem so incapable of speaking honestly about the world that is unfolding around us?

The core argument of this essay is that politics has become complicit in our need to regulate our anxiety about living through the polycrisis, with all the fear and uncertainty it provokes. Politics as it operates now helps us look away from this reality, when it needs to help us to stay with it. If we do not address this, we will not get the politics we need to move through these troubling times.

Winning when the building’s on fire

It was a cold February day in Tooting in 2014 when, somewhat to my surprise, I got selected as a local councillor candidate for the Labour Party, standing in a ward that had been held by another political party since 1982. Alongside me were two other candidates who are now successful national politicians. All of us mothers, all of us involved in public service in our jobs, and all of us truly believing that this next step into local party politics would help us make a difference.

This was the era of Twitter politics and campaign trail selfies. I promptly did what I was told and set up a new account where I could dutifully repeat the local lines that had polled well: keep Council Tax low, focus on doorstep issues, don’t mention immigration. I didn’t feel great about it. But, I reasoned with myself, our lot would do a better job than the other lot, and that was enough to keep me going.

Over the next few months I knocked on door after door, learning which models of letterboxes to avoid, and how to approach other people’s cats. I had hundreds of conversations with my neighbours, each time explaining political promises that I knew were more about ‘winnable messages’ than what was actually needed. There wasn’t room for imagination here: all that mattered was getting the votes. There were formulas to follow, a science to campaigning (although it remained charmingly analogue in method, with clipboards, printed lists, and pencils issued for every canvassing session).

Every single one of the talented people involved in that campaign wanted to make a difference and improve people’s lives, and every single one of us put in enormous labour to that cause. These were good people, working hard, with clear values and a moral compass. We won the ward overall, even though I personally missed being elected by around 100 votes (a sliding doors moment).

Once the buzz of the campaign was over, once the door-knocking gave way again to the noisy monotony of raising small children, I was left with an overwhelming sense of the emptiness of that political space. This wasn’t about cynicism. More, it was the sense that the machinery of the campaign had generated its own internal momentum and moral logic that was hard to resist while I was inside it. And once I was out of it again, it felt like a kind of void. A political machine that had become so sophisticated at answering one question — ‘what’s winnable’ — that is barely remembered to ask another — ‘what politics are equal to the times we’re living through?’ We were so focused on winning arguments that we didn’t notice that the building we were in was on fire.

Twelve years on, I still ask myself what it would be like to enter this space with a different theory of what politics is for. What would it be, to acknowledge the polling messages, and financial limitations, the volatile electorate, the speed with which you can be punished for one sentence taken out of context — without letting these constraints exclusively set the horizon of political possibility? What if we concerned ourselves more with civilisational risk, than political risk? How could politics organise itself to meeting this moment of breakdown and destabilisation with integrity, honesty, instead of denial and false certainty?

The politician we’ve not yet met

Since that campaign, I’ve become more and more disconnected from mainstream party politics. I can’t shake a feeling — either from my time at Little Village or stewarding Emerging Futures at JRF — that our political systems are simply not built for this moment. Even with the most talented politicians inside them (and that is not always the case), my sense is that politics is designed to help us avoid reality, to be a means of defending and protecting ourselves against unbearable truths — at the very moment we need a politics to help us face these difficult facts. These patterns are so powerful that it’s pretty unimaginable to think of a politician saying to us ‘this is frightening, and we don’t yet know exactly how to find our way through it — but we are here together and we will face it in that way.’ Instead they offer — and we reward — simplicity, confidence, the appearance of control.

Some of you might be reading this and thinking that it isn’t the job of politics to help us process grief or uncertainty. Instead you might say its task is more concrete: to make people’s lives materially better, and do it quickly enough that we really feel those improvements. Get wages up, waiting lists down, lower bills, and build more homes.

I agree, in part. Politics is always about improving people’s lives, especially after years and years of crushing stagnation and rising insecurity. Good wages and living standards, decent public services that aren’t in crisis, affordable housing: these are essential. It’s just I don’t think they’re sufficient. A government could succeed on all these fronts, but they’d still be governing through a century of climate disruption, ecological decline, technological upheaval and geopolitical instability. Material improvements are vital — and we still need a politics that helps us face a world that’s becoming less predictable and more unstable.

I am wary of false binaries here, or a view that there is a sequence to this work — that we should ‘do’ material wellbeing first, polycrisis-tackling second. Politics has to find a way of acting on both things at once: making lives better, and helping us come to terms with a changed reality that involves loss, degradation and disorientation.

So I want here to offer some reflections on what it might look like if politics wasn’t organised around helping us to avoid this painful planetary context we find ourselves in, where so much that was familiar is now in question. This is a politics that recognises that the past can no longer offer guidance about the future. What might the imagined politician do and say and think, if she possessed the kind of qualities I think we need right now — the qualities that I think our political system currently struggles to even recognise as virtues? I introduce her here to explore these questions.

She doesn’t muddle up certainty and strength. She knows that people can tolerate difficult truths more easily than they can tolerate being patronised or talked down to. She understands that fear that isn’t acknowledged has a habit of returning wearing a more destructive face — one that is angrier and more dangerous (as Victoria Hughes and I have written about here). So she resists the demand to close down uncertainty with catchy slogans or false confidence, and she stays with complexity longer than contemporary politics likes. To the surprise of her advisors, this seems to make her more trustworthy than weak with voters.

She knows that we are living through a deep transition, and she feels in her bones the loss of certainty, status, the erosion of familiar landscapes and hopes for the future that comes with these changes. This isn’t theoretical pain for her: she understands the way in which these losses can provoke grief because she recognises that feeling in herself. She sees that societies grieve just as individuals do, even if we don’t label it as such, and she knows this shared grief needs space to live in public: shutting it up behind closed doors risks curdling it into anger and blame. She understands the dangers of seeking to move people through grief too quickly, before it shows up in the polls. She recognises that what’s required of her here is accompaniment of the feelings, not denial of them.

She knows too that none of us can see the full shape of these major economic, ecological and social transitions from where we’re standing. She doesn’t pretend to see further than she does. Instead, she offers her hand to us, reassuring us that we can face uncertainty together. She doesn’t feel the need to promise us, falsely, that she can remove it. Instead she sees her job as helping us to believe we can tolerate the uncertainty and survive it.

And because she isn’t spending all her energy and political capital on creating a mirage of confidence and certainty, she has room to notice different things. She’s read the research on the values perception gap and knows that most of us rank care, fairness and community very highly for ourselves, then wrongly guess that our neighbours put more weight on status and self-interest. She finds it fascinating that we are in fact a nation of people who share the same values in secret, each assuming we’re the only ones feeling that way.

She speaks to those ‘latent majority’ values even if they appear more subtly than other opinions in the polling data, muted by the relentless noise of divisive social media. She understands that her job is to make it easier for us all to live more openly by these values — knowing that they actually matter to us all, and she’s not afraid to reach into the legal and regulatory machinery — the hidden wiring — that keeps those values from being reflected in how institutions and public leaders behave.

From here, a different kind of politics starts to take shape. She still wants to make people’s lives better through economic security, housing, decent work. But she knows she is doing this in this time of deep ecological, economic and geopolitical change — so she reaches for different tools and frames, expanding our sense of what’s possible as she does so.

Her starting point is that people flourish through interdependence and connection and collective agency, and that these are things people want. That means that ownership and power are the beating heart of her work. She gets that ownership dictates who has security, and how benefits are shared. She paints pictures of nurses who own their workplaces, and of tenants with security. Of communities who own the energy they rely on, and of businesses who run on co-operative principles.

Because she calmly and unflinchingly names the climate crisis as an undeniable fact of modern life that we need to face up to, she is able to build an economy that starts with us being part of the living world, instead of standing separately from it. That leads to her putting ecological health back on the balance sheet as an integral measure of whether our economy is succeeding, instead of treating it as an externality. Suddenly rivers and soil and biodiversity become visible and valued once more, and we are all the better for it.

And now she sees the latent majority values of family and community, she knows that care needs to be treated as a precious foundation of a good society, rather than taken-for-granted free labour, or an over-priced service delivered by an exploitative employer. She points out plainly and directly that an economy that treats care as a cost while rewarding extraction has its values upside down, and she acts from there.

I could go on: the point is that none of these priorities start with an analysis of winnable policy propositions. They start instead with a different understanding of what people are like, and what politics is for. Our imagined politician sees her job as helping us live well together, inside the reality we’re actually in — not the one we’d prefer to pretend we are in.

Why she stays imaginary

If the capacities described above are what are needed now, why do they remain so absent from public life? The tempting answer is that we’ve simply not found the right leader, that this is some kind of casting problem. I don’t think that’s quite it, or at least, it’s not only that.

It’s also that the system fails to produce the leaders capable of staying with reality in the first place. In fact, it actively rewards leaders who don’t stay with reality, because we, the electorate, have been trained for years to prefer the ones who won’t level with us. False certainty becomes the most electable quality there is, far easier to vote for than a clear-eyed account of what’s actually at stake. There is a circular quality to all of this, because false certainty, when it’s offered again and again, makes it harder than ever to offer something different.

This phenomenon isn’t actually that surprising. Kegan and Lahey’s work on organisational immunity to change shows how systems can sincerely want one thing while unconsciously protecting another, older commitment that the new thing would threaten. Politics is no different — and here, our own hunger for reassurance is one of the commitments being protected by current politics. A politics built to protect that hunger will inevitably reward whoever can make the world sound and feel manageable. We keep choosing it. No one has yet offered us an alternative, and asked whether we could bear it.

So my imagined politician would struggle long before she reached high office. Her willingness to be truthful about uncertainty becomes weakness or a lack of clarity; her comfort with complexity becomes indecision and poor communication. Her commitment to long-term resilience is pitted as a zero-sum game against prioritising and solving today’s problems. Her refusal of the black-and-white world of heroes and villains is seen as a failure to have a clear call to action. In short, the very qualities this time between worlds requires of our politicians all get used as the evidence that she’s unfit to lead.

This is a pattern that extends beyond individuals, to the wider ecosystem surrounding formal politics. You can see it in the way that electoral cycles reward things which can be delivered within a single Parliament. It’s there in the Treasury rules that privilege what can be measured over what is actually valuable, and visible again in political communications strategies that demand confidence and conflict over complexity and patience. This is leadership as performance, when what we need most of all is leadership as accompaniment.

And the same patterns play out beyond Westminster too. I’ve written elsewhere about how public institutions become extraordinarily good at defending the assumptions and belief systems that once made them effective, even if the world around them changes. These old assumptions become the lens — and the lens decides what the institution is even capable of noticing. This is why genuinely transformative ideas so often get called ‘unrealistic’ by the centre: because the centre’s own definitions of competence and impact render them unintelligible. The edge sees possibilities the centre can’t yet perceive, or at least which it can only perceive as risk.

So the politician I’ve written about here remains imagined, because our political systems have become brilliantly wired to select somebody else. Institutions produce the leaders they know how to recognise.

This is why I think it’s a mistake to treat this as a crisis of personnel. Change the leader, change the politics: that’s the message of the month. We wait for a better PM and hope that will do the trick. But leadership isn’t produced in a vacuum. It is cultivated and constrained by the systems through which people learn what competence looks like. We keep searching for exceptional leaders, while leaving the machinery that systematically eliminates them completely untouched.

Building the centre from the edge: a fifty year marathon

If the institutions of the centre can’t produce the kind of politics that are now needed, then the obvious question is where else these politics might come from.

The recent and troubling surge of the populist radical right offers some important insights here. It can feel shocking to see the speed with which local councils are falling to a more divisive, nativist politics. But the truth is that by the time these ideas are shaping up manifestos and speeches, they’ve been cultivated for years and decades outside of formal politics. This is more akin to a fifty-year marathon, than an electoral cycle sprint.

“Economics is the method,” said Margaret Thatcher in a 1981 Sunday Times interview, “but the object is to change the heart and soul.” She understood that durable political change required patient institution building, for sure, but also it required efforts to reshape what people understood to be normal, and what they felt to be desirable, in order to open up new space for de-regulation, privatisation and the rest. Research soon to be published by Common Cause Foundation has shown how this agenda cultivated insecurity, individualism and status anxiety, while weakening many of the institutions that had once nurtured belonging and trust, and eroding collective purpose.

Thatcher saw these tracks — material change and cultural change — as different parts of the same effort: each deepening the market for the other. The neoliberal project understood that as well as cultivating the ideas at the edges, it needed to build the connective tissue between the edges and the political centre to be effective. Over the last half century, it laid the pathways capable of carrying these ideas from the margins to the mainstream, via a sophisticated fieldbuilding strategy that involved funding a combination of thinktanks, newspapers, donor networks, campaign organisations, business groups, research institutes, media platforms and cultural narratives. These efforts gradually shifted the boundaries of political common sense — making it possible for today’s edge experiments to become tomorrow’s mainstream thinking.

In other words, the rise of the populist radical right more recently has been slowly growing in soil that’s been carefully cultivated over decades. I sometimes wonder whether progressives have fully absorbed the implications of this. Too often, we behave as though better evidence and stronger arguments will be enough. We invest heavily in policy development, advocacy and communications as if we’re fighting an information war — seeking to win over minds, but paying insufficient attention to the hearts and souls that Thatcher spoke of. These efforts might be important, but they are not sufficient if the deeper conditions through which people make sense of the world remain unchanged.

Looking around today, what I see are hundreds, maybe even thousands of extraordinary acts of hope that are taking shape across communities, movements, artists, faith groups, neighbourhood organisations up and down the country. I see people rehearsing many different futures into being: creating new forms of democratic ownership, rebuilding relationships of care, experimenting with economic solidarity, restoring relationships with the living world. They’re busy — often to the point of burnout — building the fragments of a new political settlement that is more just and regenerative by design.

What I also see is how these initiatives are so frequently isolated, running on fumes, and disconnected from institutions who hold power, and which struggle to ‘read’ and recognise this work. We uphold these efforts as inspirational material for better, more beautiful futures — but we don’t recognise them as containing the seeds of a new politics. And in turn, the people doing this work know about these seeds, but they are cautious in mentioning them, knowing that the minute the work is badged as ‘political’, limited funding is likely to become even more scarce, and they expose themselves to threats and hostility that will make the work harder than ever.

This is where progressive philanthropy is failing, and badly. Our revealed collective belief is that good ideas are enough. We fund pilots. We love innovation. We happily back the community-owned bakery, the neighbourhood repair cafe, the brilliant new land trust. But what I rarely see is a comparable investment in the slower soil work that actually changes political possibilities: building the institutions, relationships, capacities, leadership, public imagination and political infrastructure that’s capable of carrying those ideas into the mainstream without them getting co-opted and diluted in that process.

Instead, we ask the people building those alternatives to brighten up a few conferences, and add some sparkle and zing at the policy round tables we attend. We tell them to give us tidy theories of change in exchange for three year (if you’re lucky) project-based grant requiring measurable outcomes, before we stop funding them because ‘there wasn’t enough demonstrable impact to justify our continued support’. Then we wonder why nothing much has changed in the political landscape after a couple of years, despite the fact that all we’ve done is fund some impressive individual organisations and projects.

I understand where all this comes from: a fear of waste, a desire for ‘accountability’ for the money designed for public good. I think perhaps it also reflects a reluctance to fund anything that feels too close to party politics. But supporting the long slow journey of ideas from the edge to the centre isn’t party political per se — it’s how new political settlements take shape. Choosing not to invest in this is an active choice, and not a neutral one at that: caution at this kind of scale, against the kind of organising we are seeing in more authoritarian and divisive spaces, is its own kind of decision. We are pruning the bushes painstakingly, while others prepare for war.

The populist radical right has understood this for decades and has invested accordingly, with a patience and seriousness that should give the rest of us a lot to worry about. We need to build the field-level infrastructure that will make it possible for the work of regenerative edges to move to the centre. And as part of that, we need to cultivate a different kind of politics and political theory and practice. One that positions politicians as companions capable of helping us face the challenges of today together, rather than asking them to be complicit in our understandable instincts to bury our heads in the sand and not face the fear and grief that is upon us.

Living with two clocks

As I write, the Labour Party is once again consumed by a leadership ‘moment’. The arguments between different camps are about electoral strategy, fiscal credibility, migration, how best to respond to Reform. Undoubtedly all serious and important questions deserving proper discussion and deliberation.

But, I’m also struggling with an existential feeling that these arguments are just too small for where we find ourselves — that they are all constrained by a political imagination that remains far too narrow for the complex challenges of the world we’re now living in. The question behind so much of the public debate seems to be — ‘who can manage this more competently?’.

I want to see politicians who are living and working in service of a different set of questions:

• Who can help us remain honest about the deep uncertainty we face — in a time when the past is no map for the future?

• Who can speak directly to our feelings of loss, grief and anger, without whipping it into nostalgia or blame?

• Who can remind us of our unspoken, more latent values, and how these are shared by our neighbours and fellow citizens?

The current political culture might see these as soft questions that have no place when there is so much structurally that needs to change. But that’s a false choice. The politics I’m describing actually makes things like democratic ownership and economic security more possible. Deep changes like this garner more support when people understand why the world is changing, and what that asks of us. The questions I pose here speak to the conditions we need to create in order to shift the dial on vital material issues of justice like the concentration of ownership, economic security, and wealth inequality.

I talked in the last section about the fifty year project of neoliberalism, because that’s the kind of timeframe it seems to take to shift our notions of what constitutes political ‘common sense’. It’s obvious that this shift doesn’t happen by winning a single argument. Instead it happens because decades of soil work has been systematically funded, in order to make the argument thinkable in the first place.

I also wrote above that we need this new politics ‘in a matter of years’. I meant that too. This is the dilemma and tension we face in this work. Both the 50-year and the 3-year timeframes are true, and together they are irreconcilable.

This mismatch is what troubles me most now: the mismatch between the time it takes to change hearts and souls, and the time we have before any one of the dimensions of the polycrisis crosses a threshold we cannot return from. Building the connective tissue between the edges where regenerative and just futures are already being practised, and the institutions that shape our lives, isn’t a short-term project, and it requires resources, focus and courage. That work has barely begun. And yet we need it now, in a matter of years.

My daughter is ten. In a ‘matter of years’ she’ll be an adult. In fifty years she’ll be reaching the end of her working life. Both clocks run inside her little body. The same is true in this work of building just and regenerative futures: we need to live with both clocks. I do not think that the politics we need will arrive in time to meet the crisis on its own terms. But I can’t bear the thought that this could become an excuse for not building it anyway. This isn’t hope, exactly. But nor is it despair, which is a way of walking away.

Somewhere in this I sense the discipline that I think progressives — politicians, but also the rest of us — now need: to keep doing the fifty-year work, with eyes fully open about the three-year clock. To live with that dissonance and keep going anyway.