It’s definitely time to use the f-word. But, as leaders, we must know what it’s worth when we say it.
Expo
Downright frightening. Can I even feel the half of it? While I can easily talk about *The Future!* violent race-related riots across England this week felt like an attempt to drag the UK into the past, an idea of England with fewer voices in it. But in a similar spirit to a festival I co-hosted last weekend, joyfully defiant community responses all over the country have demonstrated something to take note of – what a new spirit of looking forward might potentially mean to way more of us. Especially when we start to see that none of us have the last word on oppression.
I don’t claim to be a trend forecaster. And, regrettably, I’m not sure I’m a brilliant science fiction visionary either. I didn’t spend the 1980s frustrated I was just a bit too early for an international computer network to help me secretly ace my exams, and thirty years later I was gobsmacked it produced Brexit.
Didn’t have a Scooby that was coming. To me, 2016 felt like waking up in Invasion of the body snatchers.
So I may have had to retroactively adjust the blinkers of my intersectional privilege a tad, but a life in creativity wasn’t all private viewings and fashion parties and sparing me the need for brilliant exam results. In time it has given me a slightly different take on leadership – I instinctively observe that with storytelling.
How well a leader uses the theatre of making ideas land, certainly; think of your audience, by slide 48, Gary. But also, by how well they seem to tap into emotional truth.
How far can a shared moment get us?
I’ve been suggesting over the last couple of years that leaders need to start using the f-word. It’s partly how I pitch my place in change-making events; my creative confidence can help leaders “talk about the future again”. This means more than managing trend and risk analyses, it’s something that takes that nerve-wracking thing. Vision.
Perhaps partly as a result, it’s a word that’s seemed tacitly banned for the past couple of decades. But global leaders have been clearly reading my posts at last.
First time I heard it recently it rang out like a bell. It was congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a rally at Climate Week in New York last September and she used it in just the sort of context I feel the need for its revival – a passionate call for justice from leadership, effectively. To start investing in futures more of us can believe in again. Work for together again.
This past couple of weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has been using it. “It’s a fight for our future” she said in her very first address as Democrat almost-nominee, using the general singular that futurists twitch at. “It’s about two different Americas,” she said, “one that looks back and one that looks forward.”
I blinked at it.
Her new running mate, Tim Walz, has been coming out with it. “Together we will fight for our future.” You’ve heard him.
And… is it me? Does some vague sense of future, of possibilities, seem part of something just beginning to resonate with more of us?
“They galvanised a feeling of hope, engaged with Americans, acted with purpose and invigorated online conversations” said Rakia Reynolds this week. “As a society, we’ve been doomscrolling and trash-talking for so long that a positivity pipeline was welcomed with open arms—and maybe even an iota of trust.”
Writing in AdWeek, she is one of many commentators already analysing the Harris campaign for storytelling gold and I can see it unexpectedly feels to some of us like the Democrat candidate is tapping into a seam of emotional truth about change itself in this moment. Something new. She does, after all, seem to embody it. On the surface.
Fear of change you might say is a significant theme of the last ten years. It is how political populism stokes isolating frustrations into fires in people’s shop units and high streets. Violence below the surface given legitimacy and outlet. But it can be a fearsome porn addiction online – an itch in the pants stoked into gut flames in the unreal single-bandwidth sensorial experience of eyes on a screen.
We can amplify it in ourselves, all alone in our rooms. Silently teaching the algorithm how we want to see the world.
You’ll say it sounds like we should get out a bit more.
But, if so, where would we go?
Practicing the world we want.
Business rarely gets the luxury of being populist. Global economics tacitly demands business looks forward relentlessly for one thing – “growth”. Plus, workplace representation has at least developed enough that open sexism and racism aren’t supposed to be listed as package features in recruitment ads. I’ve yet to see any Stop The Boats memes sponsored by electrical engineering firms in the midlands on Linked In.
So, in generally liberal times, one event I’ve been involved with on the surface for five years wouldn’t sound controversial at all in a pitch to corporate or arts or local authority public facing funding. Back when we imagined there was any funding just for fun.
World Of Love Festival.
I think founder Bea Sieradzka’s vision for it began with simply wanting to encourage people to learn different languages and it evidently grew into a whole weekend celebration of diversity, over in my extended back garden of Kings Park in Boscombe. I can amble there with a coffee.
It’s a gently fun showcase of people living in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole linked loosely into communities with shared roots all around the world. It looks like a gathering of gazebos and parades and performances of traditional voices, stories, colours, flavours, aromas and beats all in one field across from the Cherries’ stadium. My duties as host of the main stage you may feel free to assume give me an extra hit of whatever it is that liberal white dudes get a little extra smug on at Protected Characteristic community fairs. Because, despite my furtive protestations to Bea every year that she can’t have a middle aged monolinguistic English white bloke ring mastering a racial diversity event, I’ve still done it. Bea scolds me for saying so each time, but having radio host and BCP Indian Community leader Anjali Mavi co-present with me definitely improves the show, I feel more part of the story. She’s a pro and a laugh to banter with between acts and only occasionally forgets I don’t speak Bengali, which is lovely. Plus, if it is an initiative to quietly help the still majority white population of my home towns feel comfortable with who their towns also are today, my damn-fool face in there has just part of it up to now. I don’t feel needed, I do feel welcome.
And somehow, every year it all turns into balmy late afternoon sunshine in that little field of love, like a family cook-out. Simple, heart-calming, engaging for those just wandering in to attend and grab a bite with the kids.
It’s quirky, energising, juxtaposial, funny and sweet and moving and I don’t know the half of it, obviously.
Bea’s post from a couple of days after the event sums up a lot with some honesty.
“Someone wrote to us today, “I have attended numerous festivals but never encountered one like yours, where multicultural ethnicities come together and seamlessly flow throughout the event.” The reality is that achieving this seamless flow isn't always as easy as we’d like it to be. We all bring our own emotions and experiences, which can make navigating differences challenging. But it’s precisely through these challenges that we find the essence of what we aim for: uniting people and blending diverse cultures into the world we live in.
“Our festival is about more than just celebrating differences; it’s about integrating those differences into our shared experience, enriched by the British values of inclusivity, unity, and respect for one another. It’s not always easy. But it’s great if we can keep trying.”
It’s great if we can keep trying. There is a realistic note.
We never know the back stories. I walked to that field this year thinking it again. What might a young rapper from South Sudan, not much older than the civil war that began in 2013, be bringing with them into their music, between Bentui and Boscombe? A hymn to his mother that he will be okay? TR Craze’s new single might be bobbing Afro pop, but My House On Fire is clearly testifying to a long personal journey. And, as Caroline said to me, it’s sort of weird to dance to such a testimony.
I get to bring some silly joyfulness, as my privilege would always seem to suggest and my job always requires a bit. It may be easy for an old liberal to enjoy a mix of voices, flavours and sounds on a warm summer afternoon, it’s like a world’s fair, a UN shop window. But I know enough when I’m welcoming people onto the stage. And not just about what it takes to bring people together across languages and cultures and still current divides of conflict represented around that field in Boscombe.
But this year’s festival also fell on a weekend of far right mobilisation across the UK.
I can say that I knew up front there had been warnings from the police. They had, in fact, talked Bea through the details of what to do if anyone showed up, and that they would be on standby to swiftly attend. A security person told me later that afternoon they had backup on speed dial also. I heard insider testimony from a community support professional of being targeted that morning on email by a far-right group.
I found myself watching the perimeter from the stage for much of the day. And much of the day seemed to pass slowly, even with all the beats and dancing and irrepressible fun.
Bea had shared just a glimpse of this up front with me, not wishing to twist my joyful role but making sure I had an idea. She said: “I let you know because I trust you will know just what to say and do.”
That’s a lot of faith in my potentially front line diplomatic capabilities.
But I wondered, what would I do with that mic, if bully boys strode past our extremely porous perimeter?
One phrase kept coming to mind.
We’re not going back.
Neglecting the connections.
What holds us together?
Netflix and sugar, mostly, right?
But what would make your nearest high street feel like home? What signals stimulate the idea of who we are together? It’s a story, right? But what makes us feel it like it makes up part of who we are?
The ideas of where we’ve come from, the ideas of where we’re heading?
The Past is no more real than The Future. They’re made of the same fuzzy grey memory mood brain goop. So we should be vigilant to how the media amplifies our perception of all this – the vibration of it into us.
The absolute certainty of a MAGA Republican dictatorship can switch to the overnight liberal bejazzlement of Joe Biden finally stepping aside for Kamala Harris. A more socially minded new government in the UK can flip back into a stomach pit-drop of race riot violence on streets across England. It’s a head spin. A roulette wheel you’ve bet your mental health on. All on black. Now all on red.
If you’re paying it all attention. The broadcast edits of reality.
I’ve found this week that, not unlike my own reaction to Brexit in 2016, trying to understand it and biting back my fear and anger with respect, it is posts on Facebook from people I think well of and normally like very much that scare me. The body snatchers virus had barely begun its work eight years ago, I might be tempted to think by the same medium.
But I at least know a bit more now. I know it’s not that. I am disturbed that certain friends of mine seem to not have a Scooby about the effect of their posts about boats and Farage and *wokeism!* on other friends of mine. I do know now that a generation of slidingly right wing Conservatism in England has made a country so unequal it is culturally coming apart as a society in our minds, supposedly spilling onto our streets. That will intersect for some of us. But whose voices we’re surrounding ourselves with – there’s the real centre of influence we choose to sit in the middle of.
As Dame Sara Khan says in the intro to her report into social cohesion, published in April:
“Rather than high risk and acute threats such as terrorism, cyber-security and foreign state interference, many of the cohesion risks I identify are chronic, insidious and often sit below the radar; the impact of which is not actively measured or even fully appreciated. There is a growing and dangerous climate of threatening and intimidatory harassment leading to serious censorship – what I have termed freedom-restricting harassment – affecting not just our politicians and those in public life, but members of the public too.”
Her criticism of politicians helping to make this happen from the top down, has bordered on exasperation.
The speeches, the references, the terminology sewn into statement after statement from Conservative ministers since long before Brexit. The near-naked incitement to racial hatred on front page after front page across our newstands nationwide. We know whose skin the structural storytelling industry has in the game. And when any white friends share memes about “concerned fathers #notfarright” they’re showing how stomach-turningly easy it is for them and me to not even notice how othering our self expressions can be. How little it costs us to give a neighbour yet another little stab cut of dismissal.
“One of the hardest things is, coming from a muslim background, it’s horrible to hear the monstering of people, it’s ludicrous – of course it gets to you” said journalist and podcast host Coco Khan this week. “In the 90s we were all just Asian” she said.
“The power structures have been working efficiently I would say since 9/11 to create distinctions between us.”
Historian David Olusoga is unequivocal in this point.
“Riots are not protests and there is a difference between motivations and excuses. Despite much that has been said, the riots of 2024 were not born of “legitimate grievances” about poverty, underinvestment and the breakdown of basic services, all supposedly deepened by mass immigration” he said. “The people attacked on the streets, those who had to defend their places of worship or their homes, are the neighbours of the rioters. They live in the same towns and suffer the consequences of the exact same poverty and underinvestment.”
Novara Media recorded a take-down of this behaviour that will sound like an inrush of oxygen to some of us, from a young white woman in Barnsley, who said: ““Your problems are from the top-down people making us feel small because we’re working class. But I’m proud to be working class, and I’m proud to be anti-racist working class as well.”
Which doesn’t do justice to the detention lesson plan this whole clip was. As the first comment under it on Insta said: “This woman has come into the bar I work at a few times and she absolutely schooled one of our regulars (a very middle class Reform voter btw) she is CLASS and she sinks pints like a champ ❤️”
“You have to make adjustments, of course you do,” said Danny, a doorman calling into Shelagh Fogarty’s LBC radio show from somewhere in London. “I know what I look like, I look like a doorman… and when I walk down the street and see a group of Asian women looking a bit nervous because of the way I look I deliberately give them a nice big smile.”
“I have culture, I have colour, I’ve learned things from around the world – they’ve enriched my life. If you live in my community, you are my people”.
If you live in my community, you are my people.
God I want to have a pint where these people are drinking. Don’t you?
This amorphous concept we call “society” has always been a judgement word – are you in or out of it? Do you wish you were accepted by whatever it is in your head, or do you know it’s bullshit? Do you still believe in citizens and scroungers? The high street is a minefield.
You might simply ask why would so many of us want to set our own house on fire? Or at least our bins. I know I’m always giving myself away when I talk about futures. Is there a more entitled tell about personal privilege?
You can say so. But we’ll still have to live together and manage our emotional truths as well as our bins. The fact that some of us still think it’s a mystery how others of us can feel as Sudanese as British is, I can see enough, a failure of the culture we’re all swimming around in and it’s a failure that costs us dearly in safety, wellbeing and reputations. A cost still boringly being demanded of us by the usual top tier commercial plunderers we let get away with it.
From ground up and top down alike, could some of us behave like real leaders in the stories and characters we choose to champion? To illustrate our vision.
What we’re all kinda waiting for is leaders who will show us futures that have invested in us.
So does change happen in a key moment?
I do tend to bank on this. But it’s more like change manifests then, after years brewing, like all evolution. Which also means such moments are like dealing with the weather and getting out in nature: You can’t control anything except which pants you pull on, and what you pay attention to before choosing them.
“This is a moment for an actual temperature test” said Nish Kumar, “– the sort of temperature test that we didn’t have when Joe Cox was murdered”.
“It’s okay to be scared” he added, addressing everyone in his audience clearly feeling the fresh skin sweats of racial hatred. “I am clinically scared – but I know we’ll be alright. Because we are the sons and daughters of people who faced this before and beat it.”
So, in this context, I feel Not Going Back resonating – and wonder how far it might.
Working with what we’ve got.
There is a vibe around this phrase that almost seemed to fall out of Kamala Harris’s first speech, that c o u l d bring people together in larger numbers than fear of change has been doing so. Not Going Back. When her audience in the mid west just spontaneously chanted it back to her and stopped her in her tracks, I felt a little jolt of electricity.
Emotional truth unlocked. Could it be shared between millions of us?
The historic truth could, of course, stop us working with it.
As heavily US-funded Israel reportedly delivered a truck full of unidentifiable Palestinian bodies into Gaza this week, it might not exactly be easy for you to chant Not Going Back with any sincerity.
Our context is real. Our supposed freedoms unequal, hard-won by some, easily lost by everyone. And while riots across England looked dumbly violent, they weren’t just chillingly well orchestrated by political players. As professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College Corey Rubin said to Adam Conover three quarters of a year ago, good liberals really shouldn’t be constantly othering the cheerleaders of Trump or Yaxley Lennon as dumb. There are emotional truths being triggered by the grifters, and deep internal stories in all of us.
But we are not just one story. Not one of us. And we get to edit the one we think we’re in.
Those images that flooded in after the same weekend I was standing on that little vulnerable stage at World Of Love festival, feeling like I had so little skin in the game. The anti-fascist throngs diffusing and wrong-footing more planned hate mob stuff. How many of us together seem to have felt that this is about all our futures. Because it so obviously is.
A local Facebook friend of mine has been learning out loud in all this, impressively. I won’t name him, but his questions and testimony to having a go at standing up for the better us lot have been honest and challenging. Having been to anti facist protests at least three towns around us, he concluded a realistic but heartening post about his experiences like this:
”Do not lose sight of the reason we do this. It is NOT a 'protest'. It is not a game, or a fun day out. It is protecting your community from a potentially violent, hateful mob. Yes, it might be in the town where you live and work. You might even know some of the people on the opposite side. But if this is your calling, to counter the racist hate, good for you… This racist vitriol really is a small minority, and today it showed. Good job!”
The reflex to other fellow humans is boringly, bone-freezingly universal. We should know with flint in the soul it serves the few in power, not the most of us. It’s a habit to get out of fast, where survival and wellbeing are concerned – even as I know which side of the lines I’ll be standing at the next public stand-off. The old system is out to use all of us, as we dare to try to transition ourselves out of it. Sometimes you have to use one bit of it to fight another. Like building a raft from the bits of the ship that crashed.
But if it’s a story inside us, all a different future takes is practice.
Alexandria’s passionate call at Climate Week made clear that we will have to – practice it, ordinary us lot. But that we really can, if we want it, if we organise and if we can see why to bother putting in some hours. Including taking off some old blinkers to see who is really standing next to us.
“We organise out of hope. We organise out of commitment. We organise out of love. We organise out of the beauty of our futures.”
So the question is: Which future will we go out to meet?
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