With the news today that Burnham’s localism will mean that directly elected mayors will now have direct receipt and control of business rates and some income tax in their regions, there will now, very quickly, be vast amounts of lobbying happening to persuade those mayors to use this money for all sorts of things.
And I think the most important place for Sheffield and South Yorkshire to spend that money is into rail transport.
Two years ago, Gareth Dennis, rail engineer and host of the #Railnatter podcast, wrote an article for the Tribune (with accompanying video episode) on why South Yorkshire needs its own CrossRail, and a first draft of what that could look like.
The network that Dennis proposes provides crucial links across the region, all the way from Doncaster to Chesterfield. Regular services along these lines would allow significantly better connectivity for a region of 1.8 million people.
Submissions to Oliver Coppard will already be happening, and I want those of us here in Sheffield and South Yorkshire who care about better rail links to be in that conversation.
I’m disabled. I can’t lead this. But what I can do is be a link, and connect people to each other.
So if you’re interested in this, email southyorkscrossrail@gmail.com (a google account I just made and will be happy to pass on) and we can start linking up with each other, and hopefully build a campaign for better regional trains.
So there’s about to be a Labour leadership contest. You’ve probably noticed.
Whether it’s Starmer hanging on, the briefcase horror of Streeting, Burnham making his move, or someone else emerging from the chaos, there are going to be a lot of conversations over the next few months about who should lead the party. About what Labour should stand for. About what kind of country it’s trying to build.
And if you’re a Labour member, you’re going to have a vote. Maybe more than one.
A couple of years ago, my girlfriend and I wrote a book called How To Be Free. It’s a short introduction to democratic communism. It’s 25k words, takes about three hours to read, we avoided as much jargon as we could, and it’s free. We wrote it for people who are looking around at the world and want to do more than just set things to rights over a pint. It’s not a manifesto. It’s not a set of policy proposals. It’s a values framework.
And I think it’s hyper relevant right now.
Because politics is where the real world meets philosophy. The people and policies we vote for are the real-world manifestations of our personal ethics. We vote based on values, not on policy white papers. We can be convinced with stirring rhetoric, but that rhetoric needs to be based on recognisable ideas about the nature of people, and about why it’s worth us coming together to make a society at all.
So as you’re watching the leadership contest unfold, and as you’re deciding who to support, I’d like to offer you the five values we built the book around. Not as a tick-box test, but as a compass. Something to measure the candidates against.
1. Power resides in the people
This sounds obvious. It’s the basis of democracy. But do the candidates actually act like they believe it?
Ask yourself: do they trust party members, or do they fear them? Do they see the membership as a resource to be managed, or as the actual source of the party’s legitimacy? Do they talk about “the British people” as though that includes everyone, or is there always an unspoken “but”?
The question to ask of any candidate is: what power would you give away? Not what power would you consolidate. What power would you put back in the hands of ordinary people?
2. We all count as people
This one cuts deeper than it seems. It’s not just about saying the right thing about trans rights or disabled people or migrants. It’s about whether a candidate’s entire political worldview is built on the idea that some people matter more than others.
The people who currently add the most value to society per pound of investment are hospital cleaners. They prevent thousands of infections, protecting us while we’re at our most vulnerable, and they’re paid minimum wage to do it. Does the candidate’s economic policy reflect that kind of understanding? Or does their vision of “growth” still mean enriching the people who are already rich and hoping some of it trickles down?
Watch for who they talk about most. The people they centre in their rhetoric. That’ll tell you everything. Ask them about PIP cuts, safe migration routes, strike support, and check their record on Gaza.
3. Variety is strength
I won’t pretend to summarise a whole chapter here, but the core idea is that difference is not a problem to be managed — it’s an asset. A society that draws on many perspectives, many experiences, many ways of living, is stronger than one that tries to homogenise.
For Labour, this means asking: does this candidate see the coalition the party needs to build as broad and inclusive? Or are they trying to win by narrowing the tent? Are they comfortable with disagreement, or do they treat it as disloyalty?
There is enough food to feed the world. There is enough water to drink. There are enough houses, and where there aren’t, the means to build them exists. The “problems” of poverty, hunger, thirst, and homelessness are no longer inevitable, they are political decisions.
The technology to solve most of our problems already exists. Finland solved homelessness by simply putting people in homes first and supporting them from there. We don’t need new inventions. We need political will.
Ask the candidates: do you believe there’s enough? Or are you going to keep asking us to fight each other for the scraps?
5. Get what you need, then do what you can
This is a rephrasing of Marx’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, deliberately reversed. When people are excluded, homeless, ground down by precarious work, they can’t contribute meaningfully to the society they’re trying to build. What people need the most is secure, shame-free access to life’s essentials: food, shelter, heat, water, electricity, healthcare, education, transport, and internet connectivity, which is now essential for communicating with the state.
The state should be trying, as hard as it can, to provide you with these essentials. And it should be trying to find out what else you need; there are over 14 million disabled people in the UK, nearly a fifth of our population, and they need additional support.
Once you’ve got what you need, you can do what you can to build the world you want to live in. You can engage in local politics. You can build a resilient community. You can care for a relative or loved one. It’s nonsense to expect you to give what you can before you’ve had your needs met.
Ask the candidates: do you think the state has a responsibility to make sure nobody goes without the essentials? Or do you think some people just have to lose so others can win?
None of this is a voting guide. I’m a Green Party member, so I won’t be voting in this leadership election.
But I have a stake in it anyway. We all do. The next Labour leader is going to be our prime minister. And I want a strong left that actually stands for something. One that’s worth getting out of bed for. And I want our arguments on the left, both within and between parties, to be about better ways of doing good things, not marginalised people desperately trying, again and again, to persuade their elected representatives to not kill them.
Our book is a starting point for that conversation. It’s the product of 4 years of our thinking that we’ve turned into a resource to be drawn on. An offering. A way of saying: here’s what we think freedom looks like. What do you think?
If you’re a Labour member with a vote to cast, I’d urge you to read it. It’s free, it’s short, and it might help you work out what you’re actually looking for.
You can read How To Be Free online with no paywall.
So I was doing that thing where you’re staring into space and your brain starts joining dots that nobody asked it to join. You know the one. ADHD train of thought, pulling in bits from the news, something you read three years ago, and that one conversation you had on the bus.
Anyway. I ended up thinking about Royal Mail.
Not in the usual way, like “oh god the letters are late again”, but about what it could be. What it already is, if you squint.
There are currently about 11,500 Post Office branches in the UK. That’s more than all the bank branches, supermarket chains, and McDonald’s combined. And the people who run them, the postmasters, are already embedded in their communities. They already know everyone. They already handle your parcels and your passport applications and your TV licences.
And then there’s Royal Mail, which has a legal obligation to deliver to every address in the country, six days a week, for the same price. No other logistics company has that. Amazon doesn’t have that. Nobody does.
So here’s the thought.
What if Royal Mail built an online marketplace? One that’s native to the UK, linked to local shops, designed to get people buying from their own high streets again instead of from a warehouse in Seattle via a delivery driver who’s on a zero-hours contract and has 47 stops before they get to your house?
I know, I know. Royal Mail can barely deliver a birthday card on time these days. But hear me out.
The problem with Amazon isn’t that it’s convenient. It’s that it’s the only convenient option. If you want next-day delivery and a decent search function and not having to remember which of fourteen different local shops might stock a replacement kettle element, you go to Amazon. Because everything else is fragmented and clunky and feels like it was designed in 2004.
But the infrastructure for an alternative already exists. It’s just not connected up.
What I’m imagining is this: an app. We can call it something hideous like, The High Street, or ShopSort, or I don’t know, I’m not a branding person. The point is that it’s an app that lets you search for things and find them at shops near you. You search for “coffee table.” First, it shows you what’s available within walking distance, which you can pick up today. Then it shows you what’s available from other UK shops, delivered tomorrow by your local postie. And if there’s nothing in your city, then you can expand it to the global marketplace if you really want it.
Every result tells you where it’s from. Smith & Sons Hardware on Mill Road. The Corner Bookshop in Hillsborough. Makers’ Guild, Bristol. You can see real-time stock, message the shop directly, and pay through the platform. Royal Mail handles the logistics. You pick it up from the Post Office counter when you go to post your friend’s birthday present.
Collection is the thing, I think. That’s the killer feature. You get a time window, and your parcel is waiting at the Post Office. No missed deliveries. No parcels left in the rain. No frantic drives to a depot on an industrial estate at 7am on a Saturday because you missed the delivery and they won’t redeliver for three days.
For small shops, this would be transformative. They sign up for a flat monthly fee (£50?) and suddenly they have a national online presence without having to know anything about SEO or Amazon’s algorithm or how to ship things to the Outer Hebrides. Royal Mail collects from your shop at the end of the day and does the rest.
A bookshop in Sheffield can sell to someone in St Ives. A specialist model shop can ship anywhere. A hardware store whose foot traffic has been declining for a decade suddenly has an online storefront with zero technical overhead.
And here’s the thing about the Post Office specifically. It’s trusted. People have been going to the Post Office for five hundred years. They know where it is. They know it’ll be there tomorrow. Compare that to Amazon, where every interaction is mediated by an algorithm that doesn’t care if you exist.
I know there are objections. Let me deal with them.
“Royal Mail can’t even deliver letters on time.”
Yeah, fair. Service standards have slipped. But that’s a management and investment problem, not a structural one. The Communication Workers Union (the postal workers’ union) has explicitly said they want to expand into parcels and e-commerce. That’s the growth area. That’s where the money is. A new digital platform would generate the revenue to invest in the core service, not drain it.
“Amazon would crush them.”
I don’t think so. Not if this is done right. Amazon cannot do what the Post Office does: be on every high street, in every village, trusted by every demographic. This idea isn’t “Amazon but red.” It’s “Amazon, but it’s rooted in what’s already here.”
“Who would build it?”
This is where the government needs to step in. Not necessarily to nationalise, though I wouldn’t be mad about that. But by creating a public-interest mandate, like the one that created the Universal Service Obligation in the first place. Ofcom could require Royal Mail to open its delivery network to local retailers on fair terms. The British Business Bank could fund the platform. The Post Office, still publicly owned, provides the physical infrastructure.
“People won’t switch.”
People switch when it’s easy. If the app works, the prices are competitive, and the warm glow of supporting your local high street comes with the convenience of 11,500 pickup points and free next-day delivery within your postcode area, they’ll switch.
The thing is, we have this massive national asset. It’s already there. It’s on every high street. It’s losing money and drifting under Czech ownership and nobody seems to know what to do with it. And the answer is sitting right in front of us: turn it into the one thing Amazon can never be. A marketplace that’s actually about the place it’s in. One that keeps cash, tax, and business right here in the UK.
We have the infrastructure. We have the workforce. We have the trust. What we’ve been missing is the imagination.
I co-wrote a book! And you can read it for free!
It’s an introduction to democratic communism, using five basic values we think are easy to agree with. The whole book is only 25k words, which the internet tells me would take an average 18 year old three hours to read.
And we wrote it with an average reader in mind! Not someone who spends all their time on politics and has a massive library of leftist literature, but just anyone who’s looking around at the world and wants to do more than just set it to rights over a pint.
If you enjoy reading my blog posts, you’ll love the book, and my co-author and I would love for you to read it! Start here, and enjoy!
You all know what utopian thinking is. When you’re daydreaming to yourself, or putting the world to rights at 2am over a drink or several. And you come up with something that has zero chance of being actually implemented, but you reckon would be cool if it was?
So. I was doing that recently, and pondering on the subject of income and wealth inequality, and what, if anything, could be done to make things more equitable. I think it might have been sparked by Rishi Sunak releasing his tax records, and how capital gains tax is a joke, but honestly that was so far back in the ADHD train of thought that it’s just a guess.
There are currently massive ranges of income and wealth in every country around the world, but I’m going to focus on the UK cos the only time I’ve ever lived in another country I was 11 and so sheltered that in retrospect it blows my mind.
What are the problems that I’d like to solve?
- Unemployment benefits and financial support for disabled people in the UK are a joke
- Income tax is high, and benefit tail-offs are like a cliff, which disincentivises work at lower ends of the pay scale
- Parenthood is soooooo expensive
- Wealth, via capital gains tax, is in no way fairly taxed
Before I had to stop work due to disability, I spent a good few years working in local government and the NHS, where pay is on a grade and spine system. So, each job has a grade level (say, grade 1 for a ward clerk) which is based on how much responsibility and training is necessary to do that job, and you advance one spine level for each year you are in a job at that grade, until you hit the top.
I believe that this could be applied to the job market as a whole. We could have 5 grades, each mathematically tied to the others, so a Grade Two is 1.5 times a Grade One, Grade Three is twice Grade One, with the top, Grade Five, being 3 times Grade One. This would massively flatten the outrageous income inequality in the UK, and would tie salaries at the top definitively to salaries at the bottom, so that if a CEO wants to increase their pay, they must also increase the pay of those at the bottom of their corporate hierarchy.
But here’s the magic – Grade One isn’t actually for employment, it’s the UBI. It’s the amount you are given by the state for every day that you’re not in a Grade Two to Five job. As soon as you are getting a salary, you get paid by your employer, but Grade One becomes the floor that no one ever falls below.
Of course there will be cases where people work part time, but again, that’s pretty easy to work out – if you do 2 days a week in a Grade Three job, you get 0.4 Grade Three pay from your job, and 0.6 Grade One benefits from the state. Given that Grade Three is twice Grade One, you end up with 1.4 times Grade One, so even working part time is worth it for the extra money.
How about children and child benefits? Well, that also becomes quite simple – up to the age of 16, everyone counts as half a Grade One, and their benefits are paid to whoever they live with. So, if a child lives with both parents, one of them is nominated to receive their benefits, but if they spend the weeks with one parent and the weekend with another, it’s divided up between them proportionally. At 16, they start receiving the full amount, half to their parents, and half in their own name, which will do two things; one, there will be a lot of 16 year olds who buy very silly things, and two, a lot of banks and building societies will start bringing out accounts for 16 year olds to help them save and budget well. At 18, they start to receive it all in their own name.
Now. The common argument against anything like UBI, how would this be paid for? For starters, anyone who’s working will have their full Grade paid for by the employer, not by the government, so the state is only responsible for people who don’t work, and the proportion of part time worker’s weeks when they’re off. Everyone would still be required to pay national insurance. But there’s massive stores of wealth at the moment that are barely taxed – capital gains, profits, inheritance, and land. Balance the numbers right, and you might even be able to abolish income tax altogether.
What does this end up looking like?
You can have parents who can afford to spend the early years with their children and don’t have to work themselves to the bone to afford childcare. You have a career ladder that is still worth climbing, but doesn’t produce neighbours who earn such vastly different sums that they find it impossible to relate to one another.
Income and wealth inequality are, of course, incredibly complex issues, and this idea of mine is emphatically utopian. However, I think that implementing this kind of system for the job market, and explicitly tying in Grade One as a floor below which people cannot sink, would create a kinder and far less desperate society.
Wanting to get paid more because you did a lot of training to qualify for your job, and because it includes a lot of responsibility, is not a bad thing. It’s not wrong to want to be appreciated for your efforts with cold hard cash. But people who can’t work, or have chosen to do work that isn’t paid, are still people, and they also deserve to live well.
A little over two years ago, in November 2018, I had a long weekend in Paris with a partner. It was a great weekend. We saw the show at Moulin Rouge, visited the Louvre, ate like kings, and I got tear gassed and pepper sprayed by riot cops. Because entirely without meaning to, we happened to visit that fair city on one of the first weekends of the long-running protests that later became known as gilets jaunes movement. And of course, me being who I am, I ended up going past the front line between the cops and the protestors on my way back to the hotel.
(I promise that I didn’t plan to end up at a protest in a foreign country after becoming a wheelchair user, but these things seem to happen to me. Insert gallic shrug.)
For all that it was frightening – all riots are frightening – the police were more frightened than the protesters. Why else would they have used pepper spray. I didn’t follow the gilets jaunes movement, so I don’t know whether or not they achieved their goals, or whether or not I would, with more knowledge, have agreed with them. But they succeeded where most English movements do not. They made the government aware that they rule by consent of the people.
The old adage goes, an Englishman’s house is his castle; which is a fine sentiment for taking responsibility for what happens in the spaces you’re responsible for, but it also isolates us from one another, putting battlements between neighbours and colleagues. Thus psychologically isolated, we miss opportunities for acting together.
We are social beings, and our lives are more interconnected and interdependent now than they have been at any time in the past. Our collectives are larger, and so are our impacts. But we have yet to adapt to this reality. The human mind developed in a world of small communities, with available resources defined by the speed of feet or hoof. We need to adjust our fundamental ideas of how reliant we are on people and processes we don’t see or understand; to recognise the scale of response that is required from us if we want to grow old in a world in which we have homes. Castles or not.
In Paris, I witnessed close up what the French understand about community that the English often find so hard to grasp. There are many more of us than there are people in charge. And if we all ask for the same thing, the world changes. Mass movements do get results.
In the UK, we have been subject to a centuries long campaign to make us forget this. To persuade us that the people in charge know best, that noblesse oblige is benevolent, that obscure references to Greek wars are a useful attribute for a ruler.
But looking back 2500 years doesn’t prepare us for the next 2500 years. The world of the last two-odd millenia is not the world we live in now. We have split the atom. We have pierced the veil of our atmosphere. We have pushed the boundaries of our influence into places that used to be wild. We have taken the bones of ancient extinct species and rendered them for baubles, then used their blood to transport the baubles around the world on a whim.
We have changed the sky.
The challenges that humanity now faces are ones of our own making and on a scale unlike anything our species has ever faced before. And they are challenges that we must face together, fast, if we want to avoid becoming a forgotten smear on the fossil record.
Covid is not the first disaster of the climate catastrophe. It will not be the worst.
My city, Sheffield, was the setting for the 1984 film, Threads. The film depicts the consequences of a very fast disaster – a nuclear war – with long and awful consequences. We are in the early years of the climate catastrophe, which promises to be every bit as devastating as that, but on a longer time scale. Covid-19 is an early part of this catastrophe, a warning bell, born of humanity’s relentless push for resources in the wild spaces of our small and shrinking planet. We have pushed into nature, and nature is pushing back.
Looking at the scale of this, the actions of teaching unions in England over this last weekend seem small, but they are exactly the sort of collective actions that we, passengers on this spaceship Earth, need to take to assert our desire for life over profit.
The government was told on 22 December 2020 that the country needed a strict lockdown to minimise the number of deaths from Covid. We know that they didn’t act for another two and a half weeks. They let households mix for Christmas day, and primary schools go back for a one day virus transmission bonanza.
We cannot trust our rulers, but pressure works. The government was slow to respond to the pressure, but they did finally do the right thing. Too late, and at what will be an appalling cost in lives, but pressure works.
We must rediscover our collective right to political power. Pressure our rulers to take the actions necessary to ride out the oncoming catastrophes of a warmer and crowded planet. We must join unions and talk to our neighbours and call our MPs.
And we must remember what I learnt from the Parisiens I met on 24 November 2018: pepper spray washes off. Solidarity is forever.
I’ve just finished watching the Novara Media 100k livestream, and one of the last questions was asking what gives them hope for the future, and I’d like to answer that for myself.
The corona vaccinations that have been announced over the last month are amazing technological achievements, but they are also a political and social achievement. They show what humanity can achieve when politicians, society, and private institutions are all pulling in the same direction.
We should, obviously, already have started working on global warming and climate change, and there have been successes, but things need to move faster. To a certain extent, the theoretical and technical problems of climate change have been solved, but have yet to be implemented.
In the same way, there’s an argument to be made that the technology behind the covid RNA vaccines was an all-but solved technology, waiting for the right combination of virus, investment, and opportunity. Once this combination arrived, everything swung into gear and, out of apparently nowhere, we have not one but three vaccines preparing to roll out in a timescale no one would’ve believed this time last year.
What this proves is that when politicians see, or are made to see, something as an urgent crisis, change happens. Greta Thunberg was right all along! We have the science, we just need to do what it tells us to do. And what it’s telling us is that we urgently need to change where we get our energy from, how we grow and move our food, and how we travel locally, nationally, and internationally.
I’ve heard people talking about how it normally takes 10 years to make a safe vaccine, and using that as a reason to say that these covid vaccines won’t be safe, but that’s a misunderstanding. The vast majority of scientific time is wasted trying to get funding and approval to do the science. Everyone agreed that covid was a crisis, and therefore all covid vaccine projects went to the top of every pile and there was a lot more money around for pushing things forward than there usually is. All the artificial barriers that are usually in place just became a lot smoother. The safety procedures have all been followed, but they didn’t have to do a 3 year funding application between each stage.
Another thing that apparently takes 10 years is stopping the sale of new fossil fueled vehicles and setting up a network of charging hubs for electric vehicles; despite the fact that all petrol stations and most homes in the UK have mains electricity, and that the UK, one of the pioneers of wind power, and earlier, of nuclear power, is in an excellent position to make the switch to electric only vehicles powered by carbon neutral electricity generation.
Our climate is in crisis. We know this. We know what we need to do to fix it. And we know that the actions of individuals will never be enough. Just on electric cars, government will need to subsidise the technology until it’s competitive, and provide highways support for roadside and service station charging technology. This is just one area where government action is necessary to move us all forward in ways that are individually unattainable.
What’s new is that we now know that, if they wanted to, our government could move forward, fast, with the collective actions needed to drop carbon emissions and mitigate the impact. They did it for corona. They have no excuse not to do it for climate change.
On my way home from Sheffield train station after going to the Put It To The People march in London this last weekend, my taxi driver told me about an upcoming scheme in Sheffield city centre which had me gasping.
The idea is to reduce inner city traffic pollution by levying a congestion charge on all commercial vehicles. The consequences of this seem pretty obvious to me. Given that there are no charges on private vehicles, this will raise taxi and public transport fares, and make commercial deliveries to the city centre more expensive, thus raising prices.
The city centre is by far the most well connected part of the city for public transport. There are park and ride facilities for people to be able to leave their cars on the outskirts of the city. I don’t know how below the radar this proposal has been, but I guess that’s why Sheffield City Council has chosen to levy this charge on commercial rather than private vehicles, to lessen the publicity and be able to charge, and therefore collect, more money.
Reducing pollution is obviously important, but this scheme doesn’t seem designed to do that, but rather to raise money for the Council with as little public protest as possible, and in the process get a couple of good headlines on climate action and score votes for the next local elections.
Allow me to suggest a better scheme: Ban private cars without a blue badge from the city centre altogether. Just ban them. Electric vehicles or not, ban them all and reduce congestion in the city centre. Don’t do this charge for commercial vehicles at all. We want a vibrant city centre with reduced air pollution, and we can have it without having to compromise accessibility. If necessary, build some multi-story car parks on the current park and ride sites, only one of which (Meadowhall) is currently more than one flat lot.
Taxi drivers, bus companies, and haulage firms are already aware of which way the wind is blowing, and charging them an access fee to the city centre will just mean they have less money to invest in actually purchasing the electric vehicles that will actually make a difference to air quality in the city centre. In addition, due to embedded carbon from manufacturing, it can often be “better to keep your old banger on the road than to upgrade to a greener model” and many commercial drivers will be doing this while saving up for a next generation electric vehicle.
I’m a disabled person and use a wheelchair, and I’m aware people have different access needs. A blue badge isn’t easy to get, but it is possible without having to go through the DWP, and black cabs are pretty good at accommodating mobility devices.
I can absolutely understand the impulse to do *something* about air pollution, but in my opinion, this ain’t it. It’ll make buses, taxis, and city centre shops more expensive, and end up encouraging more out of town shopping, in private cars, and less shopping in the pedestrianised city centre. And the only justifications I can see for it are a naked grab for money and good headlines.
I’ve created a new blog for posts about disability and sex that don’t really feel like they fit here. I might well continue to post things here, but for the moment, my primary focus is Chronically Sexy. Please follow the new feed, and share it with those who will find it interesting or useful. See you there!
I’ve been blogging at fearlessknits.wordpress.com for 7 years, and have changed a lot in that time. Reading my earlier posts from my current perspective has become an exercise in personal archeology.
This isn’t to say that I want to forget or renounce the person I used to be, but it no longer feels like we belong under the same banner.
There’s also the fact that over the last year, I’ve been moving towards doing more disability and sexuality activism. Politics with a small p. I don’t know exactly what shape this will end up being, but I do know I have a lot to write about.
I’ve transferred over some posts from my fearlessknits blog that feel like they fit here, and I’m going to leave everything up there.
Being ill, disabled, and sexy is not always easy. And we face challenges in our sex lives and intimate relationships which…
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