The sense of fury is quite familiar, while its locus becomes more extreme: we were outraged in 2013 by Theresa May’s racist vans; furious about David Cameron’s 2015 minimum income requirement for British citizens wishing to live with their spouse in their own country. I could reach back to 2005 and briefly reignite the dismay at Michael Howard’s sly, sinister and failed election campaign, whose rhetorical question – “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?” – asked the nation to reimagine itself as a place where everyone was a secret furnace of boiling resentment towards the Polish delicatessen, just waiting for a sign.
We have been sickened by the Grenfell fire and appalled by the abject failure of Kensington and Chelsea council, which this week was revealed to have left two-thirds of its victims still homeless, while £21m has sat in the bank, earmarked for “affordable” housing. From the Windrush scandal to the deliberate disenfranchisement caused by ID requirements at local elections, every act has that disorienting quality of being simultaneously shocking and inevitable.
How could a government bound by the rule of law and the universal values of respectability and fairness do these things? And yet, how could a government whose fall-back position was always to demonise and smear those it considered the least powerful behave any other way?
There is no shortage of anger, but if anger is an energy this is solar: generative, comprehensible, human in scale, but much more useful if you could store it. The only thing that turns rage into resistance is stamina. In a formula that has probably inspired a pop-psychology diagram on Facebook, the further away you are from an injustice, the faster it fades. Initially, everyone is indignant; within a month, that has whittled down geographically, reduced to the people who live among those affected; within six months, it’s down to their acquaintances until, finally, only a hardcore, such as the Hillsborough families, are left, fighting a wrong that never went away, that only increased as scrutiny mapped its dimensions.
Often, when justice is finally won, it’s because the law has stepped in where casual fellow-feeling has proved inadequate, immune to considerations of boredom and a bigger crisis coming along. A court is able to concentrate on an issue for long enough to get some retribution, as the Lawrences found. Peopled, nevertheless, by people, it also tends naturally towards the case for the establishment, unless that case is mortally weak. You cannot devolve your citizenly responsibility to the high court.
If we want to end the “hostile environment”, and end any possibility of a government explicitly setting out to perpetrate hostile acts against its own people; if we want compensation for the Windrush victims and the proper attribution of responsibility to the people who set out to destroy their lives; if we want to express in some permanent way how abhorrent it has been to see “send ’em back” transmute from a BNP slogan to a Conservative policy, we need radical solidarity. Solidarity with staying power, muster points, real-life expression: solidarity with a plan.
There’s a precedent in the Black Lives Matter movement. Before it, American racism followed a loop. A police officer or white vigilante would kill an innocent black man; aspersions would be heaped on the black man’s character and activities, and then disproved. A court would acquit the white man regardless, and protest would follow, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the energy of the victim’s family; and the event would recede until its anniversary caused it to be culturally memorialised in essay, discussion or film.
Black Lives Matter hasn’t ended police brutality – far from it. Still less has it eradicated racism. But it has spored a connected response to each injustice. From this a pattern can be established, and beneath that a worldview. It has smoked out the “all lives matter” brigade – people who object to any suggestion that black people may be victimised by the authorities, regardless of the evidence, but previously never had to be explicit in that. It has delved into endemic and less dramatic racism – disenfranchisement, black people in custody – and it has created the moral framework for grassroots unity on the left.
It’s difficult to make a practical and broad-based case against Donald Trump, for instance, when your starting point is the Occupy movement. An abstract critique of the system works best when yoked to a concrete critique of its figurehead: that he is a person to whom some lives demonstrably matter more than others.
What we need to emulate is not the slogan so much – though slogans help – as the practical execution; to plan a summer of civil activity that is connected, visible and impossible to ignore. The local elections in England on 3 May are vital, and not just for a generalised expression of opposition to the government. Five pilot projects – in Bromley, Gosport, Swindon, Watford and Woking – will be demanding identification from voters at the polling booths, in a move that the Equality and Human Rights Commission has warned will disenfranchise migrants.
What would solidarity look like in this situation? Would you tell your neighbour that their vote mattered and that if returning officers had been turned overnight into border guards, you’d be watching? What would you do with what you saw? How do you make Watford your business ahead of election day? What are the Brexit flashpoints of the coming months, and how could the key issues – specifically, freedom of movement and the notion of EU citizens as actual people – be connected to fighting racism at the heart of government? When the anniversary of the Grenfell fire arrives, how do we express on a national level that these tragedies are all linked?
Unhelpfully, I have no answers: locked in an itch-scratch-itch cycle of protest and disillusionment, my mind goes inexorably to demonstrations and placards and, once there, is foxed. I know marching doesn’t do much, yet imaginative alternatives never suggest themselves. But one fortification of solidarity is to know that it doesn’t start, let alone end, with the limits of one’s own creativity. As the people closest to an injustice will fight it the longest, so their answers will be the most developed. The important thing for all of us is to stay on side. Don’t wander off. The wandering-off years are over.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
