I’m in two groups that have sprung up spontaneously online, for neighbours to help each other out: one on Facebook, the other on WhatsApp. Neither is remotely political, in the sense that nobody is discussing the government or its deficiencies. And you would never distinguish between the two in terms of generosity or creativity: there are mental health nurses offering Skype calls, people offering parking spaces and dog walking. And above all, and always, support for self-isolation: any shopping, any errands, anything at all, to maintain this state of confinement that only a fortnight ago would have felt impossible, and still feels so unnatural.
The WhatsApp group, though, was organised by the local Labour party, and this is how it shows: it was organised by wards, which are much smaller than the entire borough – 10,000 people rather than 300,000. The ward immediately split into subgroups of two or three streets, and the leafleting began.
This is what you always remember from a Labour childhood, the endless leafleting, the crushing sense of futility at popping another 300 flyers telling people how seriously your candidate takes buses. In a time of crisis, it is transformed: you don’t want to create an online community of people who all use the same social networks. You want to tell everybody. There is a huge amount of embedded knowledge about the process of activism, how to get round an estate where there’s an entry code, what phrases to use in the leaflet, how big the font should be. All guardedness is jettisoned, with people freely giving out their numbers and addresses to strangers.
There is a lot of regular, worldly expertise – a nurse, a shrink and a vet on one scabby road – who can scotch operational rumours that circulate quite freely on Facebook (“wear gloves”, the round robins say; but gloves are the same as hands, in hygiene terms. And at least hands, you can wash). You could predict from miles away that there would be a lot of local knowledge, but it is still so surprising in its particulars – there’s a nunnery in the road perpendicular to mine, which everyone has always known, because of the nuns. But it was the activists who knew that it was also a hospice, housing 176 terminally ill people, and it was that tiny local support group that started putting together a rota for checking what they need. Not every member knows every other in a Labour ward, but there’s one person who everybody knows, and she (it’s always a she) carries a lot of weight, maybe because she doesn’t swing it. She can shoot down a misjudged idea with an emoji. In this group of very mild, sometimes online-only acquaintanceship, there is a huge amount of love.
Hoaxes and hysteria are the condiments of any emergency: presumably there’s malice in their creation, which is depressing, but I understand why people believe and spread them. We are in this insistently eerie state of constantly checking the news, only to find it hasn’t changed, except to worsen. This puts us all in a passive, suspended state. If you can find movement in events, you can think yourself ahead of them. Hence this slew of rumours: the army’s on the streets, the shops are running out of food, this guy knows a guy who works in RBS, and he says national quarantine by 5pm, my friend who’s a nurse says don’t drink anything with ice in it, and hold your breath while counting to 10. They spread pretty much unchecked on open forums, but are shot down with precision in tighter groups.
It is not relevant what the politics are of this ground army; it could be any group, the Women’s Institute, the RNIB. What is relevant is that the ground army exists, and is confronted with a challenge it is uniquely placed to meet. The moral act would be for all Labour leadership candidates to come out and say: the election will go ahead, it’s all online, but the campaign is over. You all know who you’re voting for. Redeploy the phone-bankers to talk about other things; cross-pollinate ideas; show solidarity; think about more organised ways to support the frontline workers and people who are isolated; shoot the breeze. The membership base has been the site of deep connections, knowledge and trust for many decades, counterpoised always by the amount of energy it spent talking about, and finding differences within itself. Members have already relinquished that second pastime entirely, and the leadership candidates should do the same.
We already know, I think, that we’re not going back to who we were before: a nation that could wind itself up into bitter hatreds over flimsy concepts, that took “pragmatism” to mean economic constraint over human generosity.
“Concentrate on the future” is what people say under lockdown, in France, in Italy, when pressed for advice on how to stay sane. They don’t mean, “think about the time when the bars are open again, when we can hug one another for no reason”; they mean, when we rebuild it, what do we want life to look like?
Politics has already gone far beyond our previous understanding of it as a set of performative oppositions and set itself to the urgent question: now that we suddenly know how much we care about one another, what action does that demand? In the immediate term, the answer is very obvious, counterintuitive and painful: it’s to stay the hell apart.
In the longer term, the question is more searching. What can we build, together, to keep each other safe, not just from disease, but from want, from despair, from solitude? These questions, I think, will collapse old party divisions. After this brutal lesson in what matters, we will have a keen eye afterwards for what doesn’t. Labour can model that now – given that it just isn’t possible to cooperate and compete simultaneously, it must choose cooperation. Everything else can wait.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
