what now? after #GE2019

In the wake of the UK's General Election result, what now?

Today is one of those days where I am reminded how much wisdom there is among my friends. Any wisdom I share here, mostly comes from them...

1. Breathe. Take some deep breaths. This is not just a metaphor - it's a serious, emotional, physical, spiritual necessity.

2. Reach out to friends. For a physical, or virtual hug. Share food together. Cry together. Be silent together.

3. Make space to allow shock, grief, anger, fear to express themselves. Don't make judgments about the emotions that you find yourselves with. Don't push them away, or pretend they're not there. Let them be. Don't jump too quickly into action, or analysis.

4. Embrace poetry, song, art, where they resonate for you. They will enable parts of you to speak that will otherwise go unheard.

(Thank you, Jane Perry and Cormac Russell for channelling Leonard Cohen today)

5. Find or re-engage in wider solidarities: community groups, trade unions, broad-based community organising, campaign groups, wherever. 'Build coalitions of realistic hope and action', as my friend and colleague Ruth Harley puts it:

"Deep breath. Be kind to one another, of course. But know that kindness is not enough. Find solidarity - in trade unions, broad based community organising, campaign groups, wherever. And act - organise, agitate, resist. Support your community. Hold your MP to account. Take time to listen to your neighbours. Especially if this result came as a surprise to you. Have cross-generational conversations. Build relationships with people not like you. Don't dismiss the fears of those who are most vulnerable. Offer what help and solidarity you can. Don't panic. Don't get caught up in recriminations Don't bury your head in the sand. None of those will lead to change. Build coalitions of realistic hope and action. Make as much of a difference as you can, wherever you can. And do it together. #solidarity #resistance #power" (Ruth Harley, on Twitter, @ruth_hw)

6. Push our new government to make clear, concrete commitments on key issues (as the Methodist Church have done this morning in their open letter to the Prime Minister).

7. If they've made promises already, hold the representatives of our new government to account on these. Another friend and colleague Revd Claire Turner puts this powerfully:

"So, they apparently promised more money, more hospitals, more nurses, more GP appointments, more public services ... so it's our job to hold them to those promises - loudly and fiercely - on behalf of the most vulnerable.  Our civic responsibility does not end with a x against a particular name.  That's where it begins.

Our MP gave me postcards to give to the people who knock on my door asking for food. I will be emailing him every time someone calls. Every time. Tonight, at the end of the nursery nativity, 2 families asked me to put money on their gas and electric meter keys.  At the nativity play. 

Hold them to account."

8. Remember that democracy is more than voting in elections. The most important democratic conversations are the ones that happen every day in our neighbourhoods and other places of life, work and gathering - including our churches and faith communities. Find or create spaces for honest truth-telling and deep listening to each other - where possible, across some of our differences, and not in separate, self-reinforcing bubbles.

9. Listen.

In General Elections and referendums, politicians will proclaim confidently either that "the people have spoken" and that they therefore have a mandate to do what they intend to do, or that they have "heard the message from the electorate" and are therefore making various changes of direction in response. But this isn't genuine, serious listening. This is taking a set of statistics, imposing a particular interpretation on them (usually one that fits ones pre-existing agenda), and then acting accordingly.

Genuine, serious listening - 'generative' listening - creates the space for something new, perhaps never-before-expressed, to be heard: in others, perhaps very different others to us; but also in ourselves. What is going on in our country can only partly be understood at a rational level - people voting for particular policies because of the direct, practical impact of those policies on their lives, for example. So much more is going on at sub-rational levels, at the levels of deep emotions, senses of foundational identity, experiences of worth/value, security, meaning, connection/attachment, and the like - and experiences of the lack or loss of those things. Some of these will be very much an individual thing, but much will be shared more widely - in particular communities or geographical areas, among people from a particular class, religious or ethnic background, or who have lived through a shared experience, of displacement, unemployment, stigmatisation, abandonment, and so on. And it's at these levels that we need to be facing hard, collective realities about our shared histories and present day realities. We need to be talking about widening inequality, a decade of austerity, and our de-industrialized society; we need to be talking about the tension between individualism and our attachments to communal and collective identities, about identities rooted in our ability to consume or produce, and identities rooted in other grounds for value and purpose; we need to be talking about the 'hostile environment', racism, whiteness, global North-South inequalities, and the legacies of Empire, colonialism and slavery; we need to be talking about nations and regions, cities and towns, urban and rural, how each shapes our sense of identity and relationships with our neighbours, near and far, and how our image of where and who we are has changed and is still changing (Anna Rowlands' recent piece is hugely helpful on some of this); we need to be talking about our dis-connection from the earth itself, through urbanisation and capitalism, and the fearful outlook for our shared human future. We need to talk about all of these, and more - and we need to hear how differently we experience these, depending on our own location, experience, and so on. We need to do the painstakingly hard work of trying to see the world through the eyes of someone else, and then working out how we can live together in ways that enable us to share together - share places, share resources, share neighbourhoods, share a society, share the planet. Today, in that 'day after the night before', I'm not feeling remotely optimist about any of this. I'm not sure I'm even clinging on to much in the way of hope right now. I'm far from convinced that our new government will lead on any of these challenges in ways that are at all positive - and it feels much more likely that the very opposite will be the case. But I am determined to continue working on this stuff, from the 'bottom, up', with my friends, neighbours, colleagues and companions on the way - both those who look and sound and think like me, and those who don't. And I pray for courage, for all of us, to pursue that work. Because it is, at the end of the day, our fundamental vocation as human beings.