London Quakers want to ‘build back better’
'After this upheaval of our lives, what changes do we foresee – and which we want to encourage?'
London Quakers gathered last week for a Build Back Better event featuring author and Quaker descendant Mark Thomas, founder of the The 99% Campaign. The event explored the questions: ‘After this upheaval of our lives, what changes do we foresee – and which we want to encourage? What work is in progress already that we can support and join?’
Mark Thomas, whose mother was a Quaker, told the Friend that the key to building back better is ‘to find ways to grow the pie faster and share it more fairly, because most people are poorer than they were in 2007’.
If this decline carries on, he says, ‘by 2050, the UK will be a banana republic with a small elite of very wealthy people at the top, but with around ninety-nine per cent [of people] living in poverty.’
Amid the dire predictions, however, the author sounded a note of optimism, buoyed by the fact that membership for his campaign has grown from around 100 people to 760 since Christmas. ‘It is terrifying, yes, but at least we can see the facts very clearly now, and people are more ready to listen.’
While the pandemic has been a ‘dreadful thing’, hitting the most vulnerable hardest, he says, ‘it has highlighted things that it was just about possible to pretend weren’t there before, such as poverty. Lots of people are putting up messages on the website about how concerned they are, so I can see that the emotional commitment to doing something is much bigger than it was even four months ago. The biggest single barrier is that people don’t know, or they’ve been told there is nothing they can do. Another problem is disengagement, with young people much less likely to vote than the over-seventy-five-year-olds. In principle they have the power to shape their destiny, but they need to seize that power. So we need to spread the word.’
The five ways to ‘build back better’, he says, are: democratic reset; fact-based policy (rather than myth-based policy, citing austerity as an example); formulating policies that ‘grow the pie and share it fairly’; investing wisely in the future; and creating clean competitive markets.The event on 24 October included workshops, speakers, conversation and worship. Topics covered were social, economic and climate justice; solidarity across boundaries; and what can London Quakers do differently.
