This is the last track on the album ‘Electric Ladywood’, by Dominic Hyde and Glast Dance. I’m afraid it’s not very musical. If you’re still listening, I hope you enjoy it.

If you have listened to any of the rest of the album, I‘d like to tell you how grateful I am. It means an enormous amount to me and, I suspect, to all people to imagine that someone might take an interest in what they have to say. My name is Dominic Hyde, and I wrote and performed these songs, along with my regular band Glast Dance and a number of Birmingham-based friends and session musicians.

As it happens, it took me about eight years to write, save up and record ‘Electric Ladywood’. In that time, I worked in Boots and Tescos; I worked on the Work Programme, and then as a groundworkers’ labourer, scaffolders’ labourer, hod-carrier and bricklayers’ apprentice (my current job), ultimately amassing about £7,000 over the best part of a decade in order to fund this album.

Without the encouragement, kindness, talent, and community support of Birmingham- and in particular, the musicians and audiences of Balsall Heath, King’s Heath and Stirchley- there is no way this album could have been made at all. I’m particularly grateful to a number of friends and family members who contributed £350 towards the album recording costs, including one Adnan Aslam, Kate Knight and Roo Hocking, and my aunts Sarah and Alex.

* * *

At many of our happiest, and our most painful, moments, we are driven to ask the question, ‘What is it that gives life value?’ For me, at least in one sense, the list appears to be constantly expanding. I would say that my life has value because of my wonderful partner Anne-Marie Allen; because of my friends and family; because of music, silence, trees, laughter, creative work, because of the relative freedom afforded by my body and my mind, because of the possibility of intimacy and the possibility of dialogue.

In another sense, what gives life value is simply a feeling of gratitude for it, whether gratitude comes fleetingly through brief pleasures, or flowers slowly, in the quiet spaces that attention and tenderness open in us.

I think we can push our understanding of gratitude slightly further, and say that gratitude comes through a sense of communion, or community, with the world, or with ourselves, or with each other. To some extent, gratitude just means being glad to be close to someone or something.

* * *

As I try to understand the many problems facing Britain today, it is difficult for me to imagine how the things I am grateful for could possibly mitigate any of their impending dangers. Are music and meditation and laughter any match for climate collapse, racist violence or an imploding democratic system? It is surely naïve to think so. But I increasingly believe that community could provide some of the remedy for our catastrophic political and environmental failures.

For the sake of brevity, I think we can say that Britain currently faces three major kinds of crisis, whose causes and symptoms overlap in an often intimidatingly complicated manner. I’d like to try to make some sense of these crises, and I’d be grateful if you’d indulge me for the next twelve minutes or so. I will have to skip over some extremely important considerations, but I will at least try to be as quick possible.

Firstly, Britain faces a crisis in housing and living standards.

Homelessness in the UK is increasingly rife. Dependence on food banks has expanded at a frightening rate over the past fifteen years, as has the level of children and older people living in poverty. A range of legislation in the past twenty five years or so has eroded the rights and protections of British workers, making jobs less secure and less rewarding. Growing queues for council housing, combined with rising rent, property purchase and living costs, have helped to engender a climate of anxiety and mutual resentment, often directed at those deemed ‘unworthy’ or ‘parasitic’ by a predominantly right-wing press- families dependent on state benefits, for example, and migrants to the UK.

History is so boring- and inconvenient! A brief glance at the work of British novelists writing in the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s will quickly show how our ‘modern’ housing crisis is at least 100 years old. It is predicated on a wide range of factors, including a historical lack of investment in the quality and quantity of homes available for working-class Britons. Check out George Orwell’s ‘The Road To Wigan Pier’ for more on this.

More crucial, though, is the massively skewed distribution of land ownership in Britain today. Guy Shrubsole, author of ‘Who Owns England?’ has done remarkable work (available online) in uncovering the huge areas of Britain owned by immensely wealthy families, who have largely inherited their riches, or gained them through speculative finance, the high-stakes gambling process responsible for the 2008 car-crash of the global economy and subsequent recession. As of 2019, it was estimated that 25,000 landowners- less than 1% of the British population- owned roughly half of the total land in the UK (see Rob Evans’ 2019 article in the Guardian online).

I was grateful for a recent conversation with the forklift driver on a site I was working on near Burton-On-Trent. He put some of these figures into perspective for me. He pointed out that the owner of the firm who ran the site- on which six large and expensive properties were being built- probably owned a few hundred acres of land in total.

He had been a carpenter, apparently, but married into the family of a large building firm owner, and was now worth somewhere between £40 and 50 million. Bear in mind, the median wage in the UK, as of 2020, is about £30,000 a year. If this man had been so minded, he could literally have paid the entire annual wages of over a thousand average UK workers and still had £10 million plus in the bank. Now he could afford to sit on his hundreds of acres of unused land, refusing to build, waiting for house prices to rise, and then knock out a series of expensive flats and houses at his leisure, pocketing a tidy sum as he did.

If this seems despicable to you, remember that it is barely the tip of the iceberg. Consider the case of Conservative MP Richard Benyon, whose family home, Englefield House near Reading, sprawls over thousands of acres and was purchased over two centuries ago by his family. Benyon, whose net worth as of 2019 was estimated at £130 million, was able to claim £2 million over ten years in farming subsidies from British taxpayers.

How about another Conservative MP, Richard Drax, a keen proponent of Brexit who believes that ‘the country is full’? Richard Drax, incidentally, lives on a 7,000 acre estate in Charborough, whose maintenance was funded partly by his ancestors’ leading role in the 18th and 19th century sugar and slave trades.

I don’t mention Richards Benyon and Drax merely to attack them as individuals. The big picture of UK wealth and land ownership disparity is truly depressing. In 2016, the Office For National Statistics estimated that the richest 10% of British households owned 44% of Britain’s total wealth. The poorest 50% of households owned just 9% of Britain’s total wealth.

Of course, this doesn’t even take into account the tax manipulation carried out by many of the richest corporations and individuals in the UK. Patrick Cannon, a professional barrister specialising in challenging abuses of the tax system, suggests that tax evasion and avoidance in 2016/2017 likely cost the British taxpayer some £7 billion- that’s three and a half times the cost of the unemployment benefit paid out in the same year according to the ONS.

I’ve often wondered why it is, then, that when I sit in the canteen on site, the otherwise thoughtful and considerate people I work with are more likely to be angered by the perceived freeloading of families on benefit, and the families of migrants to the UK, than by the theft of our tax revenue by the richest people in the UK, who are, by and large, white, English, and inheritors of vast wealth.

Part of the answer is sad, and simple. It’s not Richard Benyon’s family in front of yours in the queue for council housing, or for a crucial medical operation; it’s not Richard Drax’s kids who’ve just smacked a football against your window, or who exchange grumpy faces with you at the bus stop. We tend to attack the problems that we can see, or that we can easily conceptualise. Under pressure, in a climate of anxiety, facing a shortage of decent, secure jobs and housing, we are all guilty of pushing our angry feelings onto the nearest available receptacle. The landlord is ripping us off, but we never see him. So we kick the cat.

This brings us to the second crisis of Britain, the crisis of democracy. Ask yourself, ‘Is my voice heard? If not, why not?’

The cause of Britain’s crisis of democracy overlaps massively with the cause of Britain’s crisis in housing and living standards. It can be fairly well explained in terms of wealth and landownership inequality.

To be fair, there are merely technical reasons why Britain fails as a democracy. Because of our first past the post voting system, for example, UK political parties have a weird ratio of MPs in parliament to votes gained in elections. According to the website of the Electoral Reform Society, the Conservative party received 43.6% of the votes cast in the 2019 general election, but holds 56.2% of the available seats in parliament. By contrast, the Liberal Democrats received 11.5% of the vote, and hold only 1.7% of the seats in parliament.

A fairly simple change from first past the post to an alternative vote, which allows voters to rank multiple preferences of potential MPs, would help to correct this imbalance, and also encourage people to vote for the parties they actually want to vote for, no longer having to vote tactically for a lesser of two evils.

A small-ish change in our voting method could go a long way to improving democracy in the UK. But there is a more fundamental problem to consider. Big money still tends to win elections, and barely-concealed bribery continues to direct government policy.

The 2006 cash-for-honours scandal made it clear to the British public that lifetime entry into the House of Lords was often just a case of giving money to the right people at the right time. Following police investigation, both the Labour and Conservative parties were shown to have accepted about £15 million worth of loans from wealthy individuals, a number of whom went on to sit in the House of Lords.

Formal and informal lobbying is a threat to the integrity of our democracy but also to our national security. Guided by the demands of our Arms industry, for example, successive Tory administrations have been prepared to sell hi-tech weaponry to the Saudi Arabian government, perhaps the world’s most violently reactionary theocracy, despite Saudi Arabia’s brutal military actions against Yemen, ongoing abuse of the rights of women, LGBT groups and immigrant workers, and history of sponsoring international terrorism. Or think about Open Democracy’s 2019 investigation into donations made to the British Conservative party by Putin-associated Russian oligarchs, amounting to millions of pounds between 2010-2019. Could these donations have anything to do with the delay of the 2020 report on Russian interference in our general election?

When we seriously examine the impact of entrenched wealth on policy-making, it becomes clear that British democracy is drowning in a shallow pool. Holding our head under the water are a cluster of right-leaning billionaires and their associates who dominate the British media landscape.

To make sense of the implications of this, it is worth asking yourself the question: what should newspapers and journalists do? ‘Accurately report important news’, perhaps, or ‘break important stories on the basis of strongly-supported research’. We might then ask, how do British newspapers actually respond to these prerogatives?

In one sense, our newspapers do report important news, if only because they have a degree of control over what we think of as ‘important’. In the past two years, for example, I think I must have seen about thirty front-page stories relating to Meghan Markle for every one front-page story concerning the collapse of the earth’s biosphere. One could be forgiven for thinking that global disaster were more likely to result from a rapidly-dispersing monarchy than from rapidly dispersing ice sheets.

In the face of nationally and internationally significant events, however- upcoming elections, for example, or pandemics- the British print media is sometimes compelled to ditch headlines about royal family tiffs and naughty immigrants.

Luckily, coverage of nationally significant issues does not have to be factually dishonest to utterly distort reality. Sometimes our major newspapers find it easier not to report the news at all. In the run-up to the 2015 general election, for instance, The Sun newspaper issued its readers with a 100-day challenge to ‘keep out’ Ed Miliband- placing images of the Labour candidate looking confused or silly on its front cover day after day. The implication was that his physical clumsiness in these pictures meant that he would not have been a capable prime minister.

There is nothing factually inaccurate in putting unattractive photos of people on your front cover with a funny headline; neither is there anything worthy of the designation ‘news’. The frankness with which our right-wing media seek to control election results is perhaps best summarised in the Sun’s 1992 headline following Neil Kinnock’s defeat by John Major: ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’.

Where outright lies do occur, they are unlikely to be challenged or corrected, and certainly not within a time frame that would make any difference. In LSE Professor Bart Cammaerts’ 2019 study, a team of international researchers employing rigorous statistical methods concluded that some 75% of the British press coverage of Jeremy Corbyn misrepresented what he had said or written in the past, with an impressively high proportion of coverage dedicated to mocking the strangeness of his clothes, beard, or fondness for allotments.

Recent research by Private Eye magazine shows how Boris Johnson, in his capacity as a Telegraph columnist, was able to publish false claims about the European Union, avoid legal challenge by characterising his column as ‘satirical’ and thus intended to be treated as a joke, and then have fellow Telegraph columnists reprint his claims as literally true in their own articles.

More worrying than the lack of accuracy and accountability in the British print media is the movement of ‘dark money’ in our social media and online advertising. In 2019, for example, the investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr demonstrated how wildly innaccurate, more-or-less untraceable Facebook advertisements, paid for by organisations associated with millionaire Brexiteer Arron Banks, had come to dominate large numbers of Facebook feeds in areas of the UK in which the population was ‘on the fence’ about Brexit.

Social media advertising, of course, is uniquely well-placed to subvert laws on election spending, factual accuracy and hate speech. The popular internet magazine, Spiked, with its continuous attacks on environmentalism, intersectional activism and the welfare state, was recently shown to have received massive funding by the Koch brothers (whose joint wealth as of 2019 was estimated at some $120 billion dollars). The Koch brothers are notorious for a string of environmental abuses and business practices which have directly led to the deaths of at least two people (the result of a butane explosion), and contributed significantly to global greenhouse emissions.

Britain’s democratic crisis is underpinned by tremendous wealth inequality. Wealth inequality is profoundly tied to land ownership inequality. Our housing and living standards crisis also rests on this imbalance.

What, then, is the final crisis of Britain? Quite reasonably, many would say ‘climate collapse’. Even at the lower tier of likely climate-related problems, disaster looms: soil erosion and ocean acidification threaten global food supplies; droughts, floods and superstorms suggest massive infrastructural damage and the imminent, forced migration of tens of millions of people; we can likely expect a proliferation of subtropical bacteria and associated conditions in formerly temperate climates like the UK (anyone for Lyme disease?).

Moreover, the causal structure of the emergent climate crisis mirrors that of our democratic, and housing, crises. All three hinge on the power of entrenched wealth and land ownership to shape policy and manufacture consent among subject populations. The work of Naomi Klein, Mike Berners-Lee and George Monbiot (all available online), among many others, has compellingly demonstrated the murky connections between high finance, government lobbyists and the fossil fuel industries.

But despite the terrifying threat to the earth’s biosphere and life systems, I feel we have to go deeper than climate to explain the troubled condition of modern Britain. After all, it’s hardly the case that we lack the technological capacity to reverse climate collapse, even at this late stage- check out The Solutions Project online if you’d like to cheer yourself up after this miserable rant.

In truth, I think we have to acknowledge that Britain’s deepest struggle is not a crisis of the earth, but a crisis of the spirit- a circle of loneliness, isolated anger, anxiety, moral paralysis, and a nation-wide sense of personal and political helplessness. In brief: the bastards have won, and no one cares enough to stop them.

There are many dimensions to our crisis of the spirit. Of course, we see literal, life-threatening illness- the so-called ‘diseases of despair’, including alcoholism, suicidal behaviour, drug addiction. We should also include increases in the proliferation of heart disease, early on-set dementia and other conditions that are exacerbated by stress and loneliness. Among various other mechanisms, we now know that stress precipitates the ongoing release of the hormone cortisol, which is associated with long-term disruption to the immune system, sleep patterns, cholesterol regulation and cellular age.

Perhaps more crucially, loneliness, anger and anxiety prevent us from making the sustained efforts of empathy and analysis that are required to engage meaningfully in moral action. I could quote you medical studies on the subject- but I don’t need to. Look into your heart of hearts.

I know that when I am scared and angry, the comfort and the pleasure of collective hatred is far easier than the painful act of trying to understand someone who disagrees with my beliefs. Our culture of sublime, technologically-enforced isolation allows us to indulge the very human habit for explanatory narcissism, our tendency to want to see the world in terms that flatter our understanding of it. Each in our own bubble, we become a mass of vulnerable people who refuse to recognise or understand each other’s vulnerability.

This is the point at which we need to consider the value of community.

First of all, having a group a people- or just one special person- to talk with, laugh with, share your fears and hopes with, is a tremendous help for your mental health- and, most likely, theirs. Anxiety, anger, and depression generally restrict our ability to act with sustained compassion, and encourage us to respond with suspicion and hostility, rather than patience and curiosity, to people who disagree with our views.

Bonding with your friends over music, sport, an allotment, or a nice cup of tea, is a wonderful way to improve your mental and physical health, and to enjoy yourself. But the real, transformative value of community can be found in ‘bridging’ activities, which bring together different groups of people, previously separated by race, occupation, religion, wealth, gender, or what-have-you.

As well as helping to reduce unemployment and cut crime, bridging activities provide a basis for communities to direct and improve their own local areas. Generally speaking, they are low-cost, and require minimal commitment. A bridging activity might be a weekly open mic night at a local pub, a free comedy show, or some spirit-breakingly tedious boardgame evening. Well, maybe not boardgames, but you get the idea.

To see how low-cost, low-commitment monthly events can bring disparate groups in a community together, and prepare them to make radical change from the ground up, check out the Participatory City Foundation, and particularly their remarkable work in Barking and Dagenham. The incredible story of Peter MacFadyen’s ‘Flatpack Democracy’ in the Somerset town of Frome is another to look up.

When they operate through workers’ co-operatives, communities gain an impressive ability to challenge transnational corporations and national governments on issues of global importance. The achievements of community co-operatives don’t tend to be widely reported in the news, but they often have world-beating significance.

As Naomi Klein outlines in her work ‘This Changes Everything’, as of 2014, around 50% of Germany’s renewable energy production occurred on land held by farmers, groups of citizens, and nearly 900 small-to-mid-size energy cooperatives. This is the result of a shockingly rapid transition to green energy fostered by German communities, much to the surprise of both the German government and energy corporations.

Likewise, at the turn of the millenium, almost 85% of Danish wind farms operated on land owned by co-ops and small-scale farmers- not bad for a country which derives such a vast portion of its electricity from wind power.

The fact that communities are based in specific locations affords them the opportunity to resist the destructive land-grabbing tendencies of transnational corporations. The ability of communities to occupy, care for, and positively transform a given area helps them to subvert the combination of land-ownership and vast wealth from which the fossil fuel giants derive their power.

If you want to look more deeply at the ways in which community groups can unify to revitalise their towns and cities, tackle corruption and mobilise against climate change, you might enjoy reading ‘Land For The Many’, a 2019 report edited by George Monbiot and available for free online.

* * *

On those long, dark nights when I try to thrash some sense out of my personal history, I tend to see three periods emerge from the gloom. I see a long, murky, childhood era whose significance and emotional direction are about as clear as an Ice Age cave painting.

I witness a decaffeinated epoch playing out between the ages of about 20 to 26; it strikingly resembles an episode of the Peep Show minus sex, laughter and flatmates.

And then I see a flame in the shadows. At the age of about 27, I start dropping into a beloved community café in Balsall Heath; I move in to a strange, wonky-looking house occupied by eco-Feminist Kate Bush devotees; I begin to play live music in Birmingham; I meet a group of people I’d like to be close to for the rest of my life; and I start a life with the person I love more simply, and more completely, than anyone I’ve ever met.

For the first 28 years, it feels like I stumbled through life; the idea that I should give life-advice borders on the ridiculous. But if you do find yourself perplexed, I’d encourage you to consider the following:

1) However isolated you feel, there are people in the world who would want you to feel loved and supported if they knew you;

2) However useless you feel, there are people in the world whose lives you could immediately improve through small actions, if you were prepared to look for them;

3) However unloveable, or out-of-place, you feel, you can support hundreds of people just by turning up to meet them, or checking in with them to see how they’re doing. A single, sincere act of benevolent curiosity- ‘How are you getting on?’- makes the world a kinder place.

Whether you are trying to transform the world, or transform your own mind, maybe community should be your first stop.