I![new-power-200529495[1]](https://reimaginingthefuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/new-power-20052949511.jpg?w=280&h=373)
’ve recently finished reading the excellent book, “New Power”, by Timms and Heimans – a master class in the paradigms of power we seeing in play around the globe at this time in history. It is a really important book to engage with, well written, easy to read and full of great stories and powerful analogies.
It got me thinking again about ‘the northern power house’ and how much of this is still predicated on ‘old power’ models. But the North has a long history in New Power and Social Movements, which have radically changed the political landscape of the UK. I love the fact that over 1/3 of the people of Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield signed a petition, to their own personal cost, to see the beginning of the end of the slave trade. The Peterloo massacre is another example of people movements ahead of their time. Had social media been around in those days, the #enoughisenough, or #blacklivesmatter would have been lighting up the Twittersphere.
It is new power, not old power that will really ring the changes needed across the North, and leaders need to partner with the emerging social movements to bring the real shifts that are needed in these wonderful parts of England. We must see a fair distribution of resource, radical moves for social justice, the breaking of long held inequalities in health and social care, transport, education, policing and economic opportunity. The Northern Powerhouse could be shaped by New Power not Old Power, and those in Old Power positions must make space for what is emerging and be willing to partner with it for a truly creative co-disruption, so that something truly transformational might occur. So here’s to some #northernpower to #changethefuture because #togetherwecan
Alongside that sits my ongoing rumination about economics and politics and a need for something altogether different. Economics, from the Greek word, ‘Oikos’ literally means ‘household’ or ‘ecology’ and has to do with how we organise our household or our ecology – worth noting here that both the household and the ecology are ‘living systems’ and not ‘mechanistic’ (a word which describes many of our current approaches in how we think about economics generally). I have particularly found Kate Raworth’s book, Doughnut Economics, to be extremely helpful, along with Charles Eisenstein’s, ‘Sacred Economics’, and Tomas Sedlacek’s, ‘The Economics of Good and Evil’, in helping me reframe how I think about economics and to dream about what else might be possible for us together.
Harry and Meghan’s wedding, we reimagined the world based on love?! Is it really that crazy? It is foolishness to those who deem themselves wise and experts in how things need to be run….but there is great wisdom to be found in the ‘self-giving, others-empowering love’ we find in the kenotic source of life itself!
More than ever, we need to find ways of having conversations, based on the premise of Albert Einstein, who said that if he had one hour to save the world, he would spend 55 minutes trying to find the right question and then he would only need 5 minutes to solve it. Our temptation is to dive in and fix problems, often based on our own very limited perspective, or piece of the jigsaw, which often leads to finger pointing, blaming and shaming, before we’ve really discovered what the question is that we’re actually needing to ask……The problems before us are complex and the next election isn’t going to fix them! We have an environment which is under significant stress, an economic system which is profoundly dysfunctional, global inequality at every level, major health crises, boundaries and histories which divide us and ongoing conflicts and wars. Pointing fingers and blaming ‘the other’ isn’t going to help us. We must be willing to encounter those totally different from ourselves and find an altogether better way……
reimaginingthefuture 