If I was in charge...

There’s something wholesome and positive about the British garden shed. I used to spend a great deal of time in my granddad’s, learning how to use tools, make and repair things, mostly out of wood.

You use it or lose it though, and many of those skills – like how to put dovetail joints into the frames of a cat-bed hotel – are gone. Heritage Crafts maintains a red list of endangered crafts, with nearly 100 on the critically endangered list; and put your hand up if you know your grandmother’s recipes for colds and flu.

But rather than simply accept the widely held view that we’re a bunch of lazy and silly consumers deschooled by neoliberalism, we want to bring back a skill that we think is missing from the lives of people everywhere around the country. That’s right, we’re bringing back the craft of political repair.

That’s why we’ve set up this new-old-fangled thing: the Political Repair Cafe. 

What is it, then, this Political Repair Cafe?

Most people have heard of surgeries, where MPs* meet local constituents to hear of their issues, grievances or ideas. (*Some MPs. For example, Regurge’s Nigel Farage has not, as far as is known, surgeoned his Clacton constituents; apparently Essex police have warned Mr Farage of some embarrassing situations if he were to.)

Many people have also heard of repair cafes. These are spaces where over 1.5 million people every year take a belonging (a slow laptop, a defective toaster) to see if it can be repaired and reused, its planned obsolescence overcome, and two-fingers given to capitalism’s throwaway culture. (Some of you will be thinking our politics must’ve had planned obsolescence built in at some point! But that’s not been proven.) 

Many of these repair cafes come out of the environmental movement. Our friends at the Oswestry Climate Action Hub have a mission to “make, share, grow, repair”. What’s wonderful about repair cafes is they provide community and “third spaces” for people to meet in-real-life and be neighbourly together; they’ve grown into a global phenomenon too, last year more than 89,000 volunteers ran 60,000 events to repair 1.6 million items!

The Political Repair Cafe is a lovechild of these ideas, but with a twist. The idea is a simple one. You take a broken piece of politics into the Political Repair Cafe, and the lovely people on hand in the cafe help you repair it.

We’re only just getting started of course, but the plan is to have local Political Repair Cafes for local broken bits of politics, and regional and devolved Political Repair Cafes too. Oh, heck, why not national and international repair cafes as well?! Where the tools needed to fix the political problem are often bigger than what any local cafe has on hand.

Just to be helpful: Political Repair Cafes are for repairing politics. We take BPIs – broken political issues – and use our expertise in LWT (Listening Well Together) and MDT (Making Decisions Together) to do our best to FIT (Fix It Together). Very important to us is passing on the craft: to not only get the broken politics working again, but to give anyone the skills so they can mend it for themselves next time. And who knows, maybe even become a Political Repair Cafe volunteer. (We always need volunteers.) 

Just to give you an example, last week at our brand new local Political Repair Cafe someone came in with a common BPI, a lack of local planning consideration for nature and climate mitigation and adaptation. 

Well, as you probably know, the local government is missing around 900 planners amongst its ranks – all those cuts. But the issue with this BPI seemed to be more with the main circuit board than any missing piece (although many of the newer planning machines seem not to have an eco-function at all).

So we got to work on rewiring the board, and we inserted a Neighbourhood Planning circuit into the operation. It’s where local neighbours don’t have to wait for their council, but can submit a plan themselves, especially where an official plan is missing. In fact, sometimes we fit in a whole new Parish Application (most people are blown away that this is even a thing). And then obviously we helped the neighbours with some LWT and MDT training, which means they can crack on themselves when the BPI breaks again. 

Now, we know our limits, and some BPIs need new components which we can’t afford in our little shed. We point people towards where they can get these, for example on this planning issue, our friends over at Humanity Project and Community Organisers are making a co-governance neighbourhood assembly socket set (just ask for a COGNAS Set at your local Political B&Q.)

Now, of course, there’s the old saying: everything is politics. So you can imagine we’re kept very busy at the Political Repair Cafe! 

But it’s important to make the distinction between BPIs and BSIs, even though they run on the same power source and have mostly the same components. So to avoid any disappointment it’s important to know that if you turn up to your local Political Repair Cafe with what we call your BSIs – broken social issues – then, like those big shiny stores in the shopping malls, we’ll have to send your BSI away for a more thorough look-see. It might be a few weeks or months until you get your BSI back, hopefully repaired.

As an example, two BSI’s from just the last few weeks. Someone in Margate brought in an overcrowded prison system; and in Cambridge a lovely but very angry gentleman brought in IPSO, the ineffectual press regulator. These can be dealt with, but only in the National Political Repair Centre. There you’ll find around 150-200 experts in LWT and MDT and lots of other things (learning, deliberation, facilitation, mediation, speaking up) who gather in public chambers and go through a well-researched and defined process using the right tools to fix the BSI. 

Now, what you may ask, coming back to BPIs, are the things we see most brought in at our Political Repair Cafe?

We get quite a few rusted up councillors. Some are salvageable, we give them a tightening of the johnny-screws and a new lick of paint. The others, well, we mainly squirt them with a bit of WD40, there’s not much we can do for those one-part(y) jobbies that were never very flexible. We generally suggest people turn them into plant pots or something and get some new greener kinds in with the limber tensiles.

There’s quite a lot of votes brought in. You see, people bought into theirs with sincerity, used it once, but after that it just seems not to work. They’re like vapes, only with less flavour. I’m glad people aren’t throwing them away, and bringing them in to see what’s gone wrong with them. Sad to say, we have to point out nothing’s wrong: they’re just single use. At least we can dispose of them properly and not start a bin fire. We’re okay with those new proportional voting systems, but I’ll be honest, they’re still only single use, and it still means people can’t use their politics everyday.  

And if there’s one thing we love at the Political Repair Cafe, it’s helping people see they can make and repair politics every day, and don’t have to wait on others.

But the number one thing we see at the Political Repair Cafe by a country mile, and it doesn’t discriminate with age or anything, is people every day carrying in the politics they bought that are all clapped out of trust.

It’s not the batteries running out. It’s something deep in the circuitry, and I’ll be honest we have some trouble fixing it. The problem is compounded by the fact that every repair is different, as some part of the trust that’s broken just seems to be different for each person.

But we get on with the tools we have, our LWT and MDT, as our friend Karen over at SAWN says, what most people need is “a good listening to” while we work away with the assembly-kit or charter-making or rhetoric-spanner twiddling with the knobbly bits on the trust’s receiver. 

And if that don’t fix things, we bring the big (soldering) guns out: the In Real Life (IRL) Levelling Tool. You see, most times, a couple of turns with the IRL Leveller and people realise that just coming into the cafe seems to magically help, like turning the thing off and on again. So bring your BPI with the broken trust twiddle to us, and we’ll make it alright by spending time together, IRL!

N.b: the Political Repair Cafe is not to be confused with the Parliamentary Repair Cafe, an initiative of Restart, which takes repair cafes into government.In March this year, representatives from more than a hundred of the UK’s community repair groups met 91 MPs to work towards repair-friendly policy in the UK for electronics, and a shift towards a less throwaway culture more generally. 

Great work, indeed, and kindred spirits to the cause for a circular political economy, where good ideas are repurposed, where old policies are taken apart and put back together, and where public money stays in the public system. (This is similar to but not the same as Reform’s recycling of Tories. As every experienced political repair cafe volunteer will tell you, some models are just past saving.)

A final word. There are of course no new ideas. Not even my idea last week to fix the climate crisis by moving the Earth 1% further away from the sun (which was in fact, the plot of a Futurama episode in 2002, where robot farts were used to relocate the planet.) So just to say thank you in advance to all the wonderful political repairers out there who’ve had the same or a similar idea, and who are putting the idea into practice one repair at a time.

A Note on Jason Arday

A couple of weeks ago we published Clare Farrell’s piece on Information Health Warnings for ‘news’ publications and broadcast, to remind people of how corrupt, ideological and obstructive the ‘news’ has been on the climate for what now feels like decades. We are conscious that Black and other racial, social and gendered groups have been the victims of that same ‘news’ agenda for much longer.

That the media hounding of Jason Arday brought far more coverage than Peter Mandelson’s corruption and inclusion in the Epstein files, and many times more coverage than the plagiarism of other white professors, speaks for itself. We wanted to recognise the massive tragedy of Jason Arday’s death, and point towards Newscord coverage, the Better Law Project’s demand for a public inquiry, Hardeep Matharu’s incredible writing in Byline Times, this by Carole Cadwalladr, Ibram X. Kendi’s piece and Lee Jasper’s commentary on this issue.

Elsewhere in Absurdity...

Stella is up in Edinburgh all week searching out the wildest and weirdest the Fringe has to offer. 🎭 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

John has been designing a new form of social media based on the AT Proto that allows people to design their own feeds in full knowledge of what the algorithm is up to. 🤓📱

Alex is going to the launch of Laura Coleman's new book The Heart and The Hawthorn, a "high stakes queer cosy fantasy" inspired by her time on a big cat sanctuary in Bolivia. 🐆📚

Charlie’s gigs had a distinctly international feel, with New Zealand Flying Nun legends The Bats and South Korean punks Sailor Honeymoon.🇳🇿 🇰🇷

We last saw Clare heading off to Boomtown, having helped the festival define this year’s chapter: Radical Redesign. ✊👽

And Genevieve is leading a protest song / singing workshop at We Out Here this weekend for their new tent centred on activism called Action Stations. Loads of excellent workshops and talks all weekend! 🎶🎷