If I was in charge...

‘If I ruled the world, every day would be the first day of spring’ sang Tony Bennett. OK so I’m not actually ‘ruling the world’, I’m just hypothetically exploring what I might do ‘If I was in charge’ for a day, but the song’s sentiment still applies. I would be delighted if Tony’s ruling could be true.

I bloody love spring. It is without a doubt my favourite season. You can keep your increasingly Hellscaped hot summers. Autumn’s sense of loss, mulch and decay can go do one. And winter? I was fond of a bit of a bitter, bleak mid-one, but the endless mildly insipid grey of today’s does nothing for me. So spring it is.

The reason that spring sings the catchiest ear-worm in the Eurovision of my heart is because of all that it symbolises: rebirth, renewal, resilience, regeneration, revitalisation, reinvention, all the ‘re’ words you can think of, nature gets stuck right into the lot of them in spring. All life seems to burst forth from the intangible liminal pregnancy of ‘imbolc’, into the wild, florid exuberance of buds, shoots and leaves. The world is reimagined once again in this fizzing, frothing, wrangling and entangling extravaganza of life in service to life.

Politically we talk of ‘springs’ – the Arab and Prague springs most famously – as moments of hopeful renewal and upheaval. Where new shared possibilities are incubated and hatched, like tender young chicks cheeping nervously into being, only too often to end up in the KFC of bureaucracy or the Nando’s of an authoritarian backlash.

But spring 2027 will be different. Under my watch, we will see the launch of the UK’s first ever ‘Natural Service’* programme. This will reframe the idea of military training for the purposes of death, to civilian mobilisation for the purposes of all life.

The relatively brief period of conscription and National Service in Britain from 1949-1960 is often seen through the romantically misty-eyes of hindsight, by a certain generation at least, as some sort of civic apogee – a dizzy height of common purpose from which we have resolutely coughs retreated ever since.

The purpose of that historic Homeguard-style Dad’s Army (it was prejudicially men only, the women were of course actually running the country) was ‘defending the nation’, albeit under the refrain of ‘We’re doomed!’. The modern antidote to that is a programme that promises to help the nation truly ‘adapt and thrive’ in the teeth of the climatic and democratic crises. These are now not only threatening to bite us very hard and deeply on the bum, but have already frankly gnawed off most of a collective national buttock. This is no time for being half-arsed, we need to all get playfully serious together, now.

Given redacted and suppressed Government reports of the genuinely serious National Security threats of ecosystem collapse, this Natural Service initiative comes not a moment too soon. A chance not to just ‘Keep calm and carry on’ but to ‘Get excited and change things’. An inclusive call to nationwide action, unity of intention and clarity of purpose, a mass movement of common endeavour for people, planet and the more than human world.

Natural Service will be for everyone. Every adult of working age will be invited to gift a year of their life to society, either as a 12 month stint in one go, or through effective monthly placements over several years (following a Jury service style model of work leave). Participants will be paid a Living Wage and will take part in a wide range of environmentally, socially and civic-minded projects, less ‘boot camp’ and more ‘rebooting’ Britain.

These would include actions that rapidly help the UK to both mitigate and adapt to climate change and intimately reconnect communities back to one another and our systems of decision-making, reweaving the frayed threads that hold us all tenderly together.

For the natural world there would be local conservation, nature recovery and rewilding, tree and hedgerow planting, river restoration and wetland creation. For climate adaptation there would be urban shading, natural flood management and sustainable drainage systems. For civic resilience there would be a homeguard, for our homes – communal emergency planning, disaster relief, flood response, wildfire support, and evacuation logistics. For social care there would be elderly assistance, youth clubs and neighbourhood improvement. For democratic renewal there would be deliberative democracy, citizen’s assemblies and deep facilitation skills.

Crucially Natural Service will also bring people together over food security, working on local regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, community allotments, soil restoration, composting, edible gardens and orchards. An army may march on its stomach, but perhaps a nation can be reunited through ours?

The programme will work in harmonious partnership (I am in charge it will be harmonious) with existing organisations already active in all the areas mentioned above. Natural Service will provide additional ‘people power’ support, not replacing existing paid roles, but complementing them. In return Natural Service citizens will gain invaluable hands-on experience, new skills and build networked relationships. These will be formative, memorable times for all involved. You will never forget what your Natural Service did for you, or what you did for your fellow citizens, your country and the world beyond.

The experience of giving your time to communal endeavours, for the benefit of all, in service to the collective, will not only help to practically heal fractious political wounds, but should deeply embed a mindset of camaraderie and conviviality in all those who partake. People divided over politics are united through projects.

When we have a million talented young people brimming with potential who are currently not in employment, education or training. When we have vital skills and invaluable experience underutilised across other generations. When we have an urgent need to experiment and do things differently. When we have a listless sense of what Britain is for, and a dangerous but understandable disconnection from and cynicism about politics, combined with literally existential threats, there is an enormous opportunity lurking here like the irrepressible life-force contained within a bare winter twig just before Easter…

“Utopian idealism!” I hear you cry, followed rapidly (rabidly?) by a reference to the apparent lack of a magic money tree to pay for it all. However I reckon £10B should cover it, and rather conveniently there’s a neat little wealth tax idea that might generate that. Or sod it maybe we should stop subsidising fossil fuels to the tune of about £20B a year and use that? Natural Service might just put the spring, and all the fresh thinking and doing that entails, back in Britain’s step.

*The idea of a ‘Natural Service’ programme was first discussed at a Hard Art session in November 2022

Elsewhere in Absurdity...

Another busy one for Absurd HQ.

Most of the team were at WOMAD Festival, on Byline Times’ World of Words stage. Clare was on several panels with our friend Kati from Nothing But Love, and we recorded an episode of Good Neighbours featuring amongst many highlights Clive Lewis MP, Anthea Lawson and our Alex dressed in Andrew Tate’s arrest get-up 😳. It’ll be on youtube very soon.

Afterwards, Alex managed to fall into a canal. We have no way of knowing if it was related (he’s OK, thankfully).

Diya headed to Trafalgar Square for the Indian student Cockroach Movement solidarity protest. John visited Transactionland, an artwork, community space & venue for thinking about economics. Tracey went to the Transition Town Hub gathering: London Community Climate Connections... and Clare celebrated the Ploughshare activists 🔨 🥰.

Finally, one for this Thursday, 12-1pm. Genevieve is leading some collective singing at a Defend our Juries ‘graduation’ outside Westminster Magistrates Court.