Politics never has been a rational conversation. It’s about balances of power. The reason public health used…

Politics never has been a rational conversation. It’s about balances of power. The reason public health used to be a priority but now isn’t, is because the balance of power shifted. Away from the ‘public’, which current politics openly admits it doesn’t even believe in. /1 https://t.co/6iPaTRDqtJ

It’s been telling us that for decades. We mistook it for a debating point, because we love team sports. But that was the reality that was being constructed, all through those decades. And we could ignore it because we weren’t faced with an existential threat. Now that we are,…/2 https://t.co/Rau7C1TxCM

…it’s there in plain sight. The public was invented after the great 20th century wars, as a concept to try to capture the inter-dependencies of all of society, in the great re-building. Once that re-building was done, the old hierarchies threw the concept away. /3

We can be ‘right’ about Covid all day long. It won’t change much. Just as being right about climate change never prompted much action. Climate action is coming now only in the ‘o shit’ way, when businesses are losing money. This is why I’ve always said…join a union. /4

Mass joining of unions would instantly shift balances of power. It’s the only other thing that has ever shifted politics. Yes unions have their problems, what doesn’t? But it’s the removal of power from ordinary people in the past 50 years that is the source of all of our…/5

…current crises. That power wasn’t achieved using rational argument. It was achieved by brutal, bare-knuckle political battle, as the unions in the UK are trying to re-ignite now. It may be too late, who knows. /ends