An inflection point
How to decide what you will do when the moment calls
I have had the voices of two great men circling in my head all weekend: W. H. Auden and John Milton, each grappling with how to make meaning when the world has gone dark.
For Milton, the darkness was literal. Blindness arrived just as his ambitions as a poet seemed most fully within reach. His great fear was not physical incapacity, but uselessness: that the world no longer needed what he had to give. “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” he asks, bitterly. And then comes the answer that has been quoted ever since: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
For Auden, the darkness was political. Writing from self-imposed exile in New York, he watched Europe collapse into war as “the clever hopes expire / Of a low, dishonest decade”. His response was not to retreat into quietism, but to insist, stubbornly, that even when history is brutal, the human voice still matters: “All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie.”
I like to write. It helps me think. And yet, Wystan, John: I am uneasy. Because while personal wellbeing comes from accepting what you cannot change, there are moments in history when that feels like a cop-out. When standing and waiting is not enough. When testifying, however important, is not enough.
This feels like one of those moments.
The world is at an inflection point. And the question now being put to each of us - quietly but insistently - is whether we are prepared to make an inflection of our own.
This is not my war, but it is my world
I know that Minnesota is not my fight, in the narrow sense. I am not American. I do not vote in their elections. I do not shape their courts.
But the malaise that fed Trumpism is not foreign to me. It is present in my town, my country, my people. The same loss of trust, the same exhaustion with institutions, the same hunger for certainty and control. We are kidding ourselves if we think we can watch from the sidelines.
Because whichever of our problems I consider, the answer keeps coming back the same way: we will not get through this without the mobilisation of citizen capacity.
Our public services, as I’ve written before, simply aren’t affordable unless we can shift effort upstream - toward prevention, community care, and mutual support - through deeper collaboration between citizens and the state, and between citizens themselves.
Our civic and social cohesion, though stronger than in many similarly diverse countries, is visibly fracturing. A toxic information environment, the normalisation of explicit racial and religious hatred, and the steady erosion of shared norms all weaken the web of trust on which democracy depends. Repairing that web is not something the state can outsource, regulate or legislate into existence. It is slow, relational work by people, with people, across every divide.
Crime, too, is ultimately a communal phenomenon. Law enforcement matters enormously, but perceived lawlessness is worsened when communities feel anonymous, disconnected, and indifferent to one another. Safer societies are built not only through punishment, but through belonging.
And then there is what lurks on the horizon: the possibility that we are entering not just a geopolitical cold snap, but a second Cold War. One in which Britain is no longer securely sheltered on one side, but awkwardly pinned between competing powers. Preparing for that world would require a reallocation of time, treasure and talent on a scale we have barely begun to contemplate: higher defence spending, yes, but also lower consumption, different priorities, and - again - citizen mobilisation.
This is not just a question of politics or activism: voting, taking sides, protesting. This is a question of citizenship: participation, contribution, service.
The question of purpose
What all of this adds up to is a quieter, harder question than “what do you believe?”
It is: where will you show up?
I started my working life wanting to be a writer. I heard the call to service when I began writing about politics, because observing felt insufficient. Since then I’ve worked in government, founded a feminist political party, started a mental health charity, rescued a think tank from bankruptcy, led on ‘social purpose’ at a large university, and now support academics, founders and innovators trying to bring something new into the world.
So I’ve seen how questions of purpose can be answered, in infinite different ways. And I can tell you that power, capacity and leverage exist everywhere. Every sector has pressure points; every role offers moments where decisions compound; every institution bends slightly in response to who occupies it and how they behave. The question comes to all of us, every day: what will I do? And the answer must not be: stand and wait.
The Japanese talk about ikigai: finding the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what sustains you financially. In calmer times, that idea felt like a comfortable challenge. In darker times, it sharpens. The weight of ‘what the world needs’ is greater. It needs all of us to ask that question of ourselves.
Don’t just stand and wait
If we were serious about responding to this moment, we would stop treating purpose as a private lifestyle question and start seeing it as a source of national capacity. That would mean volunteering networks that use skills, not just spare time. Coaching, mentoring and professional networks treated as civic infrastructure. Employers that create space for contribution rather than quietly penalising it. Professional bodies, unions, faith groups, universities and councils acting as matching systems between people who want to help and places that need them.
This isn’t about turning everyone into an activist. In fact, activism at its worst can drive communities apart. Society needs participation more than polarisation - contribution more than purity. It’s about stepping up to the moment and asking what we want Britain to be. The arc of history will only bend toward justice if we put our shoulders to it, together.
This is an inflection point. Future generations will ask versions of the same old question: what did you do in the war, Daddy?
These problems are not the state’s to solve alone. They are ours.
You have more than a voice.
Don’t just stand and wait.
Cheer up. Be brave. Join in.
Some resources
The lovely people at NCVO link to a number of different places where you can find volunteering opportunities.
I never tire of connecting people with Jon Alexander and his thinking on citizenship. He’s got a podcast How to Save Democracy here - my favourite episode is with Baratunde Thurston, an American activist who teaches us that citizen is a VERB not just a noun.
I recently connected with the team behind Feds Forward, a platform helping former federal workers find their next chapter - I would love to see something similar in the UK if anyone wants to collaborate.
My colleagues at Zinc run a programme for professionals seeking to maximise their impact in their career. (This is a paid for programme, but we’re working with a number of charities to support free and discounted places). It’s called Inflection, which is mostly why I used the word. It’s living rent-free in my head along with Wystan and John’s rhymes.
Thanks for writing this – a few of the points have stuck in my head and I’d like to respond to some of them. Your comment on “what lurks over the horizon” and the international situation is what really interests me, and how this links to mobilisation of citizen capacity not least because international policymaking tends to be a primarily elite activity without much scope for citizen involvement – and often relatively little interest – even as it affects us all (I have a bit of a personal stake in this: after doing a DPhil in International Relations, I worked for four years as a postdoc and teaching fellow in the politics and international relations department of a Russell Group university before being let go, so the question of “where will I show up” is on my mind a lot now – I have plenty of time on my hands).
What’s really concerning is that we seem to be a long, long way off from even really understanding or being able to clearly articulate the nature of the international situation (a geopolitical cold snap? A new Cold War? A ‘rupture’ rather than a ‘transition’?) and what the implications, and appropriate responses, could be. This is where academics and universities should be able to fulfil an important role, providing expertise and advice, contributing to public debates and acting as a ‘critical friend’ to policymakers, but I’m not seeing much of that. For sure, ‘impact’ and ‘knowledge exchange’ are tricky in this area, and I’ve seen how messy and fragmented even the most thoughtful attempts at policy relevance are from within academia (and there are plenty of academics who recoil at the idea of taking on this role). There’s huge potential for some of the great scholars doing important research in this area to mobilise and contribute in lots of ways but we seem a long way from meeting the seriousness of the moment we’re in.
Final point: this is going to be a real challenge for progressive politics and progressive internationalism – causes such as aid, human security, the responsibility to protect seem to be part of a lost era and progressives aren’t comfortable talking the language of war, hard power and geopolitics. This is understandable but it’s not good for the foreign policy of a democratic society in the current international situation – if war is too important to be left to the generals, progressives will need to be actively and seriously engaged in discussions about when and how the country should or shouldn’t go to war (and not in a way comparable to debates over Iraq and Afghanistan, still less Kosovo).
Thank you for articulating this so well. In the face of these enormous trends and events it is very tempting to think that agency is in the hands of leaders, or organisations - others - and that our role is to observe, comment, reflect, but ultimately just await a resolution. Whereas the conditions that give our communities and polities resilience are built up over time through immeasurable small actions, including our own. Our individual contributions beyond observation and analysis are necessary but never individually sufficient.