Finding hope in the everyday

A version of this essay was first published in Ordinary Hope: A New Way of Changing Our Country Together. Read in full here. 

The comedian and writer Caroline Aherne once said that you can find all the comedy you’ll ever need amongst the canned goods and detergent of the local supermarket. Her writing not only represented the lives of ordinary people - their triumphs and disasters - it respected them.

In her most famous show, The Royle Family, Aherne tells the story of everyday life with a family living in an everyday house in an unnamed suburb. Aherne’s characters give voice to the lives of the working-class people with whom she grew up.

In the show’s 2012 Christmas Special Queen of Sheba, the family rallies around - as their much-loved Nana is cared for. Placed in an NHS bed in the living room; life continues as Nana enters her final months. In one memorable scene, as Denise does Nana’s nails, the frail matriarch makes Denise promise that her funeral will be full of laughter.

Like millions of other families, when the time came for my own grandparents’ funerals, a celebration of life was at the centre. We shared the greatest hits in the pub afterwards, amongst the discounted beer and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. Looking back on their lives. Memories of friends, wedding anniversaries and trips to the seaside. Long summer BBQs that rolled late into the night.

Like the Royles, the seemingly small moments provided the release valve when times were tough—these moments provided the stepping stones to brighter days. And now their memory was a thread connecting us back to them and one another.

Thousands of ordinary everyday moments which had provided the fuel for extraordinary lives.

And yet today, it can feel like many cannot access these moments: a trip to the seaside, a chance for a small treat or a pair of football boots. Moreover, the seemingly ordinary aspects of our public services are failing to meet basic needs and often leave people without a sense of dignity.

And just as Aherne understood that by telling the stories of ordinary people, you could unlock something far more powerful than a laugh, so too should our politicians understand that a politics that gives voice to ordinary people can unlock more than just a vote.

That in fact a politics in service of the everyday could provide a genuine chance of renewal.

You hear this need for change when you speak with Ordinary Hope project members, the journalist, Anoosh Chakelian and campaigner and founder of Camerados, Maff Potts.

'Ultimately, we’re talking about people. And people have feelings, so it shouldn’t surprise you if they currently don’t feel particularly trusted, valued, thanked, noticed, listened to, supported by national or local politics,’ Maff says.

This will not come as a surprise to local councillors or MPs. Speaking to voters week in and week out, MPs hear the frustration of communities who feel let down by a politics which has sought to project someone else’s visions of the future, or what’s more, a future which is never realised.

It’s a sense of cynicism that has spread. Overcoming it will be key to any party not only winning an election but also sustaining a programme of renewal in unstable times. Having spent the last decade speaking to voters and community leaders in marginal seats across the country, Anoosh has heard first hand this yearning for a sense of voice and change.

"I think there’s a real sense of cynicism about whether things will happen because I think people have been promised a lot and that just hasn’t been delivered".

The Ordinary Hope team captures this frustration so often when we visit places across the UK for the photo and interview series ‘Citizen Portraits’. A mood we have once again captured with images from Wolverhampton and Hastings.

And yet alongside this frustration you also hear and witness something else—a belief in one another and the power to change the places around them.

Speaking to people for Citizen Portraits, you don’t hear of a nation defeated; it’s more a nation worn down by false promises. And even after these false dawns, ordinary people are willing to serve the community around them. In the end, they haven’t given up on each other.

A big part of this is about creating a politics and public service interested in their lives and hopes for the future. In this sense, the everyday and ordinary once again play a vital role in rebuilding a sense of trust between a people and its politics.

Keir Starmer recently spoke of the need for a politics that ‘treads light on people’s lives’. To many, it made sense. As we heard in an earlier interview with Luke Tryl, people are tired of politics forcing its way into their lives, seeking division while people want peace. Yet there is a second element - people want politics to place power and trust with those they respect.

In doing so, politics can begin rebuilding the bonds of trust that have been severely damaged.

In recent polling conducted for UCL Policy Lab by More in Common, we saw that respect and trust exists for local charities and national organisations that serve the common good, including the National Trust. A genuinely powerful and restorative act would be a politics which loudly places itself at the service of those working to tackle the challenges facing communities. This is both a rhetorical device but also a policy framework

In a sense, this new way of working can be seen as a mission to respect and value both experience and ideas.

Much has been made of the last five years of the turmoil in British politics. The scale of our challenges, the endlessly unstable and fractious politics. The horse race of political leadership and court intrigue. Not to mention the emergence of a booming new industry of social media stars and podcast hosts - made famous through the rise of a kind of political soap opera.

Too often, our politics fails to recognise the power of ordinary and everyday action. It’s perceived as neither big enough in scale nor pure in ideological leanings. But in forcing out the ordinary and everyday from our politics, we weaken our ability to overcome the challenges we face.

And yet Britain has done it before. Time and time again, it has found renewal in the everyday ideas and experiences of ordinary people. In their book England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country, Ordinary Hope members, Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears, explore the incredible power of the everyday ideas that have fueled renewal.

We’re reminded of Paul McCartney’s quote: “The fact is, being ordinary is very important to me. I see it in millions of other people. There’s an appreciation of common sense. It’s really quite rational, my ordinariness. It’s not contrived at all. It is actually my answer to the question, what is the best way to be? I think ordinary.”

Our political life has too often ignored this way of thinking. When the everyday ideas of the communities are allowed to breathe and grow, it creates an ordinary hope, a messy beauty – which has produced some of our most significant institutions and ideals from the BBC to the NHS, from sports clubs to unique brands.

And this isn’t some attempt to reflect a time now gone. In our current culture and economy, we see the imprint of this long tradition. Sam Fender singing to a packed-out St James’ Park about growing up amongst the terrace housing of North Shields, his saxophonist playing the simple note of a Local Hero into the summer night. Or Stormzy, with his mix of grime and gospel bleeding into the experiences of growing up skint amongst the tower blocks of south London.

And it’s not just culture where we see the power of the everyday appear. We see it in the many social enterprises and organisations that have risen to meet their communities’ needs. Whether it’s Maff Potts’ Camerados, with their “public living rooms” on the streets of towns and cities across Britain, or the work of Hastings Common, which Anoosh Chakelian has reported on, these ideas and enterprises are made innovative and effective by the fact they directly connect and represent those they seek to serve.

While politics has busied itself with court intrigue and a singular vision, a parallel world beyond Westminster continues to work to overcome the day-to-day challenges communities and institutions face, from innovative ways of cutting waiting lists in the NHS to new relational approaches to adult social care.

And for every failure to build grandiose projects, there have been a thousand start-ups and community-led enterprises. A politics focused on the everyday might try to ask - what would a state that serves these organisations and ideals look like?

The everyday is a transformative place. It is where we fall in love, where we laugh and cry. It’s where we share our toughest challenges and highest achievements, and it’s where politics can reconnect with its future again.