Under Privileged Eyes: Culture as Medicine, Never A Drug: Make Every Prisoner Wanted, Cared For, Back To Learning, A Good Job and Place To Call Home: we all need this!

In 2024, we’re still building that representative democracy that our great grandparents, parents, friends, relatives and neighbours so desperately aspired to after the Second World War. Did they want to be house servants, work in a factory under their old military line manager? No.

What we need to realise though, after this election, that we do need a new beginning: harm and hate the product of forty years of rising inequality, a society predicated on depersonalising work, introducing precarious jobs and housing now needs to build a healthy, productive, inclusionary work, home and neighbourhood culture.

We’re now in a position where everyone wants more collaboration, everyone wants and will benefit from a productive economy and opportunities across the lifespan.

The supply chains set up to reconstruct the world after that war have evolved into an unhealthy institutionalisation of social and personal harms: a culture of illness, medicalisation and addiction where everyone is suffering and no-one feels they can change it. This is so true of people who enter the justice system.

Look around Nottingham city centre: you can see how the dominance of this  corporate, bland supply chain economy affects what we think we’re capable of: it’s a space of absences and presences as if something really important is missing that makes its presence felt.

Absent landlords of empty buildings undermine the productivity and opportunity for everyone. Types of presence and types of absences in a city centre that is increasingly supported by well-meaning but under trained, underdeveloped staff in charities needs to evolve in to an inspiring, healthy economic and social space. They and we deserve an economy where charity disappears and people grow throughout the lifespan.

At the moment Nottingham is grieving both the financial harms inflicted on the council and public services over many years and an attempt to pretend through financialising the city and business leaders brainwashed into thinking that businesses don’t need services, people don’t need democratic representation.

Over the last thirty years this arrogant supply chain economy, starting with discrediting working class history and heritage unbalanced and ignored the needs, talents and abilities of working class Nottingham people and targeted students, international and home -this wouldn’t have been so bad if there hadn’t been a sustained and hostile attack on civic history, the value of councils and by a government that needed to end notions of reciprocity and relationship in the political process: everything that reminded people of citizenship, shared and developing notions of social inclusion and representation. Our last government was quite at home with a permanent underclass (that it had created).

The movement away from Civics and service, balance and accountability then proceeded with incredibly expensive purpose built student accommodation (that also undermined the local attempts of organisations (like Unipol) that supported small landlords to provide high quality affordable housing with and for students) and followed up with a parasitic student focussed eating drinking and night time culture that wasn’t set up by local investment but came from anywhere but here, with a rigid notion of how long it was in for and how local people could serve in it.

As servants really.

No real jobs, no real skills here: even for the highly qualified graduates, post grads and PHDs because services were slashed, undermined and that insecurity characterised the exemplar science businesses: they recruited through networks and had finite capacity. Good for marketing inward investment but of little value in creating a productive ground for a really diverse economy.

A similar planning process was applied to Rushcliffe: it was seen as a target because of its apparent concentration of older, affluent and wealthy people who could be targeted for residential homes and nursing services, the lack of detailed, granular understanding of the potential and power of linking geography and intergenerational values in was excised from planning.

This notion of meeting the needs of inward investment above everyone who actually creates the economy, misusing the indigenous talent, creativity and innovation to be marketing for these big brands has been and has created a false economy because the relationship between village, town, city the county the district is absent from its memory.

It’s this system that has dementia in its very DNA as it creates a loss of shared value(s) and value: dementia capitalism. It encourages mindless competition and aggression to stand in for the true, generous smarts we really need just now.

We all have friends, colleagues, relatives in all geographies: we need proportonate scale in planning and for a truly mixed economy to be valued. Undemocratic planning affects everyone’s quality of life.

Democratic planning means thinking about how we’ve all got connections across village, town, city, county, district, nationally and internationally: it’s a rich microbiome that has a chance to sustain us all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POObBnwGzv0

The old depersonalising way of creating development is harming us in the same way that highly processed foods play havoc with a human microbiome. The analogy of highly processed food and the bland corporate branding of businesses set up not to grow people but to provide data and a predicted short term yield can be seen in the way the city centre looks and the way we’re all affected by the way our acquaintances, friends, relatives, colleagues are employed, live, socialise.

You never get over the shock of people on benches in sleeping bags with few teeth, multiple injuries: how can we allow our streets to become A+E departments? How have we allowed A+E to make up for the harms of structured inequalities?

What can we see in Nottingham city?

Mainly small and medium branded outlets, larger corporate buildings and space managed by the supply chain version of what that supply chain demands (doughnuts, cakes, sweets, vapes, sugary and highly alcoholic drinks, coffees, pubs that open for a couple of years then close, then open again: big wheels, and roundabouts, highly over processed foods, big screens, surrounded by Deliveroo riders, Uber drivers wheeling in and out faster and faster homeless people waiting, waiting, waiting: all watched over by CCTV,  security or police.

The corporate brands feed off the drive in the sole trader, the micro, the SME: they keep the space, keep replacing their precarious staff: their mission is unchanging: profit trumps everything.

This is why we need to keep on building a representative democracy in every institution, organisation, corporate, SME, micro, sole trading exchange. We can do so much better by each other. We need to grow natural world and human world diversity and through that we’ll be productive, happy and healthy.

Why? Because the enormous detail in the and of the local is the microbiome of the world we need to grow in the village, in the town, in the city, in the county, the district, see the life, the culture, history that prioritising the big brand that hides unaccountable and opaque financials. This way of planning and delivery erases the value and contribution of its employees.

We need to evolve and regenerate the enormous shock and awe structures of the big property, construction and utility, energy, defence, and prison supply chains that property developers, speculators and investors have demanded of us for so long.

It’s highly metaphorical that Timpson locksmiths are part of the process, rehabilitating ex offenders at the heart of communities: these kinds of insights throw light on so much more.

Above: Simple line on Vecteezy: Timpson Unlocking the layer of the supply chain necessary to begin to regenerate the economy.

There’s a missing layer of representation in our economy that’s prevented growth, regeneration and productivities. We need to cultivate a love of learning, knowledge, discussion, conversation, debate with everyone, the guilty, the innocent and those in-between and keep building a richer, productive economy that references human and natural diversities as essential to growth.

Culture is everything, everywhere, all the time and we need to understand it as a healing thing, a medicine, not a drug. People who commit crimes are as much ‘society’ as the people who don’t.  The supply chain way of controlling difference has been to ‘drown out’ and trump rational argument by a hateful and cruel ideology of ‘no way back for prisoners’, cultivating aggression rather than thinking skills, morality and balance in people.

When we realise that prisoners just as pro are as often shocked, in stress, ill and as much as rehab, need cultural recovery. In our prisons, in our detention centres, in our market economy of gang and gig labour men, women and children lose purpose, meaning self respect, health and purpose. They’re not accounted for as having value, it’s ok to write them off.

We can bring everyone in if we stop working to the demands of the aggressive, enormous supply chains to build more prisons, more enormous residential complexes for older people, no more global student accommodation, no more parasitic business set up for a short time to extract as much value from the older person, from the student. This is just not the kind of economy we’re capable of.

Let’s begin the work of reducing harm, reducing aggression and frustration, let’s build!