One week into the UK General Election and the biggest news is from across the Atlantic, where Presidential candidate Donald Trump has just been found guilty of a crime he could go to prison for. Unfortunately, the founding fathers of the American Constitution never imagined this scenario--so there is no law to prevent Trump running his campaign from prison. He’s the first ever Presidential candidate proposing that he stands for office as a convicted felon.

Trump’s defence is that the entire legal system has been hijacked and the trial was politically motivated. That America has become a ‘divided mess’. This while he divides America with his own delegitimising of the American constitution, polarising the people.

More and more we observe, on both sides of the Atlantic, people calling out the dysfunctionality of the political system—which makes it ever more dysfunctional.

Diane Abbott calls out the Labour Party for barring her from standing for re-election as an MP. Although the formal charge against her was that she called into question the suffering of Jewish people, her exclusion has been associated with ‘purging the Left’ and even racism.

As she accuses Starmer of exclusion, the media picks up evidence of a ‘divided party’ and the party once again falls prey to self-implosion. This was never the intention of Abbott, nor of Jeremy Corbyn, caught in a similar trap, now obliged to run as an Independent.

In our editorials each week, we might be accused of doing the same delegitimising of “official” politics and to some extent, we have no defence. We regularly report evidence of dysfunctionality in party politics. However, we are not pinning the blame on specific people, or expecting that a change of personnel will fix matters.

Our position is not a protest, a call to abandon party politics, or to abstain from voting. It is more of an exhortation to evolve democracy at the systemic level. To generate a new society wide structure that is more capable of revealing ‘what needs to happen’ and ‘what I can do’ to meet the polycrisis.

Within that bigger picture, making a decision on July 4th is only one of a number of things we are committed to and investing in, which give us hope for the future.

Over the past decades General Elections have had a variety of party-political outcomes across the British Isles. Due to the first past the post system, the Labour and Conservative Parties have always dominated government in Westminster, with brief moments of coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

In Scotland and Wales on the other hand, due to the proportional system of voting that drives these devolved parliaments, other parties – the SNP, the Green Party and Plaid Cymru – have been able to enter government. However, despite this islands-wide ecology of micro- and macro-political systems, the UK has not been able to significantly change its direction towards climate breakdown, growing inequality or well-being for the people. Conditions for flourishing get steadily worse.

This is why we launched The Alternative UK/Global: to bring attention to new spaces of developing agency that are emerging cosmolocally. The general public will not have heard much about them because they appear counter-cultural, not in hock to the current socio-economic-political system: one that depends on constant growth to deliver an illusion of security. At the same time, these new initiatives have their long roots in a feminine tradition and have been rapidly growing since the birth of the internet.

Until now we have focused on four broad arenas of agency, which we captured in the incubator process:

1. Future Being: the tools and practices of equipping each of us to become capable of the future unfolding – the challenges and the opportunities

2. Future Doing: the new daily habits, work and play of people moving into a better future, broadly described as ecocivilisation

3. Future narrating: the kind of gathering news capable of shifting hope into optimism telling a new story of possibility?

4. Future politics: the new structures and constitutes that enable citizen participation at a meaningful level

On this evidence, a new party manifesto (see our proposal for Spring) might propose:

1. A new education system developing personal and social capacity for integrated regenerative and tech futures (what we refer to as I-We-World)

2. Universal Basic Income to help citizens make lifestyle changes for a rapidly changing lifeworld

3. Citizen-led, cosmolocal news and social media to challenge global manipulators of local and global narratives

4. All citizens to be offered a chance and mechanisms to politically deliberate and shape national policy

We regularly present the conditions for this prospectus as being ripe on their own terms. However, we admit this is unlikely to move people towards action the way that a headline in our current daily papers might. Look carefully at the promises parties make which can attract votes, but may do little to change the status quo. Both in terms of hierarchies of power and our relationship to the future.

Add to that the emotional register that news media adopts to help their journalism land its claims. For example, the paltry Conservative proposal to maintain a link between pension rise and inflation – which makes a difference of £0.28 per week (according to The Independent) - is presented as a heroic act in defence of old people.

So what emotionally contrived headlines could The Daily Alternative generate, in order to draw attention to the promising changes happening outside of the mainstream media gaze? Arising directly out of our manifesto, we might suggest:

1. Young and old offered free training to upgrade themselves for the future!

2. Universal Basic Income helping people guarantee their food supply and future health!

3. Community owned global media shifting mental health decline!

4. Weekly gatherings help citizens take back control of their future!

So what’s to stop The Daily Alternative launching Spring as a political party with this agenda? Particularly with the PR system we enjoy in Scotland? It’s too early.

As we have shown in the past, British society is unlikely to generate new outcomes from direct democracy (box-ticking) or even more sophisticated online participation like pol.is. See our blog this week on Audrey Tang’s vision for digital democracy. However, unlike the Taiwanese public, with its history of Confucian socialism, we are deeply wired for confrontation – as our House of Commons design proves. Direct democracy is unlikely to change that, any more than PR is.

What we need is some time and space in our daily lives to meet at community level. To build relationship and trust through locally-sourced, well-facilitated deliberation. To think deeply into the interconnectivity between I, We and World, with a view to facing the polycrisis on personal, social and planetary levels.

We can see the beginning of new architecture of this kind of deliberation appearing – everything from citizen and people assemblies, circles, liberating structures, constellations antidebates and so much more. But in our wider landscape, they are more like green shoots than budding trees. There are already plenty of neighbourhoods, towns, cities, bioregions that have begun this work, that we can learn directly from. But they need an investment of time and resources to accelerate the work.

We should begin that investment now. The goal would be, over the next three to four years, to link up enough of these community agency networks (CANs)—who are doing the work of democratic innovation—and have them constitute the beginnings of a parallel polis. This would then be actively generating a manifesto that a new party—our suggested title: Spring--could represent in any national parliament with P

It's a plan. How about it?

Alternative Editorial: Alternative Manifesting