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Participatory Practice
inheritance spans accumulated experience, intelligence, inventions, investments and hard work, together with environmental assets – energy, minerals, rivers, oceans, soil, flora and fauna and climate. We should never take for this for granted, ‘no one has the right to more of the earth’s resources … than the total of those resources divided by the world’s population’ (Sayer, 2016: 341). The concept of the commons extends from what we take for granted in our everyday lives, like roads, waste disposal and public transport to the riches of the arts, past and present, to advances in science, past and present. Inequalities in the development of the commons privilege the powerful over the less powerful, often leading to slavery and exploitation. As a global phenomenon, neoliberal capitalism exploits poorer people within rich countries, making societies more and more unequal, at the same time as exploiting poorer countries, keeping countries unequal. The result is a divided world. These points certainly challenge any dialogue that centres on the ‘Because I deserve it’ narrative of individualism. ‘The commons are our collective heritage, our common wealth, our collective knowledge and our traditions of sharing in society’ (Standing, 2019: 349). David Cameron claimed his ‘Big Society’ was about participatory democracy and community empowerment. This is not true! It was an exercise in making the poor responsible for their own poverty. Thatcher’s ‘care in the community’ and Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ need to be critiqued for ‘community engagement [being] used as an excuse for social dumping’ (Monbiot, 2017: 81). The small state simply absolved itself of responsibility for protecting democracy by ensuring fair distribution of resources, maintenance of human rights and a balance of power between the powerful and powerless, using ‘austerity’ as a smokescreen for robbing the poor to pay the rich, with dire consequences. This was the final dismantling of the values that informed the welfare state. Philip Alston revealed the shameful state of British poverty to the world, so let’s see what he had to say.
At last, a critical analysis from a human rights perspective! Philip Alston, the UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, came on a mission to investigate Austerity Britain in November 2018 and did not hold back on speaking truth to power.
A story of speaking truth to power … Once upon a time in Austerity Britain a visitor from Australia spent a fortnight travelling round UK communities, listening very carefully to the stories people told about their everyday lives. He just happened to be not only a human rights lawyer, but the UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. In the fifthrichest country in the world, he witnessed with his own eyes such extremes of 54
