Parallel State: Lines of sight beyond the territory
by Simon Poulter

Until one month ago, British people were among the few lucky individuals on this planet that could count themselves to have access to not just one, but two citizenship. Facing a deterioration of the positive powers that are granted to UK-citizens, the question who has benefitted from taking away these ‘bonus rights’. Would it be possible to reinstate this safety-net by linking mobile and transitory points of resistance and in so doing so connect to a new form of citizen-power? Meet the emerging Parallel State. Simon Poulter reflects on the day when the ambitions of the Parallel State were drawn out, and reviews the territory it was inescapably born into.

The Parallel State formed on 1 February, 2020 in Huddersfield, hours after the UK ‘exited the EU’.

 

1. The Parallel State is a place for openness, tolerance, otherness and change.
2. Citizenry of the Parallel State does not preclude or conflict with a citizenry of any other state. You may be a member of any other state and also of the Parallel State.
3. The Parallel State sits alongside the workings of other states and respects their democratic processes and procedures. Citizens of the Parallel State may hold views that differ from their other citizen statehoods.
4. Citizens of the Parallel State hold that cooperation across political boundaries is now a necessary function of preserving the resources and condition of the planet. They, therefore, advocate common policies and behaviours that promote the well-being of this planet. Citizens of the Parallel State hold that discussion and dialogue bring about comprehensive change. In many cases, differences of opinion may be evident among people and this is not a problem within a discursive environment.
5. Citizens of the Parallel State reject the manipulation of communities and populations through false information (so-called ‘fake news’). They welcome dialogue through facts and research-based agendas.
6. Citizens of the Parallel State welcome diverse lifestyles in relation to language, ethnicity and religious background. The Parallel State is not religious but upholds the right to beliefs that do not conflict with other declarations herewith.
7. The Parallel State stands for human thought and dignity. It welcomes exploration but not at a cost to the planet.

The intention has been to draw together people who did not just want to take the ‘Brexit Reality’ lying down but form direct action. It has been apparent that the positive language emerging from Boris Johnson and the Tories has been intended to form a glow around Brexit. The term ‘unleashed’ appeared as a part of the new mantra-politics, as if the UK economy and people had been repressed by the dull hand of the #EU. The mantra writers at No.10 have been in overdrive, realising that controlling the language has been a big part of the agenda for Brexit. 

The bitter fight to stop Brexit continued right up until the General Election on 12 December 2019. In the period of time after the results were announced, a strange lull or quiet set in across progressive people. The pulse and passionate campaign to overturn the so-called ‘will of the people’ had run its course. Mantra politics had come to define the new democracy of the dwindling and disunited kingdom. In fact, the United Kingdom died that night as the people of Workington voted Tory. Any reaching out or magnanimity had perished long ago, as Theresa May deflected common purpose to the edge of popular discourse in favour of placating a small band of right-wing temper ‘tantrummers’. 

Mantra politics ground out the last few breaths of the dying kingdom – ‘Let’s Get Brexit Done’ became the final lumpen push and shove into the shit thick polemics of neo-medieval England. A place of such opportunity had become overcome by auto reflexive gag bile battalions of zombie citizens reciting untruths to camera. The horror show seemed to have no end, just incontinent dribbles of rank pseudo-information seeping onto the orange carpet of despair. What the fuck happened here?

In the preceding months, a man on a makeshift bed lies in a doorway in Lincoln begging. He has a place to go but doesn’t want to go there. Another man, with leg wounds from chronic diabetes, moves into position in his wheelchair next to Costa at King’s Cross, where he is fed by charitable Polish women who work nearby. He has a home to go to but was chased away by youths. There’s something dark in everyone’s story, Camden council have him on their list but he refuses help. The architect of personal misery, digital by design, is awarded a knighthood. A nation of othering looks to have othered itself. Tolerance lies in tatters, looking up at the mosaic of Bernhard Manning above the Embassy Club in Rochdale Road, Manchester, formed from his own ashes.

In early January, we contacted people across a broad network over a period of two weeks. There was quite an outpouring of feelings about the negative impact of Brexit, as the day approached. The idea of a place to go kept circulating – not as a therapy group for snowflake Remainers, but as a method to organise. The Labour Party failed badly in this respect – or perhaps it never had a chance. Either way, no truly inclusive identity was created around progressive thought or was considered important for shaping an idea of the UK in Europe influencing from a position of power-to rather than power-over.

Conversations took place over a variety of media and a decision was made to get people to open up about their experiences from all over the country. This probably numbered 100 people from Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Here are some things that they said:

My mother always tells me how much she loves this country. I ask her why and she tells me “…there are very generous people in this country, and there are millions who always give so much to charity and the British really love their animals.” 

My mother lives in a very small safe world but more recently has been watching news from India and UK and asking questions around the homeless, food banks, violence against marginalised groups, migration, hate crimes, global weather effects and of course BREXIT! She finds the news upsetting and troubling and asks me if everything is okay. I reply “… as long as we have hope, each other and take action in our own individual or collective way against hate we will survive”.

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Social media increasingly overwhelms me and my negative tendencies are slipping into a more generalised low mood. All rather head down. I feel trapped on this island at the same time that I’m actually making positive moves to devote more time to making art and doing non academic jobs. 

Brexit fills me with fear. But at the same time the spikes in hate crimes and political thievery will drive more of us to collective and individual action.

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Peterborough perspective: hate crimes spiked (over hearing verbal racial attacks at least fortnightly), racist graffiti [is] very visible in city – recently there was a huge Hitler drawing accompanied by ‘I was right,’ swastikas everywhere.

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It may well be that the UK will leave the EU, but the manner of our leaving doesn’t have to be decisive within our communities. The pressure will be on to paint a picture of a UK that is kind, reasonable – to grow and support the belief that we are all more similar than different, despite a Tory government that doesn’t know how to be other than divisive.
Brexit fills me with fear. But at the same time the spikes in hate crimes and political thievery will drive more of us to collective and individual action.

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Thoughts – The impetus to join a #parallel state is not just because of Brexit, although I am a Remainer.  I live in a ‘leave’, Tory stronghold – it’s not much fun.  The Leavers are vociferous in their justification that Brexit must be done because that’s what a democratic vote promises. They are also the loudest voices in conversations, on and offline, that refer to wanting to be “free of EU control” there is a belief that everything that is wrong with the UK is all down to “EU control”.  If a ‘remain’ voter sticks their head above the parapet the insults are quickly thrown at them.  People I’ve known for years have shocked me and I struggle to remember who they were as individuals pre Brexit. Even more shocking is to witness second generation immigrants supporting Brexit. I can’t get my head around that.

Brexit Day approached and we attended the ‘Brexit Celebration’ outside parliament. The space was awash with Union Jacks, far-right flags and an odd mix of white people. A black guy was receiving a huge amount of attention in his Union Jack suit. Makeshift camera teams interviewed people, asking for their thoughts. A series of hard Brexit leaders were wheeled out by Richard Tice. Anne Widdecombe raised the Jingometer to 10, before a particularly repugnant Julia Hartley Brewer exclaimed that we are ‘all leavers now’. The door is shut, no going back. A really bad edit of political figures from the last 40 years was beamed out on a screen. Sharp boos were reserved for Tony Blair and Theresa May. As the moment of Brexiting approached, Nigel Farage jumped onto the stage. He seemed off form, perhaps overwhelmed by the legions of far-right fanatics who surrounded him. A bad rendition of Rule Britannia, with a tone-deaf band, topped off the proceedings. People left in the light rain.

In Huddersfield, about a third of a nation removed from Westminister, the first meeting of the Parallel State took place the following day. People paid for their own travel, some couldn’t afford to come at all. It was important to place the founding point of the Parallel State in ‘the North’, although debates circulated about what that actually means now, with potential Scottish independence and wider UK break-up.

The meeting was structured around 4 themes: readings of the previous contributions on the affective, political feeling in the country post-election; finding new, positive narratives in a post-Brexit landscape; the aesthetics of the new state; and structuring the new state. The discussion was very broad with a consensus that a continuing action was necessary. Culturally active people had strong feelings on the loss of important links with Europe, such as the EMARE programme. People with children resented the loss of freedom of movement for their kids. With attendees from Scotland, a discussion on Scottish independence concluded that if it is the ‘will of the people’ from a stitched up referendum to leave the EU, then it can be the ‘will of the people’ of Scotland to leave the UK on a referendum too. 

We talked about who the ‘we’ was in this room and the need to both work with who’s in the room and how, whether to expand that. Is reaching out to Brexit-voting Uncle Dave, with his second home in a sunny European country really a good use of our time and energy? Who are the low-hanging fruit who might contribute to a Parallel State? There is an exhaustion to doing cultural work with people who don’t want you here. This is about more than hearts-and-minds. And we might not only want people in this new state who are just like us-in-the-room. This is a question of how to get on in the aftermath, how to envision collective living, to recycle structures in order to foster both collectivity and individual freedom. Is Parallel State another manifestation of the intentional community, art collective or microstate? Or does it aspire to a grander scale from the get-go, with a dash of what one speaker called ‘border theatricality’?

We talked about regulation and law. Is one of the tasks of the Parallel State to archive and use EU policies? Do we draw on the historic collaborative practices of community-based and socially engaged art? Do we return to Ernst Bloch’s theories of hope and utopia? Do we join the Tory party to become one of Dominic Cummings’s weirdos, but weirdo-as-pharmakon? Critically, we discussed the role of Brexit and the legal framework of financial dealing because that’s what it was all about and those who wanted to steal the money from beneath our noses knew that no one likes the boring stuff so they could hide their regulatory chicanery under a fluff of faux-nationalist pride and cynical use of identity politics. As one participant on the day claimed, the purpose of humans in late capitalism has moved beyond consumerism. We are all just voters now and our labour is harnessed absolutely to power. But what if we adjust the scales? What if the Parallel State insists that the primary metric is neither the 66 million of the nation nor the 25 of the art collective? What happens if the Parallel State is the 5,000 of a community, or the 500,000 of the city or the 455 million of the EU itself? 

A consequence of the meeting was to reinforce the value of physical interaction and debate. And the desire for practical working. Much of the Brexit discourse has taken place across the horizontal planes of social media, with often repeated discourses and lines. There remains a need to surface truths in order to develop sustainable, significant lines of sight and plans of action. Alongside community building, discussion, and healing is a desire to explore the spaces of taxation, of becoming fast track civil servants, of mining the private sector, of renationalising the infrastructure franchises as a form of national community asset transfer, of appropriating Tory funds for trickster action. Parallel State as a para, supra, extra, ap, trans and intrastate. We are both geo-located and electronically distributed. Inside and out. Both and. We can act in the ether and in the dust. We can draw cocks around potholes and organise via Snapchat and Signal.

We are now planning a follow-up meeting in April in Coventry. We are asking questions about how political and cultural parallelism can circumvent or confront the deterministic and insincere politics of post-truth. How can we construct a world where the veracity of information is clear? What can culturally active people do to break apart the systemic mantra machine that Cummings and Co have created? Is there a route forwards in Parallel Statehood that demonstrates integrity and authentic ideas around social justice? 

At the time of writing, we seek more people to engage and define what parallelism could be. The Parallel State has no membership, no formal constitution and no money. Of course, it can be considered as a state of mind, akin to cultural protest in Russia and China, held internally as a brain state. 

Now in power, the Johnson government will marshal its backroom forces and mantras to create the illusion of rebalancing the economy – alongside this, there can be a distinctive realignment of progressive people who can adopt the same strategies towards different end goals. Methods of organisation seem important now, how many online petitions can anyone possibly sign when there is no apparent response or debate?

What kind of place do you want to live in? In the Parallel State, people will never be left to beg on the streets.