'Protecting my peace' and other moral failures

I largely ducked out of politics before I had children, but once I fell pregnant it became even easier to rationalise turning inwards. What happened, basically, is I couldn’t hack it. When I was writing and speaking regularly, people were always angry at me. Sometimes they were really mean. I was closely associated with the Corbyn project, and the more hopeless things began to feel on that front – the more viciously the left was smeared, vilified, and ground down – the more the costs seemed to outweigh the benefits. I became desperate to escape public life. I jumped at the chance to move abroad for my husband’s work, found a nannying job, and then decided to have a baby myself.

When you have kids, it’s possible to reframe all kinds of questionable choices as selfless. Prioritising earning money above all else is being a good provider. Taking regular long-haul flights gives them enriching life experiences. Sending them to private school simply offers the best possible start. It’s not like any of it is strictly untrue, only that there’s a tension between your obligations to your family and your obligations to wider society. You could use the same moral framework to argue the righteousness of tax avoidance. Certainly, it’s very easy to justify shutting out the wider world and ‘protecting your peace’ as current parlance has it.

The Guardian recently published a piece I wrote several months ago, explaining how quitting writing about politics changed my life for the better. While nothing in that article is factually inaccurate, it’s framed in a fairly narrow way, and it doesn’t really capture how I feel about things now. It’s true that nothing I was writing was of groundbreaking importance, and that other people easily filled those same column inches – but since when is being important a requirement for being involved?

I wish I’d read enough theory to quote someone more serious, but the only thing that springs to mind is Douglas Adams: “No single raindrop thinks it caused the flood”. I have read enough history to know that progressive change comes through people trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing, with occasional breakthroughs when the stars align. My Guardian piece suggests it was self-aggrandising to believe I was doing anything worthwhile by writing. I now feel it was indefensible to retreat into despair and give up on even trying to do something useful. 

It shouldn't have taken a genocide to make me realise that opting out isn't good enough, but it has. It’s impossible to witness the obliteration of the Palestinian people and have any doubt about what I owe to humanity as a whole. The answer is obviously everything. I owe a debt far, far greater than I’ll ever settle. Every day I watch footage of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers in Gaza doing more for their fellow humans than I’ll manage in an entire lifetime. I feel strongly that in the face of such extreme barbarism, Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation was a rational attempt to shock US elites out of indifference. I hugely admire the Palestine Action activists risking long prison sentences to introduce some friction into the extermination machine.

The fact that nothing anyone tries seems capable of stopping this is no excuse for abandoning my own pitiful efforts – which so far have mainly involved attending marches, bombarding people with information on Instagram Stories, and a guest appearance on Novara Live, in which I looked like a deer in the headlights but attempted to get my points across. Quitting writing on the basis it wasn’t politically useful would have been justifiable if I’d found somewhere better to redirect that energy. I’m genuinely open to suggestions on that front, but for now, getting back involved in politics will primarily mean writing more frequently. It’s something I know. I can do it from home when my children are sleeping. Though the recent targeting of journalists like Sarah Wilkinson and Asa Winstanley is terrifying, I think I'm unlikely to publish anything that will put me at the same risk.

All of this is a very long-winded way of explaining why I’ve started a Substack. I don’t have a detailed plan for what I’m going to put on here, but it won’t be exclusively about Palestine. It might not only be things I think are politically important, either. It’s been so long, I kind of feel like I need to practice writing in paragraphs again. I don’t fully understand how Substack works, but I’m not expecting anyone to pay for this. If you do feel like subscribing for free, and maybe commenting from time to time, I’ll be very grateful.