Welcome to my world of retirement - now what do we do?

Just as I am getting used to the idea of not having to go to work, having been made redundant after 33 years of local government service on 31 December, suddenly everyone else is doing the same thing!

All our thoughts must of course be with those workers who need to keep working (including particularly those who need to keep working outside their own home) – and that isn’t just the obvious categories, such as the health workers who will save thousands of lives, or the care workers in my father’s nursing home – today trading standards and environmental health officers (who comprised the first Lambeth Directorate I worked in all those years ago) have the job of enforcing business closures.

Faced with this pandemic the old slogan “think globally, act locally” has never seemed more apposite. The pandemic clearly expresses a warning from Mother Earth to her human children that we are testing the limits of our only planet (not so much by our numbers as by the misallocation of resources caused by the capitalist mode of production). This is a global crisis like no other.

The appropriate response to the sheer enormity of this global crisis is exemplified by the proliferation of mutual aid groups growing from the grassroots up. All credit to the anarchists whose practice is informed by Kropotkin’s concept of mutual aid, and who inspired this widespread and admirable response. Whilst Governments flounder in the face of a challenge which requires them radically to depart from the received wisdoms of orthodox economics, ordinary working-class people organise spontaneously to support each other.

It is now for the official organisations of our movement, our Labour Party and trade unions, to catch up with the rank and file.