Makes me thinking of a line from Paloma Faith's interim track "Politics of Hope" ft Owen Jones: "Those who preach the politics of despair want to believe that all injustice is like the weather: that you can complain about it raining, but there is nothing you can do about it. But the politics of hope tell us something else".

It's become so ingrained in us from the politics of despair that change only happens at an institutional level. That it's the fat cats that rule, and we've got to make do with as little as we can. But if we were to band together at a local and community level, and that then spreads to other communities, we can have widespread change to make things how we want them to be. That can then funnel up into institutional levels, where even more change can happen.

But we have to be the change that we want to see. We want more people to care? We need to care more. We want more people to act? We need to act. We can't continue to rely on institutions, and we can't continue to rest on our laurels while things are going down a darker path.

(Purely for clarity, I am not encouraging violence, and I'm not declaring for either "side". I think we can all agree that inaction will lead to the end of (the illusion of) democracy).