Other people two
When I tell people I live in the Cotswolds people now ask me if I know the pub where the staff refused to serve JD Vance or where Beyonce will be living. You could not have put money on the place where I was born becoming the Florida of the UK until you understand the twisted logic of aristocracy, conservatism and the industrial military complex that continues to reign in the rurals. Our dirty little ideological secret.
In the weeks leading up to the presidential visit to my small part of the world, I started to have stress dreams of working on tech democracy projects in the former Soviet Union. My anxiety dreams re-appearing when I feel the Siberian wind of an ideological capture ahead, the same stomach pains minus the vodka. You might not immediately see the connection between our modern political story of Christian Nationalism and the Broligarchy and what happened with shock therapy in the former soviet union but I want to tell you a story about what happens when parallel universes collide in the Cotswolds.
Back in the 1990s the overflowing EU democracy budgets funded a whole load of workers’ education programmes with trade unions – training on how to use the internet and collective bargaining with employers in the early days of their shocking transition to neoliberalism. This was no EU funded jolly my friends, it was a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to prepare the Soviet old guard how to be unionists under capitalism. First learn to engage with your members (wait, listen, no wait, try to listen..oh), then to bargain with employers and voila, democratic trade unionism across the largest membership organisations on the planet. As silly as it now sounds, we thought we could help them.
Tucked in amongst their heroic stonewalling and cognac fuelled breakfasts, I remember the first time we got an internet connection in the chemical defence trade union’s tiny unmarked office in the Moscow union building on Leninsky Prospekt to heavy applause from the union executive (average age 72). I innocently suggested we send an email to our sister organisation in the Donbass the independent miners’ union of Ukraine who atypically because of their young leadership had an actual email address. As the most senior leader in the room sat down at the keyboard, he paused and then asked me, ‘what shall I write?’. Exactly.
Similarly delusional educational projects were carried out in the transition economies across the soviet empire including Romania, the seat of the most savage campaign of control within the Soviet Union. While I was working there, one night I was invited by the leader-in-waiting of a powerful energy union known as the Little Prince to dinner. A ‘cultural exchange’ took place as we walked around the national workers’ museum that had been opened just for us that night and I half- listened to a two hour monologue about heroics and solidarity. Littered with metaphors from the beautiful game and the union’s own national football team.
When it became clear that I’d lied when I said I spoke good enough French to understand this regal diatribe I was bundled into a car and taken to what looked like an old theatre. Escorted by sad faced security past a series of dining rooms full of old men and young women. Presented to the Little Prince at a candle lit table for two set on the old stage served by a row of silent beautiful waitresses in hopelessly high heals. Five glasses of varying sizes, one for champagne, red wine, whisky, brandy and vodka, all full.
Long before the days of international roaming, I was disoriented and embarrassed that I couldn’t quite register that I had just been kidnapped and taken to a brothel. Five uneaten courses later panic sets in and I ask to go to the toilet at which point I climb out of the window. I jump out into what turned out to be a walled car park, lights flash on, a fuss follows and a furious Little Prince throws me into a car and drives in reverse headlights off across an unknown town. Turns out that we were in central Bucharest and within walking distance to my hotel. I quietly get out of the car and walk into the hotel lobby locking eyes with the two Norwegian oil consultants at the bar, men surround me and I override my ambivalence about that. I was told that during the soviet period there were more children on the Romanian secret police payroll than adults. This was how society was broken, by making it necessary not to speak to your own children for fear that their play and playmates could threaten the family’s survival, the consequences of that writ large across Romania’s orphanages.
Later that year at a TUC congress I was looking after an international delegation of Russian unionists on behalf of a Global Trade Union. Day one of congress we’re sitting up in the gods, tucked away watching the proceedings below with some amusement. Vodka and animal lard is rolled out and one of the most charming silver haired man I’ve ever met, the then President of the largest energy union in Russia, is trying to teach me how to roll a cigarette with one hand. Suddenly there’s a problem with translation, much fuss over a technical term they have never heard before. Zero Hour Contracts.
As I try to explain this concept to a stunned group of communists the chair announces our presence to the hall and we all stand up and wave at the delegates. In that moment both sides look at each other with pure undiluted pity. From where I was standing, the Russian delegation understood perfectly what lay ahead for us in the UK before we saw the ideological fault lines. They understood from experience that as soon as we silently accept the lawless dressed up as freedoms, we are all corrupted.
Despite my cellular love for the rolling hills and cow-nibbled tree canopies, it troubles me that my town is the site of the most profitable Waitrose (and most dangerous supermarket car park) in the UK. I wonder wide mouthed at how my once-depressing town that felt it was built on sadness lay lines, now flourishes as a wealth management centre. An ancient fault line of its feudal underbelly, revitalised by the concentration of money and military power that defines it. In Vron Ware’s book Return of a Native, she writes with body-aching delicacy about her journey to the ‘nowhere special’ where she grew up in and navigates the politics of food, farming and environmental harm, the first tycoons and Ocado warehouse fires, the co-option of common land, and lays out the industrial machines and talks of a place in England that is hardly understood.
My mum was a quilter attending two groups every week for several decades. One group was held for the wives of soldiers in the vast military complex that peppers the South West. A safe place where women meet to create landscapes of remembered loveliness, my mum patiently absorbing their unsettled states drawing on her life as a ‘special needs’ teacher. My mum was also a regular Thursday morning quilter at the Quaker meeting house in our town. The wooden walls and tall windows, sitting in a circle in silence as quaker, Muslim and Buddhist meetings took place in the room next door. Over the last year this community saw the quiet arrest of the quiet quakers, as they lead peaceful demonstrations against the drones being sent to Gaza from the two local US air bases. Nobody in the Waitrose cafe talks about how so many pensioners now have criminal records, as we become climatized to the sound of the helicopters of state and entertainment visitors utilizing their military industrial complex.
Some months ago when the arrests started I wrote to my MP about our right to protest in the UK and received a response from the Security Minister in charge. ‘The first duty of government is to keep our country safe; and it is right that we are able to take action against those who engage in activity that threatens our national security. I hope this response reassures your concerns, and those of your constituents, and thank you again for writing to me on this issue.’
In 2025, after moving between three countries, six homes and eight jobs I received an Easter card from Romania, simply signed with peace and love from the Little Prince. A reminder of a dirty little ideological secret and that they still know where I live. It is in this way that everyday authoritarianism has come to live in our homes.
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