I think something we need to recognise is these things are habituated at an individual level. Neoliberal culture is particularly insidious in the UK because of the existing issues in the historical development of UK political culture, including but not limited to class /1 https://twitter.com/ProfAFinlayson/status/1266686276436180992

...the fact is that we have internalised a way of being that is a form of capitalist being and even reified it at the level of ethics is critical.

"Don't cause trouble at work." Even if your boss or senior leadership instructs you to do something that you *know* is wrong. /2

Now, this comes as no surprise to majority of workers at all times in all places, routinely treated as expendable.

What's interesting is UK was - sort of - an approximation to a bourgeois democracy, which sought to manufacture consent and accommodate a range of interests /3

Since rise of the New Right we’ve seen all-out assault on those interests, and even the mirage of a pluralist society. The mirage of an abiding postcapitalism which Crosland believed to be Attlee legacy, no longer capitalism but not yet socialism, was just that, a mirage. /4

But the transformation of ethics is critical here I think because neoliberal ethics is a really serious issue. You are used to seeing your boss getting away with saying up is down and down is up - you know they are wrong. But you go along with it. /5

What we’re seeing in Minneapolis and across the US are people who aren’t ‘going along with it’. All power and solidarity to them. /6

But the behaviour of Johnson et al is normalised (& was normalised as much as anything with the ‘pretty straight guys’ of New Labour, as they called themselves).

Fisher’s anecdote about his manager who maintained self image by ‘not really believing’ in the system is on point /7

As Fisher notes, in carrying out instructions for disciplinary regimes the manager was indispensable to the system, even while alienated from it.

Vilifying Cummings & expressing horror = almost a catharsis for the way we tolerate bullying &megalomania in our workplaces. /8

It lies behind all the legalistic approaches to things we see commentators obsess over, judicial challenges to Brexit, police action against breaches of rules, Russia report etc.

All short cuts, related to an ethics whereby we don’t really want to make sacrifices & take hits. /9

In short, everything is political which is trite but true. Refusal is hard because it will cost you. But there are people refusing en masse in the US right now, and rightly so. Politics is a moral reality. /10

Voting Tory costs people’s lives, and if you vote Tory you have to take a measure of responsibility for that. Sorry, that’s just how it is. Equally, voting for Blair at the height of the warmongering was indefensible as well. /11

But the abstraction of moral responsiblity from voting is part of the amoralisation of politics where we as citizens view voting in a neoliberal frame as a consumer choice, where it doesn’t say anything ‘negative’ about us. When in fact it is a moral choice which says plenty. /12

But it goes way deeper than voting. It goes for everytime we (including this tweeter) fail to show solidarity in the workplace with a colleague, or simply show good faith to power when we wouldn’t show it to someone else. /13

We need to live a political ethics and yes that makes life uncomfortable but life wasn’t supposed to be easy.

We have a shining example of refusal and ethical action taking place in the US right now, with people acting collectively against a white supremacist state. /14

Solidarity to them, and Remember George Floyd.