Mutual Aid and Communities of Place in Brexit Britain
What the rise of Britain’s grassroots Covid-19 Mutual Aid groups tells us about post-quarantine — and post-Brexit — Britain.
The internet has often been viewed as a destructive force for communities of place. We are all virtual neighbours, after all; solidarity with your local community seems trivialised in a world where one can just as easily speak to a friend in Hong Kong as they can to a friend in Hull. Yet, the response to the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that quite the opposite is true. In the UK, the internet has facilitated a rapid formation of community solidarity networks on a scale unseen before in its history. Without top-down intervention, thousands of ‘Mutual Aid’ groups sprung up overnight across the country, offering a platform for neighbours to both seek and deliver aid to their neighbours in a time of crisis. Whatever the fate of these groups post-quarantine, their story gives us hints about the future of UK urban life.
The organic spread of mutual aid groups has been remarkable in its scope and ingenuity. If you live in the UK, type in your town’s name and “mutual aid” on Facebook and you will undoubtedly find not only a group for your town, but maybe even your street. The structure of these groups is entirely informal, and varies from place to place, but is normally centred around a WhatsApp chat and Facebook group where people can ask for and offer help, whether in the form of food deliveries, masks, transport, and so on.
In most places an organic organisational structure has emerged to facilitate this, with voluntary officers providing flexible support over pragmatic operations, such as establishing a centralised phone number for people to ask for help, or applying for grants to expand operations. Remarkably, these groups have also formed a national ‘trans-local’ network of Mutual Aid groups. Websites like mutualaid.co.uk and covidmutualaid.org serve not only as a catalogue of groups across the country, but as nodes of communication between them, where knowledge, ideas, and best practice can be shared and exchanged.
For years, Britain has been divided by the vicious, tribal politics of Brexit — yet Mutual Aid groups show that solidarity is stronger than ever. Community organisation has always been a powerful force in the UK, though it is often obscured in the popular narrative. As urban spaces have been rapidly privatised, commodified, and gentrified, community organisations such as LGBTQI+ groups, BAME groups, and disability groups have provided vital support to the most vulnerable. The pandemic has been a great leveller, with Mutual Aid groups meaning that ‘community support’ is no longer an afterthought in the public consciousness. For the first time in most people’s lives, they too are finding themselves reliant on their communities. People are bound by experiences, and it is unlikely that this bond will fade from public consciousness in a post-quarantine world.
As well as placing community organisation at the forefront of people’s minds, the pandemic has also illustrated how powerful a force it can be. When the national lockdown was introduced on March 23rd, the government promised to recruit “an army of NHS volunteers”. By the time the government volunteering app launched, Mutual Aid groups had already been established for weeks. The government’s centralised approach was cumbersome and ineffective. To date, two thirds of volunteers that have signed up have not been given a single task by the centralised server. Conversely, Mutual Aid groups are a hive of activity. This undoubtedly illustrates that communities need not, and indeed rarely do, wait for leadership in a time of crisis — they lead themselves, and aided by the internet, do so remarkably effectively.
This collective, trans-local solidarity further demonstrates that virtual spaces are not eroding community bonds as many urbanists have feared — rather, virtual spaces serve to augment communities of place. UK Mutual Aid groups show that people are just as willing to engage with, and are indeed dependent on, their neighbours as they ever have been. Virtual space, after all, is used by people that exist in physical spaces. We might be less likely to know who our neighbours are than we were before the advent of the internet, but then we are also more readily exchanging local solidarity, ideas, and goods without the intermediary of a political or economic actor. If Brexit demonstrated how the internet can facilitate divisive politics, then Mutual Aid shows that the old, idealistic view of the internet as a unifying platform should not be totally discounted.
Finally, Mutual Aid groups have shown that the divide between urban and rural is more blurred than it ever has been. From personal experience, a local urban-based Mutual Aid group can serve its periphery rural communities where there might not be enough people in close proximity to form a stand-alone group. People are all too eager to help their rural neighbours out, making them more visible to one another than before. Undoubtedly, the rural-urban divide has been a defining feature of Britain’s social tension in the past five years, yet Mutual Aid has demonstrated that these divisions do not run as deep as many commentators make out. Our concept of a ‘spatial community’ has expanded, with virtual space bridging the gaps of geographic space.
Boris Johnson, in a play on the infamous phrase used by Margret Thatcher, said that Coronavirus proves “there really is such a thing as society”. This is, of course, obvious to all but the most cynical. What mutual aid proves, however, is that there really are “communities of place” — but that these communities look and feel bigger and more dynamic than they once did. This outpouring of mutual solidarity is more important than ever, as for the UK a ‘post-quarantine’ world is also a ‘post-Brexit’ world. Lockdown has, for now, brought divided communities together — it can only be hoped that connecting us to our neighbours through mutual aid will also dispel the lie that we are better as individuals than we are standing together in solidarity.
