olitics is a roller-coaster, with ups and downs now coming at a dizzying speed. An idea, a meme or a video shared across the globe can spark upheaval. A brutal cop is caught on camera in Minneapolis, and within days a global movement for racial justice sweeps across the world. In this political maelstrom people feel lost, disorientated. Hopes for change are raised fast but dashed quickly. Take reactions to coronavirus. Already the left appears to be suffering a post-crisis comedown. At first, the pandemic seemed like a political turning point. There were the initial promises of collective action, the rush of mutual aid, the weekly applause for the NHS and its echoes of the blitz spirit. Even the current Conservative government turned on the spending taps. And then came the Dominic Cummings scandal. Many smelt blood, hoping his fall would bring the government down. That Cummings stayed in post took the wind from the left’s sails. Back in the real world, the Tories waited it out – because they could. While the left prays, the right plans – to refashion Whitehall, to own big spending while retaining an air of economic competence, to remake global relations in a post-Brexit world. They’ll do anything and everything to win. Along the way, Labour has tried Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, and now Keir Starmer. But without practicing deep-rooted change, relying on a single leader to save the party is a displacement activity. It’s time to take a long breath and rethink. We have four years to do so. The politics of transformative change, even in this accelerated moment, takes time and needs to be sustained with deep roots. What are these deep roots? The building blocks of transformative change are fivefold. First, a shared and persuasive vision of a good society and good life; a policy programme that will get us there; an electoral strategy of parties and groups that share this vision and benefit from the programme; connecting with emergent and energetic forces in society that prefigure that good society and can help sustain it; and, finally, a political culture of pluralism and intense collaboration that can harness and direct the latent, disparate potential lying all around us. Let’s take an example. In 1945, Labour didn’t transform the country solely because it won a big majority. This electoral win was necessary, but not sufficient for change. After the experience of the second world war, ideas were at play that would transform society. John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge supplied the policies, but even deeper forces were at work. The collective experience of the war and the memories of the depression that preceded it contributed to the culture of determined renewal that defined that era. The Fordist systems of administration that ran the factories, Whitehall and the army, together with unions and the looming existential threat that the Soviet Union posed to western capitalism, sealed the postwar settlement. What equivalent experiences and forces can the left draw on now? Austerity and inequality are the evils to be banished; pandemics and climate breakdown the universal dangers to be avoided. People cherish time from work, air they can breathe, care and security. We have motive enough, what we lack is means. It’s the “how” of change we must fathom, not just the “what”. But that “how” is emerging. In the Steven Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi classic Close Encounters of Third Kind, seemingly disconnected characters start drawing the same mountain-like shape. Something big is connecting them. Today, in every place and every sector, a new and shared ethos is connecting us. People are shaping deep relationships of trust, collaboration and participation. If neither the free market nor Fordist factories set people free, then as networked active citizens, they’re finding new collective ways to realise their humanity. Look at the Manifesto for Collaboration, or the Tiny House movement starting to spring up across the UK. Watch what more radical local governments are doing in places such as Camden and Barking and Dagenham, in London, to Manchester and North of Tyne (Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland). The critical point in this hive of activity is not just that collaboration is morally right. It’s that engagement and negotiation are increasingly efficient. In the complex opportunities and challenges we face, the cybernetics pioneer Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety rules: any governing body must be at least as complex as the body it seeks to govern. Efficacy today demands not simplistic control or competition, but complex collaboration. This new thinking and practice is brought into timely focus in Garden Mind, by Sue Goss, a new publication from Compass. Goss is a system change practitioner who argues that gardening – with its patient, tending and adaptive style – is a good analogy for what should replace the clunky but still dominant “machine mind” that has long defined the role of the state. We’re no longer cogs in a wheel but curators in an ecosystem that we shape, and which shapes us in turn. But gardening takes time. “Great works are performed”, wrote Samuel Johnson, “not by brute strength but through perseverance.” Change isn’t just coming – it’s already here. We need to see it, seed more of it, connect to it and persevere. • Neal Lawson is a director of the centre-left pressure group Compass