What a worrying and somewhat soul-destroying moment in history we are living in right now. Democracy and science are under attack from all sides. Literally with Putin in Ukraine, in every other sense with Trump in the US and at the political fringes in the UK and Europe. It feels like the gloves are well and truly off. Rather than listen and deal with what science or morality is telling us we need to do, it feels as if many would rather diminish, counter, or ignore it, however ill-informed this might be.

Here in the UK, lots of areas are under siege. Our Universities and Colleges are struggling to stay afloat. The health service is struggling to cater to the highest level of demand it has ever seen. Public servants and public facing staff like teachers and staff in transport services are struggling with a lack of resources and are having to field increased levels of anger and aggression. Our schools and public services, like libraries and sports facilities, are threatened with closure and charities are left trying to pick up the pieces that fall between the gaps in society (while being faced with fewer and fewer resources and in some cases, increasing hostility).

In the US the problems are even more surface and insidious. Right now, everything that doesn’t fit into the right-wing playbook is under attack, such as public science, parks and meteorological bodies. For goodness sake, half their citizens, and the whole of Canada and Greenland and the EU are under attack… This has serious knock-on ramifications here in the UK, where, to add to the problems, our public services have been starved of money, and many of our intellectual institutions are already being squeezed beyond breaking point.

But other than horror or disbelief, what is our overarching reaction? In my experience, whether it is getting a GP appointment, shutting a library, filling potholes, stopping our homes from flooding, or seeing major layoffs in higher education, the first public reaction -fuelled by scandal hungry media, or by polarising public figures- is to blame someone. It is as if we are being encouraged to simply be angry. It is easy to blame someone else for our frustration, but it almost certainly doesn’t solve the problem, it just makes us feel better or reinforces some prejudice we already hold. It’s emotionally draining, intellectually distracting and ultimately reactive, but not in a constructive way. And if we are spending all of our energy reacting, then we’re not looking ahead or leading and unless we take a more considered approach aimed at actually avoiding problems recurring, we are just going to repeat these mistakes.

I am fortunate to work across so many sectors and forget that perhaps this broad spectrum of daily contacts is unusual, but they all share something in common. People in every single sector of academic and working life that I speak to right now seem to feel both financially and emotionally exhausted. There is clearly something fundamentally wrong in our society. And from my perspective, it seems obvious that this stems from increasing inequality and a failure to tackle long-term concerns. For fifteen years, driven by austerity, we have been trying to run on empty and things are starting to break and it’s not clear who is offering an alternative vision.

Whilst politicians are setting targets and acknowledging some societal concerns, they are then not bothering to fund them. As a result, nothing much is changing. It’s like we have resigned ourselves to our fate, because nobody wants to rock the boat or find the funding. We are at risk of leaving a legacy of inaction for the early part of the 21st Century along the lines of “sorry, but we never thought it was important enough to find the money”.

Yet, in 2008/09 we borrowed vast amounts of money to bail out bankers who gambled with our economy and lost vast sums through lending ever more unsafe loans to people who couldn’t afford them. And we borrowed vast sums in 2020/21 to respond to Covid, not all of it well spent.

But these reactive and expensive actions were sticking plasters to failures elsewhere. They weren’t visionary, they were emergency last-gasp measures. And whilst the bank crash and Covid crisis are now past, we continue to starve the rest of the economy of funds, in the full knowledge that other crises loom over our near future. So where is the leadership and the vision to move us forwards? Where is the plan to invest in something positive?

Imagine that instead of waiting for the next crisis to hit, we actually took the initiative and applied the same urgency, focus and finance we used for the Bank crash and Covid, to deliver something which actually built our lives, strengthened our environment and underpinned young people and our economy. What a compelling vision that could be, to bring people from all walks of life around the same core priorities to deliver meaningful change and progress. To tackle climate change for instance. If done well, it would provide a national shared purpose, provide jobs, future proof industry and protect lives and the environment. It would be a massive investment in our future.

Of course, we could simply continue to make short term decisions, cut public expenditure and starve progress of resources, but with the almost certain knowledge that there’s another disaster waiting round the corner, but this seems incredibly myopic. What is needed from my perspective is positive vision and far-sightedness, to challenge the status quo of relentless short-termism, austerity and false economy? We seem stuck. We are stuck with high levels of inequality and poverty. Stuck with failing infrastructure and struggling public services. And stuck with climate change and nature loss making their presence ever more obvious and threatening to derail everything. Yet politics itself is currently stuck in business as usual, or in angry finger pointing – in some cases seeming to blame the poor and powerless for their poverty. And then to add insult to injury, some, like Trump in the US, and others who would copy him in this country, seem intent on destroying public services even further whilst pandering to the mega-rich.

There needs to be an alternative – a positive and compelling vision – optimistic, intelligent and caring leadership with a responsible, honest assessment and action plan to protect ourselves and our societies, and with the funding to back it up. How refreshing that would be, to stop having our time wasted by stupid announcements and anti-science, and instead to invest our energies into something positive which makes us more resilient as a society.

To do this I feel we need to try to stop blaming each other, resist the pull to anger, and instead start building something worthwhile together. We need to get beyond simply reacting in horror or surprise to widely predictable impacts and instead to start focusing on making a difference and solving these problems instead. Solving poverty. Rebuilding the NHS. Securing the future of our public services. And protecting citizens from climate change. All of these are possible, but there needs to be a huge step up in vision, leadership and positive investment. Ignorance, inequality and austerity are ultimately political choices. Its time to choose better.