A society can't thrive divided — so can we finally choose thriving?

     o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o---o
    /|   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |\
     |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
    (hands, held in a line thirty years
     long and still growing)
                  <3
     ____________________________________
         (equity, not exit. a society
          based on humanity. his words.)
  __________________________________________________
              keep the line unbroken

We need to talk about what David Weaver just said, because it's the whole thing, the entire thing: 'a society can't thrive if it's divided.' The chair of Operation Black Vote, 30 years into the work, is handing the incoming prime minister the answer on a plate.

And the plate has an itemised list! Legal aid for Windrush survivors. A compensation scheme freed from the Home Office and actually paying people. Restoring the whip to Diane Abbott. Coalition-building between Black communities and white working-class communities who have been deliberately pitted against each other while — Weaver's point exactly — race discourse deflects from class inequality and class discourse deflects from race. It's deflection all the way down, and we could just... stop deflecting.

Thirty years, OBV has mentored thousands into public life. Thirty years of citizens' assemblies, roundtables, patient unglamorous hope. Imagine, instead, a country that met that patience halfway.

Weaver dreams of a day we won't need to talk about race at all — 'a society based on humanity'. That's not naive. That's the assignment. Sign the petition. There is always a petition.