DYSTOPIAS make gripping settings for science fiction novels. That’s how I first learned about them as a teenager. There was the despotic superstate Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984; the brutal theocracy of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; the paranoid Galactic Empire in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation; and the savagely feudal Imperium in Frank Herbert’s Dune. 

These enthralling books, alongside others that I eagerly gobbled up in the mid to late 1980s, might have been set in a variety of disturbing post-apocalyptic and futuristic societies, but they all had one reassuring factor in common: they were fictional. As such, each imaginary dystopia functioned for me as a parable. A literal warning of what could happen if our society lost the plot. 

Of course, I was aware of real-life dystopias, but as far as I could tell that kind of extreme societal misery was consigned to the history books, orotherwise unfolding safely elsewhere. Here in Blighty, we had our fair share of injustice and heartless policies without doubt, but for the most part I believed our nation – leaving aside its dark imperialist past – to be a relatively benign one. A place where democratic processes still worked, and it remained possible to express dissenting opinions. 

I am no longer so sure of that anymore. Chilling developments in recent years have shot great gaping holes in my blanket assumption of our overall societal wellbeing and I don’t think they can be easily patched up. 

Food Banks and Warms Rooms

We now live in an era of Food Banks and Warms Rooms. A time when a thousand people in England can die from the cold in the month of December alone, while a few months later oil and energy companies announce record profits running into billions. A period in which one in five of the UK population officially live in poverty forcing millions of vulnerable households into an existential choice between heating or eating as our nation grapples with a cost of living crisis that has seen the prices of everyday essential items rocket and energy bills nearly double within a year.

Last year’s summer of discontent has accordingly swelled into this year’s tsunami of industrial action leaving society in frequent paralysis as unprecedented numbers of public sector workers have walked out en masse to protest over their pay not keeping pace with inflation. It includes the biggest NHS strikes in its history only two years after Britons regularly applauded NHS staff alongside other essential workers for labouring selflessly through the pandemic. 

And how has the British government responded to this societal cri de coeur? 

By passing hard-hitting laws to limit the impact of such protests, that’s how. They range from the Strikes Bill, which enables minimum service levels to be safeguarded in key sectors during periods of strike action, to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act as well as the Public Order Bill, the last of which came into force just days before the Coronation and was used to arrest several anti-monarchy campaigners on the day itself and hold them for up to 16 hours without charges – a heavy-handed response to peaceful protestors not often seen on these shores. 

It would be one thing if inflationary pressures were affecting everyone proportionately, but income inequality in the UK, already one of the highest in Europe (with a Gini coefficient ranking it as worse than Romania), is on the rise. Runaway executive pay and excessive shareholder returns are deepening this chasm. Plus the inadequacy of current welfare benefits to cover minimum living costs has led to an explosion in destitution. 

Health disparities between the South East and the North are also widening. In wealthier areas, life expectancy is now nearly 15 years higher, which is almost the same gap as the UK average and Sudan. In short, the UK is growing sicker and poorer. 

Welcome to Britain’s Inequality Games!

Obscene Disparities

If I sound downcast, it’s because I am. Our country today is one of obscene disparities. A polarised nation that lurches from crisis to crisis, never properly resolving anything and leaving its people feeling helpless, disillusioned and lied to. A dystopian society – yes, I’m calling it – in which the number of children in food poverty almost doubled in the past year to just short of four million while in the same period the combined wealth of all UK billionaires went up too. 

All of which finds me sitting opposite a man with an idea. 

Phillip Ullmann, a social business entrepreneur who once ran the UK’s leading talents solutions group with a combined workforce of 100,000, might not look particularly radical at first glance with his navy blue suit and neat silvery hair capped by a kippah, but his vision of creating a fairer society through utilising an ancient form of pledge called covenant is nothing short of revolutionary. 

It’s why I have come to meet him – hope being such a rare elixir these days – despite this subject falling outside my usual journalistic beat. 

It is strikingly apt for someone who cites religious concepts regularly that it was an epiphany which upended Phillip’s traditional career path a few years ago. As CEO of the Cordaunt Group with revenues at its peak of more than £1.2 billion, the realisation that business, specifically the pursuit of making money, wasn’t fulfilling him hit him hard and he began to cast around for what business could be about. When he came across the concept of social enterprise, he was hooked. 

Here was a “a completely different way of operating where your purpose is not looking after yourself or a group of shareholders. You’re focused on people… the planet… a much wider range of stakeholders.” 

His attempt to bring Cordaunt along with him on his journey towards greater social purpose, however, was more challenging than he had anticipated. In 2020, Cordaunt went into administration before being bought up and rebranded into a new business. It was a salutary lesson, Phillip acknowledges; one that taught him that if the objective of making money for shareholders is embedded within a company’s DNA, it is almost impossible to change that organisation from within, nor is it even fair. 

Ancient Concept of Covenant

Phillip was not to be deterred from his path. Three years ago, he began to study the Hebrew Bible with a circle of Biblical scholars during lockdown, a development he wryly concedes as “crazy” and it was this close reading of it coupled with his unfailing eye for business that was to lead to his most revelatory insight yet; namely that the ancient concept of covenant, a form of pact common in early near Eastern societies involving promises made between different parties based on a desire to work towards a common good, was still fit for purpose and relevant for the modern age. 

Covenants, he believes, offer “real and pragmatic” solutions to the inequalities and exploitative practices that result from our current business models which are overwhelmingly contractual. Covenants mean delivering for stakeholders, not just shareholders. And he’s practicing what he preaches. Today, he’s the CEO of the Covenant Advisory, a consultancy “building business coalitions and linking these to state and civic institutions.” Remodelling society around a kinder, more inclusive covenantal approach, he is convinced, really can change the world.

Now I’d be the first to admit that turning to a pledge framework that dates back several millennia as the answer for our current economic woes sounds fantastical. But I’m also intrigued. How can a construct birthed in such a spiritual era have traction in our modern, decidedly less devout times? 

The answer, according to Phillip, is that it’s already alive and kicking in the estate of marriage which, although still a legally binding contract, works on a far deeper level because of the promise two people make to each other. In other words, a good marriage succeeds because the interests of both parties are aligned in a higher purpose than they would be in a transactional exchange in which a seller tries to sell something at the highest price and a buyer wishes to purchase it for the cheapest price causing the interests to be misaligned. 

“You’re not competing with your wife, you’re trying to achieve things together that you can’t achieve separately,” he says. “Having children, building up a loving family, working as part of a community. So, it’s about collaboration, working together in a loving relationship… moving from a completely competitive ruthless environment where it’s survival of the fittest to a world where we actually care for each other; we care for the eco-system.”

There is much to unpack in Phillip’s thinking about how we can revitalise our dysfunctional economy through covenant. Some of his theories are already fine-tuned, others less so. But as the cogs of my brain whir to keep up, I notice myself growing energised by our discussion of fairer, more accountable methods of doing things in a way that I haven’t felt in years. Most of my prepared questions fall by the wayside. Instead, I listen, really listen, and respond with genuine curiosity. 

By the end of our conversation, I think I understand that a covenant seeks to foster relationships between people, even ones with estranged interests, to join together for our common good. And it’s this – our relationships with our family, our community and our land – that is the key driver of human endeavour, not money. Once we look after those fundamentals, the payback is on a whole different level. 

Is such a covenantal future possible for the UK? I don’t know. It feels a little like a utopian dream but perhaps the depressing realities that our country is enmeshed in today have caused my imagination to grow smaller and gloomier. What I do know is that we all need to be having a big conversation about what we want to be as a society going forward because it’s never been more vital and a covenantal approach should be absolutely on the table.  

© Tanya Datta