Being issued with a paltry fixed penalty fine for breaking the Covid-19 physical isolation rules set by their Tory government, neither Johnson nor Sunak has any intention of admitting fault or dishonesty (Rowena Mason & Aubrey Allegretti, ‘Boris Johnson defies calls to quit after he and Rishi Sunak fined’, 12 04 2022). And Tom Ambrose (12 04 2022) provides what should be lethal contextual information: ‘Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak: timeline of denials’. Members of the public, as well as political commentators and colleagues, allude to the Prime Minister’s lifelong habit, from his Eton years to Parliament, of escaping seriously tricky situations (“like Houdini”) with grudging acceptance or resignation. “It’s just Boris”, they say, implying he is entitled and untouchable; that there’s nothing we can do to rein him in, call him to order like a naughty child, never mind remove him from office.
Lies, deceit, fabrications, buffoonery: Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson, UK Prime Minister, is a known barrel of laughs. William Davies reviewed Peter Oborne’s magnificent book (2021), The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism, describing it as “a clinical and merciless account of Boris Johnson’s lies – written by a former colleague” (Guardian Review, 06 02 2021). Jonathan Freedland followed with ‘The charge sheet that should have felled Johnson years ago” (Guardian Journal, 01 05 2021). Both provide detailed lists of his offences over the years, but Oborne goes beyond cataloguing Johnson’s crimes, “a history of deception, misrepresentation, false statements and serial fabrication” (Oborne: 1-2), to analysing, in anger and grief, the consequences for society, politics and democracy: the damage. “Political lying”, he argues, “is a form of theft. It takes away people’s democratic rights”. It is an abuse of power by the entitled narcissist: a form of political treachery. It’s not a joke, something to be made light of, and to be moved on from because Putin’s Russia is waging war on Ukraine. These issues, of power and democracy, of deceit and violation, are connected matters.
Oborne has been paying attention over the years, not looking away when it hurt or might damage him professionally. Johnson “has lied to voters, to ministers, to journalists, to Parliament. He has lied to adults. He has lied to children” (ibid.: 165/6). And he has done all this with the complicity of the UK mainstream media, which too often served/serves to amplify his lies and falsehoods and/or not give them the scrutiny they deserve. This Prime Minister has also precipitated the departure of senior civil servants he saw as obstacles to his authority: “By September 2020, no less than six permanent secretaries – Whitehall’s most senior civil servants – were either gone or on their way out” (ibid.: 103). At the same time, he chose to hold on to acknowledged liars in Cabinet, to suit his own ends, because their primary gift was/is abject loyalty; that is after all why he appointed them, not for their honesty, integrity or basic competence. The Justice Minister, Lord Wolfson, has just resigned in dismay, not just at Johnson’s dishonest behaviour, but “the official response to the crisis”, i.e. the lack of Cabinet scrutiny and accountability. In his resignation letter, he makes explicit that what is at issue is the rule of law, and a head of state who does not abide by the rule of law in their own country, he says, has no credibility or moral authority to advocate internationally for the rule of law, as opposed to the use of force and violence. Equality before the law is a fundamental principle for any would-be democracy and fair society.
Nor can the war in Ukraine be used to deflect attention from Tory attacks on these basic principles and the institutions designed to protect and uphold them. We need a person of integrity at the top, not a compulsive liar and smirking narcissist, concerned only with self interest, self promotion and party political advantage. To call this situation ‘party gate’ (media-speak) trivialises what is a constitutional and political crisis, which in turn distracts public attention and political scrutiny from, for example, the involvement of Putin’s mates in making substantial political donations to the Tory party, as well as allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum (ibid.: 26). Oborne spells out the serious issues raised by Johnson’s tenure in office:
“In Xi Jinping’s China or Putin’s Russia it’s a crime not to lie. Criticism of the ruler is forbidden. . . . Such regimes kill and torture truth tellers. . . . In Britain we have long prided ourselves that we do things differently . . . But we are in the process of abandoning the institutional protections that in the past have saved us from dictatorship. The Johnson government is set on a sustained, poisonous and calculated assault on these institutions.” (Oborne: 9-10).
So abandoning the idea that political truth telling and accountability, the rule of law and a non-partisan civil service, are central to our politics and democracy, to our lives and communities, has grave social and political consequences. This crisis is not just about illegal Downing Street parties. It is a political power struggle that we, the people, must win. To stand with Ukraine, for example, we must win our own political battle to defeat the culture of entitlement, impunity and corruption that threatens our own democracy as well as international relations of goodwill. If Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson proves to be fireproof (yet again), it will be our democracy that goes up in flames. No man’s career and vanity is worth that sacrifice.
val walsh / 14 04 2022
For more on the problem of democracy and Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson, see:
‘Beyond defeatism: countering Tory triumphalism with progressive substance’ (08 01 2020), and ‘Lessons from the UK 2019 Brexit election: from tacit to explicit. From gloom to agency’ (13 02 2020) in Category: Commentary 2020, togetherfornow.wordpress.com.
Beginning to map a cognitive route through bewilderment, despair and rage.
The appeal of Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson for victims of Tory rule and Austerity politics.
The fracturing of working-class as a political identity.
The main enemy is not one thing (nor one person).
The next Labour leader.
Footnote.
Beginning to map a cognitive route through bewilderment, despair and rage.
“Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the ‘freedom’ of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretenses” (John Berger ‘Where are we?’ (October 2002) in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, 2008: 41). Emphasis added.
So with the 2016 EU referendum and the 2019 Brexit general election, the UK twice fell short of Berger’s basic criteria for a functioning democracy. And as historian, biographer and political commentator, Fintan O’Toole points out, there is a further problem: “Brexit is at heart an English nationalist project” (Heroic Failure. Brexit and the Politics of Pain: 166), (which Scotland understands) and to be feared for that very reason, as English nationalism assumes and promotes elite whitesupremacy and rule (notably by far right men).
“But nationalism is, more than ever before, a mystification, if not a dangerous fraud with its promise of making a country ‘great again’ and its demonisation of the ‘other’; it conceals the real conditions of existence, and the true origins of suffering, even as it seeks to replicate the comforting balm of transcendental ideals within a bleak earthly horizon” (Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, 2018: 274). Emphasis added.
English nationalism is not intended to address the needs, desires or aspirations of working-class people (however they are identified). But the Tory party can pretend (for long enough to get elected). Which they just did.
During the 2019 UK general election campaign, Tory leader, Alexander Boris de Pffeifel Johnson, was variously approved by white working-class voters as “a proper leader”, “quirky”, and as “one of us”, seeming to bear out O’Toole’s caustic observation that:
“Objectively, the great mystery of Brexit is the bond it created between working-class revolt on the one side and upper class self-indulgence on the other” (O’Toole, ibid.: 124).
During the months of campaigning, shock and bewilderment were felt by many on the Left, when faced with those who professed to approve of or even enthuse over Johnson, as a man and as a political leader. In the wake of the general election, this requires more than rolled eyes or expletives, or merely a sense of defeat in the face of ‘ignorance’. We need to understand his appeal: and what many despairingly refer to as ‘turkeys voting for Xmas’. Five days after Labour’s defeat at the polls on 12 December 2019, in an effort to make sense of what had happened and what it means, I turned to writers who have nourished and inspired me, some for years, some just recently. I turned to the beauty provided by their work and example, to remind me of our best efforts as humans.
This should have been an anti-Austerity, social justice and climate general election. Instead, the far right managed to use Brexit, hate and fear, to extend and intensify their political power and control. Progressives need to take time for this potentially difficult conversation, before proceeding in haste, and with the heightened emotion of deranged panic, despair and unbridled rage (all in plentiful supply); and/or displays of ego, personal ambition and vanity.
The appeal of Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson for victims of Tory rule and Austerity politics.
“But a curious and sceptical sensibility would recognise that to stake one’s position on national or civilisational superiority, or turn the accident of birth into a source of pride, is intellectually sterile” (Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, 2018:34).
That is, not just arrogant, elitest and racist. This matters.
The fostering of disbelief in Labour’s manifesto and distrust of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, worked brilliantly to fragment and dissipate opposition to the Tory party, and its record of Austerity politics, and to its leader, Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson: himself well known for his unbridled mendacity, sexual irresponsibility, misogyny, sexism, racism, class-based sense of entitlement and contempt for parliamentary procedure. As Pankaj Mishra cautioned ahead of the election: “There should be no mistaking the neo-fascistic cults of unity and potency he promotes, and the insidious forms they assume in England’s tabloidised media”(‘Time’s up’, Guardian Review, 07 12 2019). Like Pankaj Mishra (Age of Anger, 2018) and Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019), Paul Mason turns to Hannah Arendt’s research into totalitarianism, to throw light on the current rise of authoritarianism and neo-fascist politics.
“In 1951 Arendt wrote that the ideal subject of a totalitarian state is not the convinced Nazi or communist but ‘people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of
experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist” (Mason, Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defense of the Human Being, 2019: 102).
This state of being is informed by the quality of exposure to experience, opportunity and information (alluded to by Berger). And this in turn foregrounds the role of formal education, in addition to experiential learning, and the effectiveness of public channels of communication in society. For example, ahead of the election, Andy Beckett suggested that the Labour party manifesto could leave the reader with the impression that “the Tories have been merely approving bystanders, rather than central participants, in Britain becoming a society of billionaires and food banks” (‘Our focus on the future lets Johnson avoid the present’, The Guardian, 30 11 2019). And “having a ‘future election’ [glossing over the impact of nine years of Tory rule and Austerity politics] has especially suited the Tories this time” (Beckett, ibid.); not forgetting that mainstream media have remained politically onside with that sleight of hand. See, for example, the conversation about the BBC and its election coverage, ‘The BBC Is . . . Cancelled?’ between Aaron Bastani and sociologist, Tom Mills on novaramedia:
See also Mills’ book, Myth of a Public Service (2nd edition 2020).
Highlighting the role of MSM, Maya Goodfellow cites historian Sundeep Lidher, one of the editors of Our Migration Story, a website that documents the generations of migrants who have come to and shaped the British Isles:
“’There’s a myth that . . . pervades the public debate that migration is something that happened in Britain after 1945 or that it’s a modern phenomenon. Actually we have a long, rich and very diverse history of migration’. Without detailed public knowledge of these histories, the UK’s understanding of itself will always be narrow-minded. . . mythical and inaccurate” (Maya Goodfellow, Hostile Environment, 2019: 48). Emphasis added.
And racist. Goodfellow’s book provides a detailed report and analysis of the omissions, distortions and lies that have featured in the UK’s official immigration narrative. Previous Labour governments have regrettably been party to that mythologizing and its brutal consequences for people’s lives.
Mishra highlights the importance of both the range and diversity of our sources of information, but emphasises the vital connective tissue of individual lives:
“Materialist analyses that invoke the abstractions of nation and capital, chart the movements of goods, the drastic change in climate systems, and the growth of inequality through the techniques of statistics, quantitative sociology and historicism will remain indispensible. But our unit of analysis should also be the irreducible human being, her or his fears, desires and resentments” (Mishra, 2018.: 35). Emphasis added.
“What had made people susceptible to fake news in the 1930s, Arendt argues, was loneliness: ‘The experience of not belonging to the world at all’” (cited Mason, 102). Mark Fisher has pointed to the impact on ordinary people of the decline of the unions during the neoliberal years: without an agent to “mediate the feelings people have and organize those people”, discontent will “remain at the level of individual disaffection”, which “easily converts into depression as well” (Fisher, ‘There is an alternative’, Tribune, Winter 2019: 59). He refers to “the privatisation of stress” (ibid.) as a consequence of the neoliberal years.
In 2020, in the context of a neoliberal, consumerist economy organised around spectacle and the inculcation of fear and desire, within which sexualized, gender power relations are particularly influential, we can expand on Arendt’s analysis. Maybe there are those who are poor and have felt hard-done-by; who have also been disadvantaged by the education system, and feel disempowered and even socially powerless, who choose to align themselves with Boris Johnson as a “proper leader”, because he can do and say what they can’t – e.g. lie on a daily basis, bamboozle, insult and dominate others and get away with it (including racism, misogyny, sexism, homophobia); even be admired for his duplicity, his arrogance, his sexual irresponsibility, his aggression and daring; his fearless sense of entitlement; his contempt for authority and the institutions of our democracy; his recklessness, his desire to dominate: his classed masculinity. This composite also functions as both a magnet and warning for the far right, including Tory BAME politicians: stay close or you could be the target for his racism, sexist bullying, or his ‘professional’ contempt. Patriarchy rules.
Psychologically, identifying with the coloniser / abuser can be a way of denying the extent of vulnerability, damage and shame: a way of saving face and hiding hurt and fear. If you don’t name abuse or rape, you avoid exposure (and shame) as a victim (but not the experience as a victim). Maybe for some communities and individuals, their approval for posh boy Johnson constitutes deference disguised as defiance; resentment and class shame couched as independence and assertiveness, instead of a class act of political challenge.
“By shame I do not mean individual guilt. Shame, as I’m coming to understand it, is a species feeling, which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity for hope and prevents us looking far ahead. We look down at our feet, thinking only of the next small step” (Berger, ibid.: 36).
Compare this with the process of feminist consciousness-raising and politicisation, which require you to start by identifying injury, abuse, injustice. As a woman in a patriarchal society, you identify as a victim and with victims, then move to a more assertive identity and practice, beyond victim identity towards creative agency. The process of politicisation is a collective one over time, with collective consequences. It is personally and intellectually powerful and transformative, and gets you out of that victim hole, but it is not about individual empowerment, advantage, or upward social mobility.
However, there is also the matter of seduction as a sexual and/or political ploy.
Seduction is rooted in a power imbalance. It is a function of inequality: a form of power play that re-enforces relational, social and sexual inequality. It works as a knowing manipulation, disguised as ‘charm’, ‘invitation’, and/or mischief. This ‘playfulness’ / flirting works to both attract attention and to distract: e.g. to disperse (critical) scrutiny and encourage acquiescence and submission. It could be argued that the process of seduction is in itself a form of bullying. Significantly, in an ‘attention’ economy, these are all forms of attention, and if we have been starved of attention, we may be particularly susceptible. We are at our most vulnerable to the attention of the seducer or abuser when self esteem and confidence are low; when neglect and/or abuse and/or grief have left us feeling fearful, forlorn, abandoned, bruised or broken. Isolated, inferior and unloved. Then we overreact to the smallest kindness or show of interest. Like serial abuser Jimmy Savile, Cambridge Analytica’s strategy was to hone in on such isolation and vulnerability. Patriarchal / heterosexist culture trains women and other subordinate identities to respond to seduction. It is how control and subjugation are simultaneously exercised and disguised. Seduction is the opposite of peer process, where differences meet as equally worthy of respect, contributing to a process of knowing, acceptance, collaboration, affection, intimacy: loving kindness and reciprocity; intellectual and social affinity.
For Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson, seduction/bullying/dominance is clearly his preferred (or perhaps only) modus operandi: a reflex rooted in white privilege and his elite, class-based sense of entitlement and hetero-masculinity. What’s there to like (or emulate) about this vain, aggressive, bloated, conventional upper class hetero male, for whom truth has little appeal? “Boris may talk the talk on healing, but every casual aside betrays his baser primal instincts. . . . He is a man entirely without humility” (John Crace, ‘Johnson, a man totally without humility, can’t resist the chance to gloat in his hour of triumph’, The Guardian. 21 12 2019). What’s there to prefer to the dignity, political compassion, social awareness and stamina of Jeremy Corbyn, with his lifelong commitment to social justice and fairness?
A lot of women find Johnson repulsive (I’m quoting, not guessing). We don’t see him as amusing or as a harmless ‘buffoon’. We know the type, and recognise him as an obstacle to women’s dignity, safety and opportunity: whatever our age, ability, ethnicity, faith or sexual preference. This is an old fashioned, elite hetero guy, subjectively barely touched by the social justice movements (e.g. feminism and anti-racism) and technologies (e.g. white goods and the contraceptive pill), which have wrought improvement to the lives of women and other oppressed people in our society since the 1960s. This makes him a relic of a bygone age (along with many other Tories and far right men, including Trump), for whom ‘unnatural’ actually means “the new power of women to choose their partners and live their lives without sexist bullshit” (Mason, ibid.: 86).
The fracturing of working-class as a political identity.
“In fewer than ten years, the neoliberal project had reshaped the world economy. But its true achievement lay in the changes it made to the way human beings think and behave” (Mason, 2019: 44). Emphasis added.
In the late seventies and early eighties:
“Neoliberalism did not just hammer workers; it encouraged people no longer to identify as workers. Its success was in being able to seduce people out of that identification, and out of class consciousness” (Fisher, 2019: 60). Emphasis added.
None of us have entirely escaped these neoliberal pressures, for example, to replace political attentiveness with shopping:
“The West’s basic orientation toward business and financial capitalism . . . (has) produced the collective sense of what is thinkable and what is not” (David Wallace- Wells, The UninhabitableEarth. A Story of the Future [2019]: 164). And “inequality has been justified for generations” (Wallace-Wells: 165).
Normalised, as ‘natural’ and unavoidable. These are not superficial tweaks, but significant, internalised shifts in consciousness and values.
“In the regime of privatisation, commodification, deregulation and militarisation it is barely possible to speak without inviting sarcasm about those qualities that distinguish humans from other predatory animals – trust, co-operation, community, dialogue, solidarity” (Mishra, 2018: 328).
Jeremy Corbyn brought back these qualities into Labour’s party politics, into parliamentary procedures, and public discourse. And Labour supporters, old and new, loved him for it. But:
“What made neoliberalism different is the way . . . . it created a reality in which it became impossible to imagine alternatives. Educated and inquisitive individuals found it increasingly impossible to think their way beyond it“ (Mason, 2019.: 65).
Along with many members of the Labour cabinet.
Judging by the slew of irate reactions to Labour’s general election defeat (in particular from Labour MPs and journalists who have ceaselessly opposed Jeremy Corbyn as leader), the white ‘working class’, unlike other sentient human beings, is a clear and fixed historical entity, and just ‘are’ who they are, and by extension, cannot be called out on their irrationality: for example, approving more Austerity and inequality, more “calculated cruelty” (film maker, Ken Loach’s phrase), homelessness, NHS privatization, prohibitive educational fees / costs; and more environmental degradation and chaos, with consequences for people’s health and the planet; and forsaking the UK’s biggest and most stable economic market, for the ‘clean slate’ and international void of Brexit – “another upper class jest” (O’Toole, ibid.: 156). All of these developments will disadvantage the already disadvantaged further.
The “working-class revolt” O’Toole refers to may be the simultaneous actions of a number of working-class voters, but it does not constitute a “working-class revolt” rooted in class-consciousness; what Mark Fisher would call “a system of co-ordination and some system of memory” (Fisher, ibid.:60). It is more like collusion. After all, no working-class activist / socialist will ever ask for “more punishment, more poverty, fewer rights, please”. Nonetheless, the media and politicians of all persuasions have triumphantly seized on this as a “working-class revolt’, partly through misunderstanding (see above), but mainly through their desire to use these voters’ actions to discredit Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, his supporters, and the Labour manifesto. It’s being used as ‘proof’ that the Labour project under Jeremy was rubbish.
Since the general election In 2019, those Labour MPs, like Lisa Nandy and Jess Phillips, who have sought to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership ever since he was elected (twice) to that role, now busy themselves directing their anger at the Labour leader and each other for Labour’s election defeat: overlooking, or in ignorance of, the economic and political forces mentioned here, that predate Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. They ignore the complexity of the situation, and instead wonder how they can ‘win’ these voters back. As Nandy puts it to disenchanted former Labour voters on the street or in a pub: “We need to win back your trust, don’t we?” Mea culpa (but not Nandy personally, of course.)
For Nandy and Phillips, their bid for the leadership is by way of an extension of their hostility to Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Their main reflex seems to have been not to upset working-class Brexit voters, for fear, presumably of losing their own seats. “Unless we change course, we will become irrelevant’, Nandy says (‘Labour’s route back is through local activism”, The Guardian, 04 01 2020, as if local activism is something new). This unspecific rhetoric could mean anything. It feels like dog-whistle politics: opportunistic and shallow, given the complexity of the economic, environmental and political challenges ahead, which will not be addressed by simply trying to second-guess what might change these voters’ minds regarding Labour. If these voters have read and rejected the manifesto, and therefore rejected anti Austerity measures, stopping further privatization of the NHS, returning to free higher education, legal aid, the recovery of the public sector, including transport and housing, for example, then the switch to be a Tory or Lib Dem voter is logical. Nandy and Phillips approach to these voters amounts to tacit agreement, implying they are right in their hostility to Labour / Jeremy Corbyn / the EU. If that’s the case, logically, as MPs, they should follow these ex Labour voters out of the Labour party. In their haste to appease these working-class voters, they may have jumped the gun. A recent report has crunched the numbers, and the figures seem to indicate it’s the Remain Alliance that cost Corbyn the vote, not him or the manifesto: https://spotlight- newspaper.co.uk/politics/12/16/ge2019-vote-share-reveals-tories-got-lucky/#
Nonetheless, these working-class actions will have (already have had) political consequences, but their irrationality and delusional optimism lack political coherence, as the move constitutes a vote against working-class interests. ‘Working-class’ as a demographic or sociological category does not in itself supply the class politics that turns you into an agency for your own agency and wellbeing, that enables you to challenge and defeat your class enemies. And if, in 2019, you think your class enemies are socialists in the Labour movement, you have a problem. As does the Labour party. Sociologists, politicians and the media maintained for a long time that social class was no longer an issue, no longer mattered: had gone away. The EU referendum and this Brexit general election suggest otherwise. But “the bond” between “working-class revolt” and “upper-class indulgence”, noted by O’Toole, was, until the 12th December 2019, thought to be logically and politically inconceivable.
There are Labour MPs, who in 2019 retain a belief in the virtues (or inevitability?) of a market economy, (setting aside its established and acknowledged inability to deliver equality, safety and social justice, housing, health and dignity for citizens, and environmentally sustainable practices, for example); who think Labour’s anti-Austerity politics is a ‘leftwing’ fantasy; that ‘working-class’ voters are somehow pristine, impervious to and independent of far right media manipulation, and the relentless demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters over the last three years. The sustained, ferocious venom towards Jeremy Corbyn feels so personal. Like spite.
Inciting voters to vent inchoate anger and direct it at the Labour party and its leader, rather than the party responsible for nine years of Austerity politics, the slashing of public services, the intensifying of racism through the ‘hostile environment’ and calculated attacks on our multicultural society, does not make for working-class empowerment. Nor does it show respect (as Nandy and others mistakenly assume). It might better be understood as “sado populism” (Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, cited Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure. Brexit and the Politics of Pain [2019]: 132). A white, working-class Labour friend (not based in Liverpool) rang me after the election to say that she had expected Labour to be routed “in its heartlands”: in a Ribble constituency in the north west, white working-class people were rejecting Jeremy Corbyn as “a Nazi”. She sounded shocked as she reported this, but also fatalistic about the electoral outcome. Do Nandy and Phillips expect me to ‘respect’ those people? Is this what Nandy means when she says the next Labour leader “will have to be up for a scrap – willing to run to places where we are loathed, take the anger on the chin, and make and win the argument” (‘Labour’s route back is through local activism’. The Guardian 04 01 2020).
In 2019 there is no one, simple explanation for Johnson’s appeal as Tory leader, or for Labour’s electoral defeat. But it is certain that none of the factors mentioned here as important instrumentally and historically for our society and its politics, were brought on by the election of Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, having voted consistently against neoliberal policies and measures as a backbench MP, he is less responsible than most other Labour MPs. Goodfellow provides an example:
“As the policies that went on to make up the hostile environment were being turned into law through Parliament, the Labour Party put up the most minimal resistance. . . . . the party abstained on the 2014 Immigration Bill, effectively waiving it through; and they went into the 2015 Election selling Labour Party mugs that promised they would put ‘Controls on Immigration’.
But there was some Parliamentary resistance. 16 MPs voted against the 2014 bill, 6 of them from Labour, including 3 of the people who would go on to lead the party a year later: Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell” (Goodfellow, 2019: 6).
Objectively, it is surely delusional for working-class voters in 2019 to assume that the Conservative party will deliver on its promises to fund and improve public services and infrastructure, as opposed to continuing to slip money into the hands of its core supporters and funders (the very very rich of the far right), while stripping back funding for the vital benefits and services (e.g. dental care, sure start projects, child care, education, housing, the NHS, mental health, legal aid, affordable and efficient transport, for example) that provide the infrastructure and social safety net of a welfare state in a European democratic society. There is nothing in the history of the Conservative party, never mind the nine years of Tory Austerity politics, to suggest that the Tories care a jot about such social projects, as opposed to those (such as coal, oil, fracking, armaments and finance) designed to produce enormous and fast financial profit for themselves and their funders. As Guardian journalist, Gary Younge, quickly noted:
“It took [Borarse] less than a week to abandon his commitments to raising the minimum wage, to protecting labour laws and child refugees, and to push for an ID bill that will suppress the vote of the poor and minorities. There is no shortage of issues for the left to get involved in beyond Labour. The Earth certainly can’t wait until 2024” (Gary Younge, 21 12 2019. ‘Amid defeat,
remember – the left is more than Labour’, The Guardian).
The Tories were pushed to pretend they cared by the shift in political discourse that arose following the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2016; the exponential rise in Labour party membership; the activism of party members; and the two ambitious Labour manifestoes (2017 & 2019), explicitly rooted in socialist values. As Younge commented after the election:
“Contrary to Tony Blair’s claim that the left turned Labour into a ‘glorified protest movement’, Labour actually turned the left into a glorified electoral machine. The thousands of people who canvassed in the cold and half-light over the last month were not there to wave placards in central London and preach to the converted, but to knock on doors in marginal constituencies and convert the waverers “ (Younge, ibid.] .
And many of those people, of all ages and backgrounds, were doing this for the first (but not the last) time.
Building on the interventions of Cambridge Analytica during the EU referendum campaign, Tory strategy under Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s unelected special adviser, who masterminded the Tory Brexit campaign, has ‘working-class voters’ apparently ring-fenced and rounded up, with new working-class MPs (e.g. in the north east), ready to be co-opted into the historical Tory ploy/plot, of undermining/removing workers’ rights and environmental protections, and above all, the right to have rights; as well as the right of parliament to scrutinise and adjudicate government policies and practices, as is appropriate in and fundamental to, a functioning democracy. This much is already openly on the Tory table under Prime Minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson’s dash for Brexit ‘victory’. “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” he bellowed triumphantly at his first meeting with his new cabinet (17 12 2019). As Fintan O’Toole notes ominously: “Brexit is the irruption into politics of the risk culture of the City” (ibid.: 143).And Cummings is a key proponent, on the payroll and busy ‘running the country’ behind the scenes in Whitehall.
In 2020, the main enemy is not one thing (nor one person).
“Surveillance capitalism’s successful claims to freedom and knowledge, its structural independence from people, its collectivist ambitions, and the radical indifference that is necessitated, enabled, and sustained by all three now propel us toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions. Instead, surveillance capitalism must be reckoned as a profoundly antidemocratic social force. . . . . Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above” (Shoshana Zuboff [2019] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight For a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: 512/513).
The economic, social and political forces already described have a powerful additional ‘partner’ and engine. As Zuboff makes clear, this coup is not just technological, but in the service of particular masters, who are open about its incompatibility with democracy. Democracy is their core target/obstacle. Mason is concerned that “many on the left just cannot get their heads around the idea that the main enemy has changed” (Mason, 2019.: 259) and insufficient attention is being paid to “this new alliance of right-wing authoritarians and techno-literate fascists” (Mason, ibid.: 11). Like the other issues already discussed, these are feminist issues, feminist causes for concern, and Mason (like Mishra, 2018) understands this:
“It becomes clear that antifeminism is not peripheral to the alt-right: it informs its entire critique of the modern world” (Mason, 2019.: 86).
“And the wider problem is that – in the few short years since social media became a global reality – violent misogyny has become a pervasive subcultural identifier for the far right worldwide” (Mason, ibid.: 87).
Moving beyond Arendt’s theorization of totalitarianism, Mason argues that:
“What drives people to the far right is no longer simply economic or cultural insecurity, it is the fact of seeing such parties legitimised, in power, actively dismantling liberal democracies from above” (Mason, ibid.: 98).
Whatever else it does, in 2020 social media performs this role: creating mutual visibility between strangers, encouraging comparison, competition, scrutiny: fear, hatred and sexual violence. This renders democracy itself at risk, as Zuboff powerfully demonstrates in her book.
Those Labour MPs born into and working within a political environment that took the neoliberal consensus uncritically for granted, have had difficulty moving beyond these erroneous and damaging assumptions into anti Austerity politics: their professional comfort zone revealed as culpable incompetence. They may also have difficulty in accepting that “civilisation is so fragile that it has been brought to the brink of total instability by just one generation of human activity” (Wallace-Wells, ibid.: 220). On their watch. And that this cultural / political / environmental crisis has dramatic consequences for our/their politics may be hard to swallow. It cannot be business as usual. Hence the welcome ambition and vision of the 2019 Labour manifesto.
But the UK post Brexit (if it still exists) also means relinquishing European relationships / collaborations in the fight against neo-fascism (i.e. racism, misogyny, homophobia, environmental exploitation and degradation), as well as international efforts to respond effectively to crime and climate breakdown. These are not political options, but entwined matters of urgent necessity, and we need politicians (NB Labour politicians) who understand “what ongoing global warming spells for public health, for conflict, for politics and food production and popular culture, for urban life and mental health” (Wallace-Wells, ibid.: 36); the role of the market economy and neoliberalism in creating this crisis; and the implications of surveillance capitalism for national and international policy and practice, including democracy and their own role as politicians in responding to these crises. This complexity remains unaddressed by those Labour MPs whose main aim is to savage Labour’s legacy under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. By contrast, Mason’s sense of urgency is clear, not rhetorical, and evidence-based:
“Today, preventing fascist psychology from becoming mass is one of the most important tasks for progressives and democrats” (Mason, ibid.: 258).
If Labour MPs still think (like former Labour leader and prime minister, Tony Blair) that neoliberalism and the market economy is the solution rather than the problem, it shows (a) they have not been paying attention during the neoliberal years and/or have (like Blair) personally benefited from that project, and (b) they haven’t done their homework, i.e. got out and about beyond Parliament, read, researched and questioned in order to extend their understanding and capacity for appropriate action as politicians.
The inquiring mind (revered by educationists, psychologists and sociologists, such as Jerome Bruner, Paulo Freire, Charity James, Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, Donald Bannister & Fay Fransella, and Rollo May, for example) is also the terrain of the creative mind. And as Bannister & Fransella noted in their exposition of personal construct theory and prejudice: “Simple experience as such may not be an effective agent of change – it does not of itself involve reconstruction” ((Inquiring Man [sic]. The Theory of Personal Constructs, 1977: 114).
Art / music / culture / education / reading, however, can deepen and transform experience, leading us beyond the confines of our individual experience and life, in terms of upbringing and education, while also illuminating those biographical roots. For evidence of contemporary creative practice, see Victor Merriman (2018) Austerity and the Public Role of Drama: Performing Lives-in-Common. For historical illumination on these issues, as well as inspiration, see The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose (2001; paperback 2002, 2nd edition 2010). A big book in every sense, it begs the question in 2020: Has this working-class desire for learning and knowledge and creativity diminished? Or been crushed? By poverty or racism, for example. (See Akala [2019] Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire.) Or by the withdrawal of educational opportunities, the closure of local libraries, and the expansion of digital intimidation and control? If language is “the product of consciousness, imagination and sociability” (Mason, 2019: 138), we need a system that nourishes all three in their interconnections, and a political culture that works to secure the conditions for these as human rights for everyone, whatever our social origins. That means an education for democracy: explicity anti-fascist / anti-racist / anti-misogynist /anti-homophobic. This is Labour work: Labour values, Labour purpose. Mark Fisher counsels:
“There is no honour in failure, although there is no shame in it if you have tried to succeed . . . . The odds might be stacked in such a way that we do keep losing, but the point is to increase our collective intelligence.That requires, if not a party structure of the old type, then at least some kind of system of coordination and some system of memory. Capital has this, and we need it too to be able to fight back” (Fisher, ibid.: 60). Emphasis added.
This will be a personal and political, collective effort, that builds on the social, political, cultural and environmental work of Labour members / supporters / politicians / intellectuals / activists over the last few years. The groundwork has been started: opening up the party to members; liaising with specialists; researching and preparing a raft of policies designed to transform our economy, improve people’s lives, and reduce our impact on the planet; and finance infrastructure (such as the NHS, education, housing, transport, legal aid, an investment bank), that serves a decent and fair democratic society.
The next Labour leader:
needs to be someone who can inspire trust and loyalty through her/his integrity, political vision and honesty. A leader we can be proud of nationally and internationally.
S/he needs to be someone conscientious and equality-aware, with proven composure and impact in parliament in the face of the insults, stunts, bluster, evasions, lies, shouting and contempt of the prime minister and his obedient servants, which can be expected to continue.
S/he must be a leader who brings a depth of intellectual and political understanding, as well as life experience and courage, to the challenge ahead, and who can convene a team culture
S/he must be someone who will proudly defend our multicultural society, no ifs no buts, and who will not be tempted to resort to matching the behaviour and language of Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson.
S/he must be someone willing to confront media lies and distortion effectively.
The next Labour leader will continue to front an anti Austerity party, and be prepared and able to roast ‘Borarse’ on the spit of his own ignorance, arrogance, vanity, callousness and undented sense of entitlement, at the dispatch box. On behalf of the many, not the few.
References.
Akala (2019) Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire.
Donald Bannister & Fay Fransella (1977) inquiring Man [sic]: The Theory of Personal Constructs.
Andy Beckett (30 11 2019) ‘Our focus on the future lets Johnson avoid the present”, The Guardian.
John Berger (2008) ‘Where are we?’ (2002) in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance.
John Crace (21 12 2019) ‘Johnson, a man totally without humility, can’t resist the chance to gloat in his hour of triumph’. The Guardian.
Mark Fisher (Winter 2019) ‘There is an alternative’. Tribune. An edited extract from the recent anthology of socialist writer Mark Fisher (1968-2017), K-Punk: The collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 2004-2016.
Maya Goodfellow (2019) Hostile Environment.
Paul Mason (2019) Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being.
Rowena Mason (21 12 2019) ‘Labour faces “a hard road back” to its heartlands, says Nandy’. The Guardian.
Tom Mills (2nd edition 2020) Myth of a Public Service.
Pankaj Mishra (2018) Age of Anger: A History of the Present.
Pankaj Mishra (07 12 2019) ‘Time’s up’, The Guardian
Lisa Nandy (04 01 2020) ‘Labour’s route back is through local activism’. The Guardian.
Fintan O’Toole (2019) Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.
Jonathan Rose (2001; paperback 2002, 2nd edition 2010) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
Heather Stewart (04 01 2020) ‘Phillips and Nandy enter contest to lead Labour party’. The Guardian.
David Wallace-Wells (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future.
Gary Younge (21 12 2019) ‘Amid defeat, remember – the left is more than Labour’. The Guardian.
Shoshana Zuboff (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power.
Footnote: Media ownership and practice remain a huge obstacle to democracy and progressive politics, and this is linked to the dominance and manipulation of oligarchs in UK politics. For a thoughtful, measured and piercing report in relation to the 2019 UK general election, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I_ZhGHxnHQ Watch and be heartened.
Beginning to map a cognitive route through bewilderment, despair and rage.
The appeal of Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson for victims of Tory rule and Austerity politics.
The fracturing of working-class as a political identity.
The main enemy is not one thing (nor one person).
The next Labour leader.
Footnote.
Beginning to map a cognitive route through bewilderment, despair and rage.
“Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the ‘freedom’ of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretenses” (John Berger ‘Where are we?’ (October 2002) in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, 2008: 41). Emphasis added.
So with the 2016 EU referendum and the 2019 Brexit general election, the UK twice fell short of Berger’s basic criteria for a functioning democracy. And as historian, biographer and political commentator, Fintan O’Toole points out, there is a further problem: “Brexit is at heart an English nationalist project” (Heroic Failure. Brexit and the Politics of Pain: 166), (which Scotland understands) and to be feared for that very reason, as English nationalism assumes and promotes elite whitesupremacy and rule (notably by far right men).
“But nationalism is, more than ever before, a mystification, if not a dangerous fraud with its promise of making a country ‘great again’ and its demonization of the ‘other’; it conceals the real conditions of existence, and the true origins of suffering, even as it seeks to replicate the comforting balm of transcendental ideals within a bleak earthly horizon” (Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, 2018: 274). Emphasis added.
English nationalism is not intended to address the needs, desires or aspirations of working-class people (however they are identified). But the Tory party can pretend (for long enough to get elected). Which they just did.
During the 2019 UK general election campaign, Tory leader, Alexander Boris de Pffeifel Johnson, was variously approved by white working-class voters as “a proper leader”, “quirky”, and as “one of us”, seeming to bear out O’Toole’s caustic observation that:
“Objectively, the great mystery of Brexit is the bond it created between working-class revolt on the one side and upper class self-indulgence on the other” (O’Toole, ibid.: 124).
During the months of campaigning, shock and bewilderment were felt by many on the Left, when faced with those who professed to approve of or even enthuse over Johnson, as a man and as a political leader. In the wake of the general election, this requires more than rolled eyes or expletives, or merely a sense of defeat in the face of ‘ignorance’. We need to understand his appeal: and what many despairingly refer to as ‘turkeys voting for Xmas’. Five days after Labour’s defeat at the polls on 12 December 2019, in an effort to make sense of what had happened and what it means, I turned to writers who have nourished and inspired me, some for years, some just recently. I turned to the beauty provided by their work and example, to remind me of our best efforts as humans.
This should have been an anti-Austerity, social justice and climate general election. Instead, the far right managed to use Brexit, hate and fear, to extend and intensify their political power and control. Progressives need to take time for this potentially difficult conversation, before proceeding in haste, and with the heightened emotion of deranged panic, despair and unbridled rage (all in plentiful supply); and/or displays of ego, personal ambition and vanity.
The appeal of Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson for victims of Tory rule and Austerity politics.
“But a curious and sceptical sensibility would recognise that to stake one’s position on national or civilisational superiority, or turn the accident of birth into a source of pride, is intellectually sterile” (Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, 2018:34).
That is, not just arrogant, elitest and racist. This matters.
The fostering of disbelief in Labour’s manifesto and distrust of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, worked brilliantly to fragment and dissipate opposition to the Tory party, and its record of Austerity politics, and to its leader, Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson: himself well known for his unbridled mendacity, sexual irresponsibility, misogyny, sexism, racism, class-based sense of entitlement and contempt for parliamentary procedure. As Pankaj Mishra cautioned ahead of the election: “There should be no mistaking the neo-fascistic cults of unity and potency he promotes, and the insidious forms they assume in England’s tabloidised media”(‘Time’s up’, Guardian Review, 07 12 2019). Like Pankaj Mishra (Age of Anger, 2018) and Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019), Paul Mason turns to Hannah Arendt’s research into totalitarianism, to throw light on the current rise of authoritarianism and neo-fascist politics.
“In 1951 Arendt wrote that the ideal subject of a totalitarian state is not the convinced Nazi or
communist but ‘people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of
experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist” (Mason, Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defense of the Human Being, 2019: 102).
This state of being is informed by the quality of exposure to experience, opportunity and information (alluded to by Berger). And this in turn foregrounds the role of formal education, in addition to experiential learning, and the effectiveness of public channels of communication in society. For example, ahead of the election, Andy Beckett suggested that the Labour party manifesto could leave the reader with the impression that “the Tories have been merely approving bystanders, rather than central participants, in Britain becoming a society of billionaires and food banks” (‘Our focus on the future lets Johnson avoid the present’, The Guardian, 30 11 2019). And “having a ‘future election’ [glossing over the impact of nine years of Tory rule and Austerity politics] has especially suited the Tories this time” (Beckett, ibid.); not forgetting that mainstream media have remained politically onside with that sleight of hand. See, for example, the conversation about the BBC and its election coverage, ‘The BBC Is . . . Cancelled?’ between Aaron Bastani and sociologist, Tom Mills on novaramedia:
See also Mills’ book, Myth of a Public Service (2nd edition 2020).
Highlighting the role of MSM, Maya Goodfellow cites historian Sundeep Lidher, one of the editors of Our Migration Story, a website that documents the generations of migrants who have come to and shaped the British Isles:
“’There’s a myth that . . . pervades the public debate that migration is something that happened in Britain after 1945 or that it’s a modern phenomenon. Actually we have a long, rich and very diverse history of migration’. Without detailed public knowledge of these histories, the UK’s understanding of itself will always be narrow-minded. . . mythical and inaccurate” (Maya Goodfellow, Hostile Environment, 2019: 48). Emphasis added.
And racist. Goodfellow’s book provides a detailed report and analysis of the omissions, distortions and lies that have featured in the UK’s official immigration narrative. Previous Labour governments have regrettably been party to that mythologizing and its brutal consequences for people’s lives.
Mishra highlights the importance of both the range and diversity of our sources of information, but emphasises the vital connective tissue of individual lives:
“Materialist analyses that invoke the abstractions of nation and capital, chart the movements of goods, the drastic change in climate systems, and the growth of inequality through the techniques of statistics, quantitative sociology and historicism will remain indispensible. But our unit of analysis should also be the irreducible human being, her or his fears, desires and resentments” (Mishra, 2018.: 35). Emphasis added.
“What had made people susceptible to fake news in the 1930s, Arendt argues, was loneliness: ‘The experience of not belonging to the world at all’” (cited Mason, 102). Mark Fisher has pointed to the impact on ordinary people of the decline of the unions during the neoliberal years: without an agent to “mediate the feelings people have and organize those people”, discontent will “remain at the level of individual disaffection”, which “easily converts into depression as well” (Fisher, ‘There is an alternative’, Tribune, Winter 2019: 59). He refers to “the privatisation of stress” (ibid.) as a consequence of the neoliberal years.
In 2020, in the context of a neoliberal, consumerist economy organised around spectacle and the inculcation of fear and desire, within which sexualized, gender power relations are particularly influential, we can expand on Arendt’s analysis. Maybe there are those who are poor and have felt hard-done-by; who have also been disadvantaged by the education system, and feel disempowered and even socially powerless, who choose to align themselves with Boris Johnson as a “proper leader”, because he can do and say what they can’t – e.g. lie on a daily basis, bamboozle, insult and dominate others and get away with it (including racism, misogyny, sexism, homophobia); even be admired for his duplicity, his arrogance, his sexual irresponsibility, his aggression and daring; his fearless sense of entitlement; his contempt for authority and the institutions of our democracy; his recklessness, his desire to dominate: his classed masculinity. This composite also functions as both a magnet and warning for the far right, including Tory BAME politicians: stay close or you could be the target for his racism, sexist bullying, or his ‘professional’ contempt. Patriarchy rules.
Psychologically, identifying with the coloniser / abuser can be a way of denying the extent of vulnerability, damage and shame: a way of saving face and hiding hurt and fear. If you don’t name abuse or rape, you avoid exposure (and shame) as a victim (but not the experience as a victim). Maybe for some communities and individuals, their approval for posh boy Johnson constitutes deference disguised as defiance; resentment and class shame couched as independence and assertiveness, instead of a class act of political challenge.
“By shame I do not mean individual guilt. Shame, as I’m coming to understand it, is a species feeling, which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity for hope and prevents us looking far ahead. We look down at our feet, thinking only of the next small step” (Berger, ibid.: 36).
Compare this with the process of feminist consciousness-raising and politicisation, which require you to start by identifying injury, abuse, injustice. As a woman in a patriarchal society, you identify as a victim and with victims, then move to a more assertive identity and practice, beyond victim identity towards creative agency. The process of politicisation is a collective one over time, with collective consequences. It is personally and intellectually powerful and transformative, and gets you out of that victim hole, but it is not about individual empowerment, advantage, or upward social mobility.
However, there is also the matter of seduction as a sexual and/or political ploy.
Seduction is rooted in a power imbalance. It is a function of inequality: a form of power play that re-enforces relational, social and sexual inequality. It works as a knowing manipulation, disguised as ‘charm’, ‘invitation’, and/or mischief. This ‘playfulness’ / flirting works to both attract attention and to distract: e.g. to disperse (critical) scrutiny and encourage acquiescence and submission. It could be argued that the process of seduction is in itself a form of bullying. Significantly, in an ‘attention’ economy, these are all forms of attention, and if we have been starved of attention, we may be particularly susceptible. We are at our most vulnerable to the attention of the seducer or abuser when self esteem and confidence are low; when neglect and/or abuse and/or grief have left us feeling fearful, forlorn, abandoned, bruised or broken. Isolated, inferior and unloved. Then we overreact to the smallest kindness or show of interest. Like serial abuser Jimmy Savile, Cambridge Analytica’s strategy was to hone in on such isolation and vulnerability. Patriarchal / heterosexist culture trains women and other subordinate identities to respond to seduction. It is how control and subjugation are simultaneously exercised and disguised. Seduction is the opposite of peer process, where differences meet as equally worthy of respect, contributing to a process of knowing, acceptance, collaboration, affection, intimacy: loving kindness and reciprocity; intellectual and social affinity.
For Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson, seduction/bullying/dominance is clearly his preferred (or perhaps only) modus operandi: a reflex rooted in white privilege and his elite, class-based sense of entitlement and hetero-masculinity. What’s there to like (or emulate) about this vain, aggressive, bloated, conventional upper class hetero male, for whom truth has little appeal? “Boris may talk the talk on healing, but every casual aside betrays his baser primal instincts. . . . He is a man entirely without humility” (John Crace, ‘Johnson, a man totally without humility, can’t resist the chance to gloat in his hour of triumph’, The Guardian. 21 12 2019). What’s there to prefer to the dignity, political compassion, social awareness and stamina of Jeremy Corbyn, with his lifelong commitment to social justice and fairness?
A lot of women find Johnson repulsive (I’m quoting, not guessing). We don’t see him as amusing or as a harmless ‘buffoon’. We know the type, and recognise him as an obstacle to women’s dignity, safety and opportunity: whatever our age, ability, ethnicity, faith or sexual preference. This is an old fashioned, elite hetero guy, subjectively barely touched by the social justice movements (e.g. feminism and anti-racism) and technologies (e.g. white goods and the contraceptive pill), which have wrought improvement to the lives of women and other oppressed people in our society since the 1960s. This makes him a relic of a bygone age (along with many other Tories and far right men, including Trump), for whom ‘unnatural’ actually means “the new power of women to choose their partners and live their lives without sexist bullshit” (Mason, ibid.: 86).
The fracturing of working-class as a political identity.
“In fewer than ten years, the neoliberal project had reshaped the world economy. But its true achievement lay in the changes it made to the way human beings think and behave” (Mason, 2019: 44). Emphasis added.
In the late seventies and early eighties:
“Neoliberalism did not just hammer workers; it encouraged people no longer to identify as workers. Its success was in being able to seduce people out of that identification, and out of class consciousness” (Fisher, 2019: 60). Emphasis added.
None of us have entirely escaped these neoliberal pressures, for example, to replace political attentiveness with shopping:
“The West’s basic orientation toward business and financial capitalism . . . (has) produced the
collective sense of what is thinkable and what is not” (David Wallace- Wells, The Uninhabitable
Earth. A Story of the Future [2019]: 164).
And “inequality has been justified for generations” (Wallace-Wells: 165). Normalised, as ‘natural’ and unavoidable.
These are not superficial tweaks, but significant, internalised shifts in consciousness and values.
“In the regime of privatisation, commodification, deregulation and militarisation it is barely possible to speak without inviting sarcasm about those qualities that distinguish humans from other predatory animals – trust, co-operation, community, dialogue, solidarity” (Mishra, 2018.: 328).
Jeremy Corbyn brought back these qualities into Labour’s party politics, into parliamentary procedures, and public discourse. And Labour supporters, old and new, loved him for it. But:
“What made neoliberalism different is the way . . . . it created a reality in which it became impossible
to imagine alternatives. Educated and inquisitive individuals found it increasingly impossible to think their way beyond it“ (Mason, 2019.: 65).
Along with many members of the Labour cabinet.
Judging by the slew of irate reactions to Labour’s general election defeat (in particular from Labour MPs and journalists who have ceaselessly opposed Jeremy Corbyn as leader), the white ‘working class’, unlike other sentient human beings, is a clear and fixed historical entity, and just ‘are’ who they are, and by extension, cannot be called out on their irrationality: for example, approving more Austerity and inequality, more “calculated cruelty” (film maker, Ken Loach’s phrase), homelessness, NHS privatization, prohibitive educational fees / costs; and more environmental degradation and chaos, with consequences for people’s health and the planet; and forsaking the UK’s biggest and most stable economic market, for the ‘clean slate’ and international void of Brexit – “another upper class jest” (O’Toole, ibid.: 156). All of these developments will disadvantage the already disadvantaged further.
The “working-class revolt” O’Toole refers to may be the simultaneous actions of a number of working-class voters, but it does not constitute a “working-class revolt” rooted in class-consciousness; what Mark Fisher would call “a system of co-ordination and some system of memory” (Fisher, ibid.:60). It is more like collusion. After all, no working-class activist / socialist will ever ask for “more punishment, more poverty, fewer rights, please”. Nonetheless, the media and politicians of all persuasions have triumphantly seized on this as a “working-class revolt’, partly through misunderstanding (see above), but mainly through their desire to use these voters’ actions to discredit Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, his supporters, and the Labour manifesto. It’s being used as ‘proof’ that the Labour project under Jeremy was rubbish.
Since the general election In 2019, those Labour MPs, like Lisa Nandy and Jess Phillips, who have sought to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership ever since he was elected (twice) to that role, now busy themselves directing their anger at the Labour leader and each other for Labour’s election defeat: overlooking, or in ignorance of, the economic and political forces mentioned here, that predate Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. They ignore the complexity of the situation, and instead wonder how they can ‘win’ these voters back. As Nandy puts it to disenchanted former Labour voters on the street or in a pub: “We need to win back your trust, don’t we?” Mea culpa (but not Nandy personally, of course.)
For Nandy and Phillips, their bid for the leadership is by way of an extension of their hostility to Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Their main reflex seems to have been not to upset working-class Brexit voters, for fear, presumably of losing their own seats. “Unless we change course, we will become irrelevant’, Nandy says (‘Labour’s route back is through local activism”, The Guardian, 04 01 2020, as if local activism is something new). This unspecific rhetoric could mean anything. It feels like dog-whistle politics: opportunistic and shallow, given the complexity of the economic, environmental and political challenges ahead, which will not be addressed by simply trying to second-guess what might change these voters’ minds regarding Labour. If these voters have read and rejected the manifesto, and therefore rejected anti Austerity measures, stopping further privatization of the NHS, returning to free higher education, legal aid, the recovery of the public sector, including transport and housing, for example, then the switch to be a Tory or Lib Dem voter is logical. Nandy and Phillips approach to these voters amounts to tacit agreement, implying they are right in their hostility to Labour / Jeremy Corbyn / the EU. If that’s the case, logically, as MPs, they should follow these ex Labour voters out of the Labour party. In their haste to appease these working-class voters, they may have jumped the gun. A recent report has crunched the numbers, and the figures seem to indicate it’s the Remain Alliance that cost Corbyn the vote, not him or the manifesto: https://spotlight- newspaper.co.uk/politics/12/16/ge2019-vote-share-reveals-tories-got-lucky/#
Nonetheless, these working-class actions will have (already have had) political consequences, but their irrationality and delusional optimism lack political coherence, as the move constitutes a vote against working-class interests. ‘Working-class’ as a demographic or sociological category does not in itself supply the class politics that turns you into an agency for your own agency and wellbeing, that enables you to challenge and defeat your class enemies. And if, in 2019, you think your class enemies are socialists in the Labour movement, you have a problem. As does the Labour party. Sociologists, politicians and the media maintained for a long time that social class was no longer an issue, no longer mattered: had gone away. The EU referendum and this Brexit general election suggest otherwise. But “the bond” between “working-class revolt” and “upper-class indulgence”, noted by O’Toole, was, until the 12th December 2019, thought to be logically and politically inconceivable.
There are Labour MPs, who in 2019 retain a belief in the virtues (or inevitability?) of a market economy, (setting aside its established and acknowledged inability to deliver equality, safety and social justice, housing, health and dignity for citizens, and environmentally sustainable practices, for example); who think Labour’s anti-Austerity politics is a ‘leftwing’ fantasy; that ‘working-class’ voters are somehow pristine, impervious to and independent of far right media manipulation, and the relentless demonisation of Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters over the last three years. The sustained, ferocious venom towards Jeremy Corbyn feels so personal. Like spite.
Inciting voters to vent inchoate anger and direct it at the Labour party and its leader, rather than the party responsible for nine years of Austerity politics, the slashing of public services, the intensifying of racism through the ‘hostile environment’ and calculated attacks on our multicultural society, does not make for working-class empowerment. Nor does it show respect (as Nandy and others mistakenly assume). It might better be understood as “sado populism” (Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, cited Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure. Brexit and the Politics of Pain [2019]: 132). A white, working-class Labour friend (not based in Liverpool) rang me after the election to say that she had expected Labour to be routed “in its heartlands”: in a Ribble constituency in the north west, white working-class people were rejecting Jeremy Corbyn as “a Nazi”. She sounded shocked as she reported this, but also fatalistic about the electoral outcome. Do Nandy and Phillips expect me to ‘respect’ those people? Is this what Nandy means when she says the next Labour leader “will have to be up for a scrap – willing to run to places where we are loathed, take the anger on the chin, and make and win the argument” (‘Labour’s route back is through local activism’. The Guardian 04 01 2020).
In 2019 there is no one, simple explanation for Johnson’s appeal as Tory leader, or for Labour’s electoral defeat. But it is certain that none of the factors mentioned here as important instrumentally and historically for our society and its politics, were brought on by the election of Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. In fact, having voted consistently against neoliberal policies and measures as a backbench MP, he is less responsible than most other Labour MPs. Goodfellow provides an example:
“As the policies that went on to make up the hostile environment were being turned into law through Parliament, the Labour Party put up the most minimal resistance. . . . . the party abstained on the 2014 Immigration Bill, effectively waiving it through; and they went into the 2015 Election selling Labour Party mugs that promised they would put ‘Controls on Immigration’.
But there was some Parliamentary resistance. 16 MPs voted against the 2014 bill, 6 of them from Labour, including 3 of the people who would go on to lead the party a year later: Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell” (Goodfellow, 2019: 6).
Objectively, it is surely delusional for working-class voters in 2019 to assume that the Conservative party will deliver on its promises to fund and improve public services and infrastructure, as opposed to continuing to slip money into the hands of its core supporters and funders (the very very rich of the far right), while stripping back funding for the vital benefits and services (e.g. dental care, sure start projects, child care, education, housing, the NHS, mental health, legal aid, affordable and efficient transport, for example) that provide the infrastructure and social safety net of a welfare state in a European democratic society. There is nothing in the history of the Conservative party, never mind the nine years of Tory Austerity politics, to suggest that the Tories care a jot about such social projects, as opposed to those (such as coal, oil, fracking, armaments and finance) designed to produce enormous and fast financial profit for themselves and their funders. As Guardian journalist, Gary Younge, quickly noted:
“It took [Borarse] less than a week to abandon his commitments to raising the minimum wage, to protecting labour laws and child refugees, and to push for an ID bill that will suppress the vote of the poor and minorities. There is no shortage of issues for the left to get involved in beyond Labour. The Earth certainly can’t wait until 2024” (Gary Younge, 21 12 2019. ‘Amid defeat, remember – the left is more than Labour’, The Guardian).
The Tories were pushed to pretend they cared by the shift in political discourse that arose following the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2016; the exponential rise in Labour party membership; the activism of party members; and the two ambitious Labour manifestoes (2017 & 2019), explicitly rooted in socialist values. As Younge commented after the election:
“Contrary to Tony Blair’s claim that the left turned Labour into a ‘glorified protest movement’, Labour actually turned the left into a glorified electoral machine. The thousands of people who canvassed in the cold and half-light over the last month were not there to wave placards in central London and preach to the converted, but to knock on doors in marginal constituencies and convert the waverers “ (Younge, ibid.] .
And many of those people, of all ages and backgrounds, were doing this for the first (but not the last) time.
Building on the interventions of Cambridge Analytica during the EU referendum campaign, Tory strategy under Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s unelected special adviser, who masterminded the Tory Brexit campaign, has ‘working-class voters’ apparently ring-fenced and rounded up, with new working-class MPs (e.g. in the north east), ready to be co-opted into the historical Tory ploy/plot, of undermining/removing workers’ rights and environmental protections, and above all, the right to have rights; as well as the right of parliament to scrutinise and adjudicate government policies and practices, as is appropriate in and fundamental to, a functioning democracy. This much is already openly on the Tory table under Prime Minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson’s dash for Brexit ‘victory’. “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” he bellowed triumphantly at his first meeting with his new cabinet (17 12 2019). As Fintan O’Toole notes ominously: “Brexit is the irruption into politics of the risk culture of the City” (ibid.: 143).And Cummings is a key proponent, on the payroll and busy ‘running the country’ behind the scenes in Whitehall.
In 2020, the main enemy is not one thing (nor one person).
“Surveillance capitalism’s successful claims to freedom and knowledge, its structural independence from people, its collectivist ambitions, and the radical indifference that is necessitated, enabled, and sustained by all three now propel us toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions. Instead, surveillance capitalism must be reckoned as a profoundly antidemocratic social force. . . . . Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic and antiegalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above” (Shoshana Zuboff [2019] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight For a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: 512/513).
The economic, social and political forces already described have a powerful additional ‘partner’ and engine. As Zuboff makes clear, this coup is not just technological, but in the service of particular masters, who are open about its incompatibility with democracy. Democracy is their core target/obstacle. Mason is concerned that “many on the left just cannot get their heads around the idea that the main enemy has changed” (Mason, 2019.: 259) and insufficient attention is being paid to “this new alliance of right-wing authoritarians and techno-literate fascists” (Mason, ibid.: 11). Like the other issues already discussed, these are feminist issues, feminist causes for concern, and Mason (like Mishra, 2018) understands this:
“It becomes clear that antifeminism is not peripheral to the alt-right: it informs its entire critique of the modern world” (Mason, 2019.: 86).
“And the wider problem is that – in the few short years since social media became a global reality – violent misogyny has become a pervasive subcultural identifier for the far right worldwide” (Mason, ibid.: 87).
Moving beyond Arendt’s theorization of totalitarianism, Mason argues that:
“What drives people to the far right is no longer simply economic or cultural insecurity, it is the fact of seeing such parties legitimized, in power, actively dismantling liberal democracies from above” (Mason, ibid.: 98).
Whatever else it does, in 2020 social media performs this role: creating mutual visibility between strangers, encouraging comparison, competition, scrutiny: fear, hatred and sexual violence. This renders democracy itself at risk, as Zuboff powerfully demonstrates in her book.
Those Labour MPs born into and working within a political environment that took the neoliberal consensus uncritically for granted, have had difficulty moving beyond these erroneous and damaging assumptions into anti Austerity politics: their professional comfort zone revealed as culpable incompetence. They may also have difficulty in accepting that “civilisation is so fragile that it has been brought to the brink of total instability by just one generation of human activity” (Wallace-Wells, ibid.: 220). On their watch. And that this cultural / political / environmental crisis has dramatic consequences for our/their politics may be hard to swallow. It cannot be business as usual. Hence the welcome ambition and vision of the 2019 Labour manifesto.
But the UK post Brexit (if it still exists) also means relinquishing European relationships / collaborations in the fight against neo-fascism (i.e. racism, misogyny, homophobia, environmental exploitation and degradation), as well as international efforts to respond effectively to crime and climate breakdown. These are not political options, but entwined matters of urgent necessity, and we need politicians (NB Labour politicians) who understand “what ongoing global warming spells for public health, for conflict, for politics and food production and popular culture, for urban life and mental health” (Wallace-Wells, ibid.: 36); the role of the market economy and neoliberalism in creating this crisis; and the implications of surveillance capitalism for national and international policy and practice, including democracy and their own role as politicians in responding to these crises. This complexity remains unaddressed by those Labour MPs whose main aim is to savage Labour’s legacy under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. By contrast, Mason’s sense of urgency is clear, not rhetorical, and evidence-based:
“Today, preventing fascist psychology from becoming mass is one of the most important tasks for progressives and democrats” (Mason, ibid.: 258).
If Labour MPs still think (like former Labour leader and prime minister, Tony Blair) that neoliberalism and the market economy is the solution rather than the problem, it shows (a) they have not been paying attention during the neoliberal years and/or have (like Blair) personally benefited from that project, and (b) they haven’t done their homework, i.e. got out and about beyond Parliament, read, researched and questioned in order to extend their understanding and capacity for appropriate action as politicians.
The inquiring mind (revered by educationists, psychologists and sociologists, such as Jerome Bruner, Paulo Freire, Charity James, Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, Donald Bannister & Fay Fransella, and Rollo May, for example) is also the terrain of the creative mind. And as Bannister & Fransella noted in their exposition of personal construct theory and prejudice: “Simple experience as such may not be an effective agent of change – it does not of itself involve reconstruction” ((Inquiring Man [sic]. The Theory of Personal Constructs, 1977: 114).
Art / music / culture / education / reading, however, can deepen and transform experience, leading us beyond the confines of our individual experience and life, in terms of upbringing and education, while also illuminating those biographical roots. For evidence of contemporary creative practice, see Victor Merriman (2018) Austerity and the Public Role of Drama: Performing Lives-in-Common. For historical illumination on these issues, as well as inspiration, see The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose (2001; paperback 2002, 2nd edition 2010). A big book in every sense, it begs the question in 2020: Has this working-class desire for learning and knowledge and creativity diminished? Or been crushed? By poverty or racism, for example. (See Akala [2019] Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire.) Or by the withdrawal of educational opportunities, the closure of local libraries, and the expansion of digital intimidation and control? If language is “the product of consciousness, imagination and sociability” (Mason, 2019: 138), we need a system that nourishes all three in their interconnections, and a political culture that works to secure the conditions for these as human rights for everyone, whatever our social origins. That means an education for democracy: explicity anti-fascist / anti-racist / anti-misogynist /anti-homophobic. This is Labour work: Labour values, Labour purpose. Mark Fisher counsels:
“There is no honour in failure, although there is no shame in it if you have tried to succeed . . . . The odds might be stacked in such a way that we do keep losing, but the point is to increase our collective intelligence.That requires, if not a party structure of the old type, then at least some kind of system of coordination and some system of memory. Capital has this, and we need it too to be able to fight back” (Fisher, ibid.: 60). Emphasis added.
This will be a personal and political, collective effort, that builds on the social, political, cultural and environmental work of Labour members / supporters / politicians / intellectuals / activists over the last few years.
The groundwork has been started: opening up the party to members; liaising with specialists; researching and preparing a raft of policies designed to transform our economy, improve people’s lives, and reduce our impact on the planet; and finance infrastructure (such as the NHS, education, housing, transport, legal aid, an investment bank), that serves a decent and fair democratic society.
The next Labour leader:
needs to be someone who can inspire trust and loyalty through her/his integrity, political vision and honesty. A leader we can be proud of nationally and internationally.
S/he needs to be someone conscientious and equality-aware, with proven composure and impact in parliament in the face of the insults, stunts, bluster, evasions, lies, shouting and contempt of the prime minister and his obedient servants, which can be expected to continue.
S/he must be a leader who brings a depth of intellectual and political understanding, as well as life experience and courage, to the challenge ahead, and who can convene a team culture
S/he must be someone who will proudly defend our multicultural society, no ifs no buts, and who will not be tempted to resort to matching the behaviour and language of Alexander Boris de Pfeiffel Johnson.
S/he must be someone willing to confront media lies and distortion effectively.
The next Labour leader will continue to front an anti Austerity party, and be prepared and able to roast ‘Borarse’ on the spit of his own ignorance, arrogance, vanity, callousness and undented sense of entitlement, at the dispatch box. On behalf of the many, not the few.
References.
Akala (2019) Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire.
Donald Bannister & Fay Fransella (1977) inquiring Man [sic]: The Theory of Personal Constructs.
Andy Beckett (30 11 2019) ‘Our focus on the future lets Johnson avoid the present”, The Guardian.
John Berger (2008) ‘Where are we?’ (2002) in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance.
John Crace (21 12 2019) ‘Johnson, a man totally without humility, can’t resist the chance to gloat in his hour of triumph’. The Guardian.
Mark Fisher (Winter 2019) ‘There is an alternative’. Tribune. An edited extract from the recent anthology of socialist writer Mark Fisher (1968-2017), K-Punk: The collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 2004-2016.
Maya Goodfellow (2019) Hostile Environment.
Paul Mason (2019) Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being.
Rowena Mason (21 12 2019) ‘Labour faces “a hard road back” to its heartlands, says Nandy’. The Guardian.
Tom Mills (2nd edition 2020) Myth of a Public Service.
Pankaj Mishra (2018) Age of Anger: A History of the Present.
Pankaj Mishra (07 12 2019) ‘Time’s up’, The Guardian
Lisa Nandy (04 01 2020) ‘Labour’s route back is through local activism’. The Guardian.
Fintan O’Toole (2019) Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.
Jonathan Rose (2001; paperback 2002, 2nd edition 2010) The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.
Heather Stewart (04 01 2020) ‘Phillips and Nandy enter contest to lead Labour party’. The Guardian.
David Wallace-Wells (2019) The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future.
Gary Younge (21 12 2019) ‘Amid defeat, remember – the left is more than Labour’. The Guardian.
Shoshana Zuboff (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power.
Footnote: Media ownership and practice remain a huge obstacle to democracy and progressive politics, and this is linked to the dominance and manipulation of oligarchs in UK politics. For a thoughtful, measured and piercing report in relation to the 2019 UK general election, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I_ZhGHxnHQ Watch and be heartened.
The EU referendum, rather than being a democratic act, was a dishonest political manoeuvre by former Tory prime minister, David Cameron, ostensibly to resolve longstanding internal divisions within his party re the EU. There was no effort to provide relevant and adequate objective information about what exiting the EU would entail. In fact, it is now clear the ‘Brexit’ campaigners had, and still have, no idea. Evidence about what actually happens, about the role of the UK within the EU and vice versa, is irrelevant to Tory politicians embroiled in the internal power struggles within their party or white supremacists who see chaos as a political strategy. (See ‘Whose “cry of pain”? Whose rage? Whose agenda?’ in category Commentary 2017 at togetherfornow.wordpress.com)
The ‘Brexit’ campaigns were funded (and furnished with data) by Robert Mercer‘s Cambridge Analytica and Aggregate IQ, part of a network of rich, white supremacists, which includes Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. It has since been acknowledged that the ‘Brexit’ campaign was fuelled by outright lies and misinformation, and was driven by a political desire to inflame distrust and hatred towards ‘foreigners’, refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants and Muslims. The nature of the funding and data provision emerged after the referendum result. It raises questions not just about its impact on voters’ behaviour, but about its electoral legality.
Although there had been no electoral guidance as to what % vote should count as a ‘winning’ result for such a major constitutional, economic, political and cultural change (e.g. 60%?), the referendum result, at 48:52, was hailed by the MSM, the media and the Labour party as the ‘will of the people’, which had to be obeyed. However, Prime Minister May (mis)judged that she could secure a more solid mandate for her own role as PM (unelected as she was by either her party or the country), by calling a snap general election, when she expected to destroy the Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, as an electoral force. As a result of her impulsive act and the way in which she conducted her campaign, she lost what little mandate she had, and her party’s overall majority was slashed. This result can fairly be seen as reflecting the democratic will of the people, especially as we had all been warned off voting for Labour by both politicians and media.
As evidence unfurls from all corners of civil and professional society, business, industry, higher education, the NHS and the unions, it becomes clearer by the day, that there can be no such thing as a ‘good ‘Brexit’ (hard or soft): legally, economically or culturally. On the basis of the evidence so far, what we face are degrees of catastrophic self harm as a society, and even, as one EU politician put it recently, “mutually assured destruction” between the UK and the EU.
So, in the light of this new evidence, this emerging reality/horror show, isn’t it time for the UK Labour party to spell out the above, and take up the most recent mandate, which confirmed opposition to Tory Austerity politics and May’s strident ‘Brexit’ rhetoric? Time to be bold, rather than repeating, as Labour MP Emily Thornberry had to on Question Time (BBC1, 16 11 2017), that “we are a democratic party and must obey the referendum result and work to get the best possible deal for the country”.
This statement may obey the rules of grammar, but it flies in the face of sense and meaning and logic. As well as what we urgently need now from Labour politicians: the political will to do what is best for our country and all its peoples, without sacrificing any of those made vulnerable by Tory manoeuvres.
This is the unedited version of my published Guardian letter, 13 05 2017:
Jonathan Freedland (‘No more excuses: Corbyn is to blame for this meltdown’, The Guardian: 08 05 2017) continues his excoriation of Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters. It makes for slippery journalism.
He cites the election results as “evidence” and “proof” of Corbyn’s failure as leader, but notes the collapse of UKIP, “its programme swallowed whole by the Conservatives. Ukip voters transferred en masse, reassured that Theresa May will give them the hard Brexit they want”. Many working-class anti-EU voters, he says, feel better represented by May than Labour. Well yes, because Labour’s stance towards Europe, the EU, other nationalities, the world, is not the same as Ukip or the Tories. Generational and educational factors, as well as social and economic experience and circumstances, have influenced voting behaviour.
Few of the participants in the two focus groups Freedland observed ever bought a paper and seldom watched a TV bulletin. “So blaming the media won’t wash,” he proclaims triumphantly. Nor could they name a single politician, other than May, Corbyn and Boris Johnson. Freedland ignores the significance of where/how participants get their information, and the role of closed circles/echo chambers on social media, concluding: “They had formed their own, perhaps instinctive, view.” What on earth does that actually mean? As journalism it’s beyond poor. Is it disingenuous or just sly?
Freedland quotes Dave Wilcox, the Derbyshire Labour group leader, who refers to “genuine Labour supporters”, who will not vote Labour while Corbyn remains leader. “Genuine”: well what does that make the rest of us, those out campaigning for a Labour government? ‘Fake Labour voters’? And what of all those young people ready to vote Labour because Corbyn is leader?
Theresa May exults in her identity as a “bloody difficult woman”. Her bluster seeks to disguise the fact that, as Professor of European Law, Michael Dougan (speaking as a panel member on Brexit Britain, at Liverpool’s WOW [Writing on the Wall] festival, 06 05 2017) insists: “There is no plan”. Freedland would serve democracy better by calling to account a prime minister “nervously pinballing from one stop to the next, with apparently no idea of where she is going or why” (John Harris, ‘Today there are three voter types: the disconnected, deceived and dismayed’, The Guardian: 06 05 2017), but determined to take us with her.
The equalities slate and Labour in 2016 So many of the opportunities that the British people have had over the past half century – the best schooling, the best of health care when ill, and for many of us the best chances at university –owe their origin to the decisions of the 1945 Labour government to build decent public services that reflect our obligation each to the other in society; to create a welfare state that has taken the shame out of need; and to deliver a national health service free to all (Gordon Brown, then Labour Prime minister, in his introduction to the republication [2008] by The Aneurin Bevan Society in association with UNISON, of Nye Bevan [1952] In Place of Fear: ix). Emphasis added.
The roots of the Labour party lie in taking up issues of inequality and social injustice: and writing 60 years later (in 2008) Gordon Brown, then Labour Prime Minister, reiterated how, in the aftermath of a devastating war, the unpredictability of need (for example health care) and the rising costs of new health technologies:
It is more important than ever to pool risk and share the cost of those interventions fairly across our whole population (Brown, ibid: xiii).
This was Labour’s 1945 ethic that its politics would seek to serve and deliver. And at the centre of Bevan’s vision was a National Health Service, “a uniquely British creation, and still a uniquely powerful engine of social justice” (ibid: xiv), not just health care. Labour’s NHS underpinned a distinct vision of society (together with social housing and state education) and the politics required to create that new reality. Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, current Labour leader, stand by this ethic.
The years since have seen wave after wave of liberatory / equality / social justice / environmental and community campaigns and movements help make significant improvements in our society to the lives and rights of previously marginalized and/or exploited constituencies. In 2016, we stand on the shoulders of those campaigners and activists who made parliamentary legislation and social change possible, bettering so many lives and communities.
When Tom Watson came to Liverpool in 2015 campaigning to be the Deputy Leader of the Labour party, I told him (from the floor at the end of the meeting) that I had waited most of my adult life for a Labour party that did not see environmental issues and feminist values as add-ons, as opposed to being integral to Labour values and progressive change. On his election as Deputy leader, Tom declared that “The Labour party must be a feminist party!” Wow, I thought. So what happened next?
Most Labour MPs supported the renewal of Trident in July 2016. 184 Labour MPs did not vote against the Tory Health & Social Care Bill, which will further the privatization of the NHS. 1945 Labour values have taken a concerted Tory thrashing. Most recently, for example:
Education experts have expressed fears that the abolition of the student maintenance grant for the poorest young people, combined with increasing tuition fees, will set back widening participation and deter those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds from going to university.
Students from low-income homes . . . are no longer entitled to a maintenance grant to support their living costs, but will have to borrow the money in the form of an additional loan, further increasing their debt. (Sally Weale, ‘End of student grant “could deter disadvantaged from university”’. The Guardian, 02 08 2016).
The architects of austerity have left government, yet disabled people still face inhumane benefit cuts (Frances Ryan, ‘Peter has a lifeline – why remove it?’ The Guardian, 04 08 2016).
Ryan provides harrowing examples of what Nye Bevan referred to as “unnecessary deprivation” and “preventable poverty” (Bevan, ibid.: 3) – not to mention humiliation and indignity – which Ryan damns as a “reflection of a system that has decided the disabled are fair game” (Ryan, ibid.). The ease with which the Tories, with a piddling majority of 12, are getting their political programme through the House, is in part an indictment of a PLP unwilling to act collectively and decisively as an opposition party.
The Labour history outlined above is a significant part of the backdrop to the second Labour leadership contest in a year, brought on by a Parliamentary Labour Party determined to bring down the current elected leader, Jeremy Corbyn (as opposed to the Tory government). The Labour leader (and those early Labour values and purposes) are identified by the media and the PLP as not just “leftwing”, but on the “hard left”, now that the centre of British politics has shifted so far to the Right since Thatcherism. So what remains of the relevance of the conventional binary ‘left / right’ distinction?
The problem of old words. The student of politics must . . . be on his (sic) guard against the old words, for the words persist when the reality which lay behind them has changed. . . . thus we talk of free enterprise, of capitalist society, of the rights of free association, of parliamentary government, as though all these words stand for the same things they formerly did (Bevan, ibid., chapter 2: ‘The role of parliament- active or passive?’: 13).
‘Rightwing’ is a pretty stable term: the interests represented and the methods used have remained fairly consistent and familiar over time. ‘Preventable poverty’ and ‘unnecessary deprivation’ are to the Tories mere collateral damage: and unacknowledged political tools of social control. By contrast, the term ‘leftwing’ lacks stability, belonging to a politics of change and challenge, designed to shift the status quo, its norms and its power relations.
Whereas racist views are historically more readily associated with rightwing politics and fascism, and the Labour party and trade unions have increasingly identified themselves with anti racism and anti homophobia, Labour’s commitment to multiculturalism and anti-racist values has tumbled somewhat in the wake of the EU referendum result (Brexit) and the rising dominance of the UKIP narrative, that actively sought to engender fear of difference, under the banner, ‘Take back control’. The EU campaign exposed a sense of grievance and abandonment felt by mainly elderly working-class communities, in particular in the north and midlands.
White working-class communities, dominated by people in their 60s, 70s and 80s, who mainly left school at 14, 15 or 16, between 40-70 years ago, used the referendum to convey their acute sense of social class grievance, their fear of and hostility to migrants, and seething anger at the British establishment, identified with Parliament and London, as distant elites. They managed to outvote young people, many of these college and university-educated, who overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU. And it is the latter constituency that will have to live with the consequences of the Brexit vote, not those older voters who so exultantly celebrated the result. And now, the promotion of Owen Smith by the PLP as leadership candidate further calls into question the centrality of the equalities slate to Labour politics.
No matter that equality issues (including VAWG, FGM, sexual trafficking and disability issues] have crept on to the political agenda, ostensibly becoming cross-party concerns, if the PLP embraces and promotes MPs whose reflexes are sexist and/or homophobic, glossing over their behaviour in a haste to label them ‘leftwing’ or centre left, or mainstream, what does being Labour actually mean? While anti-racism (including hostility to anti-semitism – see letter from 110 correspondents in The Guardian, 09 08 2016, on Shami Chakrabarti’s report for the Labour party on antisemitism and racism in the Labour party. Full list at gu.com/letters) may reasonably be considered historically as part of Labour DNA as a party, this is obviously not the case regarding sexism / misogyny / homophobia or disability issues (see ‘Troubling Labour: the Labour leadership contest’ in ‘Commentary 2016 category, togetherfornow.wordpress.com)
Sitting opposite young Corbyn supporter, Sam , on C4 News (09 08 2016), an older, long term Labour man, lauded Tom Watson’s attack on Corbyn supporters as “Trotskyite entryists”, and described Watson as “a bruiser”, who would sort things out. Here was old style hetero-masculinity strutting its stuff, indifferent to gender issues, male dominance and aggression as problems not virtues: a Labour man seemingly unaware that being a “bruiser” is no longer a desirable category of masculinity, marking you out for stardom, but part of the problem the Labour party must tackle. Many of us, women and men, young and old, have had enough of ‘bruisers’ and bullies ‘sorting things out’, on the street, in the workplace and in politics.
That core Labour values seem to mean different things to the PLP and to the wider membership (including those who favour Jeremy Corbyn and the values he represents), is now out in the open. ‘Leftwing’ quickly became a term of abuse rather than a mere adjective (including in The Guardian). Although the situation in the PLP looks frought, chaotic and nasty, this new transparency can also be seen as a good thing, as it means that clarification (even revival) could follow. And the internet and social media are helpful to supporters who want to track how MPs are voting on particular issues. This was not possible until relatively recently.
This split burst to the fore with the ‘shock’ election of Jeremy as leader in 2015, after Ed Miliband’s resignation, following Labour’s (‘shock”) 2015 general election defeat. Politicians and the media did not see his election coming: all the ‘experts’ were thwarted, because they were collectively so out of touch with what was happening to people’s lives and communities across the country, as a result of the neoliberal project and its lethal manifestation, Austerity politics.
Neoliberalism (sometimes known as market fundamentalism) had been internalised as the ‘natural’ order (past, present and future) instead of being understood as a chosen political project of the Right at a specific time for their own purposes. Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, notes:
The founders of the euro were guided by a set of ideas and notions about how economies function that were fashionable at the time, but that were simply wrong. They had faith in markets, but lacked an understanding of the limitations of markets and what was required to make them work (Stiglitz, ‘The future of the eurozone?’ The Guardian, 06 08 2016).
And he suggests that:
On both sides of the Channel, politics should be directed at understanding the underlying sources of anger; how, in a democracy, the political establishment could have done so little to address the concerns of so many citizens, and figuring out how to do that now: to create within each country, and through cross-border arrangements, a new, more democratic Europe, which sees its goal as improving the wellbeing of ordinary citizens. This can’t be done with the neoliberal ideology that has prevailed for a third of a century. . . (ibid.) Emphasis added.
(See ‘”The trouble is. . . ” Economists, economics, and the Labour Left’ in ‘Commentrary 2016’ category, togetherfornow.wordpress.com)
The neoliberal credentials of the three candidates standing against Jeremy Corbyn for leadership in 2015, including two women who self identify as feminist, left them exposed as part of the problem, not the solution, as well as problematising the identity ‘feminist’ for many Labour supporters.
Language, identity and Labour politics. Social institutions are what they do, not necessarily what we say they do. It is the verb that matters, not the noun (Bevan, ibid. chapter 2: ‘The role of parliament – active or passive?’: 13).
Writing over 60 years ago, Nye Bevan’s counsel remains astute:
As we fumble with outworn categories our political vitality is sucked away and we stumble from one situation to another. . . This is the real point of danger for a political party and for the leaders and thinkers who inspire it. For if they are out of touch with reality, the masses are not. Indeed they are reality. For them their daily work is an inescapable imperative (Bevan, ibid.: 14). Emphasis added. [In 2016 their daily work / their reality is more likely to be un or underemployment, zero hours contracts and insecure jobs.]
So what does it mean, for example, to be a feminist and not vote against the Tory Health & Social Care Bill? What does it mean to be a feminist and vote with a Tory government for more, and more brutal, Austerity, including privatising the NHS and dismantling support for people with disabilities? To vote for cuts that result in the closure of Sure Start centres, a reduction in support services for women victims of men’s violence and sexual coercion? Cuts that make women and children poorer and less able to survive and thrive with dignity. The removal of educational opportunities for young and old. Cuts that plunge people into hopelessness and despair, mental health problems, even suicide. Many neoliberal women in the PLP (‘Blair’s Babes’, feminist or not) appear not to understand their role as Labour MPs in this crime scene.
Similarly, what does it mean in 2016 to be a ‘leftwing’ Labour MP, and not vote in opposition to Tory policies (perhaps because you fear being labeled ‘leftwing’ or ‘radical’, not a proper politician, a ‘pussy’)? Owen Smith, for example:
supported Osborne’s devastating benefit cap because of its popularity with voters, and abstained on a welfare bill that was expected to negatively affect 330,000 of the country’s poorest children” (David Wearing, ‘Labour’s bitter battle isn’t about Corbyn – it’s a fight for change’. The Guardian, 27 07 2016).
Owen Smith is being described as ‘leftwing’, and seems to want to present himself as a leftwing contender for the 2016 Labour leadership contest: more Corbyn than Corbyn, only not Corbyn. What does it mean to be a male leftwing MP who indulges in the odd sexist or homophobic outburst? And Angela Eagle, whose voting record and actions suggest she is not leftwing, is now glued to his side on the leadership campaign trail, trying to look cheerful as her credibility as a senior Labour MP crumbles.
Neoliberal Labour MPs seem not to understand that offering a political platform labeled TINA (there is no alternative), is offering no political expertise, effort or commitment on their part, to people they are meant to represent. Such a political offering from Labour perpetuates a raw sense of betrayal and contempt, as was evident during the EU referendum campaign. By contrast, Corbyn’s leadership has drawn older, ex Labour voters, previous non voters, and those too young to vote previously, back to the Labour party or into the Labour party for the first time. The anger at injustice and the neoliberal project felt by this diverse body of people is fuelling a collaborative political movement aimed at democratizing the Labour party and building effective political alliances, rather than the gesture politics of grievance, rejection and victimhood.
The ‘leftwing’ and ‘rightwing’ binary may have taken a nosedive with this contest. In 2016, it would appear that a politician whose reflexes are sexist and/or homophobic can be either ‘leftwing’ or ‘rightwing’. The current complexity and shifting sands of progressive politics needs language and a naming that bring together new constituent elements as a convincing and vibrant political narrative and political agenda. A sense of the complexity of the challenge made of us as we variously face up to difference, privilege, gender power relations and racism, for example, and strive to achieve heightened awareness, to behave with sensitivity, respect and understanding – true empathy – is suggested in a recent conversation between two authors.
Discussing translation, ‘travelling while black’ and how to avoid classification, author Teju Cole in conversation with Taiye Selasi, responds to her question about how he “writes often and explicitly of race and nation, but more allusively about gender” (‘Afropolitan, American, African. Whatever. I’m “local” in many places’ (The books interview, The Guardian, 06 08 2016.) He responds:
Misogyny is atmospheric. What does an embodied commitment to the equality of women look like for a male writer? I think the central conflict of my novel, Open City, is about how this smart man, this occasionally charming man, is also guilty of an atrocious act of violence to a woman. . . . but writing in a non-fictional mode, as in the essays of Known and Strange Things, permits me a more straightforward expression of what’s at stake – and part of what’s at stake is getting to the point where we say, “Come the fuck on, this should all be self-evident by now.” You can say that seriously, or with bitter irony. But of course, it’s not self-evident. Most men, even the feminists among us, still swim merrily along in all the advantages that masculinity proffers (ibid.). Emphasis added.
And if you think that being a ‘bruiser’ is still a useful category of masculinity, please step off the Labour bus now, and make room for those women and men who have worked hard over many years to show how wrong and dangerous that old masculinity and male dominance is to our society and an inclusive progressive politics.
Meanwhile. It seems clear that in the wake of the social and political movements of the C20 and C21, the term / identity ‘leftwing’ has been voided of meaning, if it can gloss over and not prioritise as fundamental to Labour values, the social justice and human rights issues obscured by racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia and disablism. But the political and democratic deficit extends further: the term ‘leftwing’ provides little or no purchase on other challenging and interconnected political issues, and may even be an obstacle to clear thinking, effective action and alliance building regarding the following, for example:
asylum
refugees
movement of peoples
environmental issues, such as renewable energy, water conservation and distribution, pollution, climate change and decarbonisation of the economy
consumerism
new economics
electoral reform.
All of these issues have implications for the practices of democracy and sustainability: keeping nature, people and communities alive and well, as opposed to exploiting / killing them off / using them up. A recent clutch of letters in The Guardian (06 08 2016) speaks to ‘Our collective amnesia on climate change’ and the lack of engagement by the media, politicians and universities.
Parliament in Britain is centuries old, and “so many people confuse the existence of Parliament with that of democracy” (Bevan, ibid.: 8). But we’ve only had political democracy since 1929. It is clear we need new ways of talking politics in order to respond to its contemporary complexity adequately. The search for meaningful, ethical and political terms and practices is urgent. A new collective effort, across old demarcations and boundaries towards a progressive politics, could prove to be inspiring as well as lifesaving, rather than something to fear.
The government’s proposed new contract for Junior doctors in the NHS
“Hospitals may refuse to impose Hunt’s new contract”
Preventing Prevent: “students not suspects”
“Met signals a shift in attitude to rape claims”
Non compliance and democracy in 2016.
Recent events, including twice being on the picket outside The Royal Hospital in Liverpool, in support of the UK Junior Doctors’ strike (12 01 2016 & 10 02 2016), have caused me to reflect on the question of non compliance. Four examples clarify how we might understand the concept and practice of non compliance in 2016.
The government’s proposed new contract for Junior Doctors in the NHS. Months ago, a young Junior Doctor friend described the proposed new contract to me as “medieval”. He was agitated, anxious and angry. So was I. We had met through helping organise Liverpool’s People’s Health Assembly in 2013.
Junior Doctors in the UK have been driven to strike by one of the Tory government’s attack dogs, Jeremy Hunt, a man with the permanent stare of a rabbit in the headlights, and a man who once described the NHS (treasured by 92% of the population since its inception in 1947) as “a failed experiment”. This is the man David Cameron judiciously decided to put in charge of the NHS, in place of his previous ill-judged choice, Andrew Lansley, who had himself managed to create havoc and widespread professional hostility within the NHS as he mismanaged its reorganisation. (See Mark Steel’s incisive and hilarious summary online of Hunt’s political progress, including his earlier disastrous period as Culture minister, when his political career just missed becoming toast by a mere Tory whisker.) As Steel puts it, speaking of the Junior Doctors, there they go again, another strike after the last one, only 40 years ago. . . .
Hunt‘s chosen ‘strategies’ have been bullying and coercion: old style male dominance, but dressed up as metro elegance and feigned dismay. It is about crushing those who deliver NHS services, those who train and study over long years to deliver excellence and save lives. It is about control of a professional cohort that has ‘dared’ to assert its professional expertise and commitment against government diktat. Their offence is in part that they have demonstrated their capacity for professional integrity, personal responsibility and non compliance.
Unfortunately for Hunt, the Junior Doctors are knowledgeable (and better informed than him about the jobs they do and the conditions required to do them well); they are articulate (clear and convincing on camera) and passionate (demonstrating authenticity rather than shifty duplicity and spin); and as their witty and moving placards declare: “Ain’t afraid of no Hunt“ (only his new contract), and “One profession. We stand together”.
At this point, it should be noted that Junior Doctors live and work in a world in which evidence counts; it’s part of their training as well as the ethic that underpins best practice. By contrast, Tory politicians don’t do evidence, preferring to get by on the back of a highly honed sense of entitlement and superiority, backed up by unlimited funding from friends in the City, and Tory-dominated media. The Tories may commission evidence, as a PR gesture, but generally bury it or ignore it once it’s handed in, hoping the media will forget it was ever commissioned, that questions were ever asked.
Negotiation is supposed to involve sharing information and knowledge; identifying issues together, in a spirit of cooperation; partnership in problem solving; and listening. Negotiation is best conceived as a peer process, in which all sides care about that third thing they have in common (the enterprise, project, challenge, problem, relationship) rather than a parent-child power struggle or conflict, premised on the idea of one side ‘winning’, overpowering the other. Negotiation should not resemble arm wrestling. Hunt went one better from the outset, when he publicly threatened to impose his new contract without consultation or agreement. He assumed threat would induce fear and panic in the doctors. He was opting for what constitutes an abuse of power within a social democracy: force.
Democratic accountability flounders in these deep waters. And, as the Junior Doctors have found, like many previous groups of employees, negotiation may be the name on the can, but the can gets kicked down the road till it is unrecognizable and not fit for purpose.
So the doctors strike twice (so far) in an orderly and careful manner, to best limit inconvenience and damage to normal service in hospitals. Theirs may be described as an example of non compliance as social responsibility, personal and professional integrity; simultaneously survival strategy and political clout as a result of collective action. It is also importantly a way of communicating their values and the detail of their professional complaint to the wider public, who, in their work, they serve. After 40 years without a strike, their action has genuine shock value for the public, as citizens and service users. Most of us are both at various points in our lives.
‘Hospitals may refuse to impose Hunt’s new contract’ (James Meikle, Denis Campbell & Jessica Elgot, The Guardian. 13 02 2016).
Heidi Alexander, shadow health secretary, says this “underlines the extent to which the decision to impose a contract that nobody wants would destroy morale in the NHS” (cited Meikle et al.) And morale is no mere trifle in a health service, but can make the difference between excellent, inadequate or dangerous practice; fragmentation and disengagement or effective team work. This second example of non compliance moves beyond individual non compliance, into institutional or corporate non compliance, and hospitals may act independently or in an act of country-wide institutional / professional co-ordination. This measure retains features of the Junior Doctors’ non compliance: for example, as social responsibility, survival strategy and the public exercise of power in refusing to obey what amount to orders from the government. Their act of non compliance also serves to demonstrate allegiance with their own staff: a tentative (and desperate?) act of solidarity across professional demarcations and power relations.
Preventing Prevent: “Students not suspects”. My third example is in relation to the government’s Prevent scheme for implementation by schools, colleges and universities. The rhetoric speaks about “delivering fundamental British values”, and exhorts individuals and organisations to identify signs of potential “extremism” in their peers and colleagues (along the lines of the Stasi in postwar Eastern Germany, where a considerable percentage of the population were required to act as government spies against neighbours, friends, colleagues and intimates).
New concepts and terminology have been invented by the Tory government, such as “non violent extremism”, and “domestic extremist”, and the language of safeguarding is used to emphasise “cohesion’ and “managing risk”. At a meeting held at the University of Liverpool (10 02 2016) to advocate against this scheme, speakers on the panel and from the floor described the policy as racist and in particular anti-muslim, arguing that it implicitly identifies all Muslims as terrorists-in-the-making. Staff and students in schools, colleges and universities are organizing to oppose Prevent, claiming that it will poison and undermine peer and staff and student relations, distort the educational environment, creating fear and mistrust all round, without reducing risk or increasing safety. In fact, speakers all thought it would make race relations and social cohesion far worse.
These staff and students therefore advocate non compliance with the legislation, and this can be understood as an act of social and professional responsibility; as an humanitarian act, refusing to ‘other’, for example, Muslims; as an act in defence of the open practice of education for democracy, acknowledging the intimate and essential interconnections between education, equality and democracy.
‘Met signals a shift in attitude to rape claims’ (Vikram Dodd, The Guardian, 11 02 2016).
My fourth example comes in the wake of the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, announcing that he wishes to see the policy of police automatically believing victims of rape and sexual assault dropped (see Dodd).
Vera Baird, the police and crime commissioner for Northumbria, said her force would not be adopting the policy of not automatically believing an alleged abuse victim” (Sandra Laville, ‘Hogan-Howe under fire for abuse comments’. The Guardian, 13 02 2016).
Baird explained: “Thousands of victims of sexual abuse have been denied justice through the attitude the Met commissioner now advocates” (Laville, ibid.). Similarly, the College of Policing chief executive, Alex Marshall, “put distance between the rest of UK police and Hogan-Howe” (ibid.):
While careful consideration should be given to ensuring the integrity of the evidence, to begin an investigation from a position of doubt is unlikely to encourage victims to come forward (cited Laville).
Vera Baird’s speedy declaration of non compliance with Hogan-Howe’s proposal for a reversal of what has been implemented as best practice in the wake of the Jimmy Savile revelations in 2012 (followed by many others), may be variously identified as an act of personal and professional integrity; an act of conscience; an act of social responsibility; and an exercising of the political power vested in her position as a police and crime commissioner.
Baird is so far the only police and crime commissioner to declare non compliance with Hogan-Howe’s proposal. It remains to be seen whether others in her position follow suit, in which case it would become another example of collective non compliance by a professional / political cohort (cf the hospitals cited earlier). It will also be of interest to see if there is a political split on this issue across party lines. Baird is a Labour party member, but we know that on gender issues and sexual politics, consensus does not necessarily follow party political demarcations, being itself subject to those tensions and differences. For example, women are a tiny minority as police and crime commissioners. There were 192 candidates standing for election in England and Wales (not including London) for 41 posts. Of these, only 35 candidates were women, and only 6 of these were elected. And those in post (women or men) with gender-aware, feminist values will be an even smaller minority.
Non compliance and democracy in 2016. Democracy requires people’s vigilance, our active engagement. Without that participation, it can be high-jacked by those with vested interests democracy fails to ‘serve’; those who relish their own power and who see democracy as their enemy. Dr Rachel Clark, a core medical trainee, sums up the current impasse and its destructive consequences for Junior Doctors and the NHS after Hunt’s decision to impose his new contract:
I don’t think the relationship with the government can get more poisonous. And really, all I really want to do is get on, and go to work, and care for patients. I don’t want to be speaking to the media, or protesting, or fighting the government (cited Jessica Elgot,‘Defied doctors weigh future’. The Guardian, 13 02 2016).
I sympathise, I really do. For example, as a fellow human being, as a woman, as a mother, as an anti-Tory activist and anti-fascist, and as a worn-out feminist and anti-racist campaigner, amongst my multiple identities. But I am also tempted to observe: welcome to the real world we share under a Tory government using Austerity as its cover for imposing its malign will on the people.
Another doctor, from one of the poorest constituencies in the country, describes the imposition of Hunt’s new contract as “the final nail in the coffin for some of them” (Dr Stephen Hitchin, a registrar in emergency medicine, cited Elgot, ibid.) “Medicine” he says, “is already dominated by people from wealthy backgrounds, this will make it worse” (ibid.). And it is also likely to particularly disadvantage women doctors with caring responsibilities for young or elderly relatives. So gender and poverty, for example, are relevant issues in debates about the Junior Doctors’ contract.
The despair and exhaustion Junior Doctors feel are widespread across society now, not confined to those most disparaged and victimized by government policies, such as those with disabilities, those on welfare benefits, the unemployed and the homeless. And as one young Merseyside Momentum supporter asked me after the last picket: “How many of the Junior Doctors actually voted for this government in 2015?” I had to admit to him that, on the picket on that freezing cold morning, I had forgotten to ask.
So acts of non compliance can also be identified as urgent and emergency actions: refusals to accept, for example, injustice, cruelty, corruption (material as well as of the spirit), and above all, the rule of force and coercion. The examples discussed here are all responses to imposition, to force (legal or otherwise), to politics and governance as dominance and coercion (you can make your own list), designed to create subservience, and inculcate a sense of inferiority and powerlessness (no matter what your social, economic position or circumstances). I have the following words on a postcard, cellotaped to the front of a ring-bound shiny silver notebook that I currently carry to meetings;
When INJUSTICE becomes Law, RESISTANCE becomes Duty.
Democracy necessarily involves critique and dissent, as opposed to silent obedience, endurance and conformity in the face of violation, for example of someone’s human rights. Non compliance can therefore be understood as a civic duty, as a defence of democracy, equality and social justice. By acting together (and for safety and greatest impact, we need to act together, not in isolation or discrete constituencies), with both small gestures and collective movements, we can turn non compliance into widening ripples of creative agency for social justice, equality and human rights. And bring this Tory government to an end. Please participate.
Food blogger, Jack Monroe, complains (rightly) that it is “easier to launch personal attacks than political arguments”. (Jack Monroe [20 03 2015] ‘I didn’t leave the Labour Party. It left me’. The Guardian). But what are her political arguments? Where’s her political analysis? Hers is a victim statement, a personal gripe about not getting what she wants. But the urge for democracy is not individualistic and progressive politics is crucially about power and power relations, about adjusting structural disadvantage and exploitation, for example, beyond the individual self.[i]
With no publicly funded NHS, for example, democracy itself is fatally wounded, and dare I say it? The environment will be an irrelevance in a political environment that allows poverty, social divisions, inequalities, conflict and violence to rule untrammelled and unregulated for another five years. Health, dignity and education, the ability to participate, socially, culturally and politically, will fall away.
Green denial presents several contradictory faces:
Green votes will be a good thing because they will take votes from Labour and so help stop Labour from forming a government.
Green votes will not allow the Tories through.
However, if that happens, it doesn’t matter: Greens are not responsible for the social, economic and political consequences of our electoral actions.
As Greens we don’t care about the consequences of a further five years of Tory-led government for the people and the environment.
Our priority is the long-term electoral future of the Green party.
There must be an order of electoral priorities and action that ensures a Labour government is elected in May, in order then to tackle environmental issues and sustainability as essential components of the transformation of our society and economy, hopefully supported by MPs from other political parties.[ii]
Nor is damage limitation, which is where a Labour-led government would have to start, a mere negative, a feeble response. Ask those most severely affected by this government’s slash-and-burn policies. Ask those in communities and local government currently struggling to limit Tory damage. We may not be able to “get what we want” at a stroke, but we do know for certain what a second-term Tory government has in store for society, especially its poorest and most vulnerable members.
So first identify the enduring source of your political fear and loathing. Second, vote strategically. Third, pile on collective political pressure after the election. Or as award-winning British singer, Paloma Faith, put it recently: “Vote first. Then complain!”[iii]
[i] See ‘Friends, comrades, strangers: especially those feeling apathetic, cynical, confused, disillusioned and/or angry. Pre-election reflections as May 2015 looms’. In category ‘essays 2015’. togetherfornow.wordpress.com
[ii] See Val Walsh (09 08 2014) ‘Reflections on climate change, sustainability and democracy: prioritizing renewal, equity and justice in the Liverpool City Region’. Submission to Mayor of Liverpool’s Commission on Environmental Sustainability. In category ‘conference papers 2014.’, togetherfornow.wordpress.com
[iii] See ‘Food blogger Jack Monroe joins the Greens’. Unpublished letter to The Guardian (20 03 2015). togetherfornow.wordpress.com
There’s an awful lot of “I” and “me” in food blogger Jack Monroe’s plaintive response to hostile reactions to her decision to join the Greens (Jack Monroe [20 03 2015] ‘I didn’t leave the Labour Party. It left me’. The Guardian.)
Democratic rights and responsibilities. She protests “my democratic right to vote for whoever the hell I like”. Yes but, that’s not the full picture is it? In the 2010 UK European elections some people on the Left in the northwest stayed away because there was no ‘perfect’ candidate for them, in particular given their refusal to vote Labour. Nick Griffin, the BNP (British National Party) leader, got in by a handful of votes. So venting anger at the Labour Party can have dire (unintended) consequences for a lot of people. We had to wait 5 years, but we have since rectified this situation and now have a strong team of local Labour MEPs in the northwest that encompasses Labour’s diversity. So voting is not simply an ‘individual’ act, or an act of ‘freedom’ to do whatever the hell you like, though our consumer economy would have us believe otherwise.
Monroe complains (rightly) that it is “easier to launch personal attacks than political arguments”. But what are her political arguments? Where’s her political analysis?
“I voted Labour last time. I got Tories. There are no guarantees in a first-past-the-post system that we will get a government that represents us.”
Hers is a victim statement, a personal gripe about not getting what she wants, rather than a political argument or analysis. Collectively, not getting what we want is a feature we have to bear; it’s called democracy. As individuals, proportional representation will still not give some people what they want. But the urge for democracy to rule is not individualistic; progressive politics is crucially about power and power relations, about adjusting structural disadvantage and exploitation, for example, beyond the individual self. Unlike shopping, it’s not just about the ‘me’.[i]
David Cameron, Tory leader and Prime Minister, has been trying to make out he takes the Greens seriously and cares about the environment. Anyone who has been paying attention over the course of this Tory-led government knows different: that it’s just about Tory electoral advantage via damaging the Labour vote. Cameron knows the Greens are very unlikely to take Tory votes: along with the Tories and UKIP and the SNP, for example, it’s Labour votes they are after. They all know their real political enemy. The Tories don’t need our help, they need our concerted, organized opposition. In other words, we need to vote together strategically to achieve this change.[ii]
“Vote Green and you’ll get Tories!” Monroe’s new critics have “shrieked” at her, she complains. But her complaint is also denial. And this denial undermines the ethical credibility of the Greens as we approach this election. Monroe’s complaint tells us that she has other priorities: that, for example, the NHS is not one of these; nor is the plight of those most affected by the Tory welfare cuts or cuts to education spending; or bringing in changes in policies and practices regarding violence against women and girls.
But I suspect it’s also about not wanting to feel personally uncomfortable. Well, having voted in more elections than Monroe has had hot dinners (probably), I can tell her that feeling personally uncomfortable is the least of our worries at a general election, where too often we cannot identify our perfect candidate or a political party that fulfills all our dreams and aspirations. Retail therapy is so much easier, more comfortable and comforting.
Denial, damage limitation and democracy. With no publicly funded NHS, democracy itself is fatally undermined, and dare I say it? The environment will be an irrelevance in a political environment that allows poverty, social divisions, inequalities, conflict and violence to rule untrammelled and unregulated. Health, dignity and education, the ability to participate, socially, culturally and politically, will fall away as deregulated turbo capitalism further ravages our society and people’s lives. This is already happening.
The NHS is not just a service, but a foundational set of values that have distinguished British society since 1945. Fought for, hard won, and the target for the rich and powerful, who never needed these services in the first place, and certainly do not approve their underlying values or power analysis. This history teaches us who we are, how we have got to where we are, and what it will take to stop the people from being further pushed off the cliff edge of our society.[iii]
The Green Party, even while it voices the environmental concerns of some/many Labour voters, apparently finds it easy to ignore this political history. So Green denial includes the fact that a Green vote will help the Tories get back for another 5 years. Caroline Lucas, in the recent Guardian interview that made such an impression on Monroe, is open about her desire to see Labour lose, as she thinks it would greatly advantage the Greens. Monroe’s Green denial also brushes aside the fact that it is the Labour Party who, as a party of government, will be tasked with rescuing and sustaining the NHS, for example. So Green denial shows several discernible faces, and these contradictions suggest an identity / ethical dilemma with potential national consequences:
Green votes will be a good thing because they will take votes from Labour and so help stop Labour from forming a government.
Green votes will not allow the Tories through.
If that happens, it doesn’t matter: Greens are not responsible for the social, economic and political consequences of our electoral actions.
As Greens we don’t care about the consequences of a further five years of Tory-led government for the people and the environment. We have other, party political, priorities.
Our priority is the long-term electoral future of the Green party.
There must be an order of electoral priorities and action that enable a Labour government to get elected, in order then to tackle environmental issues and sustainability as essential components of the transformation of our society and economy, hopefully supported by MPs from other political parties.[iv]
Does Monroe think there is any other party likely to achieve the required majority to form a government, which would tackle issues of sustainability and a low carbon economy any time soon? I suggest this is part of her denial.
Nor is damage limitation, which is where a Labour-led government would have to start, a mere negative, a feeble effort. Ask those most severely affected by this government’s slash-and-burn policies. Ask those in communities and local government currently struggling to limit Tory damage to budgets and services. Similarly, while we may not be able to “get what we want” at a stroke, we do know for certain what a second term Tory government has in store for society, especially the poorest and most vulnerable. It’s a truly terrifying prospect.
Part of democratic competence is the ability and willingness to identify the real enemy (of the people and the environment), as opposed to the source of our personal/political discontent. Then refuse as far as possible to (knowingly) aid and abet the enemy. It is clear that progressive politics does not resemble, but has to compete with, retail therapy, and what we have all internalised about ‘choice’.
Monroe’s sense that you have a right to get what you want when you vote, sidelines the importance of making sure (as far as possible) that you don’t get what you and society really really don’t want: a second term Tory-led government.
So first identify the enduring source of your political fear and loathing.
Second, vote strategically.
Third, pile on collective political pressure after the election.
As award-winning British singer, Paloma Faith, has recommended: “Vote first. Then complain!”[v]
val walsh / 22 03 2015
[i] [i] See Harry Leslie Smith (2014) Harry’s Last Stand. How the word my generation built is falling down, and what we can do about it.
[ii] See ‘Friends, comrades, strangers: especially those feeling apathetic, cynical, confused, disillusioned and/or angry. Pre-election reflections as May 2015 looms’ . In category ‘Essays 2015’, togetherfornow.wordpress.com
[iii] See, for example, Paul Mason (2008) Live Working or Die Fighting. How the working class went global, and Selina Todd (2015) The People. The rise and fall of the working class.
[iv] See Val Walsh (09 08 2014) submission to Mayor of Liverpool’s Commission on Environmental Sustainability: ‘Reflections on climate change, sustainability and democracy: prioritizing renewal, equity and justice in the Liverpool city region’. In category ‘Conference papers 2014’, togetherfornow.wordpress.com
[v] See ‘Food blogger Jack Monroe joins the Greens’. Unpublished letter to The Guardian (20 03 2015). togetherfornow.wordpress.com
Reflections on climate change, sustainability and democracy:
prioritizing renewal, equity and justice in the Liverpool city region.
Governance and leadership
Inequality / Inequalities
Research and innovation
On not speaking for others
Health, wellbeing and community
Sustainability and non market values
Living with individualism: “this storm we call progress”[ii]
Quality of place: harbour/port; home/springboard; sanctuary/hive; childhood/livelihood.
Achieving sustainability as a driver within lives, communities, culture and economy in Liverpool city region will not be the result of a series of technical fixes. Embarking on the next stage of the long-term process of cultural change involves an ambitious, qualitative shift, as local researchers and campaigners Pete North and Tom Barker note in their excellent report:
A low carbon Liverpool will have to use multiple approaches. . . . It is obvious that a holistic approach is necessary to make real progress”.[iii] Emphasis added.
In this spirit, and in response to the invitation to make a submission to the Mayoral Commission on Environmental Sustainability as a member of LFoE, and taking a lead from the key themes flagged up at the Liverpool Green Partnership (LGP) event at Blackburne House (01 07 2014), selected themes are presented here, not as discrete, but to emphasise their interconnections: how they echo, combine and reinforce each other in a tapestry of meaningfulness and practical actions: and always as a work in progress.
Governance and leadership. These are not technical and/or organisational matters only, but from the outset must exemplify the Commission’s stated/agreed purpose and values.
The Commission’s governance must demonstrate due consideration of process and methodology, which embody values, relationships and protocol that explicitly counter, challenge and seek to undo the neoliberal curse: its infrastructure, relational patterns and assumptions, and above all its consequences / outcomes for individuals, communities, society, the built environment, and the natural world. The damage, the despair, the injustice; the violence and violations; the planned deterioration and dismantling of our social fabric and the public sector values that have done so much to sustain this in the years that preceded the Coalition government in 2010, constitute a raft of obstacles to social and environmental sustainability in 2014 and beyond.
The challenge of sustainability requires this necessary ethical and practical revolution, rather than various technical adjustments: a heartfelt cultural politics, not ‘polite’ game-playing or timid bureaucracy. And it has to start immediately.
By this I mean we have to enact change now in order to achieve change in/for the future. We have to embody remembered and/or imagined values now, first through the Commission’s membership, processes and practices: its own embodied governance.
To do this, familiar, conventional patterns of power and control must cede to the ‘experimental’, such as mixed membership and participation: not all (older), ‘powerful’ men in positions of seniority and authority; not all white; not all non-disabled; not all affluent, etc.. Only one woman on the Commission so far: did no-one notice? Did no-one think this an insufficiency, a disadvantage even in 2014?
Any sustainable (i.e. just) society / community / city will not be, emerge from, or be realised by, a monoculture. Monocultures are fragile and unbalanced in their exclusivity and narrowness, and unfair in their embodiment of inequalities, dominance and subordination. Commission members and participants must be drawn from the City’s diversity, including young people and community activists, for example.
Understanding of the task by the Commission has to be thorough and authentic, as opposed to rhetoric, sound-bite or ‘green-wash’. Commitment to the challenge and change process must be genuine and unrelenting, not spin for tourists and inward ‘investors’.
To demonstrate such understanding and commitment, the Commission has to be seen to be connecting with, consulting, drawing on and constituted by, existing expertise (experiential as well as technical and professional) in the city region: its universities, businesses, communities, mental health sector, public health sector, specialist services, cultural and activist organisations, and individuals. Facilitating a peer group of participation, rather than a hierarchy of vested interests.
The level and quality of citizen and community participation recognized as key ingredients and outcomes in Bristol and Nantes demonstrate the significance of democratic capacity buildingand participation as intrinsic to enhancing sustainability consciousness within the city region (they go together), and achieving practical, social and cultural change informed by sustainability values. These examples (presented at ESRC-funded seminars at the University of Liverpool in 2012) of cities working towards, and achieving, EU Green City status, were inspirational as well as instructive for those of us in cities, like Liverpool, aspiring to become a healthy and sustainable City, but with little of the political and economic infrastructure in place at the time. Just years of community activism and action / intellectual efforts / knowledge production / frustration.
Inequality / inequalities.
What types of economic actors (workers, taxpayers, shareholders) make contributions of effort and money to the innovation process for the sake of future, inherently uncertain, returns? Are these the same types of economic actors who are able to appropriate returns from the innovation process if and when they appear? That is, who takes the risks and who gets the rewards?[iv]
To be sure, venture capitalists and other private-equity holders take risks, although even then mostly with other people’s (primarily workers’) money. . . . (And) venture capital looks to exit from its investments in at most 5 years.[v]
Lazonick & Mazzucato’s framework, called the Risk-Reward Nexus (RRN), studies the relationship between innovation and inequality, and their arguments and theorizing are highly relevant both to the reframing of economics and its role within the economy and within political discourses, as well as the reframing of the relationship between economics, politics and sustainability / the low carbon economy. They note how:
Research is now conducted on the basis of a largely segmented division of labour in which labour economists work on inequality, and industrial economists on technology – with both these groups typically ignoring the role of finance in the economy . . . . If we do not have a theory of value creation, how can we differentiate value that is created and value that is simply extracted (what some have called ‘rent’)? This is precisely what the RRN approach aims to analyse.[vi]
This segmentation is also an obstacle to sustainability understanding and action. Philosopher Michael Sandel, analyses the relationships at the other end of the market economy, in terms of two objections to markets: fairness, which asks about the inequality that market choices may reflect, and the corruption objection, which asks about the attitudes and norms that market relations may damage or dissolve.[vii] The fairness objection points out that:
Market choices are not free choices if some people are desperately poor or lack the ability to bargain on fair terms. So in order to know whether a market choice is a free choice, we have to ask what inequalities in the background conditions of society undermine meaningful consent.[viii]
Or participation more generally. For example, to state the obvious:
The attainment of gender equality can be greatly affected by women’s lack of participation in decision-making.[ix]
Domain of power: gender imbalance in decision-making remains an important challenge at EU level for all Member States.[x] (Chapter heading.)
The European Institute for Gender Equality reports “low levels of gender equality in political decision-making”, and that “the lowest gender equality score can be found in economic decision-making.”[xi]
I draw attention to these issues, which also raise the question of intersectionality (intersecting inequalities) as it pertains to the membership and work of the Commission, in the light of the opening comments on governance and leadership above. Gender equality is not just about numerical presence, but the qualitative difference diversity brings into decision-making and social action. From the outset the Commission needs to be aware of the consequences of existing and entrenched power imbalances, in society at large, in the city region, and within groups, inasmuch as these have a bearing on the Commission’s remit, and also within the Commission itself. It must not make the mistake of ‘unwittingly’ or willfully reproducing these, as has been the norm in Liverpool.[xii]
At the LGP (Liverpool Green Partnership) event (01 07 2014), ‘Shaping our city’s future’, attendees were asked to think about and comment on “What’s missing?”
But it is not just a question of what’s missing? But who is missing from this knowledge exchange?
For example, how will the Commission attract and involve those communities and constituencies who are routinely ignored and marginalized, and who in turn absent themselves from such civic projects in Liverpool? BAMER communities, economically deprived, working-class communities, people with disabilities, women, for example. (See intersectionality comment above.)
“Community Development is not a service but an approach”, observed a leading Community Development Consultant recently,[xiii] and I suggest this insight is relevant to the work of the Sustainability Commission, as it seeks to develop and model an ethos and practice that is not top-down, authoritarian and controlling, but about engagement, peer process, knowledge exchange and co-production.[xiv] (See below.)
Research and innovation.
Innovation is a learning process that unfolds over time. . . . Investment in innovation is a direct investment that involves, first and foremost, a strategic confrontation with technological, market, and competitive uncertainty.[xv]
Lazonick & Mazzucato highlight the normatively overlooked roles of both government (representing the collectivity of taxpayers), in relation to high fixed cost investments in physical infrastructure and knowledge bases, and the exertion of individual workers which is “critical to the process of organisational learning that is the essence of the innovation process”.[xvi]
Besides being uncertain, the innovation process is therefore collective, and it is the collectivity of taxpayers, workers, and financiers who to different degrees bear the risk of innovative enterprise.[xvii]
Lazonick & Mazzucato argue that:
The collective character of the innovation process provides a foundation for inclusive growth; the participation of large numbers of people in the innovation process means that inherent in the innovation process is a rationale for the widespread and equitable distribution of the gains of innovation.[xviii]
In addition, they point out: “markets do not create value”.[xix]
It is organisations, not markets, that create value in the economy. Historically, well-developed markets are the result, not the cause of economic development that is driven by organisations in the forms of supportive families, innovative enterprises, and developmental states.[xx]
This in turn, highlights the importance of human capital: of investing in human beings and the development of their skills and knowledge base.
On not speaking for others. In research, as in public health, there is no such thing as ‘people’, just various overlapping constituencies and cohorts, which makes disaggregated data a vital tool in the pursuit of good evidence and equality. Reiterating the importance of critical awareness of power and power relations within research process and knowledge production; developing an equality-aware methodology, sociologically and ethically fit for purpose (i.e. part of the ‘solution’, not perpetuating the problem), depends on the following framing assumptions:
human rights perspective and values: we are all ‘subjects’[xxi]
Mindful of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 28, in relation to climate change/justice, a rights-based agenda “requires fair and equitable burden-sharing mechanisms”.[xxvi] Similarly, in line with the Expert Group, Commission on the Status of Women, 2008, key messages include:
Climate change policy and financing must seek to promote sustainable development as the grounding for gender equality, women’s empowerment and poverty eradication. Emphasis added.
Gender analysis, gender perspective and women’s effective participation must be assured at all levels of the climate policy and climate change financing architecture.[xxvii]
The quality and relevance of the information base used to inform and justify low carbon and sustainability policies and practices will be a function of such ethical considerations, which actively support inclusion in practice, as opposed to re-enforcing hierarchy and inequality. Reporting on some of the consequences, spin-offs and life-changing experiences arising from time spent at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) during its 40 years, via the oral history project he has been conducting, Allan Shepherd notes that:
CAT’s open approach was particularly beneficial for many of the women I interviewed, some of whom experienced a profound sense of empowerment during their time here, either because the spirit of CAT encouraged them to participate more fully in jobs that would normally be the preserve of men (hard physical labour and practical outdoor jobs such as building and engineering) or because the flat management structure enabled women to play central roles in a way that traditional male-dominated hierarchies did not. I remember being the only man on the management board with four women. CAT was a socialist feminist enterprise (with a small ‘s’ and ‘f’, for it was never draconian in either attitude.[xxviii]
And living and working in an environment and organizational culture that disregarded those male-dominated, hierarchical models in the world beyond, must also have had an impact on the men (as well as the children on site). The Critical Voices Network Ireland serves as another example of “a democratic space with no hierarchical structures”:[xxix]
An environment has been created where different and sometimes conflicting voices and agendas can be heard and respected rather than silenced”.[xxx]
This kind of sensitivity to power differentials and imbalances can be markedly absent within more traditional working environments, where power bases and territoriality take precedence, to the detriment of a group’s purpose and outcomes. These skills are developed via practice, critical reflection and good will. Harry Gijbels (Senior Lecturer, School of Nursing & Midwifery, University College Cork) and Lydia Sapouna (Lecturer, School of Applied Social Sciences, University College Cork) speak of how “roles within the group are there to serve the group”, and the desire/aim is “toespouse and encourage creativity and spontaneity”.[xxxi] (Emphasis added.) This is an explicit methodology, demonstrating awareness of the politics of knowledge production and epistemology, and as such has relevance for knowledge production generally, as much as in healing and recovery.
Since the 1970s there has been a wealth of research demonstrating the importance of storying, life histories and narrative in/as knowledge production. For example:
narrative as research methodology /democratic resource / empowerment / ethics
focusing on stories not symptoms = holistic and integrative
what happened to you / me?
not what is wrong with them / her / him / you / me / it?
This movement has provided qualitative approaches to lives and experience previously hidden, marginalised or stigmatized, so it has democratic relevance. (See Health, wellbeing and community below.) But it has also proved its value in other contexts, where complexity and/or uncertainty are to the fore, and where creativity and innovation are therefore needed.
Vicky Pryce, commenting on the film Erin Brockovich (2000) as an economist, alludes to this problem:
The film highlighted a real economic issue: the difficulty the markets have in putting a price on the impact of a company’s core activity on the wider environment. In economics speak, this is the problem of measuring “externalities”. Pollution, medical consequences, congestion, noise, climate change, community displacement and unrest fall into that category. What isn’t measured tends to be ignored.[xxxii]Emphasis added.
And, as Tom Barker notes, “it’s what is not counted that tends to matter most”:[xxxiii] those externalities Pryce refers to. Her observation highlights the importance of collecting data in the first place (no data, no collective/public understanding, no subsequent, evidence-based action), but also the importance of qualitative approaches, such as narrative and stories, which don’t measure or count, but rather explore / exemplify / indicate / demonstrate / assess experience and significance. Pryce implicitly alerts us to the problem of markets and neoliberal, wall-to-wall marketization of the last 30+ years, which the Commission now has to confront.
Pete North and Tom Barker’s report (2011), Building the Low Carbon Economy on Merseyside, demonstrates the value of qualitative research, in particular in chapter 4, ‘Supporting new and existing SMEs’ (pp29-56) and chapter 5, ‘Supporting new and existing social enterprises’ (pp57-76). These chapters provide extensive experiential evidence; testimony from those interviewed, not as sound-bites or ticking the interviewer’s question boxes, but as flowing, discursive description, analysis and reflection. Invaluable, rich data for the Commission’s task: not just data collection, but glimpses of conversations about sustainability in our City and beyond, that result in consciousness-raising, knowledge exchange and production; a sense of mutuality and reciprocity that benefits everyone involved. This also effects the culture shift from uncertainty, frustration and despond, to can do. Tim Gee has analysed the importance of this process of mustering the political will needed to achieve environmental transformation: “from cultural preparation to power-shifting”.[xxxiv]
CAT, set up in 1974 in a disused slate quarry in Machynlleth, mid Wales, by a group of environmental and social activists, has always placed dialogue, conversation, knowledge exchange and experimentation at the heart of its relationships and work. A CAT graduate (male) testifies to the impact of this ethos:
I found the attitude of the people at CAT very liberating, which emboldened me to change to a new lifestyle. . . . I am now utilizing the woodland to engage in environmental education through hosting of Forest School sessions, with the aims of developing the social skills of children and inspiring them through nature.[xxxv]
Health, wellbeing and community. Looking back on the early years of CAT, Paul Allen, long term CAT staff member writes:
The concept of ‘alternative technology’ signalled a huge shift in our socio-technical evolution. . . . as technology began to confront the limits of the ecosystem, questions had to be asked about the limits to material growth, damage to natural systems and depletion of resources. . . . CAT’s Peter Harper coined the phrase ’alternative technology’ (AT) (but) more than just harvesting energy from alternative resources, it meant opening up technology to both comprehension and control by citizens and communities, challenging market dominance and focusing on benefits to living things, not just the economy. Emphasis added.[xxxvi]
So from the off, 40 years ago, CAT was a holistic, creative, multi-disciplinary, co-operative, socio-political project, that became identified as ‘environmental’. In retrospect, this naming can be seen as problematic in that it has produced what George Marshall, founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network (coinet.org.uk), has called “selective framing that creates the maximum distance”.[xxxvii] This new category, ‘environmental’, would face a lot of rejection and denial along the way, partly because it was an unfamiliar, whole new uncategorisable thing, seen as separate from existing categories and politics.
If we take a step back we can see that the impacts of climate change are so wide-ranging that it could equally well be defined as a major economic, military, agricultural, or social rights issue.[xxxviii]
Such cognitive and practical complexity presents problems for minds being trained by neoliberal turbo consumerism to demarcate and think in terms of fragments, market segments, etc.. In 1991, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Zygmunt Bauman, judged that:
The central frame of both modern intellect and modern practice is opposition – more precisely, dichotomy. . . . . Dichotomy is an exercise in power and the same time its disguise. [xxxix]
In 2010, Marshall challenged a senior campaigner with Amnesty international, the world’s largest human rights organization, “to explain why Amnesty did not mention climate change anywhere on its website.”[xl]
He agreed that it is an important issue but felt that Amnesty “doesn’t really do environmental issues”. In other words it was outside their ‘norms of attention’.[xli]
It would take a while, even within environmental circles, for environmental, social justice, health and wellbeing issues, for example, to be understood as intimately entwined. And as useful as the Stockholm Sustainable Development Goals (2013) are, mapping six major and interconnected themes, I see no evidence of gender analysis or awareness of the relevance of feminist issues and feminist theory to the sustainability project. Women are mentioned (obliquely) regarding combatting HIV/aids, and improving maternal and child care’![xlii] So women as wombs/sex/reproductive organs. . . . that sounds familiar. How can we sensibly, fairly and insightfully discuss local or global sustainability issues (including poverty) without gender awareness and feminist (and postcolonial) theory?
With regard to the links between health, wellbeing and community, in 2014 there are many examples of good and best practice in research, knowledge production (including the arts), peer process, community organising and co-creativity, from which we can learn and be inspired by.[xliii] Local examples I have encountered or been involved in recently, which variously exemplify equality awareness, creative process, democratic decision-making and capacity building, include:
The Communiversity and the Alt Valley Community Trust
North End Writers workshop (26 06 2014) ‘Our Kind.’ INTAR conference
VoiceBox Inc – Voices from The BRINK: “our values and commitment to empowerment and ‘Curious Connected Co-Creation”. INTAR conference
Mick McKeown, Helen Spandler & Mark Cresswell (25 06 2014) Can we be Spartacus? Solidarity, survivor movements and trade unions. INTAR conference
LWN (Liverpool Women’s Network) working together to influence and improve women’s position in the city region, for example working with the City Council to produce dedicated VAWG policies and practices
MPHA (Merseyside People’s Health Assembly) inaugural event (30 03 2014) & Report (09 04 2014); part of the international PHM (People’s Health Movement)
What Women Want Group, a mix of service users, survivors, service providers, researchers, practitioners, academics, activists, collaborating to improve mental health services for women in Liverpool.
LFoE is party to these broad values and approaches, but as a movement it lacks diversity, being overwhelmingly white. All of the innovative collaborations mentioned above variously embody awareness of the social determinants of health and wellbeing, such as poverty, inequality and social injustice (for example, gender power relations, misogyny, racism, homophobia, ageism); violence and abuse; homelessness and environmental degradation; and the synchronicity between health and wellbeing, creativity, human agency, equality and democracy, for example. The latter are indivisible human rights, not privileges, and fundamental to sustainable communities, societies and the natural world.[xliv]
It is perhaps worth noting that all of these projects and groupings (and there are many more) are ‘uprisings’, rather than top-down, organisational or bureaucratic projects. Their power, vitality and relevance are rooted in people’s lives, relationships, dissatisfactions, hopes and desires: their determination to do things differently and better, rather than wait; to develop and exert personal and social creativity, through collective action, rather than give up in silence or screaming. Trust and hope figure prominently, not as abstract nouns, but as forged realities on the ground. The extent and quality of such gatherings and initiatives testify to the social creativity already prominent in the city region.
The Commission’s work could inspire and draw on similar energy, commitment and creativity in Liverpool’s residents and communities, if it is seen as convincing, urgent and relevant: tackling preventable conditions that people recognise as obstacles to a fair and decent life, and as depleting the planet’s resources further and faster.
Life will be different in 2030 whether we decarbonise or not. The choice is between planned and orderly changes designed to limit climate change, or unplanned emergency measures in reaction to unpredictable and escalating climate effects.[xlv]
This is plain speaking from Peter Harper, and points to the importance of the language used to communicate the nature of the crisis we face.[xlvi] North and Barker highlight this challenge in relation to businesses and social enterprises in Liverpool:
The message needs to be optimistic, a message around efficiency, quality and meeting new opportunities from new markets; not one of control, regulation or austerity.[xlvii]Emphasis added.
They stress the importance of avoiding “mixed messages”,[xlviii] which create uncertainty and ambivalence, and “strategies that focus on emphasizing doom and gloom”.[xlix] Adrian Ramsay, Lecturer in Environment, Politics and Economics at CAT’s Graduate School of the Environment, has to grapple with these political comings and goings.[l] And this is not a superficial, ‘marketing’ point, but very specifically a problem arising in the wake of these neoliberal years:
Climate change is invariably presented as an overwhelming threat requiring unprecedented restraint, sacrifice, and government intervention. The metaphors it invokes are poisonous to people who feel rewarded by free marker capitalism and distrust government interference.[li] Emphasis added.
These consequences cannot be ignored or brushed aside. Ways have to be found to reconnect with and communicate both the human values that lie at the heart of sustainability, social justice and community, as well as the increasingly urgent ecological imperatives:
Despite the message promoted by political leaders, economists and the mainstream media, developed world economies are unsustainable economically, let alone ecologically and culturally. They must fully embrace environmental sustainability or face ruin.[lii]
Showing rather than telling will be vital, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre makes good use of visual mapping.
Sustainability and non market values. In 2009 FoE published a commissioned report as part of its national Get Serious About CO2 campaign, in which it mixed stats and information about practical initiatives across a number of target areas, such as insulation, retrofitting, energy, and transport.[liii] Five years later, examples of other positive strategies that could be effectively promoted and speedily implemented, confirm the potential of this approach, combining information, inspiration and practical action, for example:
Making the argument for building on brownfield sites, as British architect, Richard Rogers has done,[liv] and for the City Council to start tackling the issue of land use within a sustainability framework, instead of encroaching further into the countryside and creating satellite towns severed from the cultural resources, employment opportunities and social stimulus of existing city populations .
Procurement and divestment are two other potentially fast tracks and long-term approaches to change, that could run alongside other new policies and practices. Putting our money where our sustainability hearts are, City Council and other big budget organisations could deploy their financial clout by favouring those companies and organisations that commit to low carbon policies and practices.
The fossil fuel divestment movement offers an additional strategy:
If we want to stop climate change, we have to stop paying for it. At a time when stemming the flow of fossil fuels is ‘do or die’ for the planet we depend on, the call to divest has never been more important. Join us.[lv]
And might adaptation “be the fastest path to effective mitigation?”[lvi] Another plank of a low carbon strategy locally, which would also contribute to the development of a sustainability mindset and culture in communities and across the city region?
Discussing adaptation appears to help people see that climate change impacts are real.[lvii]
Such a raft of environmental changes clearly constitute more than tinkering at the edges of the low carb challenge, yet they could be embarked on without triggering a sense of doom and gloom, fear and powerlessness, which immobilise rather than motivate. In fact, such discussions and changes empower participants through the expansion of awareness, understanding and conceptual skills, as words/concepts, such as adaptation, divestment and mitigation, move from being unfamiliar abstract nouns/academic concepts, to practical possibilities, with the potential to change individual behaviour and engender positive, social and collective action. And environmental literacy expands general literacy and articulacy, self-confidence and self esteem, as well as a sense of collective responsibility and benefit. As visible results roll out, people’s understanding of and commitment to the sustainability project would expand, becoming the new ‘natural’, the new ‘right’. Examples of this process abound in, for example, Germany:
It may sound like a utopian dream, but planners and residents in Freiburg, Germany have succeeded in creating a pleasant, liveable space in the midst of the city. Allan Shepherd shows how this district came to be a showcase for co-operation, diversity and renewable energy.[lviii]
Noting the historical rise of the term ‘incentive’ in the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Sandel has critically examined “incentives and moral entanglements”,[lix] asking whether financial incentives, for example, “will corrupt attitudes and norms worth protecting.[lx] This too applies to the sustainability project, given the importance of values and behaviour change for its realization. Challenging the received notion that economics doesn’t traffic in morality, Sandel argues that:
The more markets extend their reach into noneconomic spheres of life, the more entangled they become with moral questions.[lxi]
He considers the “crowding out of nonmarket norms”, and asks: “How do market values corrupt, dissolve, or displace nonmarket values?”[lxii] Sandel recommends we recognise that “marketising a good can change its meaning”.[lxiii]
George Monbiot critiques environmental discourses that, instead of threat and terror, have turned to money to incentivise,[lxiv] arguing that “nothing better reinforces extrinsic values than putting a price on nature, or appealing to self-interest.”[lxv] In other words, you cannot fight neoliberalism and its consequences, with its own motives, values and methods, such as commodification, monetisation, marketization, consumerism and competitiveness. And after 30+ years of the neoliberal project, our heads are full of this stuff: internalized as ‘normal’, ‘natural’, ‘right’ and inevitable.
As extrinsic values are powerfully linked to conservative politics, pursuing policies that reinforce them is blatantly self-destructive. . . . One of the drivers of extrinsic values is a sense of threat.[lxvi]
In a poignant shift, Monbiot has recently admitted the error of his own ways:
For 30 years I terrified people, banging on about threats. . . . The language we use could scarcely be more alienating. Environment, even, is a cold word that creates no pictures. . . . Terrify the living daylights out of people and they will protect themselves at the expense of others and of the living world.[lxvii]
Threat will always be a weapon of the Right, of fascism, militarism, and authoritarianism (Right or Left).
On the contents page of his most recent book, Cancel the Apocalypse: The New Path to Prosperity, Andrew Simms, one of the UK’s leading environmentalists, a chief analyst for Global Witness and a Fellow of nef (the new economics foundation), cites writer and cultural theorist, Raymond Williams, who poses the alternative:
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
This is the artist/creative in Williams speaking, as much as the political man. Too few traditional male activists understand this insight, preferring the familiarity of the comfort zone of ‘protest’, blame, sectarianism, and victimhood as heroism. These entrenched positions do not require problem-solving and creativity, do not invite you to rethink power relations in a constructive and ethical way, do not involve learning, and do not help you build social and political alliances at a time when we are all served up and pitted against each other as market segments.
Living with individualism: “this storm we call progress”.[lxviii]
Ours is the era of unadulterated individualism and the search for the good life, limited solely by the demand for tolerance (when coupled with self-celebratory and scruple-free individualism, tolerance may only express itself as indifference).[lxix]Emphasis added.
Here, Bauman evokes the consequences of the economic and political changes producing what he referred to as postmodern ethics (in 1993), involving “the substitution of aesthetics for ethics”,[lxx] in what would prove to be in the years since, an overwhelming market driver for neoliberal economies [lxxi]
Jacques Peretti’s recent TV series, The Men Who Made Us Spend,[lxxii] serves as a reminder of just how extreme and shocking the facts of this turbo consumerist reality are in 2014, how we got here, and the severity of the consequences for both the natural world and for us humans, including children. He mixes stats with interviews with the leading men in this ‘drama’, together with experiential evidence of the visible, social and psychological consequences, for example, built-in obsolescence and disposability, ill health, obesity, poverty. Peretti’s investigative programmes invite us to reflect on what kind of society we are now as a consequence of the hyper capitalism of the neoliberal years, and at what cost has this been achieved. Again, Bauman is relevant here:
Modernity prides itself on the fragmentation of the world as its foremost achievement. Fragmentation is the prime source of its strength. The world that falls apart into plethora of problems is a manageable world.[lxxiii]
Fragmentation means: markets / market segments / ‘choice’ / brands / individualism, managerialism, manipulation and growth via outsourcing and privatization. Excess and surfeit. As Peretti’s investigations show, marketing strategies seek to coerce, seduce and determine: their familiar purpose is to sell us something we didn’t know we wanted or needed, and can’t afford; as well as routinely inculcating fear, shame, stigma, and a general sense of deficit.[lxxiv]
But marketing has also become content, not just the means by which a product is promoted and sold. Perhaps the most disturbing of these investigations is the last, in which Peretti tracks how children have been first targeted, then marketised since the 1980s through the promotion of toys and games, most crucially via the creation of brands; and how adults have been deliberately infantilised, to accentuate, for example, emotionality, impulsivity, instant gratification, greed and disposability, as ‘autonomy’, ‘self-determination’, ‘modernity’. Has ‘femininity’ become the emblematic neoliberal/consumerist identity, posture and target?
These neoliberal years have realised Bauman’s early analysis in spades. At the same time, public communication has been corrupted, media relations and trust in public figures (including scientists) are at an all time low. The sense of manipulation and exploitation for excessive profit by the top 1% (?), to increase sales and market share, is familiar to consumers, and as a consequence, neoliberal values and coercions have become normalised, uncontested, overpowering. It is clear that consumerism stands in the way of sustainability and low carbon practices.
As a consequence, the fact that the neoliberal emphasis on deregulation and growth at all costs was instrumental in bringing societies and the natural world to this cliff edge can be overlooked. North & Barker found that since the downturn in 2008, for some of their interviewees in SMEs and social enterprises in Liverpool city region, “growth is the overwhelming priority. This is mistaken.”[lxxv] Likewise, French economist, Thomas Piketty’s “utter failure to take seriously the ecological limits to growth”[lxxvi] in his study of wealth and income inequality in Europe and the US since the C18, reflects the reflex of conventional European economists inside their free market, neoliberal box:[lxxvii]
A central component of Piketty’s answer to the crisis is: more of the same. More growth, the proceeds of which can then allegedly be “redistributed”. The truth, however, is that growth is an alternative to egalitarian redistribution, an alternative to any serious effort to create a more equal society. The promise of growth is a replacement for the need to share.[lxxviii] Emphasis added.
Learning from the social and environmental disasters of the neoliberal years is vital for survival, sustainability and social justice (including a new economics and new business models[lxxix]), as a recent harrowing example demonstrates.
The common story is one of female emancipation turned horrifically sour in light of corruption and bad governance, multiplied by western corporate and consumer greed.
After the multi-storey Rana Plaza clothes factory in Bangladesh collapsed in 2013, killing 1129 and injuring 2,515 (mainly women), a previously ambitious young manager, with his mind set on getting rich and buying an expensive fast car, found himself utterly changed by the experience. As a result, he set up a co-operative in a single storey building (as one of his women workers said, “nothing above or below”), with an emphasis on high standards of health and safety, respectful relations with his co-workers, and decent pay.
The clothing industry in Bangladesh had been central to economic expansion and jobs for people who moved into the city from their villages, especially girls and women. This new co-op aims to show that together, workers and managers can retain and develop the industry, which supplies exclusively to western countries, while upholding human rights standards and ethical practices in the workplace; what we might call industrial decency. Leaving behind avoidable risks and exploitative industrial practices that dehumanize workers in the rush towards dominance, inequality and profit, creates a more sustainable working environment.[lxxx] Kinder all round.
Lessons here for UK business and industry too.[lxxxi] Citing a range of international, cross cultural examples, economist Ha-Joon Chang makes the case for change: “End this privatization dogma: public ownership is better”.[lxxxii] Economists, Professors Mariana Mazzucato and Carlota Perez, are also making significant contributions to the debate about the relationship between public and private sector policy and practice, specifically in terms of economic growth that is not only ‘smart’ but also inclusive and sustainable.[lxxxiii]
New Internationalist, an award-winning, not-for-profit publisher, and “one of the most trusted publications reporting on poverty and inequality”[lxxxiv] for the last 40 years, provides another relevant case study:
The publisher switched to a co-operative a few years after it had been created, once the employees realized they should be practising what they preached. . . . .
Becoming an equal pay co-operative was a difficult decision to take, explains James Rowland [a member since 1985], as the highest paid had their salaries frozen so that the others could catch up. Ever since, all decisions have been taken collectively, between the 18 members of the worker co- op.[lxxxv]
Quality of place: harbour/port; home/springboard; sanctuary/hive; childhood/livelihood.
These are not binary distinctions, but connected ‘places’: emotional, social, economic, imaginative, metaphorical, psychological and physical. Cities are variously viewed as toxic or as hubs of creative entrepreneurial flair.[lxxxvi] Economist, Professor Henry Overman, on a recent visit to Liverpool, took the latter view,[lxxxvii] declaring that cities attract the best people, the biggest talent. Full stop. He clearly meant people like himself, who, he said, grew up in Folkstone, got out, and now lives and works very happily in London as an academic. This stance is a function of the values and politics he has forged on his own auto/biographical journey from childhood to ‘manhood’.
South Korean, Cambridge economist, Ha-Joon Chang, however, notes the realities of unemployment for those not like himself, such as the men represented in the film, The Full Monty (1997):
The point is that workers cannot freely move across different jobs, because their experience is specific to their line of work – there are few skills that are equally valuable in all industries. The alternative that most unemployed workers face is to get a new job that does not require much skill – in this case stripping – that pays far less.[lxxxviii]
Overman’s social, economic and professional trajectory is clearly not the norm or even common, especially for industrial workers, and not least in the context of Austerity and cut-throat neoliberalism since 2010. Also countering happy-go-lucky neoliberal individualism and the narrative of associated upward mobility,[lxxxix] economist Paul Mason discusses the joys of the film Some Like It Hot (1959), but also applauds it as a warning:
The movie was made by people who remembered the Depression, so for all its crazy humour it is also a sombre lesson in the futility of boom-time societies in which the sources of income are gambling, speculation and casual sex, but never actual work for wages and production.[xc]Emphasis added.
In the aftermath of Liverpool’s European City of Culture year in 2008, these are real local risks, as tourism has moved up the City’s agenda. North & Barker note how Liverpool has begun to embrace urban theorist, Richard Florida’s [xci] agenda to some extent: aiming to attract knowledge workers and tourists with the increasing emphasis on fun and games and entertainment, cafés, coffee shops, restaurants, cultural and tourist attractions, etc.. (The expanding sex industry in the City will be another feature of this liberated ‘fun city’.) This risks being an address mainly directed at the already affluent, whatever their age, nationality or culture; and in Liverpool, those who are affluent and mobile are still overwhelmingly white and male.
By contrast, George Monbiot has identified the plight and needs of children in our society and in our cities as a modern crisis:
The collapse of children’s engagement with nature has been even faster than the collapse of the natural world. In the turning of one generation, the outdoor life in which many of us were immersed has gone.[xcii]
Enclosure, accompanied by a rapid replacement of the commoners’ polyculture with a landlord’s monoculture, destroyed much of what made the land delightful to children. . . . and banned them from what it failed to destroy.[xciii]
The commons belonged, inasmuch as they belonged to anyone, to children.[xciv]
This is a memory and vision of the natural world as a site of surprise and adventure, of wild play, and benefits that may extend beyond the physical. Some studies appear to link a lack of contact with the natural world to an increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD),[xcv] and other studies suggest the benefits of playing out of doors, especially among trees and grass. Monbiot says he would like to see every school take its pupils, for one afternoon a week, to run wild in the woods.[xcvi] But there are not enough woods, so he asks: “Could every new housing development include some self-willed land in which children can freely play?”[xcvii] In 2009 The Cambridge Primary Review found that:
Pessimism turned to hope when witnesses felt they had the power to act. Thus the children who were most confident that climate change might not overwhelm them were those whose schools had decided to replace unfocused fear with factual information and practical strategies for energy reduction and sustainability.[xcviii]
How can we provide this combination for adults in the city region?
But can children in the City of Liverpool compete for attention and resources on the neoliberal playing field, with its profit-driven, marketised economy, focusing more and more on the adult interests of knowledge workers, tourists, visitors, and business and industry? Monbiot’s evidence suggests that children are merely the canaries in the mine; but very profitable canaries, as Peretti’s investigation shows.
Monbiot’s concerns conjure the vision of a city as sanctuary and solace, rather than emotional and sensuous ‘desert’, pressure cooker or threat. Shared green public spaces, allotments and gardens all have a role to play in this greening of our City, a process that is a far cry from the consumerism and control of the neoliberal engine, which prefers to license for-profit ventures for passing strangers. Might there be opportunities within the more devolutionary process that lies ahead, (post Scotland’s referendum on independence, and post the 2015 UK General Election) for metropolitan areas and urban local authorities to creatively develop economic / community / environmental strategies responsive and tailored to the needs of different local ‘places’, allowing distinctiveness within the overall umbrella of Liverpool city region, rather than top-down control?
The latest developments in Liverpool city centre highlight the serious contradiction at the heart of the sustainability project. North & Barker ponder the possibility / desirability of developing Dale and Renshaw Streets as “new quarters”, “as a significant driver of jobs and businesses, and improv(ing) the city visitor’s offer”,[xcix] in particular for “a more up-market clientele”, even if “pioneered by social enterprises”.[c] Such a development would attend to the desires of those already part of the mix, part of the city centre ‘success story’, including the researchers themselves and members of the Commission. This direction of travel therefore risks abandoning one of North & Barker’s key findings:
Low carbon restructuring must combine economic competitiveness with social inclusion to ensure that all of the city’s residents are able to take advantage of the opportunities generated.[ci]Emphasis added.
This requires concerted action, a proper plan. Peter Harper suggests that inverted tariffs, the opposite of the way bills normally work, could be used to alleviate the burden of decarbonisation on poorer households:[cii]
It is possible to provide a basic energy tariff very cheaply up to a particular level as a citizen’s right, after which the normal tariff applies for a while, and beyond that it becomes much more expensive.[ciii]
Harper counters the expected objections that this would ‘distort the markets’, and that it would need government intervention to make it happen:
But something of the kind will be needed to reconcile decarbonisation with social justice, and tariffs can be designed to incentivize both efficiency and frugality.[civ] Emphasis added.
This signals the line in the sand.
Similarly, North & Barker’s chapter 6, ‘The potential for low carbon forms of development to connect to socially excluded communities’,[cv] [emphasis added], implicitly acknowledges that there are structural forces at work. In chapter 8: ‘Towards a low carbon 2050 – what is, and isn’t realistic?’ they return to this issue with a biting quote:
Communities with reduced aspirations for what they can achieve, poor local leadership, a reputation that means others avoid them, and poor connections to the rest of the city, are a problem for the city as a whole.[cvi]
While there is evidence to support such a general statement, this is definitely a speaking about and not by, and as a verdict it flies very close to demonising disadvantaged populations as to blame for their own history and circumstances. The history of poverty, social class disadvantage and division in Liverpool is longstanding, extreme, entrenched, and apparently accepted, perhaps because historically those in power and control did not see it as a/their problem; and those affected by it were too ground down and demoralised, too bereft of social and cultural capital, economic resources, hope and status, to organise collectively to challenge and change their situation. But as North and Barker rightly judge, alluding to a more sinister agenda and scenario:
They cannot be just ignored and policed into quiescence, with the focus being overwhelmingly on growth-creating sectors.[cvii]
This could be the most telling sentence in their report: a warning shot across the bows of ‘polite’ and indifferent society, and the neoliberal project. Sandel summarises:
The economistic view of virtue fuels the faith in markets and propels their reach into places they don’t belong. . . . . Altruism, generosity, solidarity, and civic spirit are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are more like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise. One of the defects of a market-driven society is that it lets these virtues languish. To renew our public life we need to exercise them more strenuously.[cviii]
Sustainability can be understood as the maintaining of non market values for living and loving, organizing and making, working and playing.
The bridge from destitution, despair and social isolation (from Otherness and subhuman status) is, apart from loving relationships, via the transformatory impact of good quality education, experiential learning, training and the sociability that accompanies these, and lives lived in the context of decent affordable homes, quality neighbourhoods, human dignity and sustaining and sustainable livelihoods.[cix] These are not technical tick-boxes, but in reality a function of the degree and intensity of inequality in a society, in particular the economic and social distance between those at the top and those at the bottom.[cx] Sustainability is unachievable without addressing this disparity and injustice. Key changes/improvements have to be designed in, not left to chance, then monitored and adapted.[cxi]
The course changed my life completely. I now have skills in something very different from what I did before, and a completely new group of friends. I’m now self-employed, refurbishing residential property to low energy standards and advising others who want to do the same.[cxii]
This is the experience of one person, another CAT graduate (male), but it also points to what is missing in Liverpool: the mighty scale of the social, educational and cultural deficit, and the urgency of the challenge ahead. Sustainability is about lives worth living, not just economics, technical fixes or the natural world. Our response cannot be piecemeal, inept or grudging.
In conclusion. The process of reflecting on the nature of the challenge of achieving a more sustainable city region has brought into focus four key theoretical, political and practical challenges; not a list to be worked through, but a conjunction to be acknowledged and worked with:
the problem of markets and marketization, and how these build in inequality / disadvantage / unfairness, exploitation, and the potential for corruption (in both senses discussed by Sandel, 2012)
power and its exercise: power differentials, the equitable distribution of power; the need to resist and mitigate the consequences of dichotomy and fragmentation, for example via non hierarchical relations and organisation
casualties: the natural world (including the air we breathe), children, communities and individuals (including those disenabled by age, disability, ill health, unemployment, loss and poverty, as well as prejudice, stigma and abuse); those marginalized and/or exploited by power
non market values: how sustainability process is necessarily a social, political, cultural, economic and technological project that uniquely(?) respects, protects and promotes the role of non market values in lives and societies, for example by encouraging awareness and caution regarding individualism and growth as unaccountable, duel virtues and drivers of markets and marketization, in the headlong rush towards greater inequality, inequity and social injustice. Avoidable pain, suffering, damage: ruin. A human rights perspective similarly encompasses and activates non market values.
val walsh / 12 08 2014
[i] Val Walsh is a longstanding member of LFoE and CAT (Centre for Alternative Technology; LWN (Liverpool Women’s Network); and MWM (Merseyside Women’s Movement). In February 2014 she became a founding member of the planning team for MPHA (Merseyside People’s Health Assembly), part of the (international) People’s Health Movement. She is an academic writer, journalist and poet.
[ii] Walter Benjamin (1979) Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn: 260, cited Zygmunt Bauman (1991) Modernity and Ambivalence: 11.
[iii] Pete North & Tom Barker, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool (2011) Building the Low Carbon Economy on Merseyside: future proofing the city for future climate and fuel price uncertainty. In association with The University of Liverpool, Liverpool Vision, Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, Groundwork Merseyside & ESRC: 24.
[iv] William Lazonick & Mariana Mazzucatto (2013) The risk-reward nexus in the innovation-inequality relationship: who takes the risks? Who gets the rewards? Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 22, Number 4: 1094.
[xii] A public meeting organized by the Heseltine Institute, University of Liverpool, as one of its Policy Provocations series, reproduced this all-too-familiar pattern: a panel of 3 men + male Chair. At least The Guardian’s senior economic editor, Aditya Chakrabortty, was one of the panel, which is why I attended. See footnote lxxxvii below.
[xiii] Alison Gilchrist (27 06 2014) Community development in helping to reshape the relationship between the community sector and mental health services. INTAR (International Network Toward Alternatives and Recovery) conference plenary. The University of Liverpool.
[xiv] The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability: “Feasta (pronounced fasta) is taken from an old Irish poem which laments the decimation of the forests. It means ‘in the future’ and Feasta sees itself as a collective thinking process about that future. It is a leading international think-tank exploring the interactions between human welfare, the structure and operation of human systems, and the ecosystem which supports both. The Risk/Resilience Network is an initiative established in order to understand energy-induced systemic risk, the scope for risk management, and general and emergency planning. It is a network where those persons and organisations with interest in the area can learn from each other and engage with practical solutions.” Emphasis added to highlight its relevance to the concerns of this paper and Liverpool’s sustainability project. Feasta is based in Dublin. http://www.feasta.org
[xv] Lazonick (2010) The Chandlerian corporation and the theory of innovative enterprise. Industrial and Corporate Change, 19 (2), 317-349, cited Lazonick & Mazzucato (2013): 1097.
[xix] Lazonick, (2003, 2011) The Theory of the Market Economy and the Social Foundations of Innovative Enterprise , Economic andindustrial Democracy, 24 (1), 9-44, cited Lazonick & Mazzucato (2013): 1105.
[xxviii] Allan Shepherd (Spring 2013) Offshoots: life after CAT! Clean Slate, No.91: 11.
[xxix] Harry Gijbels & Lydia Sapouna, University College Cork (26 06 2014) ‘Critical Voices Networks in mental health: opportunities and challenges’. INTAR conference .
[xxxii] Vicky Pryce (16 07 2014) ‘Flickonomics.’ Erin Brockovich (2000): how to measure environmental cost. The Guardian.
[xxxiii] Tom Barker (Spring 2013) Tree-hugging number crunchers. Clean Slate, No.91: 21.
[xxxiv] Tim Gee (2014) From impossible to inevitable: making change happen. Clean Slate No 92: 24-25. See also Tim Gee (2011) Counterpower: Making Change Happen. New Internationalist.
[xxxv] Andrew Price cited Clean Slate; The Practical Journal of Sustainable Living. No 92 Summer 2014: 25.
[xxxvi] Paul Allen, External Relations Department, CAT (Autumn 2012) Editorial. 40 years of ‘alternative technology’. Clean Slate, No 85: 3.
[xxxvii] George Marshall (Autumn 2012) Why we find it so hard to act against climate change. Clean Slate, No.85: 26. Marshall’s article provides a useful analysis of ‘what we do’, ‘why we do it,’ and ‘what we do about it’, with regard to attitudes, beliefs and actions: 26-28.
[xlii] Stockholm Resilience Centre (27 03 2013) Redefining sustainable development. Available online.
[xliii] Andrew Simms (2013) Cancel the Apocalypse: The New Path to Prosperity brings together existing examples of progressive, eco-aware practices to provide the materials for a mind reset on the part of his readers. Simms’ earlier book (2005, 2009) Ecological Debt: Global Warming and the Wealth of Nations set out the environmental / ethical / political crisis created by western dominance and economics, and “the steps we can take to stop pushing the planet to the point of environmental bankruptcy”.
[xliv] Susan George (2010) Whose Crisis, Whose Future? Towards a Greener, Fairer, Richer World “explains with great clarity the forces that oppress us, the choices that face us and the action that needs to be taken. Please read this book: it will equip you better than any other to confront the injustices of a world run for the benefit of a tiny elite” (George Monbiot). Susan George spoke to a well attended, appreciative COMPASS meeting in Liverpool on 17 03 2011.
[xlv] Peter Harper (2014) Living day to day, the ZCB way. Clean Slate, ibid.: 28.
[xlvi] CAT’s (2010) Zero Carbon Britain. A New Energy Strategy must count as the gold standard for reference for cities and governments. See zerocarbonbritain2030 and http://www.zerocarbonbritain.org
[liii] Tony Travers, LSE & Political Science & Mark Watts, Director of Arup (2009) Cutting Carbon Locally – and How To Pay For It. How to get serious about climate change.
[liv] See Richard Rogers (02 12 2006) How to build intelligent suburbs. The Guardian. And Rogers (15 07 2014) Forget about greenfield sites, build in the cities. The Guardian.
[lv] Danielle Paffard (Summer 2014) Divestment: the route to a win on climate change? Clear Slate. No 92: 27. Danielle is the UK Divestment Campaigner for 350.org. The Mayor’s recent decision to authorise fracking in/under the city region is a serious cause for concern, both environmentally and democratically.
[lvi] See Ranyl Rhydwen, Senior Lecturer in environment & sustainability for the Graduate School of the Environment at CAT (Summer 2014) Should adaptation be the talk of the town? Clean Slate. No 92: 20-21. For references: ranyl.rhydwen@cat.org.uk
[lvii] Ibid.: 21. See also Ranyl Rhydwen (Spring 2013) Transformational adaptation: a time for big changes. Clean Slate, No 91: 12-15.
[lviii] Allan Shepherd (Spring 2013) Community case study: where low carbon homes meet social innovation. Clean Slate No.87: 20-21.
[lxxi] A jaw-dropping, double spread, full colour photograph of Lucy Neath, a girl of 12, lying down surrounded by her record-breaking collection of merchandise for the online children’s game Moshi Monsters exemplifies this phenomenon. She has more than 1900 items. She is visibly very happy and smiling. Photograph, Paul /Michael Hughes/SWNS.com The Guardian (31 07 2014): 18/19. Individualism, consumerism, marketization of childhood, where do we start?
[lxxii] See Jacques Peretti (12, 17, 24 07 2014) The Men Who Made Us Spend. BBC2.
[lxxix] See the work of economists, Professor Mariana Mazzucato, Sussex University & Professor Carlota Perez, LSE, challenging the freemarket model, cited Paul Mason (28 07 2014) History tells us that the best innovations happen when the state gets involved. The Guardian G2: 5. And Mazzucato (2010) The Entrepreneurial State. Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths.
[lxxx] See BBC2 (21 07 2014) Clothes to Die For. Stories of the people who survived the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in the Bangladesh capital Dhaka.
[lxxxi] The co-operative movement has long embodied distinctive values as a basis for fair and sustainable organisations and businesses. See for example: ‘Worker co-operatives help connect the people’ The Phone Co-op celebrates its 15th birthday in 2013. Co-operative News. The voice of the co-op and mutual sectors: 8. ‘Retail co-operatives spread the word across the UK’. Ibid.: 9. ‘New Internationalist – a trusted co-op for 40 years’. Ibid: 15.
[lxxxii] Ha-Joon Chang (01 08 2014) End this privatisation dogma: public ownership is better. The Guardian: 36. See also Ha-Joon Chang (2014) Economics: A Handbook.
[lxxxiii] See Mariana Mazzucato (2010) The Entrepreneurial State. Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths.
[lxxxiv] (18 06 2013) New Internationalist: a trusted co-op for 40 years. The voice of the co-op and mutual sectors: 15.
[lxxxvi] See Richard Florida (2004) The Rise of the Creative Class. And how it is transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life.
[lxxxvii] Speaking in Liverpool (17 07 20140) on an all male panel at a public meeting organised by the University of Liverpool’s Heseltine institute, to discuss ‘Capital Punishment: Is London too big and is it holding the UK back?’ Maritime Museum, Albert Dock, Liverpool.
[lxxxviii] Ha-Joon Chang (16 07 2014) ‘Flickonomics.’ The Full Monty (1997): the reality of unemployment. The Guardian: 11.
[lxxxix] See also the regular journalism of senior economics editor, Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian.
[xc] Paul Mason (16 07 2014) ‘Flickonomics.’ Some Like It Hot (1959): the trouble with rentier capitalism. The Guardian: 9.
[cvi] E Cox & K Schumuecker (2010) Rebalancing Local Economies: widening economic opportunites for people in deprived communities. Cited North & Barker: 93.
[cix] See Val Walsh (23 12 2013) ‘Credible Witness: Hearing, listening, believing, learning from ‘victim /perpetrator’ voices and behaviour.’ Conference paper, BSA Study Group on Auto/Biography conference, Epiphanies. British Museum conference centre. And Val Walsh (15 01 2014) ‘Picking up the pieces: men and masculinity in an outsourced world.’ Critical Research Seminar Series (CCSE) 2013/2014, Centre for the Study of Crime, Criminalisation & Social Exclusion, LJMU. See conference presentations 2014: togetherfornow.wordpress.com
[cx] See Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett (2010) The Spirit Level. Also Danny Dorling (2011) Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists. And Thomas Piketty (2014) Capital in the 21st Century.
[cxi] “Ideas for co-ops may flourish, but few people understand exactly how to make theirs real. The Co-operative Academy is providing answers. Founded in 2009 by Omar Freilla, the academy runs 16-week courses that offer intensive mentoring, legal and financial advice, and help designing logos and websites.” Yes Magazine, s.coop/1kp0c. (May 21- June 4 2013) Co-operative News, ibid.: 22.
[cxii] CAT graduate Andrew Gill (Summer 2014) Clean Slate: 35.
Pedagogy as a collaborative, creative and political process
2014 and beyond: gaps, omissions, rights and necessities
Education for safety/survival, agency and democracy.
It is, as several people observed later, a great pity that Tristram Hunt did not arrive in time to attend the introductory session, ‘My educated self’. He would have found out a lot that is relevant to his responsibilities as Shadow Minister for Education, and it would have better prepared him for his subsequent interview, and perhaps helped him respond more convincingly to participants’ questions, comments and concerns. As others noted afterwards: where was the evidence of hispassion for education and what it can do for children and adults, and in particular for those disadvantaged by life circumstances not of their own making? He sat in the midst of several hundred attendees (practitioners all?), who all know so much, have so much experience of education in the UK (as ‘products’ and practitioners), and who care so passionately about education and its fate at this time, faced with the wrecking ball of the Tory-led government and its dire Education minister, Michael Gove. We have so much to offer a Labour government that wishes to take the side of the people and salvage something positive from the wreckage the Tories and the Lib Dems will leave in their wake. This day-long Saturday event was part of this process.
Everyone in the room on the day was in considerable part evidence of their education (because education is that powerful and enduring in its influence); and each could provide testimony on reflection, as to its value and its failures; the obstacles and the achievements; the joys and sorrows. Critical self-reflexivity is a well established process / methodology for researchers and practitioners of all kinds now, and it is in this spirit I have made my own contribution to the Inquiry, of which this is an extract, expanding on my brief contribution from the floor in the opening session on the day:
My educated self. I have been fortunate. My education narrative is a generally happy and fruitful one. I loved school from the off and at all levels: I achieved joy in learning, sharing and helping others at infant and junior school, which further developed into a sense of adventure and intellectual challenge at my grammar school. Here there were opportunities outside the official curriculum, for example for drama, formal debating, music and art. And within the timetabled curriculum, in the later years, there were several non-subject-specific slots allotted for ‘discussion’. So communication, research and creative skills (oral, listening, writing, performing, making, doing, critical thinking and reflection, investigating) were variously fostered, and by teachers who were overwhelmingly stimulating, well organised, good humoured, supportive, and generous with their time and attention.
Learning and memorising were also important across a range of subjects, but always contextualized and relevant, rather than as rote learning as preparation for a test. Education was not just about learning stuff, but about expanding horizons as well as skills; of doors opening on the world of knowledge and culture, and the self.
Pedagogy as a collaborative, creative and political process. The importance of role models is often over stated, but looking back I see that my years at school provided a number of these, and I benefitted throughout from a culture of encouragement and challenge. My favourite teachers were not just intellectually stimulating, but people with personality and a sense of humour, those I could identify as human beings as well as teachers. As my son would say in 2001, just after his 17th birthday and a month at Liverpool Community College studying music, when I asked him what he thought made a good teacher (he had had brilliant teachers in infants and junior school, as well as at his comprehensive + several duds): “It’s not just that they make their subject interesting. They are interesting.”
Looking back in my twenties, I came to understand my educational experience as a creative process (aided by early American research and writing on creativity that enabled me to recognize myself within its narratives and theory, and get over the binary western split between thinking and feeling that I had been so aware of during my years at grammar school). And there were inspirational writers / theorists / activists (mainly American + Paulo Freire) who helped me forge my own philosophy of education, experiential learning and creativity, and to understand the importance of the social and political contexts of education for all ages, including what we now refer to as the social determinants of education, health and wellbeing.
As a child and young person I had witnessed and benefitted from good practice; I had noted poor or bad practice; I had subsequently reflected on both; and as a creative and politically conscious person, I sought to go further in making a difference as an educationist.
2014 and beyond: gaps, omissions, rights and necessities. Sitting within the embrace of the COMPASS-NUT conference opening session, ‘My educated self’, listening to the stories / evidence of others, and responding to the question posed to us: ‘What would I tell myself then about what I have learnt about education now?’, I found myself reflecting on what was missing from my own very good education, which is even more relevant in 2014 and beyond. Here is my list of priorities (unranked):
First and most obviously, I was taught nothing about my own history as girl and woman, in my own country / society and within the larger world. I had to start to piece this together in my twenties through reading and postgraduate study. I would now identify this as an absolute right and necessity as part of the education of all children and young people.
Second, I identify the importance of the history of the Labour movement and the trade unions as a right and necessity within the school curriculum for all children and young people. This too I began to piece together in my twenties, although with a Labour and trade unionist father, I was more knowledgeable about class struggle than I was about women’s historical feminist struggles.
Both the above open up for consideration a range of social, cultural and political issues pertinent to individual pupils and students, and societies today, contributing to the development of research skills, critical thinking, social and personal awareness, and a basis for understanding the crucial relation between the ‘personal’ and the structural, including concepts such as internalisation, mediation, subjugation, oppression, dominance, empowerment, power. These are essential for personal survival in C21, as well as a healthy, functioning democracy.
Third, only in retrospect can I name my worst experience at school in my teens: bullying at the hands of white working-class girls in my own year. This language was not available at the time, and though not religious, I had already internalised the moral imperative of ‘turning the other cheek’ to attack or injury, and this is what I did. I would not fight back. I endured the repeated experiences (bullying always involves repetition) silently and on my own, discussing them with no-one, including my parents. I attempted to maintain dignity and carry on, hoping it would pass. It was only years later that I could identify the name-calling and shoving as bullying. Similarly, today, girls and boys benefit from the availability of the discourses of sexual harassment and (sexual)abuse (of power), which can help them seek help, set boundaries and keep safe. Without the language we remain unable to describe or understand our lives and experience, in particular the negative or traumatic.[i]
Today, I hope that the culture in schools, colleges and universities is moving beyond ‘bystander’ culture (itself an important concept), and includes teachers and other staff sufficiently versed in the needs of those who are bullied, to both prevent bullying happening, to notice when it is, and to provide effective support when it does. It must be a whole school / institution commitment and ethos. These are not ‘technical’ skills, and require CPD (Continuing Professional Development) for staff, facilitated not by bureaucrats, but by activists / artists / practitioners in the equalities and child protection fields.
Fourth, the social and political movements of the C20 and C21 that have challenged racism, homophobia, misogyny, social class disadvantage and prejudice, for example, have changed UK society for the better in ways that are significant for how we might now identify the function and philosophy of education. To prevent the unravelling of these achievements (which seems to be the aim of the current government) requires understanding, commitment and everyday action on the part of the populace, as individuals and as constituencies. This cannot be achieved and sustained within education without staff who are fully aware of these issues, and confident in their ability to act appropriately in their roles within school, college and university. For everyone, children and adults, this process of understanding (consciousness-raising) is unavoidably a process of politicization that goes beyond subject specialism.
Fifth: probably the most significant and far-reaching change over the last 50+ years is that UK society has become overtly hyper-sexualised and an increasingly coercive and violent environment for women and children: gender power relations now loom as a serious pervasive problem; an obstacle to the health and wellbeing of children and young people (the most vulnerable) in particular, producing a high-risk social environment beyond school and FHE. Scantily dressed or naked girls and women, pouting or twerking to camera, are used to sell almost everything, not least sex and heterosexual norms themselves. Girls and women are routinely objectified and commodified for profit. While adverts, the media, films and videos encourage boys and men to be predatory, dominant, even violent. And now their bodies too are up for commodification. These changes distort and undermine mental health, as well as relationships, as the boundary between ‘reality’ and fantasy, private and public becomes crushed by fear-inducing ideologies glossing ‘glamour’, ‘success’ and ‘celebrity’ as the goals. Many girls bypass education for self determination, career goals and life skills, and instead aspire to be WAGS or simply ‘famous’. And it’s all about sex (appeal) and the body. As Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett recently noted: “the sexual landscape has changed and under no circumstances can it be called freedom”.[ii]
At the moment, young people leave school and even higher education variously unprepared, ill-equiped and disadvantaged in the face of a powerful political economy that positions them in (mainly) binary opposition to each other (as female and male, masculine and feminine), and without the knowledge, skills and confidence to cope with the consumerist, heterosexist onslaught that works to shape and determine them as avid, dependent and sexual consumers: the market the neoliberal capitalist economy requires to make its profits.
Sixth: In particular, the perceived problem of sex and sexual relationships, now further complicated by the digital economy and social media and expanding opportunities for the sexual exploitation of vulnerable children and young people, requires an educational response that goes beyond ‘sex education’. In these charged and disturbing circumstances, ‘sex education’ is not the answer (as Cosslett and others have suggested); whereas Media Studies, Communication Studies, Women’s Studies and Gender Studies begin to look like basic educational rights and necessities, rather than subject options. But how do we staff such programmes, when these subjects have been systematically plundered, derided and closed down over the last 20+ years in our universities?[iii]
Education for safety/survival, agency and democracy. The neoliberal, consumerist attack on children and young people (and the rest of us) prioritises sex and sexual identity as all-consuming, overriding concerns, and is part of a process of depoliticisation and distraction from the real issues and enemies; part of the “there is no such thing as society” rhetoric. It is a politics, not just an economic position, and therefore requires a politically conscious response by both the body politic and our education system. To be fair and just and meaningful, education cannot be ‘neutral’ in the face of these forces and the ensuing damage to individuals and to society.[iv] We have for too long had an educational system (and a society) that has left social inequalities in place. In 2014, those inequalities, and the damage and despair that ensue, are being flaunted and re-enforced as ‘natural’, ‘right’ and ‘necessary’, by a government bloated by privilege, indifference and a venomous sense of superiority. As one academic, who has done more than most to expose the extent, function and consequences of inequalities in societies, has observed:
“We have an educational system that is designed to polarise people, one that creates an élite who can easily come to have little respect for the majority of the population, who think that they should earn extraordinarily more than everyone else, and defines the jobs of others as so low-skilled that it apparently justifies many living in relative poverty.”[v]
In his inaugural lecture this week, as Halford Mackinder professor of human geography at Oxford University, Dorling boldly hit the spot:
“The 1% are disproportionately made up not of people who are most able, but of those who are most greedy and least concerned about the rights, feelings and welfare of other people.”[vi]
From my experience as a mature postgraduate Sociology student in my twenties (while working as an art teacher in two London comprehensives); later as a Women’s Studies student, and as a feminist academic with years of experience teaching Art, Communication Studies, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies and creative writing for women, I know that these are among the educational opportunities that afford development of the whole person (women, men, transgender),[vii] empowering them to better understand how, for example, they got from A to B as girls / boys and arrived at specific sexual and gender identities, as well as the pressures exerted by society, culture and power, including for example, racism, heterosexism, homophobia, misogyny and social class.[viii] These academic programmes are among the ‘Studies’ that Thatcher loathed, because she knew they changed lives, put real power into the hands of ‘ordinary people’ disadvantaged and disempowered by society’s arrangements and structures.
In addition, in a democratic society that has signed up to the values and practices of human rights and social justice, children and young people need an education that provides an understanding of democracy itself, its value and distinctiveness, and what it needs for it to be sustained and maintained: i.e. an educated population, willing and able to participate.[ix]
And in a fair and just society that purports to promote an equalities culture, within which disablism, homophobia, misogyny, racism, social class prejudice and other ‘hate’ agendas are both illegal and culturally unacceptable, the education of children and young people needs to openly confront and engage with these issues, in preparation for life beyond school and FHE.
The question of ‘difference’ cannot be left to the media and other vested interests to define, control and foment.
Being a citizen in 2014 and beyond, as opposed to being defined simply as a consumer or subject, means something more complex than before. More political. Education must rise to that challenge. And this too has implications for the CPD of teachers, academics and other staff in education.
We must design and implement a state education clear about its core values; an education that supports democracy via human rights and social justice, mutual respect, the encouragement of creative agency, environmental awareness and understanding, and the (mental) health and wellbeing of both individuals and populations.
Essential to the process outlined here is the value placed on education itself within and by society and its members, including its governments, and not just a narrow definition of education for employability and the economy.
Education should not feel like a joyless imposition, but a creative opportunity, a springboard. For this to prevail, people must feel a sense of belonging and self worth. This is a collective achievement.[x]
For many working-class children and young people this is still not the case, and in some of their families and communities, education is perceived as ‘Other’, as inimical and irrelevant to their own class culture and communities.
Governments have a social responsibility towards the education of the people, rather than simply promoting the interests of the rich and powerful, attacking teachers in state schools, and deriding, determining and controlling the work of artists, researchers, academics and other professionals, such as lawyers and journalists (perceived as dangerous intellectuals). The responsibility of the latter must be to be sufficiently dangerous to the prevailing enemies of the people and our society at this time.
val walsh / 07 02 2014
[i] When, on my first visit to France at 19, staying en famille with my pen pal’s family for a life-changing 6 weeks, after writing to each other since the age of 13, towards the end of my stay her father chased me round the dining table when no-else was around, trying to grab and kiss me, again I told no-one, including my parents, until many years later I shared the memory with my adult daughter and women friends, by which time it could be told as an amusing anecdote. He was, after all, in loco parentis for those 6 weeks. How could I tell my friend (his daughter) or her mother (his wife) at the time? How could I tell my mother or father on my return? Or ever. Imagine their horror. I saw the consequences of disclosure/exposure as worse than the incident itself. I was shaken, and perhaps also knew that I might not be believed, and could even be blamed, his word against mine. It felt sordid, but is nothing compared to the experiences we now know children and young people have been subjected to by predatory older heterosexual men in what was (still is?) a climate of sexual laissez-faire. [ii] Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (28 01 2014) Porn’s influence is real. Sex education is the answer. The Guardian. [iii] Jake Beckett (01 02 2014) responding to Cosslett’s article (28 01 2014) in a letter to The Guardian shares his concern (as a recently retired science teacher required to teach reproduction but not sex education): “It was obvious that boys had been watching porn by the questions they asked”, and he suggests that what is needed is “an outside agency that employs teachers, actors or other suitable persons . . . to deliver theatre and talks that engage pupils and encourage discussion about a topic that is damaging their ability to judge what are normal relationships”. He notes the difficulty that many older teachers have addressing these issues. [iv] A similar argument can be made for eco-awareness and environmental values to be embedded within the culture of schools, colleges and universities. [v] Professor Danny Dorling (04 02 2014) Our education system is designed to polarize people, to create an élite. Guardian Education. [vi] Ibid.. [vii] And I would add Drama, Literature and making music to this list for schools. [viii] See Mary Kennedy, Cathy Lubelska & Val Walsh (1993) Making Connections: Women’s Studies, Women’s Movements, Women’s Lives. London, Taylor & Francis; Walsh (1995) ‘Eye witnesses, not spectators / activists, not academics: feminist pedagogy and women’s creativity’ in Katy Deepwell (ed.) New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies: 51-60. Manchester, Manchester University Press; Walsh (1995) ‘Transgression and the Academy: feminists and institutionalisation’ in Louise Morley & Val Walsh (eds.) Feminist Academics: Creative Agents for Change. London, Taylor & Francis: 86-101. [ix] Attending a Co op Education conference in Cardiff last year, I saw inspiring examples of how cooperative schools practise democracy, as well as talk about it. [x] See Walsh (1996) ‘Terms of engagement: pedagogy as a healing politic’ in Morley & Walsh (eds.) Breaking Boundaries: Women in Higher Education. London, Taylor & Francis:187-207. See also ’What is education for?’ and ‘Differential educational achievement’ in articles & statements section of togetherfornow.wordpress.com. Also, in the photos section of togetherfornow.wordpress.com areseveral photos of an NUT installation at Labour Party conference in Brighton (09 2013): an ‘apple tree’, where each apple contains a statement from a conference attendee, in response to the question: “What is education for?” Tristram Hunt should take a look at this as part of his research and preparation for his future job.
togetherfornow 