I am suffering from a book hangover. I have been making time to read, on the advice of my counsellor, and have ploughed my way through a number of books in the last few weeks. A couple have gripped me – ByThe Rivers of Babylon, by Nelson DeMille, whose obituary in the paper last week pointed me to his debut, was a compelling and exciting piece of brutality that seemed to have some relevance to the slaughter going on in Palestine at the moment, but it has left no particular mark, apart from a certain queasy aftertaste of a relish for brutality. I’ll look forward to reading another of his books, when I am in the mood for a well-written but unchallenging thriller, but I am not particularly enlightened by it, only further convinced that Israel’s terminal decline is very much of its military’s own making.
Last Friday, however, I came across American War on my ebook server while I was tidying up my Tolino, and read the first couple of pages. It was immediately engaging, even though it begins with a meta-narrative frame voiced by a character who then disappears from the story until the last fifty or so pages, a conceit I rather dislike. However, for a literary science fiction novel, the exposition in this story is well handled, and the narrator provides a very useful historical framing, while not giving too much away.
The novel is actually about a character the narrator knew when he was a child, Sarat1, whose tragedy is that of the war child: displacement, refugee status, recruitment, betrayal, torture and, well, that would be telling. Although her doom is played out within a broken America, it is the experience of any one of hundreds of thousands of children who have grown up or are growing up under the distant but devastating influence of the American military empire now, and over the last three quarters of a century. Her country is riven by a proxy war, and she is a mote within the storm who rises, through her fury, to achieve the status of decisive pawn.
The story is powerful in its own right. However, as a parable of how the American empire keeps its potential rivals from developing through the fomenting of division and war, it is a masterpiece. In early childhood, Sarat’s family is forced to seek refuge in a breakaway revolutionary territory, The Free Southern State, after her father is killed by a southern suicide bomber (they are not called that in this book, in order, I think, to not stress the comparison too early) and the simmering war between the U.S. and the Southern rebels threatens to reach their home. From the refugee camp, she is, eventually, recruited to the rebellion by an American agent who is in the pay of a controller from the unified empire of the Middle East, The Bouazizi Empire.2
The agent engages in all the shenanigans of an agent provocateur in the pay of the C.I.A. in Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine or anywhere the U.S. wants to keep in chaos. He recruits bombers, pays off their families, whose poverty is too deep to allow them to fight back against him, and sows a sense of belief in the fiction of the rightness of the confected conflict. The cassus belli for the South’s rebellion, incidentally, is the ban on the use of fossil fuels: that is the religious split over which the U.S. tears itself apart, and it is no sillier than the exaggerated distinction between Shia and Sunni, or Arab and Persian. The South fights to retain the right to burn fossil fuels, even after the technology is largely redundant.
The great tragedy of the story is a great crime, but it is a crime committed by a character whose motives we understand fully by the time it occurs. She has my unreserved pity and I have to remind myself that what she does is not justified by her suffering. Her crime is that of every soul-wounded jihadist: allowing her own sufferings and tragedies to eclipse her view of the rights and fears of others.
I am trying to be careful about spoilers, but I must go into the sequence which, in my view, locates this novel as a dark satire of American atrocity, rather than some weak-arsed “warning about the future” so, if you want to read the book unsullied, you should stop reading this post now. At the core of Sarat’s moral undoing is not her choice to join the rebellion, or her commitment to political assassination, questionable as they are. Sarat is broken by imprisonment in a military torture camp. In here, she is taught that she did still hold illusions about the restraints on power, and about her own ability to maintain some thread of agency in a life which has repeatedly beaten her with messages of her worthlessness. She is brutalised by people who believe they are being clever. Their rape-acts are couched in a sort of science that is supposed to make them virtuous torturers. They are the camp guards of Abu-Ghraid and Quantanamo who return to their respectable middle-class lives after making a living from sating their satanic lusts behind the razor wire. They are the least human of us all. El Akkad’s portrayal of these people is a triumph, in their bureaucratic, shoulder-shrugging pretence of disinterested duty, and the fact that he allows his heroine to enact a revenge upon one of these monsters is a weakness of the book – a little too neat, a little implausible, and setting up a ridiculous coincidence in the final act – satisfying as it becomes.
Incidentally, if these people suffer,3 I don’t care. I cannot raise sympathy. It is not a revelation to know that torture is wrong and torture is not hard to recognise. They crossed the line. They had a choice. There are some things that it is worth dying to avoid doing, and the real Guantanamo guards would not have been killed for refusing orders. A few unpleasant years, perhaps, and some economic disadvantage in the richest nation in the world, but still nothing compared to the loss of their eternal souls.
This novel impresses me the way very few do. It is not perfect, but it holds together and, in its cleverly coherent fictional world, it is true to the actual world. Nothing except the great final crime is without precedent in this novel of horrors, and that crime is something we know all militaristic nations have plans to commit, if they can ever find an excuse and overcome their fear of retribution.4
Over the last year, the monstrous, squinting depravity of the military mind, enabled and encouraged by its despotic political lackey-chorus, has been flaunting the worst of its diseased imagination in a holocaust against refugees. The sheer lack of fucks given by the bureaucracy of hate that must have been necessary to enact the pager and walkie-talkie mass assassinations is blinding; as bad as any act in El-Akkad’s fiction. The blind hatred of the Hamas warriors, who employed rape and child murder in their revenge for the near-century of Israeli atrocities is as difficult to justify as the final act of Sarat in her agonised hatred of her oppressors and torturers, but the soullessness, implacability and nihilistic determination of the Israeli mafia-war state, even in the midst of its nation’s obvious death-spiral, is giddying.
This is a novel of history, of prophecy, and of contemporary commentary. I recommend it.
Names matter in this book. El Akkad uses a clever device to give a southern-states black/Latino American girl an Arabic name, pointing to the central satirical theme of the novel. [↩]
It’s coronation weekend. I’ve not participated and I have felt more annoyed by it than interested when it has intruded. You know the cringe inspired by a performance that’s slightly off-key? That’s how I feel about it all. I don’t want to join in with The Guardian’s self-admiring republicanism: like most of the Guardian’s attempts to paint itself as still relevant, it has a whiff of trust-fund radicalism to it, but, on this point, my sense of events chimes with its.
A billionaire gets a ceremonial celebration of his privilege that costs the state millions, and we’re told we can’t afford to fund a decent health service, to educate children properly, or treat victims of war and oppression who seek safety here with human dignity.
For most of my life, I’ve been an intellectual republican but a sentimental monarchist, but I’m alienated from all of it now. It’s a farce: a Netflix mega-production pretending to be real history. It’s the simulacrum in the middle of our national breakdown, an embarrassment.
Synik is a hip-hop artist from Zimbabwe, currently living in Portugal. He released this album earlier this year, and it is his first since the left his home country and made the arduous journey to Europe. In it, he discusses exile, alienation, the exploitation of migrants and the hostility they encounter.
His real name is Gerald Mugwheni, and there is an article1 about the political pressure that drives artists to leave Zimbabwe, including an appreciation of the album, in the much-mourned online paper, The Conversation.
I don’t listen to much hip-hop. A year or so back, Englistan,by RizMC2 caught my attention. I listened to it again this week, as I have just bought a pair of bone conduction earphones, and can start listening to music as I walk the dog or cycle. I had had to give that up because earphones set off tinnitus – another of the indignities of encroaching old age. Englistan is a theatrical, even cinematic experience. A Travel Guide For The Broken strikes me as a more lyrical (in the classic sense of the word) style of rap. I think you’d describe it as downbeat hip-hop: it has a rich, melodic jazz inventiveness that is immediately musically engaging.
What has kept me listening, though, is the way the raps catch you with narrative force: on ‘Underground’, Synik talks about working in the shadow economy; ‘Wega’ is a clear depiction of being in an alien environment, while your heart is focused on home. The title track is quite special. It seems to describe a response to an experience which might be the defining adventure of our times – the experience of being uprooted by economic terror and political victimisation.
We were fractured
The scattered fragments from broken homelands
Transient bodies,
Dislocated and displaced
With borderless imaginations we discarded the familiar for worlds unknown
Forced to become adept in contorting limbs to fit in confined spaces
Which constituted a further breaking
We traversed inhospitable lands in search of new homes
And the warmth of other suns
In our time the destiny of man presents itself in political terms.
Thomas Mann
Today is the third day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I am travelling home after having visited my mother and my sister. This morning, the front page of my mother’s right-wing newspaper was covered with pictures of terror and pain and the business section noted that BAE systems are the best performing stock in a turbulent market. Even my mother, in her increasing dementia, raised the topic of the Russians’ massacre of the innocents when I got to her flat for breakfast.
My sister was less interested, or less obviously so. We are careful about our discussion of politics, although it animates us both, and we are sympathetic to one another’s outlooks. She is preparing for another Extinction Rebellion action, and for the appeal against her conviction for protesting against the Murdoch empire’s half-century of climate crisis denial. On Thursday night she spoke at a meeting. I spent the evening at my mother’s flat, then met Charlotte – my sister – at a pub afterwards. She was with people from her meeting; good, impassioned activists who are committed to pushing for real change in the way the world is run, in the hope of mitigating the damage done to the world by human activity.
I felt ashamed in their company. I am torn by a guilty desire to affect indifference, to the war and to the climate disaster. I had my season of political hope2 and it made me very unhappy,3 and the awareness of my impotence in public matters, and the apparently illusory nature of the virtues of democratic involvement, seem to press on me whenever I break my embargo on news. I leave my phone in another room when I sleep; I try to discipline myself to avoid the news, and I seek calm and serenity.
And yet my sister’s comrades seemed to me to be – not happier than I am – but more aware of themselves and warmed by their mutual endeavour. I’ve no idea whether there is a Christian among them, but they seem to have the clear-sighted tenacity of hope that I have always envied in true believers. I didn’t get to know them closely, but they included me in their round of goodbye hugs and I felt they were giving me access to the secret of their power, as they drew their comfort from each other and, generously, shared it with me.
I found the Yeats poem while reading an LRB article4 by Seamus Perry, on Colm Tóibín’s new novel,((http://colmtoibin.com/content/magician)) about the life of Thomas Mann. I intended to read the entire issue of the magazine, taking advantage of my train journey home, but this article has brought me up short. It seems to address perfectly the disillusionment I feel towards taking responsibility for anything outside my personal orbit. I was surprised to read that Yeats was a reluctant revolutionary. He wrote, after all, perhaps the greatest poem of struggle of the twentieth century,5 a poem that might today be applied to the awful glory of Ukrainian heroism in the face of the Russian spasm of fascist imperialism: in this horror, another “terrible beauty” is born. And yet, at least at the end of his life, in Politics, the last poem of the last collection he published, he expressed a weary indifference to worldly engagement.
I ‘did’ An Irish Airman…6 at school and I learnt the first stanza of Second Coming7 when I was a taxi driver, about twenty years ago, and I have, at times, taken a non-poetry-enthusiast’s limited interest in Yeats, as both an historical figure and an artist. I respected his reputation as one of the best of the modernist writers, but he was shaded from my enthusiasm by the fact that I despised them as a group because my teachers were all so uncritically adoring of modernism. Yeats got lumped in with (well, actually, overshadowed by) Lawrence, who was drilled into us as a paragon when he seemed to me to be a hack. It is only now that I realise that most of my English teachers just weren’t that good: they may have been devoted pedagogues, but their tastes were shaped by their polytechnic educations and their 1960s and ‘70s, lefty-ish, play-for-today political outlooks. Lawrence, with his leaden, explicit prose and his interest in sex and class, was easy to teach; Yeats, an infinitely more subtle and wide-ranging writer, was a more difficult study, even if his is the more beautiful work, by a country mile.
“Yeats sometimes feared that his work would be distorted by the restrictions of Irish culture.”8 He was, throughout his life, inescapably a political and public person, serving, to his apparent regret,9 six years as an Irish senator. It seems that, as he could not escape Irish culture, neither could he escape politics, living, as he did, in the long, bitter decline of British colonialism, whose death watch has lingered for over a century now.
It must be a terrible thing to be forced to upend your life in resistance to an inescapable event. How bitter the longing for the life abandoned must be. To my modern ear, the poem seems to drift close to depicting lechery as a virtuous alternative to engagement, but my response is, no doubt, an artefact of the time, and misses some of the poem’s cultural echoes: according to the notes in my copy of the Collected Poems of Yeats10, its phrases reflect the anonymous sixteenth Century English song, Westron Wind.
Westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed Agayne.11
Perry has this to say about how Yeats gives privately cherished passion a greater truth than worldly knowledge and engagement:
You could imagine a much more straightforward poem that pitted public discourse against, say, the intimate conversation of lovers, but Yeats does something much odder than that: he sets public language against the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze. And here, too, Yeats was entirely in tune with Mann, who was similarly fascinated by the way that catching sight of someone you don’t know can make you forget yourself – or, rather, suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought.
(( Perry (2022)))
For Mann, apparently, aesthetics (that ‘forgetfulness’), at least partially, manifested in a life of secret and vividly focussed crushes on unsuspecting men and boys. The most famous expression of this in his art is the ecstatic fixation of Aschenbach the writer upon the boy Tadzio in Death In Venice.12 It’s decades since I read it, but I remember feeling slightly alienated by the conflict between the internal values of the story – an ambiguous mix of social self-criticism and moral reverie – and the actual sleaziness of the character, consumed, after all the angst about aesthetic ideals, by a lust which is the deepest crime of modern culture.
Like Yeats, Mann was dragged into political activity by his times: first by the German collapse into Nazism, and then by McCarthyism in the States.((Meyers, J. (2012) ‘Thomas Mann In America’ Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 51, Issue 4, Available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0051.419;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1 Accessed 6th March 2022)) Even earlier, his Nobel acceptance speech of 192913 addressed the balance between art and the political atmosphere in which it is practised. He is, however, considered an ‘apolitical’ writer.14 After he had grasped the full stupidity and dishonesty of the McCarthy putsch…
Mann vowed not to make any more political statements, which could be dangerously distorted, and wryly remarked, “the world needs peace—but I need it too.”
Unsure how to respond to the experience of reading a poem that I feel might have been written for me in my current situation, I turned away from this post and read some news articles on my phone. The Russian attack was utterly mesmerising to watch, a dreadful deluge of iron and diesel spills, unleashed by the shrill screech of Putin’s deranged sanctimony. By the time I reached home, it had become clear that something that should be impossible was happening: the Ukrainians were standing up to their invaders and the Russians appeared to be stumbling. The Ukrainians’ courage was inhuman: it must have felt like watching a tidal wave coming at you, but as a million of them fled to the borders, hundreds of thousands of them rushed to take up arms.
By the next evening, there were interviews on the BBC’s Ukrainecast podcast with British-resident Ukrainians who were equipping themselves to return home to enlist. In answer to the predictable question, they all said they had no choice.
No choice. Like Mann, more suited to a life of bourgeois deception than to confronting evil, and like Yeats, who felt himself fettered into a conflict that reached back as far as the Norman invasion of his country and of which he was weary before he even began to publish. But unlike me. I, for now at least, seem to have a choice and I have chosen to be inactive.
Charlotte told me, when she first threw herself into Extinction Rebellion, that she didn’t expect to change anything. She just wanted to be on the right side of history. I understood that, but I still believed in the virtue of political hope and was, at the time, deeply involved in the Labour party. I felt that party politics offered the best opportunity to make a change, but that all fell apart with the 2019 election. At the time I wrote:
So, I’m looking at my position…the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that…is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics…I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Instead, I crumbled when it became apparent that Starmer had lied to gain the leadership and was just another capitalist lackey, pushing the anti-Semitism lie to squeeze out any supporters of real social justice, in favour of returning the party to right-wing conformity.((https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/whet-does-starmer-stand-for/)) Rather than take my energy elsewhere, I retreated.
I have been surprised by how deeply I have fallen into nihilism, and how unable I am to rekindle hope. I have always believed that optimism is my natural state, and that pessimism is a pointless self-scourging: why anticipate sorrow? For the past two years, though, I have felt that our last hope of stopping the end of the democratic era has died, and that the drift towards authoritarian tribalism is unstoppable.
And yet, my ideals have not changed. I still believe that economic equality is a necessary first-condition of a just society. I still believe that the maltreatment of animals is at the core of the rapacious relationship of capitalism to the planet. What I have not done is find, “the private and wordless intensity of an absorbed gaze” that Perry describes as the state in which one might, “suddenly discover yourself to be something other than you had thought”. My fugues have been fruitless. I am as adrift as I was two and a half years ago, when my political hopes died. My courage – my optimism – has been overwhelmed by the sense that the world really is spiralling towards destruction.
Is it just a question of courage? Raymond Williams said that, “To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing,” but I never wanted to be radical. I don’t see my politics as radical: the belief that one life is no less valuable than the next should not be a radical assertion. It is the basis of decency, and its denial is obscene. I think, fundamentally, I’m not suited to political engagement: I’m too self-conscious and too naked; too heart-on-sleeve.
That’s an excuse, though, of course. Yeats didn’t want to be drawn into politics:
…But the strife engendered when an intensely inward mind finds itself cast into remorselessly political times was perhaps more of an epochal predicament than it sounds. The great works of Yeats…are all about a lonely romanticism finding itself forced to enter the public world of ‘what’s difficult’, and finding that one way of attempting the task was to become a man of masks.
((Perry))
What to do? What to do?
I sought permission from Simon and Schuster to post this poem back in March. I heard nothing, and I did nag, so I’m going tp do it anyway. I own the book, and this post only makes sense if you’ve read the poem, so let’s see what happens. I expect I am beneath their notice, but if they do notice me, it will be exciting. [↩]
Last Friday, the day after the election, in a fog of tiredness and sorrow, I went to work, where I dragged learners through English mocks, and fought to believe that anything can make any difference now.
One learner, who manages an incredibly demanding life of balancing the needs of various dependents with a zero hours care job, was late. When she came in, she was, as ever, flustered. She offered her apologies and said,
“I had to get on to the Universal Credit. They’ve only paid half my rent.”
I sympathised and pushed her work in front of her. She completed it in her habitual rush, with her usual betrayal of her intelligence, because her way of coping with a life of overwhelming economic and familial responsibility at too young an age is to do everything in a hurry, avoiding dangerous reflection. We discussed each answer, interpreting how she hadn’t read the questions fully or considered all the options in the multiple choice section, and how, with a few minutes’ care, she is perfectly capable of passing what should be, for her, the formality of this exam. She promised to be early next week, and to take a few minutes to become calm, but I expect she will rush in to the exam room late, pre-occupied by another crisis that she will bravely cope with, as she tries to make the space to better her life.
In the afternoon, she came back for the maths class. I had been preparing for this class for several weeks, laying the ground for nervous learners: it’s the one in which we move from basic calculation with decimal numbers to working with fractions. This is where people give up: they believe that ‘fractions are hard’, and that they have some innate inability to ‘do hard maths’ and this section of the course is always as much an exercise in boosting learners’ self-belief and reflecting on how much they have already achieved as it is about introducing new skills and understanding.
She and my other learner who had turned up – there’s a wave of colds and stomach bugs keeping children off school, and two other women were at home with sick offspring – have developed a friendship that is still at the stage of curiosity about one another. Off-topic discussions, pleasurable as they can be, are a headache for me, as I only get two hours each week to teach a demanding curriculum. I had given them their warm up task – a few questions on what we had covered the previous week – and checked that they knew where they were with it, and I left the room to go to the loo while they completed it. By the time I got back, they were discussing the election result.
I groaned inwardly, and cautioned myself to be like a fly fisherman with a bite: to let it run until I could feel they were tiring and then take control again. A few weeks before, as part of my duty to ‘promote British values’, I had used a voter registration poster in our English class for an exercise on identifying presentational features in a text. At the time, the learner of whom I am writing had asked me my politics and I had explained that I wasn’t allowed to say, and she had responded, after a discussion of why that was sensible for a teacher, that she reckoned I was for Corbyn. At the time, I’d congratulated myself on remaining neutral. Now, as I sat quietly, waiting for my opportunity to get them back on task, she said,
“I was right about you.”
Photo: Isle of Wight County Press (I think)
She’d seen a photo on the local newspaper’s website, in one of the few articles the openly Tory-leaning rag had bothered to publish on Labour’s campaign, that had a picture of a group of Labour supporters gathering for an event in Ryde, smiling, comradely, happy, optimistic. At the back, peaking over the shoulder of the shorter man in front, grinning like a hungover idiot, I was clearly visible.
“You know I can’t talk about it,” I said, shaken.
“Yeah,” she said, “I voted for Boris. I’ve never voted before, but I voted Conservative.”
It was as if she hated me. I know she doesn’t, but that was how it felt.
I haven’t blogged about this election, beyond changing my homepage to a trite meme and linking to a couple of posts I’d heard about through the news. I haven’t blogged much this year, of course, but I did expect that, when the longed-for election campaign happened, I’d be leaping into prolix action, as I had in 2017.
Instead, I’ve been involved, ‘on the streets’, and through the Constituency Labour Party’s own systems. I’ve been the assistant secretary of the CLP for nearly two years, but that has, until recently, only meant being the keyboard monkey for the secretary and chair, both of whom have become friends. Just before the election started, however, the chair withdrew himself from consideration for the position of candidate, having been subject to sustained vilification, including threats to his family, since the last election, and the secretary got himself locked out of the Labour comms system for a mistaken breach of the opaque rules, which have more to do with internal politicking within the national party structure than they do with making the system work.
Thanks to these circumstances, my role became, accidentally, central. Over the last six weeks, I have probably written more words than in the previous twelve months. They just haven’t found their way here. The chair, who had become the new candidate’s campaign manager, told me, late on in the campaign, that his role was taking the fight to the Tories, and my role was galvanising the troops. I hadn’t been told that before, but had simply adopted the job that I didn’t see anyone else doing, or being in a position to do.
Each day after work, once I’d done enough to be sure that I would know where I was for the next lessons, I turned off my work laptop and went straight on to my own computer, where I would often be trapped until after midnight. If the next day wasn’t a teaching day, I would be out with the Cowes and East Cowes branch, delivering leaflets door-to-door, or helping with the distribution of garden signs and posters to people who had contacted the party, asking how they could help. In the evenings, there were many events, most of which were a pleasure: I have spent more time in pubs over the last few weeks than I have for many years.
At first, it was exciting. I was surrounded by people who believe, broadly, in what I believe: that humans are only of any account if they serve the group; that selfishness is a moral and intellectual failure; that the dominant political and economic system is, without question, evil; childish, rapacious and evil, but that elation had, after the first couple of weeks, begun to compete with exhaustion. I did not, however, lose hope, but I began to feel a little let down by comrades whose belief in the coming victory of justice and good sense was tempered with caution.
Two things gave me a different outlook to the majority of people fighting for a Labour victory in this election: my Christianity and my disavowal of social media.
I am not an ardently practising Christian, but I came, through the nineties and noughties, to realise that I cannot escape my faith, and that the arguments against faith that were trendy in those decades, were, in the words of Terry Eagleton, a process of Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching against a system of thought that the neo-atheists wilfully misunderstood and misrepresented. Earlier this year, I joined Christians On The Left. Through the election they have been sending out a daily email, the 2019 Prayer Diary. Written by a theologian who only introduced herself as Hazel, they were wonderfully welcome at a time when I didn’t have the space to read my normal blogs and news for which I receive update emails that, through the campaign, I simply had to delete, to be able to keep up with my inboxes. Each day, though, I read her prayers, and then got on with whatever needed doing.
As for social media, I think my absence from it since July 2017 has given me the clarity to think for myself and to avoid the political panic to which I am prone and which, I think, guided many people in this election. The Tories are crisis capitalists: they thrive on the established P.R. tactic of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). I suspect, without being in a position to offer evidence, that this was the election in which the capitalists realised their technological dream of controlling people’s reactions from within. I may expand upon that at another time, but I think that, accomplished as we in the Labour Party are at using social media to make ourselves feel effective, it means nothing unless the people who own the media are on your side.
Actually, I did rejoin Twitter for the duration of the campaign. It helped me to keep up with events in the CLP, where a disparate set of groups, spread over the largest constituency in the country (by population), were arranging their campaigning efforts semi-autonomously, and were not always brilliant at communicating outside their social media bubbles. I tried to join Facebook as well, but was frustrated. I think my use of Firefox’s Facebook Container extension, coupled with a disposable email address and a phone number linked to a burner SIM card I had no intention of using again, tipped the creepy capitalist bastards off. I’m rather proud to have been blocked by Facebook before I posted a thing!
A facile pretence of utility and ubiquity have made social media essential in politics, and have, I believe, handed the reins of power over to a capitalist hegemony as completely as any other factor in this election. I had set up my home server, after two years of study and trial and error, less than a month before the election was announced, and would have been lost without the calendar, to-do lists and contacts server it hosts, but I was still obliged to use a Google calendar for shared calendaring with the CLP. We need to look at owning our infrastructure, but it’s a hard sell. People who automatically accept the ‘services’ to which they are tied by their choice of computer system and mobile phone have a hard time understanding that they are being used, when they have put so much effort into just mastering the technology that seeks to control them. The idea that it is escapable defeats them, as the idea that all politicians are not the same defeats people who are struggling to survive in an economic system that is tightening around their lives. There is a simple answer (simpler than the route of learning and self-building that I have used), but how many people will make the effort to do it?
Earlier this year, I read Democracy Hacked, by Martin Moore. A couple of months ago, I read, almost in one sitting, the Edward Snowden autobiography, Permanent Record and, just before the election was called, I bought The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff, which I will now have the time to read fully. If you want to understand what has happened to democracy over the last decade, you need to read these texts. You do not control your data, and, consequently, electronic communication does not, any more, give us a full say in our democracy. We’ve overthrown one tyranny of informational cartels to replace it with another. We need new mechanisms of resistance.
I’m not keen on going into mainstream media’s role in this election. Enough people are already examining that, although I will add a couple of personal observations. Firstly, the full emotional crash of the exit poll was pre-announced by about twenty seconds, for me, by the smirk on the face of Andrew Niel as he talked over the countdown to it. Rattling through his bland script, he looked as though he had a hand stuffed down his truss, so excited was he by the predicted result to which he, I assume, had had early access. If you believe in democracy, honesty or truth, the BBC is not your friend, any more than Facebook is.
Secondly, it dawned on me, as I angrily skimmed The Guardian’s website each morning, that the key figures among its columnists and editorial staff are probably on a lot more than £80,000 per annum and, while they cling to the pose of being ‘of the left’ as their journalistic USP, very few of them will have voted for a party that wanted to raise taxes for the richest 5%. I think their utter betrayal of democracy is a good enough reason to not “support independent journalism” for another year. Let them take comfort from their massive wealth, their second homes and their positions of quisling influence.
There is a lot of commentary on the election leaping out and I haven’t had the heart to try to keep up over the weekend. Yesterday, Saturday, we met other Island Labour members in a Newport pub to have a bit of a thank you session, with the candidate, Richard Quigley, a gloriously happy, funny, clever and warm man, bringing his wife and daughter so he could say his personal thanks. Richard has been a pleasure to support in the campaign, as Julian, his manager, was in the last. In the pub, many of us were talking about how we are now facing the very real dread of the last restraints being released from the Tory plunder of our country’s assets. We’re thinking about the fact that we will not be able to afford ‘health insurance’ when the Fascists pocket the bribes from the Yank money and drug industries; we’re thinking about the fact that those of us who are in public service jobs will probably endure a continued slide into deeper and deeper working destitution, if we are lucky enough to keep our jobs. We are finding it harder to think without real, urgent horror of the fate of disabled people, homeless people, people who cannot find legal redress for rape or harassment and how soon it will be our turn to join them. It’s personal. Dying, untreated, of some wretched cancer, or living with pain that would be treatable if we were part of the 5%, now seems like our common fate.
What we are supposed to do, if we follow the advice that we have told ourselves since Jeremy Corbyn first gave us hope, is to pull together, look to one another, and begin to support those people already jettisoned by the Tories’ campaign of exclusion and abandonment. Some people are talking about it, but we all know that the Blairites will try another deluded attempt to drive the party into impotence by reopening the insane whinges they’ve been picking at since they were crushed in 2015. And, pathetic as their positions are, they have The New Statesman and The Guardian behind them, so they don’t have to be right, just shamelessly persistent.
So, I’m looking at my position. If infighting does get a grip, I may decide to not stand for local party office at the next AGM. Over the election, I have made new friends, or deepened existing ones, and the idea of becoming a social activist, working on practical projects, rather than just being a political campaigner, appeals to me. Food banks, advice and support networks, and care volunteers are all able to affect lives in a way that, while it is not as powerful as political office, is more useful than arguing over dogma and political tactics. And, if I convince a few people to see through the lies of the capitalist hegemony on the way, all the better.
One other thing is troubling me; an issue that is like the ticking bomb that fascists love to use to justify their cruelty. If, by some miracle, the vile Bozo Johnson manages to hold together a government for five years, the timeline for installing a government that will meet its responsibilities to the climate emergency before the deadline that scientists now say is the very latest chance to save human civilisation will be halved. We have to stop the Tories before then. We have to. I am ambivalent about Extinction Rebellion, but I think it’s all we’ve got left. We are into a period of resistance, not participation.
Let’s get back to my Tory voting learner. I can’t discuss her much more closely than I already have, but I can make some guesses about those things that drive her. Not ideologically racist, she has, I suspect, suffered humiliations at the hands of people whom she perceives as different, and came to the Island, partly, to get away from communities that are in turmoil and have been turned against one another by poverty and poorly resourced and led policing, social structures and political leadership. For her, Brexit seems like a triumph of the poor over the powerful – a reversal of the truth, as it turns out, but if your information comes from social media and tabloids, you can continue to believe that.
For her, also, they are all the same. It’s the FUD lie of lies, that says that politics is pointless and the safest and bravest response is to follow the herd. Political voting is confused with voting for a Love Island contestant, where the outcome is similar to a bet: you win if you back the winner.
In truth, of course, backing the winner in this election has guaranteed that the phone calls she gets, when she says, “Someone after money: they can jog on,” will increase. The waiting time for her Universal Credit will lengthen, the amount she is entitled to reduced, so her debts will deepen; the inadequate working protections she has at the moment will be removed one at a time, until she will be paying, not only for her work travel, but for her uniform, her equipment, and, finally, for the privilege of being employed.
She hasn’t yet noticed, I suspect, that the NHS has been privatised. The fact that ‘Boris’, as she calls him, lied about putting more money into the NHS hasn’t got through to her. They all throw figures around, don’t they? They’re all the same.
When she told me that she had voted Tory, I stared at her for a moment, taking in her beauty, her nicotine-stained front teeth, her bravely well turned out appearance that is testament to her courage, given the hours she works, and then muttered that I couldn’t get into it. It was an uncomfortable moment.
She got on with her work, doing well, grasping lowest common multiples and then comparison of fractions, but the moment must have lingered for her, as well as for me. I realised that, for her, I am part of the body of authority that keeps her working and working and working, denying her the right to gain full realisation of her talents and potential and, by confronting my politics, she was asserting herself; laying claim to a dignity she doesn’t realise I already see in her. She’s not to know that I earn less than her, and that, for all my education, I am as constrained and limited by the political and economic system as she is.
Finally, as we were summing up the learning at the end of the class, she brought it up again.
“It bothers you, don’t it,” she said, reverting to her mannered London speech, which is not how she usually talks to me.
I wanted to channel Jonathan Pie, and descend into a rant that would contain all the frustration and pain I had been feeling since ten o’clock the previous night, when Huw Edwards and Andrew Neil had gleefully pronounced my country’s doom. I stared into her eyes for a moment, trying to find the right thing to say. Nothing came.
In my struggle, I remembered Christians On The Left’s prayer email of that morning. I hadn’t absorbed it properly: I’d been too tired and too sad, but one line had jumped out at me:
Be still, and know that I am God
Psalm 46:10
I stopped searching and words came.
“Your vote is your own choice,” I said. “It’s wonderful that you voted. The fact that you have voted, for the first time, is a really good thing. The more people who vote, the more powerful all our votes are. I celebrate that.”
I doubt I fooled her. I suspect that, given the struggles she has and the job she does, she is a perceptive person, who saw how much pain I was in. However, she smiled, packed her bag, and went on to her next obligation, her courage and dignity undamaged by our exchange, knowing a little bit more about maths than she had when she came in.
A month or so back, a friend of mine who suffers from long-term, severe mental illness was attacked by a group of boys on her estate. They took photographs of that attack and posted them on social media.
They are pretty much immune from prosecution,1 thanks to the ‘viral’ response to their post. Granted, they are now pariahs in their close-knit community, and their ugly, stupid act will follow them into their adulthood, cropping up whenever they attempt to make any public progress in their lives. If you believe in mob-justice, then justice might be said to have been done. The state, however, because of the illegal publication of their identities on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, is powerless to take action against them. It can only attempt to protect them from the self-aggrandizing vigilantism to which they have opened themselves by their use of social media and their grotesque immaturity. The legitimate, accountable, democratically-authorised legal system has been short-circuited by a foreign-owned capitalist monopoly that uses the everyday indignities of humanity as grist to its algorithms and regards legal and democratic structures as barriers to wealth creation and the self-actualisation of the cleverest, luckiest and most amoral elite in history.
I saw my friend last weekend. She is terrified. She is not engaging with the community which piously leapt to her defense after years of treating her as a local embarrassment, and she thinks the police are trying to victimise her: their inability to give her a clear course of legal remedy for her ordeal has confused the issue beyond her ability to engage with it. She is also mesmerised by her Facebook feed, which seems to be confirming her long-standing belief that the world is purposed towards her destruction. Horribly, I think that her fear that the hatred towards the boys will swing back to her may be justified. That is the nature of restless, self-righteous, technologically-enabled groupthink.
The rule of law is a mainstay of democracy. Facebook undermines that rule. It is inherently anti-democratic.
A Short History of Social Media and Political Campaigning
The 2015 Labour Leadership Poll was a triumph for people who sought to manipulate social media in the service of meaningful political change: what Jeremy Corbyn called, “…a thirst for something more communal, more participative.”((Cited in Nunns, Alex, The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path To Power, (1st ed) OR Books, New York & London, 2016, p143))
By the 2017 general election, however, the political promise of the medium had begun to be diminished by forces other than the well-directed groundswell of public feeling that had empowered the Elect Corbyn for Leader movement. I am not an unquestioning fan of Momentum, but I think that the campaign to elect Corbyn as leader was a model of how to use social media to a positive purpose. What they achieved in ‘15 was to break the ‘echo chamber’ or bubbling effect of Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms, by pulling in unsympathetic friends of sympathisers, and engaging them in debate and exposing them to sincere voices of political hope.((Miller, Patrick R., et al. “Talking Politics on Facebook: Network Centrality and Political Discussion Practices in Social Media.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, 2015, pp. 377–391. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24371839)) By the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and by 2017, the social media companies had realised that this was a loophole in their control of users’ media consumption and had adjusted.
Before Facebook became a publicly quoted company, focussed on advertising spend, it had been chasing engagement over content control, powering for growth, and there was a certain freedom of expression allowed to its users. By 2016, it was chasing the control of what its users were seeing to a far greater extent, refining their offering to advertisers and data-purchasers and trying to present a soothing, ‘mimetic’ (ie, reflective, flattering) experience to users which would make viewing Facebook a comfortable and reinforcing experience to which people would return without worry.((Lanchester, John, You Are The Product, London Review Of Books, Vol 39 No. 16, Aug. 2017.)) That is why they bubble you. It’s not a service. It’s a mechanism of control.
Furthermore, the sophistication of the JeremyForLeader campaign, alongside the Occupy movement and the lessons learned from The Arab Spring movements, had caught the attention of other forces, both within the U.K. and outside it. Academic studies translated to media management policies((Miller, Patrick R., et al. “Talking Politics on Facebook: Network Centrality and Political Discussion Practices in Social Media.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, 2015, pp. 377–391. www.jstor.org/stable/24371839.)) which were adopted by right-wing forces((Schroeder, Ralph, Digital media and the rise of right-wing populism Social Theory after the Internet: Media, Technology, and Globalization UCL Press. (2018) https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20krxdr.6 )) and foreign intelligence services((llcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. “Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 31, no. 2, 2017, pp. 211–235. www.jstor.org/stable/44235006)) to undermine the impact of organised popular campaigns. Populism swings in many directions.
In short, the glory days are over for democrats who use social media. An open technology – the internet – that was designed to release knowledge, communication and democratic access from the establishment gatekeepers who had directed public debate since at least the 1850s2, has been co-opted by a new capitalist, plutocratic, neo-liberal elite, to bind its customers into a tower of Babel, in which coherent exchange of ideas is anathema, labelled as TL:DNR.
The Limits of ‘Privacy’ Settings
Know this: a private Facebook group is not private. It is exclusive, in that the labour put into it is restricted to those who choose to sign up to it. This means that it serves as a mechanism of exclusion of those people who, for whatever reason, choose to not participate in social media. However, that ad hominen rant against a comrade to which you succumbed during the Owen Smith leadership challenge is available to the right level of advertiser, if they’re searching for dirt on the Labour Party during an election campaign.
And that situation assumes that you’re wise enough to restrict your rants to a ‘private’ group, and to not share your breathless prose in a moment of vainglory to your main feed. Or that all the members of the group have the best wishes of the party at heart. Or that the administrators have kept up with the constant changes to Facebook’s privacy rules, and that the group is still actually set to ‘private’, rather than just ‘closed’. Or that no one is taking screenshots for malicious purposes.
But you know that, really. How else do the rumours of ‘green infiltrators’ get started?
Unless you delete your account – not just a single comment, but your whole account – and forego logging back into it for two weeks after you have deleted it, everything you have ever uploaded, written, sniped or ‘shared’, is sitting in a folder on Facebook’s servers, available to the highest bidder, and linked to you. Have you ever enjoyed watching someone try to backtrack on an opinion they expressed five years ago in a drunken moment? It could be you. Only the safety of the crowd protects you.
The Great Con
There is a rather mischievous argument doing the rounds in internet freedom circles that claims China actually has more politically effective internet access than the free West. I consider that nonsense: Chinese citizens have definitely scored real successes in changing government policy through internet activism, but they’ve been pretty well educated in staying away from economic, central government and foreign affairs topics. However, the state is not the only enemy of freedom, and in the West, it is not even the most powerful.
As John Lanchester puts it:
Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens…Your eyes are directed towards the place where they are most valuable for Facebook.
The sight of large chunks of a socialist party beavering away, providing free labour to create content for a few American monopolist corporations fills me with despair. It is as if the Chartists had had their discussions about citizens’ rights in the tearoom of the House of Lords. In the light of what we know about how Facebook played (or, as they claim, were played, during) the last American presidential election, we should understand that they have worked out how to neutralise justice movements’ energy and commitment. They want to keep you happy, yes; that is why there are cat videos, but angry people click as well, and division is incredibly easy to sow, if you know where to lay the seeds, and you own the field.
Know this also: social media, particularly Facebook, is as much a product of manipulative psychological theory as it is a product of technology. Zuckerberg actually pursued a dual degree at Harvard: Computing and Psychology. The mechanisms written into Facebook behavioural algorithms are rooted in the theories of conditioned response which underpin the most nakedly dishonest branches of marketing, propaganda and behavioural control. The desire for a ‘like’ or a notification of any kind on a social media app or browser window, is the same conditioned twitch seeking content-free reward as is used by the designers of gambling machines. It is the behaviour of the rat that has been trained to associate a button with pleasure and will starve to death seeking the signifier of that pleasure, even when the actual reward has been removed from the process.
Von Clausewitz said that armies lose when they try to re-fight the last war. The limited, almost-victory of the 2017 election was successful, as far as it went, not because of social media, but because Labour concentrated on what mattered: having control of its content and being clear about what it stood for. The brief flowering of commercial social media as a medium of democratic liberation is over. We need to create our own fields.
We need a CLP Facebook feed, but it should be treated as a shop window, only being populated with content approved by the CLP, in a professional manner: another method among many to spread our Labour ideals to the public. It should be curated, nurtured and controlled.
We do not need a public kvetching arena, which is what our ‘private’ Facebook group is.
Get off Facebook. Start creating our own discussion groups on secure media that we own: Diaspora is a good first step, but a Rocket chat server would be more instinctive for most users and would be easy to set up, and cheap to run, and we would own it in a way we would not own a Facebook page. It would also be free of the pressure to keep up, to keep chasing the approval of an algorithm. It would remove the competitive fury inherent in social media slavery, and it would allow us to discuss again, instead of constantly arguing.
This title is available direct from the publisher, OR Books, as a print-on-demand paperback and as a DRM-free ebook. Click on the image to go to the order page. This review is of the first edition and all page references are for the paperback.
In the 2015 election, I didn’t bother to take part. In fact, I pretty much buried my head and avoided it. I did vote: of course I voted, and I voted Labour, believing that Ed Milliband was a decent man at the head of a lousy party, but I was, as I had been since at least the Iraq War, if not since Peter Mandelson demonstrated the Blairites’ real priorities1 in 2000, a reluctant voter, who felt he had no real representation within the official political system.
If you’d asked me at that time what my ideal prime ministerial candidate would have looked like, I would have said, someone who did not seek the position, who spoke clearly about the world rather than dodging round ideas, who opposed war and injustice, who was not muddied by association with the Blair years and who was prepared to aim for a move away from the apparently unstoppable drift towards a free-market economic free-for-all. Thanks to the deafening hegemony of the press, business lobbyists and cowed or corrupted politicians, that position, even under three years ago, seemed like a naive dream.
That year’s election result, an increased majority for the Tories (although on a considerably increased Labour popular vote), contrary to the expectations of the media and their opinion polls, didn’t, therefore, take me by surprise, although I had seen one Guardian cover which had shown Milliband to have been catching up with the Tories, and my hopes had been lifted somewhat. Though a Labour government, as the party was then, would not have made much of a difference to the country, it might at least have wiped the smirks off the faces of Osborne, his lackey Cameron and their odious puppet master Murdoch. In the end, though, as we all expected in our heart of hearts, Murdoch got his way as usual, and the Tories got back in, apparently stronger than before.
It would have amazed me then to discover that, a little over a month after the election, not only would I have joined the Labour Party, but that I would be on Facebook (which I had left several years before) posting enthusiastically for a Labour back bencher to become leader, attending Labour meetings and arguing with Blairites about the leadership election, and even wearing tee-shirts declaring my allegiance to the leadership candidate.
I can remember sitting in our garden, late on a summer evening, after having returned from the Isle of Wight Festival, and deciding that this man was for real, and that it was time to put my money behind him. I joined straight away: I didn’t want to just be a £3 supporter; I wanted to be a part of the movement to reintroduce socialism into British politics, and to do my bit to bring together all the angry people who had had no way of finding a voice that could reach beyond the paywall the British establishment had erected around itself. Jeremy Corbyn was saying things that had been too outré for mainstream discourse: things like, poverty is bad and not inevitable: war is a manufactured evil, not forced upon us; the news media is distorted by vested interests and hatred and we should be fighting the racist anti-immigrant propaganda; we should be funding schools properly; we should own our vital infrastructure networks; we should be reversing privatisation of the NHS, rather than collaborating with the corrupt capitalist clique who are stealing our country while lying through their teeth to us. And, most amazingly, millions of people were listening. Within two years, I was campaigning for a Labour Party that was propelled by this man to reduce the Tories to a minority government, change the political dialogue and unseat the hegemony of the elite mainstream media.
It has been an extraordinary few years: from despair to hope. This book tells the story from inside the left wing circles of the national Labour Party and, if at times it feels a little confused, and a little too busy, that is because it has a lot of material to cover.
There had been some precursors to the Corbyn movement, but, living on the Isle of Wight, working in public service and dependent upon mainstream media for my information as I was, I had largely missed them. Principally, the anti-austerity movement had been standing for all the right things for a few years, and gaining some coverage, but had been unable to inconvenience the insulated political class. The anti-war movement was similarly strong in voice but still fairly weak in influence, although the greatest parliamentary success of Ed Milliband’s leadership of Labour was probably the defeat of Cameron’s plan to bomb Syria. Despite that, Cameron went ahead and did it anyway in his next term. The anti-tax avoidance movement had caused a certain amount of change of narrative among the Tories, but no real change of direction. Online protest movements like 38 Degrees had begun to draw together people who were not active protestors but felt angry about political conditions. Looking back, I think that, for me, the biggest nudge towards thinking I should drag myself out of hopelessness had been reading The Establishment, by Owen Jones,2 which was widely read in 2015-16 (I remember the enthusiasm of the bookseller in Waterstone’s when I bought it as a moment of political fellowship). In particular, I was fascinated by what is now a reasonably familiar concept; the Overton Window, which is the constructed restriction on what is considered permitted discourse within the political realm. This idea, new to me then, perfectly explained the previously incomprehensible way in which issues that I saw as urgent and real were contained and marginalised by the political classes.
I can remember a thrill of recognition when I read, “as the late socialist politician Tony Benn would often put it, social change is a combination of two things: ‘the burning flame of anger at injustice, and the burning flame of hope for a better world’”.3 Though I certainly didn’t lack the flame of anger at injustice, I had been lacking hope for a long time, and every event that seemed it should inspire hope would, after the first headlines, get dragged back down into the mire of politicians’ vacillations and newsreaders’ contemptuous head-shaking.
After the 2015 election, the candidates who came forward to stand as replacements for Ed Milliband did nothing to remedy that. Instead of change, we faced more greyness and surrender to neoliberalism. My despair was shared by Nunns:
The whole narrative was ‘we need to move to the right’… This was getting to the point where you go, ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to take this if this is the direction it goes in. We’ve got to at least have a go, through the debate, to pull it back.’4
The standard profile of the politician to whom we had become depressingly accustomed by now was a professional technocrat, addicted to playing a game defined as much by its restrictions as by any desire to achieve anything beyond personal advancement. In the Tories, this created the dominance of, frankly, a class of corrupt second-raters, skilled at delivering power to their corporate sponsors in return for personal advantage, staying just within the rules they had, over decades, set for themselves. Tragically, the Labour Party had followed suit.
…within the ranks of the Blairite MPs there was a decline in quality over time…made up of spads – special advisors – many of whom had moved effortlessly from university to MPs’ researcher to ministerial advisor to a safe seat to being in government (this applied to Brownites as well as Blairites). It was a career path that produced technocrats, people who had never needed to fight.5
As the candidates lined up to succeed Ed Milliband, this was exactly what we were offered: a line-up of identikit technocrats. Andy Burnham (‘soft left’), Yvette Cooper (Brownite) and Liz Kendall (Blairite) presented nothing of any substance to someone who wanted to be led against the corrupt orthodoxy of austerity and privatised public services.
They have probably been thinking for years about their unique ‘policy offer’; which combination of the words ‘future,’ ‘Britain,’ ‘forward,’ and ‘together’ they will adopt for their slogan; and how they will answer the question about whether they took drugs at university.6
In that environment, the hopes of left-leaning Labour members were not high. Some even thought that the Left should simply avoid the contest. Owen Jones is quoted saying as much.
My view was that, in the midst of general post-election demoralisation, a left candidate could end up being crushed. Such a result would be used by both the Labour Party establishment and the British right generally to perform the last rites of the left, dismiss us as irrelevant, and tell us to shut up forever.7
Had I been thinking about it, I would probably have felt much the same. I was not part of ‘the left’, but their views, as outlined in this book, were the very ideas I was dreaming of, and had been dreaming of for many years, thinking that they were politically impossible to believe in. I remember telling my sister that, at least, Cooper had been sound on the establishment of SureStart, but, given her bland, centrist campaign8 for the leadership, that felt like a quirky anomaly, rather than an indication of her radical, egalitarian politics. She, like Burnham, looked less like a campaigner who had sold out than a careerist who had a couple of slightly radical sales positions.
This very dreariness and the weight of rightward-peering consensus was, however, what drove the left to search for a candidate. John McDonnell and Diane Abbott both ruled themselves out, McDonnell for health reasons and because he felt he was too abrasive and Abbott because she wanted to run for London mayor. Clive Lewis declined because he felt he lacked experience; “I don’t even know where the toilets are,”9 but the desperation for a Left candidate to at least shift the debate away from surrender to capital was powerful. As McDonnell put it in a journal article,
That the candidates for the Labour leadership so far have failed to mount the slightest challenge to capital shows the abject state of near surrender of the Labour Party. No core Labour principle is safe in the rush to not only return to Blairism but even go beyond. Redistribution of wealth through taxation is denounced as ‘the politics of envy.’ Privatisation of the NHS is acceptable as long as it ‘works.’ Caps on welfare benefits and toughening the treatment of migrants are supported because they were ‘doorstep issues.’10
In this atmosphere, the idea of running to win was not really on the table. Merely fielding a candidate who could put the case for an alternative to servility to capitalist austerity was the only aim. Jeremy Corbyn was not even considered: “We suffered from a blindness to anything other than a conventionally acceptable candidate,” Jon Lansman is quoted as saying.11
The story that Corbyn tentatively proposed himself at a meeting of the Socialist Campaign Group is, according to Nunns, true. Despair had almost set in: “They discussed the alternative of backing one of the existing candidates in return for concessions”10 and he put his name forward, assuming that he would be defeated, but unwilling to see a contest without a genuine Labour voice. In fact, Byron Taylor, the national officer of the Trades Union Liaison Organisation had suggested Corbyn to Lansman already, pointing out that Corbyn was “…the nicest man in politics…he hasn’t got any enemies.”10
At this point, the Left’s highest ambition in the leadership contest was not to be wiped out. Nunns quotes one anonymous source as having said, “I don’t want the Left to fall flat on its face. The main thing is, we don’t finish fourth, or even worse than that, a distant fourth.”12 However, very quickly, a new factor became evident: people power.
The early signs were all good. Even before the campaign had any kind of central command, things were happening out in the wild. Throughout the summer what was known as the Corbyn campaign was actually an amalgam of spontaneous local activity, but in practice the official operation was often “at the reins of a runaway horse,” as Corbyn’s press spokesperson Carmel Nolan described it…[Marshajane] Thompson found an image on the internet with the #JezWeCan motif and paid her own money to have 100 t-shirts printed with the design. “We had a meeting in Newcastle where we literally advertised it 48 hours in advance and we got 250 people” says Ben Sellars. “This is in the first week of the campaign.” Meanwhile in London, an activist gathering held in a pub in Tottenham Court Road attracted 300 people wanting to campaign for Corbyn.13
Jumping On Board
This must be around the time I came in, signing up to Facebook, partly because of a happy event around The Isle of Wight Festival and partly because I was, like nearly everyone I knew, amazed and delighted to hear a politician saying what I had been thinking, and speaking in terms that reflected the real world, rather than a Photoshopped, PR-led mirage of ‘political reality’ that seemed divorced from the reality of my life and the world around me.
I’d found my dream candidate. Within days, I had joined the party, as a full member, not a £3 supporter.
The excitement of that time comes back to me now. I was far from the centre of things, on the Isle of Wight, going to my first constituency meetings, arguing for Jeremy, making new friends, voting in the constituency nomination poll, which overwhelmingly supported Corbyn. The local party here, like in many areas, was both excited and somewhat shocked by the influx of new faces, bringing an agenda that threw all the work they had done over the years up into the air. I must say here that the Island Labour Party, with a few exceptions, responded with great grace to the change. On Facebook, things looked rather different. A few very vocal figures were entrenched in their nostalgia for the Blair years and there were unpleasant and often circular arguments, which a couple of trotstkyite/leninist/whatever revolutionaries stirred with monomaniacal delight. However, the divisions were overwhelmed by the unanimity of the new voices, who leapt upon the opportunity to participate in politics that, at last, had some relevance to them.
This was the story nationally, according to Nunns. Local parties, by and large, were reinvigorated by the arrival of new members, while being, initially, somewhat sceptical about whether the surge in membership would translate to active participation. However, among the party’s MPs, the PLP, things were rather different. The best description is panic, and the most appalling example of the PLP’s failure to recognise the nature of their new support, and the change in the political landscape that it heralded, was interim leader Harriet Harman’s disastrous decision to not oppose the Tory government’s welfare reform bill.
Harman’s Horrible Blunder
The sheer barbarity of the Tories’ welfare reform bill, which Harriet Harman decided the Labour Party should not oppose, is well covered by Nunns.
It is a bill that piles the cost of the government’s austerity drive onto those in work on low pay-the very people Labour was founded to represent. But in her wisdom, Harman has decided not to oppose the bill. Labour will first table a ‘reasoned amendment,’ an obscure parliamentary mechanism for setting-out objections, and when that inevitably fails it will abstain…
John McDonnell, Nunns says,
…has been sitting on the backbenches seething at the debate he has heard…With his first sentence, he cuts through all the vacillation: “I would swim through vomit to vote against this Bill, and listening to some of the nauseating speeches tonight, I think we might have to.”
He [McDonnell] continues:
Poverty in my constituency is not a lifestyle choice; it’s imposed upon people…This Welfare Reform Bill does as all the other welfare reform bills in recent years have done and blames the poor for their own poverty and not the system…I find it appalling that we sit here – in, to be frank, relative wealth ourselves – and we’re willing to vote for increased poverty for the people back in our constituencies.14)
That line – ”blam[ing] the poor for their own poverty and not the system,” gave me another new hero. It summed up the confidence trick that the Thatcherites had inserted into British politics in my teens and that subsequent governments, Tory and Labour, had embedded and refined as a cover for the blatant thievery of an establishment that regarded itself as above question: sneering at disenfranchised, abandoned people for their victimhood. The fact that anyone was prepared to speak with such moral certainty against the corruption of the Draco Malfoy of British politics, George Osborne, and his Pansy Parkinson, Cameron, gave me a little hope. The fact that the PLP bottled its duty in such spectacular fashion by not opposing this brutal, snide bill with every weapon at its disposal secured my certainty that supporting Jeremy Corbyn was not just an opportunity, but a moral imperative.
When the division bell rings at the end of the debate, 48 Labour MPs-over a fifth of the parliamentary party-defy Harman to oppose the Bill. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall are not among them. But John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn are.10
The chapter on this inglorious moment in Labour history is particularly rich. Harman’s motivation for this career-defining blunder is discussed, and suggests that she was
”traumatised” by her previous experience as acting leader after the 2010 election, when under her watch the Tories pinned the blame for the financial crash on Labour overspending.15
According to Nunns, both Burnham and Cooper were desperate for Labour to oppose the Bill, but divided by a squabble over who should speak first in a Shadow Cabinet meeting, and therefore suggest the reasoned amendment. “But Harman was resolute that Labour would not vote against it. The Shadow Cabinet was fragmented.”16
I remember being aghast and weary. Had Burnham or Cooper resigned the Shadow Cabinet and joined the rebels, I think the leadership contest would have been a lot closer, but they drifted into the disaster, tied to their belief that a facile show of unity trumped principles and, in so doing, lost my respect.
I wasn’t the only one.
There was…a perception of moral decay in Labour’s position, a feeling captured by Diane Abbott in an outraged op-ed published the day after Harman’s interview (on the BBC’s Sunday Politics on 12th July 2015). “How did a party that once promised to end child poverty in a generation become one that will shrug and vote for measures which will force tens of thousands of children into poverty?” she asked.17
Stunningly, this is an argument that Labour won, to an extent. After Corbyn’s election as leader, Iain Duncan-Smith, the right-wing Tory welfare minister, resigned over further cuts, this time to disability payments.
“Fiscal self-imposed restraints,” said Duncan Smith while explaining his resignation on the Andrew Marr programme, “are more and more perceived as distinctly political rather than in the national economic interest.” He might just as well have directly quoted Corbyn’s campaign slogan that austerity is a political choice not an economic necessity.18
The (Over) Reaction
There was a quality of blinking disbelief to the media coverage of the leadership election. The over-ironed, open-necked shirts out of which comfortably Blairite skinny-necked ‘experts’ opined their certainty that a Corbyn victory was an impossibility were viewing the end of their cosy hegemony, and seemed to become shinier and starchier, simply denying it could be happening. Jonathan Freedland, Anne Perkins, Andrew Rawnsley, Michael White and Polly Toynbee, all of The Guardian, were notable columnists of the ‘left’ who circled their Range Rovers against the assault on the British media’s four-decade-long war against disadvantaged and marginalised people. Andrew Rawnsley lost his reason:
That Rawnsley should react with animosity rather than curiosity was perhaps understandable. Suddenly, the centre of gravity was moving away from the Labour elite to which he had unparalleled access, and from which he had mined the raw materials needed to fashion-with considerable skill-the books and journalism that had won him acclaim. Newbies were putting that all at risk.19
I gave up buying The Guardian (I had been a twice-a-week reader, on average, for thirty years) and have only bought one copy since.
A selection of the headlines from The Guardian website’s front page on 22 and 23 July gives a sense of the almost hysterical tone that took hold: “Blair urges Labour not to wrap itself in a Jeremy Corbyn comfort blanket”; “Think before you vote for Jeremy Corbyn”; Labour can come back from the brink, but it seems to lack the will to do so”; “Blair: I wouldn’t want to win on an old fashioned leftist platform.” On these two panic-stricken days alone, The Guardian website carried opinion pieces hostile to Corbyn from Anne Perkins, Suzanne Moore, Polly Toynbee, Tim Bale, Martin Kettle, Michael White, Anne Perkins (again), and Anne Perkins (yet again). There was not a single pro-Corbyn column…But The Guardian had a problem: its readers [disagreed]…78 per cent of the 2,500 people who responded [to a _Guardian_ poll] backed Corbyn…Such sentiment was often reflected on the letters page, an oasis amid the relentless negativity elsewhere. And anyone brave enough to venture ‘below the line’ into the netherworld of online comments could not mistake the strong feeling that Corbyn was being unfairly treated and his supporters patronised. Commenters showed themselves to be expert at puncturing pomposity and exposing illogic, but the most striking feature of their contributions was anger at The Guardian itself…The charge was that The Guardian was effectively trolling one particular candidate – one who had the support of many of its readers.20
The long term effect on the press of the earthquake beneath the British political elite’s inward-looking fortress of privilege is a subject for another essay, but it is worth noting that The Sun, which before 2015 dictated popular political culture to a pathological degree, seems like an irrelevance two and a half years later. Who is The Sun’s current political editor? Any guesses? I don’t think it important enough to bother looking it up.
The New Statesman was particularly egregious. I followed it on Facebook and noted, as did many other people, that it became not dissimilar to The Daily Mail in tone. Indeed, when The New Statesman’s editor did “…stake[] out his position on July 22nd, [it was] in The Daily Mail of all places”21
The section on the press is, perhaps, the bit of the book which has had the most impact upon me. Part of the establishment’s great confidence trick is that it is supremely skilled at side-lining voices that are not in accord with its own. Its greatest trick in this regard is to accuse oppositional voices of being ignorant and deranged: think of how often you hear establishment lackeys like Melanie Phillips or Andrew Rawnsley describe criticism of power as ‘conspiracy theory’. They alone have the right to express opposition, because they alone have the inside knowledge which the ordinary democratic voter does not have a right to share, except through the filter of their power. In the Labour leadership election, this closed shop collapsed in upon itself as it realised that, for the majority of people, and, in particular, the people it thought it had effectively demotivated from political participation, their voices were inaccessible, irrelevant and ridiculous. The people who chanted Jeremy Corbyn’s name at a rock concert less than two years after the leadership campaign haven’t heard of Jonathan Freedland, Polly Toynbee, Max Hastings or Andrew Marr. They had heard of Laura Kuenssberg by then, but only as a figure of ridicule on Facebook and Twitter. The edifice of inward-looking, London-property-owning hegemony only really began to notice that the world had moved beyond it during this leadership campaign.
And this was not an accident. In the leadership election, the Corbyn campaign knew that it needed to reach around the fortress of hopelessly corrupted commercial and ‘public service’ news power and it succeeded.
Research carried out by YouGov in August 2015 found that 57 percent of Corbyn supporters cited social media as “a main source of news,” compared to around 40 per cent for backers of other candidates. “Part of the reason why they were spending so much time on social media was because they didn’t trust the traditional media any more.” believes ben Sellers. One of the main functions of the Corbyn For Leader social media operation run by Sellers and Thompson was to circumvent the press, both by publicising the explosion of activity happening all around the country, and by curating the mainstream media to pick out the half-decent reports (“sometimes that was a struggle,” Sellers quips.
It was patently clear that some journalists felt threatened by the arrival of this new realm. A media narrative asserting that there is no alternative is much easier to sustain if there is no alternative media. The existence of a different point of view, forged among a network of people who would previously have been atomised, is what provoked the snobbish accusations of “virtue signalling” and “identity politics.” Being continually challenged about their bias and presuppositions brought howls of exasperation from journalists that congealed into a collective feeling of offence. It contributed to the general sense of consternation at Corbyn’s rise. Events were spinning beyond the media’s control.22
Note: Spookily, as I write this, I have received a marketing email from O/R books for the second edition of The Candidate. This new edition is expanded to include the 2017 election and the email uses social media quotes by ‘Britain’s major political pundits,’ all predicting the demolition of Labour at the polls. The same quotes are used in this publicity video.
Hubris doesn’t get much better than this.
Conclusion
As John Prescott says, the heart of the Corbyn campaign was not tactical, but issues-led: they talked about policies. The true pleasure of recalling the campaign, for me, is the excitement I felt every time an issue I cared about, that had become codified, contained and sidelined by ‘the political process’ was dragged into the spotlight and became live and real. The horrible corruption of privatisations, the mental health care disaster, the cruel and sickening purge of poor people from the economy by ‘welfare reform’, the collapse of education, the barely-coded racism of ‘immigration control’, the designed chaos of Tory prisons policy: issue after issue would turn up on social media and, instead of being buried in establishment pundits’ head-shaking, would be discussed, witnessed to by the people who were suffering from the policy and would drown out the lies that had been told about it with real, human truth.
The years between Jeremy’s first leadership election and the general election of 2017 included the doleful attempt by the right-wing capitalists within the Labour Party to challenge him with the corporate lackey Owen Smith’s pathetic leadership campaign. It only strengthened Jeremy as leader, although you wouldn’t believe it if you read the Guardian, for whom the only story was “how long will Corbyn last?” Even the stunning political earthquake of the general election, during which I campaigned with enthusiasm and blogged with fury, hasn’t blunted their hypocrisy and partiality. In that election, as during the recent local election campaign, mainstream media has been on the attack, settling upon one particular lie, that anti-Semitism is an attitude unique to the Labour Party and a characteristic of it. It has done harm, mainly through the old fascist trope of repetition and ubiquity, and I worry that the anti-Semitism lie, contrived and corrupt as it is, has done a certain amount to split the party at a time when it should be coming together.
Nevertheless, I am optimistic that we will see a revival of the enthusiasm when the current government finally collapses in on itself. The people who listened with interest when I was leafleting for Labour during the 2017 election weren’t members of the party, but they were care-workers, disabled people whose support payments had been decimated and blocked by Jobcentre Plus target campaigns, carers whose elderly dependents had little or no support from a National Health Service being deliberately run into the ground, and they felt hopeful then, as I hope they will feel when Jeremy leads us into the next election.
I really can’t afford to buy the second edition of The Candidate, much as I would like to read it. I read my copy of the first edition last summer, and going back through it to write this has revived my political fire a bit. I am still in the party, as the secretary of my local branch and, incredibly, I have been nominated to be assistant secretary of the Island CLP, which is a bit embarrassing. In March, I attended an economics conference hosted by John McDonnell, and I was awed by the depth of talent and energy that has coalesced around the Labour Party’s policy making: academics, campaigners, charity workers and, most importantly, people like me who just care enough to get involved, are all having their say, so that, come the next election, we will go in with policies even more deeply worked out and clearly thought through than those we offered the electorate, and so nearly delivered, in 2017.
I’ve only got a single paper copy of my dissertation, and it is fading badly. I typed it originally on a machine that used diskettes for storage and I used a borrowed disk, so that it went back to the computer’s owner when I had finished the work. In those days, I thought of computers as posh typewriters: the output was a physical product, and the data was simply means to producing that object.
I’ve been meaning to type it up into a digital copy, and tidy up some of the spelling and punctuation for some years, and I have finally done it. I’m not entirely sure of the copyright status of dissertations: I have an idea that the university has some claim over it. Anyway, I thought I would post a copy, in case anyone might find it interesting. It’s pretty adolescent, as you’d expect, but I stand by the overall gist.
