Tag: politics

  • The Curious Tale of Boris Johnson’s Heart

    I want to tell you a story about Boris Johnson’s heart. There’s a woman involved, but this isn’t what you’re thinking.

    It’s a story about an encounter between the Prime Minister and some members of the public, but there’s no shouting, and no selfies, and no phone camera footage of who said what.

    It’s kind of a mythic story, because it takes place in an ancient landscape, at one of the special seasons of the year, with a suggestion that those involved are caught in the play of old powers, in a struggle to break a spell – and also because I can’t prove to you that any of it happened.

    Let’s call it an episode from the political X-Files. To be clear, I’m Mulder here, I want to believe – if not in the spells and powers, then at least in the account as I heard it – but there’s a Scully voice hissing in my ear, insisting on the need for scepticism. 

    The thing is, I whisper back, it doesn’t matter if these events actually happened, or if they only happened in someone’s head, or if this is some live art social fiction project no-one let me in on, because there’s a truth in the story itself. A truth that asks a question about politics and what we think it is. 

    Stay with me and I’ll tell you what I mean.

    *   *   *

    There was a clear blue sky over the Ridgeway, the weekend of the autumn equinox. They say it’s the oldest road in England, though road is stretching it: a path on high, dry ground that tracks southwest through the Chilterns, across the Thames and on along the Berkshire Downs to Avebury and beyond. Near Wendover, the modern walking trail parts company from the old route, diverted to preserve the security of the Chequers estate, the Prime Minister’s country house.

    The group had agreed to meet at 10.30 that Saturday morning, but people were late. By the time they set off, there were seven adults, two dogs, five children and a baby. The invitation had been clear: ‘We are going to sing here on the Equinox [with] the sole intention to open up the hearts and minds of those in power.’

    Tori Lewis is the woman who made the invitation and it was her account of these events that I stumbled on, through a post on Facebook that led to a YouTube video shot a couple of mornings later. She sits in the grass, glowing with her sense of the mystery of the way it all aligned.

    The circuit they walked took them up Beacon Hill, where they sang their songs to the land, and around to Coombe Hill. They had come together through a community that gathers at Lewis’s family home, dedicated to honouring the earth, celebrating the turning of the year and supporting activism that is grounded in the sacred. This year, their focus has been drawn to the work of Extinction Rebellion, the climate action movement which brought parts of central London to a halt for half of April. The pilgrimage over the equinox was a preparation for the next round of rebellion, due to hit the streets on 7th October.

    They walked barefoot, singing as they went. There were unscheduled stops for nappy changes and sore legs and to look at the baby pigs, so it was long after lunchtime when they made it back to the Buckmoorend Farm Shop and Kitchen, which lies up an unpaved lane, a quarter of a mile from the gates of Chequers. The kitchen is a caravan in the farmyard, the shop itself not much more than a shed, with room for a handful of customers at a time.

    A guy called David was the first of the group to go in. He emerged moments later and whispered loudly to the others, ‘You won’t believe this, but Boris Johnson’s in there!’

    Tori and her friend Zoe looked at each other.

    ‘Which song are we going to sing, then?’ Zoe said.

    There were three of them who entered the shop, singing as they went. Tori’s legs were shaking. She remembers hiding from Johnson’s gaze for the first minute, until she caught sight of Zoe standing right beside him. After that, the power of singing took over and she went calm.

    The song they sang was simple, two lines repeating and repeating, based on a chant from Taizé, the Christian community of reconciliation born in the darkness of the Second World War. The English version was written by the singer Sophia Efthimiou, and it goes like this: ‘Listen to your heart, listen to your heart. Let love guide you!’

    The women stood around Johnson as they sang. There were tears in his eyes, Tori remembers, his mouth was open and he had his hand on his heart.

    ‘I don’t…’ he began, bewildered. ‘I don’t know what…’

    A third woman, Annabel, went up to him and put a hand on his shoulder, the way you might with a little boy in need of comfort. They went on singing.

    They saw his defences begin to come up again.

    ‘Oh,’ he said to Tori, ‘do you live locally?’

    ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Listen to your heart…’

    The whole scene lasted around four minutes, before he broke away and left the shop, getting out of a situation that could be awkward or even dangerous. His security detail was in the yard outside. He went over to the caravan to order some food.

    Another of the walkers, Laura, was waiting for her order at the caravan and she overheard Johnson saying to his girlfriend, ‘Where have they come from? It’s like they’ve emerged from the earth!’

    ‘Yes,’ Laura said, turning to him, ‘and they have a message for you.’

    At which, the Prime Minister began to repeat to himself the words of the song: ‘Listen to your heart, listen to your heart. Let love guide you!’

    And then, he left.

    *   *   *

    Well, that’s the story as Tori Lewis tells it. How do you imagine Boris Johnson or Carrie Symonds’s version of events would go? I don’t suppose we’re ever going to know.

    I said at the start, I can’t prove that any of this happened. But one reason why it has a ring of truth to me is that I’ve been a singer. I know from experience that music has a power to slip past the defences of our cleverness, to touch us deeply when we least expect it. I didn’t go in for singing in rituals at ancient sites, but I grew up singing in folk clubs around the northeast of England, and the first way I ever earned a living was ten months busking on street corners all over Europe, from Norway to Turkey and back again. There were years in my life, on the hinge between adolescence and adulthood, when singing was the only outlet I could trust, the only carrier I had for my feelings. If, as the notes he makes on Downing Street memos suggest, Boris Johnson is stuck in some endless loop of adolescence, then I can imagine that the encounter with these singing women who seemed to have sprung from the earth might touch him in a place where he is almost never touched.

    ‘Well,’ I hear a whisper in my ear, ‘that worked well, didn’t it? His heart sure seems wide open now!’

    Squint a little and maybe you could see the weird speech Johnson gave at the UN, three days afterwards, as the words of a Macbeth still shaken by the encounter with these three sisters. By the following night, back at the despatch box, he was serving up a cauldron of hate, crying humbug at the way his words are recycled into death threats and making shameless use of the memory of a murdered political opponent.

    All I can say is that, a few times in my life, I’ve walked someone up to the edge of their worldview and seen them moved deeply by an experience that makes no sense according to the heartless logic of the world as they have known it. I’m not talking about anything obviously shiny and spiritual here, only the humble magic of what human beings are capable of when we come together for reasons beyond the calculus of profit or coercion, the matrix of the market and the state. What generally happens next is that the person concerned goes back to where they came from and finds a way to renarrate the experience through the lens of cynicism. What else could they do, when to put faith in that strange experience would be to feel the solid ground of their status and all it cost them crumble beneath their feet?

    To be touched, touched deeply, is not nothing – but nor is it always, or even often, enough. There’s a reason they say the addict needs to hit rock bottom.

    *   *   *

    Look, I told you this was leading to a question – a thought worth sitting with, whatever you make of synchronicities and sacred singing, whatever did or didn’t happen in that farm shop – so here it is: how do we imagine our opponents? When you think of Boris Johnson’s heart, what comes to mind?

    Back in our twenties, a good friend of mine was invited to lunch at The Spectator, then edited by Johnson. I remember she told us afterwards it was the closest she had come to being in the presence of pure evil. I’ve told that story down the years and I’ve used that kind of language to express my anger at those whose politics I oppose. Looking at my Facebook feed, it seems as though the language in which we share our opinions is saturated with such totalising moral statements, and that’s before you even get to Twitter. Doesn’t it satisfy some fierce part of ourselves to talk this way? It satisfies some fierce part of me.

    How easy to imagine our opponents as black-hearted, to think of the throb in Boris Johnson’s chest as a pulsating epicentre of evil. What the strange story of his encounter with the singing women suggests is another possibility, one that I wonder if we know how to take seriously: the possibility that a politician’s heart might be the site of an unfinished struggle. What does politics even look like, if it includes the struggle for the heart?

    Now, you might say I’m coming on all Russell Brand. For the record, I’ve a great fondness for Russell and the way he wears his flawed heart on his sleeve. But this heart talk is not the preserve of meditating comedians who’ve been to Hollywood and back. It’s there in the thought that comes to Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, as he lies rotting on the prison straw:

    Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line between good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.

    It’s there in the language of Martin Luther King and bell hooks and Bayo Akomolafe, whose essay ‘Homo Icarus’ was written in the days after the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville in 2017 that ended in the murder of an anti-fascist activist and the gross equivocation of a US President claiming there had been ‘very fine people on both sides’ that day. Is it enough, Akomolafe asks, to call this evil? Or might some further move be called for?

    It’s a radical thing to say and a most dangerous notion to admit: that in some non-mystical way, I am practically entangled with those people I would rather demonize as white supremacists and Nazi sympathizers. The dual framework permits us to separate the ‘racist’ from the ‘non-racist’, to install a fundamental distinction between their absolute depravity and our detached moral coherence, and to defer and deflect responsibility. There are not too many places to go from there: when we begin from this set of assumptions, incarceration, conversion therapy and reverse oppression are the responses that almost always follow.

    If I turn back to Boris Johnson, with Akomolafe’s words still echoing in my thoughts, what comes to mind is the work of the psychotherapist Nick Duffell with those he calls ‘boarding school survivors’. In a system set up to produce an elite to rule an empire, the British upper classes and those who aspire to join them subject their children to a kind of ‘normalised neglect’. This is not just an education, but an upbringing inside an institution, instead of a family: a life shaped not by love and relationships, but rules and conventions. What does this do to a boy sent away to school at eleven (as Johnson was) or even earlier? ‘He has to lose his childishness,’ Duffell says, ‘he has to lose his emotional self.’ This treatment breeds a ‘pseudo self-sufficiency’, a ‘strategic survival personality’ that is relentlessly upbeat, cut off from empathy, with a sense of entitlement that serves as ‘compensation for irredeemable loss’.

    There is a limit to the sympathy such stories are likely to elicit, I realise, and I don’t suggest we hold a telethon for the survivors. What we might do is reframe the recent proposal to abolish Eton, not as an act of class war, but as the overdue dismantling of a system of organised child abuse whose consequences – for all of us – are hard to overstate. (The end of this system would also be a decolonial act that takes us well beyond the symbolic overthrow of statues, often statues of these schools’ old boys.)

    *   *   *

    Two days after their encounter with the Prime Minister, on the morning of the equinox itself, Tori Lewis and her family greet the rising sun as its light pierces the stone passage of West Kennet Long Barrow, a 6,000-year-old burial mound near the further end of the Ridgeway. Later that morning, she sits in the grass by the River Kennet to film her story. ‘We’ve been in ceremony since Friday,’ she tells the camera.

    I don’t know as much about ceremony as Tori and her friends. My sense of the sacred is less outspoken; it mostly starts at the place where words run out.

    I send the video to my friend Charlie, who used to be features editor at a trendy London magazine. ‘That’s absolutely bonkers,’ he writes back. ‘And if I hadn’t read and been involved in so many absurd stories and hilarious coincidences, I’d say she was recounting a dream. But I do actually know that life can easily be that bonkers.’

    There’s a voice in my ear that says to tell the story in Charlie’s terms and leave out the bit where Tori talks about ‘the Great Mother’. You can watch the video and judge for yourself. I’m conscious, too, that I’m a man telling a woman’s story, a story already loaded with gender dynamics. Before I start writing, I reach out to Tori, and she tells me she’d love the story to be shared far and wide. ‘It’s a story of connection and the truth of spirit and validates our work as spirit workers,’ she writes.

    I doubt I’ll ever shine with the truth of spirit the way that Tori Lewis does. My work is murkier, the storyteller as trafficker between worlds, smuggling photocopied packets of truth. But when it comes to it, you’ll find me with the ones for whom the heart is a site of struggle, for whom there is that in each of us which goes beyond the people our lives so far shaped us to be, for whom the world is under a spell that needs to be broken.

    Note

    I’ve never found myself needing to declare an interest at the end of a piece of writing, but having used strong words about the British boarding school system, I should add a word about my own education. Most of it took place in state schools, with the exception of two periods of two years each in which I was a scholarship student at an independent school. During the first of these, I was also a boarder, albeit at a school made up mainly of day pupils and a long way from the social milieu of Eton. Nick Duffell’s work with boarding school survivors makes me wonder how this shaped me, though what sets my experience apart is that I was not ‘sent away’ to school: it was my own decision at eleven, against my parents’ better judgement, and two years later it was my decision to come home again and go to the local comprehensive. But that is a story for another day.

    First published on Bella Caledonia.

  • What’s Happening in Sweden?

    You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? Sweden!

    Donald Trump, 18 February 2017

    Sweden was long seen as a progressive utopia. Then came waves of immigrants – and the forces of populism at home and abroad.

    The New York Times, 10 August 2019

    ‘If you get a call from the post office, you tell them we’re separating.’

    So it’s come to this, I think, as I read the message. 

    At the end of a long trip back to England, as we sat waiting for the Eurostar check-in, some light-fingered Londoner stole my daypack. The items lost include the mobile phone on which I have my BankID: the digital login that enables access, not only to my Swedish bank account, but to everything from the tax office to the national change of address system. To make matters worse, I’ve also lost my national ID card, and the bank won’t give me a new digital ID without seeing it, and there’s a two-week wait for an appointment to apply for a replacement. Oh yes – and we’re moving into a new apartment the day we get back, so my other half is understandably keen to get at least one of us listed as living at this new address. Keen enough that she’s about to officially declare our relationship over.

    ‘Can’t you explain the actual situation?’ I message back.

    ‘This is Sweden,’ she replies. ‘There is no template for that.’

    *  *  *

    The Swedish word for immigrant is invandrare, literally ‘in-wanderer’. Like various words in Swedish, it has been subject to critique in recent years: it puts the immigrant in a thankless position, forever the one who is wandering in, never getting to arrive.

    Friends who came here from further away, whose names and bodies mark them as ‘other’ in ways beyond my experience, talk about the daily toll of small reminders of their otherness. The questions in job interviews, the glances on the street. The exhaustion of doing everything ‘right’ and knowing it still won’t help.

    Don’t get me wrong, then, when I say there’s truth in that word. Even for this white guy from England, spared all the shit my friends put up with, the process of wandering in to Sweden seems endless. Probably it is like this anywhere: I remember a bewildering night in a stand-up club in Dublin, as joke after joke flew over my head, missing the references everyone else was getting. Seven years in, while my Swedish is somewhat fluent, I still can’t do half the things I’m used to being able to do with language, and even if I reach that point, I know life will continue to be full of jokes that I don’t get.

    Still, for all its foolishness, the situation of the perpetual half-outsider can bring with it certain gifts. You can find yourself in the role of interpreter, the person who notices details so obvious to everyone who grew up here that it takes a stranger’s eye to see them.

    Or maybe it’s just that, when you’ve been living in another country for a while, friends elsewhere turn to you when they want to understand what’s happening there.

    *  *  *

    An email arrives from a friend in New York with a link to an article in his local newspaper, a New York Times feature headlined ‘The Global Machine Behind the Rise of Far-Right Nationalism’. 

    It’s a story about Sweden and the rest of the world. It’s about the Sweden Democrats, the anti-immigrant party with neo-Nazi roots that took 62 of the 349 seats in the Swedish parliament at last year’s general election. It’s about the way political forces elsewhere seize on stories about Sweden and immigration – and it’s an examination of the role of those external forces in the rise of the Sweden Democrats.

    The Times reports that it has uncovered ‘an international disinformation machine’ with roots in ‘Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia and the American far right’, peddling a ‘distorted view of Sweden’ and seeking to influence elections here:

    The central target of these manipulations from abroad – and the chief instrument of the Swedish nationalists’ success – is the country’s increasingly popular, and virulently anti-immigrant, digital echo chamber.

    The implication is that the Sweden Democrats’ electoral success reflects the influence of those manipulations from abroad, and the reader is left to draw the parallels to American politics.

    ‘How much of this is true, according to you?’ my friend wants to know.

    I start writing back to him and then I realise that I’m writing an essay – an essay that’s been coming a long time, about the country that has become my home and the role it plays in the collective imagination of millions of people who have never been here.

    *  *  *

    ‘Welcome to the warm south of Scandinavia!’ declared a poster during the 2014 referendum campaign, a playful invocation of Scotland’s future, drawing on the long tradition of locating utopia at the top of the map of Europe. 

    It’s hard to think of a part of the world more closely coupled to a concept: the two best recent English-language books on Sweden are Andrew Brown’s Fishing in Utopia and Dominic Hinde’s A Utopia Like Any Other

    Hinde’s book starts in Scotland, reflecting on the way the Nordic countries in general and Sweden in particular feature in the political imaginary of the independence movement, but he’s quick to point out how much wider and further back this goes. As far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters from Scandinavia which caught the imagination of readers in the 1790s. Even further, you might say, to Ancient Greece, when Pindar could write of the Hyperboreans, the fabled people of the far north:

    They wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully.
    No sickness or ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race;
    without toil or battles they live, without fear of Nemesis.

    The modern version of this myth-making begins with a 1930s bestseller, Sweden: The Middle Way, by the American journalist Marquis Childs, which introduced readers to a society that had found a golden path between capitalism and communism. ‘Eighty years on,’ as Hinde observes, ‘the narrative is remarkably similar, even if the world around has changed beyond all recognition.’

    It was this narrative that David Cameron was able to draw on – in his pre-austerity, husky-hugging days – when he took up the Swedish model of ‘free schools’. Never mind that the policy was actually a landmark of Sweden’s particular strain of neoliberalism, or that the only other country to go down the route of allowing profit-making companies to run its state schools was Pinochet’s Chile. Back when the Tories at Westminster were still interested in detoxifying their brand, the connotations of Swedishness were strong enough to make this part of Cameron’s strategy of flirting with Guardian readers.

    The classic case, though, is the story about Sweden ‘moving to a six-hour working day’. Back in the days when I still went on Twitter, I remember gently chiding my mate Pat Kane for circulating this one, but he was hardly alone. Newspapers from The Independent to the Sydney Morning Herald ran with it, announcing it as though it were a national policy, rather than a short-lived experiment at a couple of workplaces in Gothenburg. Because this is the kind of thing lots of people are longing to believe about Sweden.

    So here’s the first part to get straight, if we’re going to talk about a ‘distorted view of Sweden’: it doesn’t start with Donald Trump and Fox News and the Gatestone Institute and the Russian troll factories. When it comes to making absurd exaggerations about this country to suit their beliefs, they are latecomers. If Sweden occupies an outsized position in the dystopian geography of the nativist right, this is derivative, a sacrilegious inversion of the role it has held for generations in the belief system of their progressive opponents.

    It seemed harmless enough, a few years back, when no one talked about ‘fake news’ – but actually, what’s the difference between taking a small local experiment and blowing it up into a story about a whole country switching to a six-hour day, and taking a few local incidents involving immigrants and blowing these up into a story about a whole country where law and order is breaking down? The content is different, sure, and the consequences darker, but the basic pattern is the same.

    *  *  *

    A year after I moved to Stockholm, there were riots, though the first I heard about it was the messages from concerned friends elsewhere. In London, two summers earlier, there had been a genuine sense of danger, of a city on the edge of chaos. But Stockholm isn’t London, it’s more like Paris: a historic inner city, affluent and white as hell, and then a ring of concrete suburbs where the others live. 

    In one of those suburbs, the police shot and killed a man who had been seen on his balcony carrying a knife. There were protests in the days that followed, and then a few nights of trouble, with stone-throwing and cars set alight. It wasn’t nothing, and it could have got worse – at one point, police stopped a convoy of thirty vehicles, far-right extremists heading for where the trouble was, armed and looking for a fight – but if the same scenes had played out in the Parisian banlieues, it’s hard to imagine them making international headlines.

    DOG BITES MAN is not a story, they tell you in journalism school. MAN BITES DOG is a story. By this logic, it turns out that it’s not just the nativist right who are quick to jump on tales of trouble in the social democratic paradise, it’s also the same mainstream news industry responsible for spreading fantasies about the six-hour day.

    This tendency has coloured the reporting of the entry of the far right into Swedish parliamentary politics. In 2016, I found myself pulling up Jon Henley of the Guardian over a news report that presented the Sweden Democrats as ‘now Sweden’s largest party’. Yes, a handful of outlying opinion polls that year had put them in first place, but the rolling average always had them behind the traditional larger parties of left and right. Now, that might seem like a detail, when set against all that the rise of such a party signifies – and I swear, I don’t actually spend my days fact-checking English-language commentators on their general knowledge of Sweden – but it’s another example of an eagerness to overstate what’s happening in this country, an eagerness that gets in the way of what we could learn together here, the clues that we might find in the particular experiences of this large, sparsely populated country at the top of Europe.

    It’s there in that New York Times feature, too. Read the whole thing and you’ll learn about the national socialist roots of the Sweden Democrats, how their ‘right-wing populism has taken hold’ in a country ‘long seen as a progressive utopia’, but the one thing you won’t learn is that their performance in last year’s general election fell well short of their hopes and others’ fears. Four years earlier, they had beaten the opinion polls and more than doubled their vote, reaching 12.9% – and during the last weeks of this election campaign, many of us expected them to double their showing once more. Against this background, alarming as it remains in its own right, the 17.5% the party achieved on polling day represents a loss of momentum.

    The omission of this context from the Times article matters, because it weakens the argument the article is built around. If what lies ‘beneath the surface of what is happening in Sweden’ is ‘an international disinformation machine’ – if this is the engine powering the rise of right-wing populism, here and elsewhere – then surely the Swedish far right should have been gaining momentum like never before? For who could deny that these past few years have been the historical moment in which digital media and nativist politics fused into a global phenomenon?

    We’ll come back to this glitch in the timeline and what gets left out in the eagerness to centre the story on international networks and external manipulation, but there’s another element in the Times article that is worth lingering over, and that’s the particularly dark roots of Sweden’s right-wing populists. It’s pretty standard for a European democracy today to have an anti-immigrant political party polling between 15 and 20%, but it’s rarer for that party to have its origins so directly in the milieu of uniform-wearing neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

    The way the Times tells it, the breakthrough of such a party in Sweden is all the more remarkable, given the country’s social democratic heritage, a political culture that made voters resistant to the Sweden Democrats’ earlier and more explicitly racist rhetoric. The rosy utopian picture of Swedish social democracy strikes again, I think to myself, and I start to see how much ground this essay needs to cover.

    Maybe I can get there by looking past the stories projected onto this country by its admirers and detractors, to the stories Sweden likes to tell itself?

    *  *  *

    There are many shades of culture shock. In my mid-twenties, I spent half a year in the far west of China. For the first two months, I had to carry a card with my address to show to taxi drivers because I couldn’t produce a recognisable imitation of the six syllables that would tell them how to take me home. Everything about the world in which I was immersed seemed extraordinary and the shock of difference was psychedelic, exhilarating, some days overwhelming.

    When I started learning Swedish, the main problem was getting anyone to speak it back to me: ordering in a café, I’d stumble through a sentence and the guy behind the counter would respond in flawless English. Coming from England to Sweden, the culture shock is subtle and catches you off-guard, like when you go down stairs in the dark and there’s one step more than you’d reckoned on there being: a series of these small jarring encounters with the gap between your expectations and those of everyone around you.

    Reading about Swedish history, I was caught off-guard by the concept of the Stormaktstid, the ‘Great Power Time’. It wasn’t just how ignorant I’d been of the imperial adventures of the Swedish 17th century, when the territory ruled from Stockholm stretched from the Atlantic to the far side of the Baltic and the north coast of Germany; it was the surprise of encountering a country that can speak matter-of-factly about its great power status as something that lies a long way in the past. Needless to say, England has no equivalent to the concept of the Stormaktstid, no common language in which to acknowledge the waning of its global standing, and I’m tempted to see the act of political arson that is Brexit as stemming from this lack.

    The last remnant of Sweden’s greater territorial ambitions was relinquished in 1905 with the peaceful dissolution of the union of the crowns of Sweden and Norway. To travel between these countries today, to listen to conversations in which their two languages blend, is to catch a glimpse of how it might go in Britain, a century or so down the line from the dissolution of another United Kingdom.

    Yet this vision of a peaceable endgame of history, relieved of the burdens of geopolitical self-importance, is complicated by another story of greatness that Sweden likes to tell itself. It was the Swedish diplomat Pierre Schori who coined the phrase en moralisk stormakt, ‘a moral superpower’, to describe the role his country had assumed in the 20th century. The phrase was meant with pride and it marks the point at which the external projections of modern Sweden as a utopia, originating with Childs in the 1930s, loop into the country’s self-narration, producing a sense of exceptionalism strangely parallel to America’s story of itself as ‘a city upon a hill’, a beacon of light in a dark world. The Swedish version of this story is hardly less shadowed.

    A moral superpower may not go around starting wars, but in Sweden’s case, it seems happy enough to profit from the sale of weapons. It’s not just that Alfred Nobel endowed his peace prize from the wealth he made in developing modern explosives, or that this country was responsible for the invention of everything from the landmine to the machine gun; it’s that Sweden remains one of the world’s great arms manufacturers to this day. In per capita terms, its exports of military hardware are exceeded only by Russia and Israel.

    There’s a book called Ambassadors of Realpolitik. It’s about Sweden’s role during the Cold War, but the country’s military-industrial pragmatism continues to collide periodically with its idealised self-image. In 2015, a red-green minority government, which had come to power pledging a ‘feminist foreign policy’, found itself in the kind of fix that Robin Cook would have recognised. The foreign secretary Margot Wallström had been outspoken in her criticism of human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. Now a longstanding arms treaty with the kingdom was up for renewal. Eventually, after much-reported cabinet splits, and in the face of opposition from unions and business leaders, the treaty was revoked. It was a sign that there remains life in the ideal of the moral superpower, yet in the broader scheme of things, such a gesture hardly made a dent in Sweden’s role as a global arms dealer.

    Schori’s phrase still surfaces now and then in newspaper debate articles, but there is a suspicion in today’s Sweden that the time of being a great moral power has also passed into history. In 2006, the erudite comedian Fredrik Lindström – Sweden’s answer to Stephen Fry – presented a prizewinning documentary series about the national psyche called The World’s Most Modern Country. It’s a title that plays on the stories of Swedish exceptionalism and the concrete achievements of its 20th century modernisation, but also on the sense that ‘modernity’ itself is now old-fashioned. Lindström’s artful monologues of self-doubt, the montages in which he is edited into archive footage, and the studio set reminiscent of the one in which David Frost interviewed Olof Palme made the series a study in postmodernism, Swedish style. A couple of years later, the historian Jenny Andersson published a book that tracks the decline of social democracy in Sweden and the rise of a nostalgia for the era of high modernity; its title translates as When the Future Already Happened.

    To this picture of early 21st-century Sweden, adrift in the aftermath of its own modernity, having lost and found and lost again its sense of greatness, let me add one more element that jars against my English expectations, and that is the phenomenon of a society in which the Social Democrats have truly been the establishment, hegemonic and replete with a deep-seated sense of entitlement. This may have its equivalents in the experience of local government in certain cities around the UK, but at Westminster, even when Labour has been in office, it has rarely felt itself to be in power. There are times when the contrast can feel like passing through the looking glass. 

    One small example: a few years ago, I was brought in to moderate a three-day event with a network of grassroots cultural projects from around Europe. Our hosts were an organisation based in one of those concrete outer suburbs of Stockholm, and over our time together I noticed a gap between their mindset and the other partners who came from countries to the south and east. The Swedes seemed quite sincere in their enthusiasm for a rhetoric of creative urban entrepreneurship that stank of neoliberal horseshit to the rest of us. Afterwards, it struck me: perhaps these phrases that rang so hollow to us could sound like a vehicle for change, if you grew up with the hegemony and homogeneity and complacency of a society so strongly shaped by one political vision?

    *  *  *

    The New York Times article locates the turn of the Sweden Democrats fortunes in their shift from a rhetoric of outright white nationalism to a defence of ‘the social-welfare heart of the Swedish state’. Where once it sought to deport immigrants as a threat to racial purity, the party now argues for the need to close the borders if the Swedish model is to be saved. At the centre of this model, the Times explains, is ‘the grand egalitarian idea of the “folkhemmet,” or people’s home, in which the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another.’ Though only, it should be added, through the impersonal vehicle of the state.

    In this telling, the far right has taken the social democratic utopia hostage, convincing its voters they can only hang on to their benefits and pre-schools and care homes if they keep the foreigners out. What complicates matters is that the concept of the ‘people’s home’ was itself lifted by the Social Democrats from the language of the radical right in the 1920s.

    If Marquis Childs’ book was the ur-text for the utopian image of Swedish social democracy in the outside world, the equivalent position within Sweden’s own political imaginary is held by the folkhemstalet, a speech given by Per Albin Hansson on 18 January 1928. In it, he held up a vision of the good society as ‘a good family’, a home in which there are no favourites and no stepchildren, and he set out the scale of the work that lay ahead to realise this vision. Four years later, Hansson became the first of the great Social Democrat prime ministers, inaugurating what would prove to be four decades of almost uninterrupted rule, time enough to go about building the people’s home.

    The choice of language in that speech was significant: on previous occasions, Hansson had spoken of the medborgarhemmet, ‘the citizen’s home’, a cooler and more clearly democratic term, but now he deliberately took up an expression associated with the radical conservative thinker Rudolf Kjellén. This was the same language whose potency was making itself felt in Germany in those years: the ‘folk’ in folkhemmet is a close cousin of the Volk of the National Socialists.

    The Swedish writer Katrine Kielos describes this move as a masterpiece of political reframing, capturing the rhetorical ground of one’s opponents. Writing in 2012, she could draw a comparison to Ed Miliband’s – in hindsight, rather less successful – attempt to steal the ‘one nation’ rhetoric of Toryism. Yet this is a little too comfortable a take, steering us away from the shadow side of the project which Hansson launched.

    Few would dispute that the building of the people’s home in Sweden was a feat of social engineering on a grand scale. Chief among its architects were the couple Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, among whose prolific and influential output was the 1934 book, Crisis in the Population Question, which argued for strict laws to preserve the quality of the human ‘breeding stock’. An enthusiasm for eugenics was not peculiar to social democratic thinkers, nor to Sweden; rather, it was commonplace among intellectuals, progressive and conservative, during the interwar period. However, such concerns were more deeply rooted in Sweden than elsewhere and their hold on Swedish institutions more enduring.

    In 1921, the Swedish parliament approved the creation of the Institute of Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala, the first state-funded centre for the study of eugenics in the world. Its founding director, Herman Lundborg, led a research programme that involved measuring the skulls and photographing the bodies of more than a hundred thousand Swedes, in pursuit of a more rigorous statistical basis for policies of ‘racial hygiene’. To Lundborg and his contemporaries, this project of racial categorisation was simply an extension of the work begun in Uppsala two centuries before by Carl Linnaeus, who set out to organise the diversity of the living world into a hierarchical taxonomy; in its original form, the Linnaean system included four subspecies of Homo sapiens, defined according to their skin colour. Despite the difficulty Lundborg had in drawing any meaningful statistical conclusions from the measurements his team had made, he received international recognition for his work, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1936.

    When war came three years later, Sweden declared itself neutral. The country was in no position to defend itself and had no desire to end up under occupation, like its neighbours to the west. So its neutrality was born of pragmatism and had the quality of a weathervane: when the war was going well for Germany, Sweden kept it supplied with iron ore and timber, transporting its soldiers home on leave from occupied Norway, or even en masse to the Finnish border to launch an attack on the Soviets. Later, it would find ways to be of use to the Allies, in their turn.

    This policy had its consequences for Sweden in the post-war world. While much of Europe lay in ruins, Sweden’s cities and industrial plant remained intact, its economy unburdened by war debts, and so the conditions for its economic take-off in the years that followed were closer to those of the United States than to any of the combatant countries of its own continent. The sheer prosperity of Sweden in the post-war decades, which contributed to the sheen of its utopian image, owed much to its peculiar experience of the war and its aftermath. My hunch is that the deep love for ’50s Americana in Swedish working class culture carries an echo of this period; the whale-sized tail-fin cars that gather to cruise the downtown streets of provincial towns are relics of an era of rising and broadly shared prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.

    The other legacy of Sweden’s World War II neutrality was a lack of reflection. With a few exceptions – most famously, the diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust – the Swedes seemed to have no wartime heroes, and no real villains. Whilst public opinion in the 1930s had been favourable to much of what was going on in Hitler’s Germany, attempts to launch a national socialist movement in Sweden never got much traction. There was not much soul-searching to be done, nor much moral capital to be gained from dwelling on the events of those years.

    Perhaps this explains the persistence of policies and intellectual currents which would not have found a place in the mainstream of other western European societies, more deeply scarred by the legacy of Nazism and the cost of its defeat. The Institute of Racial Biology at Uppsala carried on under that name until 1958. The policies of racial hygiene it was set up to support went on still longer: into the 1970s, the Swedish state was still carrying out the forced sterilisation of groups including Roma and indigenous Sami women. This went on through the high years of social democracy, when Sweden was, by its own estimation and that of many others, ‘the world’s most modern country’.

    It is sometimes said rather glibly that the success of social democracy in the Nordic countries was dependent on the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of these societies, as though it were easier to form a social contract of reciprocity with people who have the same colour hair and eyes. Whether or not there is any truth in this, there is a structural level on which the logic of the social democratic state implies exclusion. Whether you call it ‘the people’s home’ or ‘the citizen’s home’, the sheltering roof is built on top of walls. It offers a set of entitlements to those who hold the right papers. There are always rules that specify who qualifies, geographic and bureaucratic borders that mark the bounds of its generosity. While the moral imagination and internationalist commitments of a social democratic movement may lean away from this logic, that only puts it in the trap described by George Orwell in his essay on Kipling, written in 1942:

    All the left-wing parties in the highly industrialised countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue.

    By the late 1940s, the United States had launched the narrative of international development, whose genius is to locate Orwell’s ‘Asiatic coolies’ no longer as our contemporaries and servants, but as our followers along a chronological path that will lead them to a destination embodied in the prosperity of the western middle classes. New modes of globalisation took the place of crude colonialism and Sweden has furnished the development project with some of its most passionate and sincere advocates, not least the late Hans Rosling. 

    For Swedish men of Rosling’s generation, the experience of the post-war boom felt like an absolute validation of the development narrative, while the failure of Sweden’s early attempts at establishing African and North American colonies has lent the country a sense of innocence, compared to the ghosts of empire that haunt the photo albums of Europe’s other great powers. The 18th century nobleman, Axel Oxenstierna, got closer to the truth when he declared, ‘We have an India of our own!’, his enthusiasm sparked by the promise of mineral wealth in the Sami territories of the north, whose exploitation fuels the Swedish economy to this day. Meanwhile, the net flow of resources into this country and the ecological footprint of its consumers, closer to the American than the European average, mark it as a beneficiary of a system that still resembles the colonial arrangements Orwell had in mind, and his charge of hypocrisy still finds a target in a country that can pride itself on 200 years of peace while selling arms around the world.

    To draw out the contradictions within the social democratic project, bound up as it is with Sweden’s story of itself, is not to indulge in lazy relativism, to tar the party of the folkhemmet with the same brush as the Sweden Democrats. I’ve heard colleagues speak of their children being spat on for the colour of their skin. The chain of white supremacist terror attacks around the world in recent months, the latest just across the border in Norway, is a reminder of how much worse all this can get. Between the two political parties, there is no doubt whose activists have fought against racism in recent decades and whose have fuelled it.

    My point is not to downplay the darkness of the Sweden Democrats, but to recognise it as not simply alien, an external force hijacking the heritage of the Swedish model, but as drawing on something internal to that model, latent within the shadows of social democracy. If there is truth in such a reading, then it calls for a process of reflection that doesn’t stop at moral condemnation of the nativist right.

    *  *  *

    It would have been the spring of 2014, the Euro elections, the first time my Swedish was good enough to read the party literature landing in our mailbox. What struck me when I picked up the leaflet from the Sweden Democrats was that it named the day-jobs of their lead candidates, a care worker and a truck driver. The message could hardly have been clearer: we are the party of the low paid and the low status, those at the bottom of the ladder of economic or cultural capital.

    In 1989, the sociologist Göran Therborn was the sole Swedish contributor to New Times, the influential book-length collection from the editors of Marxism Today, rethinking the role of the left after a decade of Thatcherism. Therborn’s essay introduced his British readers to the concept of ‘the two-thirds society’, a dystopian projection of the socio-economic trajectory of post-industrial Europe, in which a third of the population find themselves locked out of a prosperity which increasingly goes to those with higher levels of technological and cultural literacy.

    At the start of the 1990s, Sweden was hit by its worst economic crisis of the modern era. The literary critic Jonas Thente recalls the nightly news reports in which laid-off workers trooped out of the factory gates for the last time in small towns across the country. While economic growth returned with time, the background rate of unemployment remained higher and in the decades that followed, Sweden has distinguished itself by having the fastest growing inequality of any OECD country. The two-thirds society became a reality, Thente observes, and yet somewhere along the way, we stopped talking about it.

    It’s true at least of Thente’s colleagues in the ‘cultural debate’ pages of the Swedish press, who do much to set the agenda of the public conversation, that they have seemed happier to write about gender, racism, LGBTQ and environmental questions than to touch on the themes of class and economic inequality. One particularly Swedish manifestation of this is the phenomenon of normkritik, the critique of social norms. At its best, this involves the unsettling of unexamined assumptions, what a librarian friend of ours calls ‘norm curiosity’: I remember a powerful session with the Swedish-Kurdish comedian Özz Nûjen at the theatre where I worked, as he mixed laughter with painful insight into everyday racism, challenging us to consider how this played out in our own professional environment. It can also slide into something more didactic, less curious, a kind of ‘norm-replacement therapy’ in which we are taught how we ought to be thinking.

    But given the acute, at times neurotic sensitivity to the policing of norms in the Swedish cultural sector, the uncritical persistence of one particular norm is striking. In the long dry summer of 2017, as wildfires burned out of control in many parts of the country, I listened in disbelief to a pair of young comedians from Stockholm on national radio as they giggled about how stupid the countryside people are and why they don’t just move to the city, instead of living out in the sticks and waiting for their houses to burn down. Maybe it’s another of the jokes I just don’t get, but it can seem as though the one kind of prejudice that is still welcome in polite Swedish society is prejudice against the inhabitants of the small towns and scattered rural communities that make up Sweden’s flyover country. 

    It’s a tendency Andrew Brown picks up on, in one of the later chapters of Fishing In Utopia, when he returns to Sweden in the early 2000s, a quarter of a century after he had lived here. In a prosperous middle-class neighbourhood of Gothenburg, he calls on his ex-wife and her current husband, a university professor, and they get to talking about the two-thirds society:

    They felt pity for the poor and for the immigrants, but for the people who stayed behind in the small towns of the interior, they felt a rather superstitious contempt, as if their bad luck might rub off on everyone else.

    ‘We should just close down the whole of the countryside,’ his ex-wife declares, with a sudden vehemence. He wonders if she is remembering the small town where she lived when they first met. 

    Urbanisation is still a recent and ongoing phenomenon in Sweden. Writing about her experiences making a film here in the late ’60s, Susan Sontag notes that people would often attribute ‘the awkwardness and flatness of their urban life’ to habits brought with them from the farms and the backwoods: ‘most of the people in Stockholm (I’m told) still remember the forest’. So perhaps the exception that seems to be made for this one form of prejudice stems from a lingering assumption that it is somehow self-directed.

    The era of widening inequality that followed the crisis of the early 1990s has also been the era of Swedish neoliberalism. Those profit-making ‘free schools’ were introduced under a one-term coalition government of the centre right, but continued with the support of the Social Democrat prime minister Göran Persson, who embraced Tony Blair and Bill Clinton’s ‘Third Way’, with its echoes of the old story of Sweden’s ‘Middle Way’. Successive governments from both sides of the longstanding block divide went on to oversee the increasing agency of the private sector and the profit motive in shaping Swedish society, a process which accelerated after 2006, when the Alliance for Sweden, made up of four parties of the centre-right, achieved an unprecedented two consecutive terms in government. In our research for a workshop in Gothenburg a couple of years ago, my colleagues from the Dutch architecture duo STEALTH.unltd were startled to discover an official website on which the city authorities pitched themselves to international developers at the MIPIM global real estate fair by promoting Gothenburg’s ‘tax-haven’ rates for companies.

    What is distinctive about Swedish-style neoliberalism is not simply that parts of the old social democratic model remain in place, but the way that widening inequality twists that model. The universal childcare on offer through the pre-school system is a remarkable support for working parents, but the generous bank of parental leave – paid at up to 80% of your usual earnings and available to be drawn on any time until the child turns twelve – benefits the middle classes most. It’s what meant that our family could make a three-month trip to England this summer, but much as it contributes to my quality of life, I can’t pretend not to know that this system is of less use to a low-paid care worker who needs everything she earns to pay the bills. Owen Hatherley sums it up rather well: ‘in Sweden, social democracy was only abandoned for the poor.’

    Three decades on, the predictions of Göran Therborn and his comrades have mostly been born out. Twenty-first century Sweden has become a society of insiders and outsiders, the pattern repeated twice-over: on an urban scale, where immigrants find themselves concentrated in the concrete outer suburbs, and then on the national scale, where the fast-growing urban centres do little to disguise their disdain for the people of the declining small towns and countryside. What made the prospect of the two-thirds society so vicious was that representative democracy would provide little incentive for the established parties to attend to the situation of the excluded third. Into this void has come a party which takes the loss, disorientation and disaffection of one group of outsiders and channels it into a suspicion and barely-disguised hatred of another group.

    *  *  *

    In the spring of 2013, I enrolled in Swedish for Immigrants, the basic language programme offered free to all newcomers to this country. That autumn, we moved from Stockholm to Västerås, an engineering city on the shore of Lake Mälaren, an hour’s train ride west of the capital, so it was here that I took my SFI exams. I’d learned how to be an immigrant and I had the certificate to prove it. My Swedish was coming along OK, too. One of my classmates, an exiled Iranian journalist, told me about a follow-on course she had signed up for, intended as a fast-track for professionally educated immigrants, to speed our integration into a society in need of our skills. I went to the job centre and asked them to sign me up, too. Only when I got there on day one did I discover that the course was intended for non-European migrants only, and I had been admitted due to an administrative error. The course leaders didn’t seem too troubled, though, and they let me stay.

    In the ordinary course of adult life, few things match the helplessness you experience when starting out in a new language. In those classrooms, in my mid-thirties, I relived the childhood experience of being in a teacher’s hands, for better and sometimes worse. But among my classmates, this helplessness had a certain levelling effect, however different the situations that waited for us outside school. 

    Many of those I studied alongside had made unimaginable journeys, taken risks and endured humiliations that I hope I will never have to face. The largest group were young men and families who had been part of the early exodus from Syria as the optimism of the Arab Spring gave way to bloody chaos. As often as not, they had wound up in Sweden by chance. 

    One friend described how, after months in Greece, he got himself smuggled to Spain, where he stood at Madrid airport, trying to get a flight to Munich where he had family, except the only flight he could get a seat on that night was to Stockholm. He took it, planning to lie his way through immigration, to travel south and seek asylum in Germany; instead, he was questioned, fingerprinted and put into the Swedish system, the course of his life turning on that choice of an airline ticket.

    Another Syrian guy I got to know had been studying in Tripoli when the Gaddafi regime fell, spent months hiding from gunmen, only to find by the time he escaped that his home country was unravelling into a civil war of its own. His parents had fled to Germany and he managed to join them there, but they fell out furiously over his father’s support for the resistance, and two days later he had left. Now, alone and deeply traumatised, he would sit in class, scrolling through video clips of street battles and explosions.

    In all the years I lived in England, I could count the people I knew who had been refugees on the fingers of one hand. Now, as I wandered into a life in Sweden, the first friends I made were these people I sat next to at school. While some were clearly broken by what they had lived through, what struck me mostly was their resilience. I began to notice a difference, though, between those who had families or faith communities to anchor them in these new surroundings and those who had come alone, who would spend their weekends counting the hours until we were back at our desks. That was when we started the Saturday fika club. It helped that Anna, my partner, had lived in Alexandria, working with children’s literature across the Middle East, and later with grassroots women’s groups in Palestine and Israel. This tall blond Swede who spoke street Arabic with an Egyptian accent won a lot of hearts.

    Fika is a Swedish institution: a pause for coffee, traditionally accompanied by cinnamon buns or ‘seven sorts of biscuit’, marking a space of sociable conversation in a culture otherwise characterised by reserve. Our teachers tried to instil in us a sense of its importance: when you get a job in a Swedish workplace, they would say, it’s very important that you join your colleagues in the fika room at break-time. So on Saturdays, Anna and I would bake and we’d invite my classmates and her workmates over for the afternoon to hang out and drink coffee and talk Swedish. This went on for a couple of years, long after the course itself was over.

    One other memory sticks with me from that period. It must have been early in the second course I took. The class had been broken up into workgroups of five or six, each group allocated some feature of the city’s heritage. We were sent out to research it and then prepare a presentation. My group was given the castle, a twelfth-century fortress by the river mouth, remade so extensively in later generations, you would hardly think it medieval. I threw myself into this eagerly, trying to play the good student, but my colleagues showed less enthusiasm. Finally, one of the women in the group turned to me.

    ‘Maybe to you this building seems old,’ she said, ‘but we come from a city that has existed for 8,000 years. To us, this is not so impressive.’ She didn’t go on to say that, here they were, treated as barbarians, in a part of the world that had still been in the Stone Age when their ancestors were laying the foundations of what we like to call civilisation.

    *  *  *

    I look at the numbers from the Migration Service and try to hold in mind the stories they represent: the journeys, the losses, the humiliations, the plans put on hold, the persistence, the stubborn rebuilding of lives under the circumstances of displacement. It was the autumn of 2015 when the numbers really took off, the nightly news leading on images of a drowned child, desperate encampments at Balkan border posts, crowds walking along the sides of motorways. These scenes were met with an awakening of conscience, a mobilisation of support, with welcome stalls at railway stations and networks collecting supplies for new arrivals. At the theatre, it was announced that we could each put an hour a week of our work time towards volunteering as part of this effort.

    That winter, I travelled to a conference in Estonia. In a Tallinn beer hall, I sat up talking late into the evening with Kilian Kleinschmidt, who had recently quit the UNHCR and was advising the governments of Austria and Germany on how to respond to the crisis. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘there is no reason why this should be a crisis for Europe.’ One million people arriving in a continent of 500 million, in some of the richest countries in the world – that this should strain our systems or our capacity to respond told us something troubling about ourselves.

    I’d read about Kleinschmidt’s work as Senior Field Commander at the Zaatari camp in Jordan, where he declared himself the mayor and the refugee camp a city whose residents were capable of organising to meet their own needs. His courage, his ability to build relationships and to generate publicity made Zaatari a success story, but it didn’t surprise me to learn that it had also marked the end of his career within the structures of a UN institution.

    Now, he spoke of the agency of the million people who had brought their desperation to Europe, commanding an attention which decades of professional communications work by NGOs and international bodies had failed to deliver. By coming here, they had revealed the gap between Europe’s story of itself and the realities that underlay that story: they were showing us how fractured our supposedly integrated continent remains, and how close to the surface were the ghosts of the politics of hate that European integration was meant to have buried.

    He talked about the threat of the far right – and then, he said, on the other hand, you have these people who want to keep refugees like pet guinea pigs. ‘You see it on Facebook: “How sweet, my Syrian was shopping and now he’s cooking for me!” Well, this is no good, either: a sentimental paternalism that makes victims of people all over again.’

    The next morning, at the opening session of the conference, I found myself sitting next to the Estonian culture minister. Over breakfast, a friend had been explaining the country’s ‘e-residency’ scheme, which allows individuals anywhere in the world to register for an ID card and set up a business that is legally based in Estonia. ‘I hear you have 5,000 e-residents signed up already,’ I said to the minister. He smiled and started to tell me about the scheme’s attractions for entrepreneurs. ‘I’m interested in how a system like this could work for displaced or stateless people,’ I said. His smile froze and he suddenly found an urgent need to speak to someone in the row behind us. Later, I learned that, just that morning, after months of tense political debate, the government had announced the arrival of the first group of refugees under the EU’s resettlement programme. There were seven of them.

    In late November 2015, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, Åsa Romson of the Green party, broke into tears at a press conference, as she stood alongside the Social Democrat prime minister Stefan Löfven to announce the reversal of their government’s previous policy on immigration. In order to give the system a ‘breathing space’, Löfven explained, the right to permanent residency for refugees was being suspended, the right of family reunification restricted and border controls reintroduced on a regular basis between Sweden and Denmark. These were temporary measures, to apply for the next three years. This was a terrible decision, Romson added, but her party had chosen to remain in the government to avoid decisions even more terrible being taken.

    By that point, the numbers of people arriving in Sweden had reached 10,000 a week. The total number of those who sought asylum in the country in 2015 was close to 163,000. The following year, that fell to just under 29,000.

    The change of policy had its desired effect, but it left an edge of bitterness in Swedish politics, not least towards the rest of Europe. In the summer of 2014, the centre-right prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt had given a memorable speech in which he called on Swedes to ‘open your hearts’ to those fleeing for their lives. Now, the thought came: if only other EU countries had been willing to open their hearts, Sweden would not have had to go against its own moral inclinations, its instinct to generosity.

    As Kilian Kleinschmidt said, the million people who came to Europe in 2015 did this continent the service of revealing the gaps within our systems and our stories. What kind of poverty did their arrival disclose within our seemingly so affluent societies? On what basis might Europe become a continent capable of accommodating and living together with the displaced? What we know of climate change, the consequences that lie around and ahead of us, makes this no academic question. Might we need to start somewhere other than the high ideals enshrined in doctrines of human rights, themselves so tangled up with the high-minded stories we like to tell about our continent and its role in the world?

    There’s a thread to pull on here that leads beyond where I am headed in this essay. For now, I remain impressed by the persistence of my Saturday fika friends and by the many small instances of hospitality I witnessed in the autumn of 2015 and the years since. It’s no small thing to live in a country that has as strong a tradition of welcoming the stranger as modern Sweden, and despite the dystopian exaggerations of the fear-mongers, the result has hardly been social collapse. Yet something else nags at me, an echo of Kleinschmidt’s words about keeping refugees as guinea pigs. Here’s what it is: with all its lingering self-image as a moral superpower, I don’t know whether this society realises how much it might have to learn from its newcomers, the extent to which they hold kinds of knowledge and experience that could make all the difference as times get harder, as I suspect they will, as the bubbles within which many of us have been living continue to burst.

    *  *  *

    We didn’t have to break up in order to get our post delivered to the new apartment. The system proved more amenable than Anna had feared, on this occasion, yet the fear was not entirely unreasonable.

    There is a ‘Computer says no!’ quality to Swedish society, a sense that for anything to work at all, it must fit within the categories and fields of bureaucratic forms. What is striking to me, as an incomer, is how natural this seems to everyone else. It’s a testament to how well the system mostly works that it is not treated as a joke, in the way bureaucracies very often are. Instead, Sweden is exceptional for the level of trust that people have in institutions.

    My friend who bought the plane ticket from Madrid describes the experience of being picked up by immigration officials at Stockholm’s Arlanda airport. Among the questions he was required to answer, they asked whether he was a Sunni or a Shia. It was, he says, the first time in his life that he had been made to define himself according to these categories, and he refused. ‘Well,’ his interviewer said, ‘I have to put something here. You’re Kurdish and Kurds are mostly Sunni, so that’s what I am putting.’

    When you are born in Sweden, you are issued with a Person Number, a ten or twelve-digit code that starts with your date of birth. Introduced in 1947, this was the first such system anywhere in the world to cover an entire population. Having a Person Number is a necessity for interfacing with numerous systems, public and private, and all newcomers given residency are issued with one. When I got my last four digits, as the expression goes, I was surprised to discover it even worked for borrowing DVDs from the local video store.

    All societies are full of their local mysteries, ways of doing things that are obvious to those brought up in them and baffling to the alien. But I wonder if any society has so deeply internalised the impersonal logic of the Person Number, the assumption that reality consists of things which can be indexed through categories and forms, existence as an entry in a database? When I listen to enthusiasts for the Blockchain talk about a near future in which entire legal codes have been uploaded and their inconsistencies ironed out, this vision of a world shorn of ambiguity, illegibility and the messy layer of human interpretation sounds to my ears like a strangely Swedish utopia.

    It’s a logic that goes deep. Remember my caveat to the New York Times description of the folkhemmet: ‘the country is a family and its citizens take care of one another’, but only through the impersonal vehicle of the state. The collective project of social democracy, born out of grassroots movements of mutuality and solidarity, became in its institutional realisation the platform for a radically individualist society. Dependence on the flawed and fallible fabric of human relations was swapped for dependence on the impersonal mechanisms of the state, and in many ways this looked like a good deal. The result is a society that resembles the vision of Liquid Modernity described by Zygmunt Bauman, in which all human relationships have become disposable, to be dissolved at will, with little cost or consequence. It is an achievement which produces a kind of liberation I do not want to dismiss lightly, even as I cannot deny my unease at its wider consequences.

    Anna remembers her return to Sweden as the loneliest time of her life. She had lived elsewhere for the best part of twelve years, most recently in Alexandria. There, if she kept to herself for 24 hours, her friends would come knocking at the door to see if she was unwell. In Stockholm, no one ever called by on the off-chance she was home. To make plans with old friends or new colleagues involved planning weeks ahead and coordinating around people’s slots in the shared laundry rooms that sit in the basements of Swedish apartment buildings. From a society only held together by the dense weave of human relationships, she had returned to one of order and independence and isolation, to a city with a median household size of one.

    Is the Swede Human? asks the title of a much-debated book by the Swedish historian Lars Trägårdh and the journalist Henrik Berggren. Trägårdh’s ideas have found an international audience through Erik Gandini’s documentary, The Swedish Theory of Love, while an English synopsis of the book was distributed at Davos a few years ago. It is an enquiry into the peculiarity of Sweden’s ‘state individualism’, following its roots back beyond the beginnings of social democracy and into the cultural history that formed the Swedish character. It is not hard to get onboard with the basic premise: in terms of the argument I have been tracing here, the inclination to treat reality as made up of things that can be indexed and categorised seems to stretch from Linnaean taxonomy to the more didactic forms of normkritik. It’s also fair to note that Trägårdh’s arguments can be turned to serve the interests of those who historically opposed the creation of the Swedish model, in as much as they locate the credit for its achievements within the traits of a national character, rather than with the social movements which built modern Sweden.

    If social democracy flourished in Sweden and came further in realising its vision of modernity here than anywhere else, it seems reasonable to look for the particular conditions that enabled it to flourish. The historical experiences, landscapes and cultural values which shaped this country may well have left it predisposed towards the social contract of state individualism, but the creation of the institutions and agreements by which that deal was made a reality propelled the inhabitants of the people’s home to a previously impossible level of independence from direct human relationships. In the ‘good family’ that grew out of Per Albin Hansson’s vision, not only were there no favourites and no stepchildren, there would be no need for actual family at all.

    Loneliness is not an easy thing to measure. At best you can look for the statistical traces that it leaves like footprints in the sand. Last December, the newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that every other day in Sweden, a body is found of someone who has lain dead, undiscovered, for a month or more. Other markers of a rising tide of loneliness might be found in the figures for mental illness among the young, or even in patterns of consumption so endemic we rarely acknowledge how closely they conform to the dynamics of addiction.

    This is not the violent dystopia of the Sweden the US president learns about from Fox News. It is closer to the general trends observed across the western societies, though pushed towards the extremes in a society that can seem on the surface to be insulated from the ills of neoliberalism, and that serves too often as a vessel for nostalgic hopes, a place where the dream of a kinder modernity is rumoured to be still alive.

    Of course, you might say loneliness is a price worth paying for all the gains Hans Rosling used to show us on his graphs, a luxury problem in a society that has met its more pressing needs. Except that the ecological realities of the 21st century bring back Orwell’s charge of hypocrisy in a new and deadly form: according to the WWF, the ecological footprint of the average Swede outstrips that of almost all other European countries. For everyone on Earth today to share this enlightened standard of life, we would need three more Earths.

    In the newsagents at the railway station, I pick up a strange publication, a Franco-Swedish ‘bookazine’ called Good Future (‘Inspired by UN Sustainable Goals’). All the articles are in English, including a lead essay from Johan Norberg, Rosling’s successor in the optimism export trade. Alongside it, there’s a ten-page feature in which editor Annelie Karlsson drives a Tesla from Stockholm to Provence.

    No one I know who actually works with climate change is persuaded by the path to the future on offer here, the green consumerism that has become so much a part of Sweden’s identity today. Perhaps it’s telling that Greta Thunberg – the most famous Swede in the world, right now – has received a rather muted response at home. Compared to the mass school strikes in Australia, Germany, Belgium and elsewhere, Swedish pupils have been slow to follow her example. Could it be that the cognitive dissonance between her message and everything the adult world is telling them is just too great?

    ‘We are coming down to earth,’ says the poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe, ‘we will not arrive intact.’ It occurs to me that the air of unreality surrounding much of the eager eco-optimism I encounter in Sweden is a reflection of how far this country has to fall. The Swedish model was built on industry, on the export of raw materials and high modernist design, on rising affluence and consumption. Its achievements do not insulate it against its unsustainability. There will be no smooth transition here, or anywhere else, but on the rocky road of the decades ahead, it will surely have to remember some of the skills of mutuality and interdependence that seemed obsolete when it occupied the high ground of modernity.

    If that is so, then Sweden may yet come to be grateful for the knowledge of people who came here from countries further down the league tables of economic development and who carry the lived experience of how to make life work under less orderly conditions. It may find, too, that there are currents within its own past and present that contribute to this remembering – not least, at the edges, including the rural and ex-industrial communities that have been treated as a threat or as a joke. For the grand stories that get told about a country and its national character are always full of gaps, threaded through with other lines of history whose significance may reveal themselves in hindsight.

    *  *  *

    On a Friday lunchtime, three weeks after my bag was stolen, I walk through the sliding doors of the Swedbank branch in the city centre, take a queue ticket and find a seat in the waiting area. At one of the stand-up desks that line the far side of the room, I hear a member of staff explaining to a couple who want to open an account that they need to speak to a national call centre, this isn’t something they can do here in person.

    Like most of us in the waiting room this lunchtime, I’m guessing, the couple are still wandering in to Sweden. There are exceptions: a man around sixty comes in, with a tan that says he’s spent the summer sailing in the archipelago, and is directed upstairs for a meeting with a financial advisor; there’s an elderly woman, accompanied by her daughter, but otherwise we all seem to be what they call New Swedes.

    I remember a conversation one day in class: most of our group were convinced that the old Swedes, the white ones, had become a minority in our city. When we looked up the statistics and found that only one in four of our neighbours had an overseas background, this was met with disbelief. In the queues at banks, at council offices, at bus stops, we are over-represented. We are less likely to go everywhere by car, to do our shopping online or out of town. It takes eight years on average, they told us at the start of that course, for an immigrant with a professional education to reach the point where she gets employment appropriate to her skills: we were here so they could help us get there faster. How much of that eight years is spent waiting around, I wonder? In queues, in the corridors of language schools, on street corners.

    In July, the city lays on a festival, with bands and stalls that line the downtown streets. Among the crowds, we run into Baha, a friend from the Saturday fika group. He laughs and shakes his head, gesturing around us. ‘Swedish people only know how to use the streets when someone tells them that they can!’

    My number comes up on the digital display and I’m shown through to a side office; in my hands, the documents I collected this morning from the police station. Not only a new ID card, but a passport, a magical instrument that means I can walk in and out of other people’s countries as though this were nothing. I know it isn’t nothing.

    Strange to see it there in black and white: Nationalitet: Svensk. I am Swedish people now. For bureaucratic purposes, at least, I stand solidly inside the walls of the people’s home, even if in other ways it still feels like I’m lingering in the doorway, eyeing the whole structure with suspicion. My papers are the proof that I have been adopted into the ‘good family’, with all its quirks and secrets. Like most families, it has stories that it loves to tell and stories no one wants to talk about. In another seven years, perhaps I’ll understand it better.

    After the train had crossed the bridge and we’d left behind the Malmö skyline, it hit me with an unexpected force: this is my country now, with all that is easy to love about it and all the rest, too. Its troubles are my troubles. When I write about its tangled history, I cannot do so with detachment, because I have become part of the tangle. Perhaps this was why I needed the three months in England, so as to come back and see this clearly, to lose any remaining illusion of distance.

    England will always be my past, my childhood home – and the past is never gone – but in as much as one can take such things for granted, I am here to stay. Running in my head are some half-remembered words, recited by Zlatan Ibrahimovic in a Volvo ad, the last lines of the Swedish national anthem, which don’t quite go: ‘I will live, I will die in the North.’

    *  *  *

    So what did happen in Sweden, when the far right won 17.5% of the vote in last year’s general election?

    Three days beforehand, the New York Times had run an op-ed under the headline, ‘How the Far Right Conquered Sweden’. The author, a political editor at a German newspaper, told readers that the Sweden Democrats ‘might end up in government’, that their success ‘makes a coalition between the Social Democrats and the Moderates unlikely’, but that both of these large historic parties might well split as a result of the vote. As James Savage – co-founder of Sweden’s English-language news site, The Local – wrote with some exasperation, these were ‘things that no one who has observed Swedish politics could assert’:

    The piece, like so many others, goes on to paint a dystopian picture of Sweden that is at odds with the experience of most people living here. A few anecdotes about gang violence in the suburbs leave the reader with the false impression of a society in decay…

    Sometimes, disinformation is not the result of dastardly plots by the enemies of democracy, but simply the decline of the foreign correspondent. (When I worked for the BBC in South Yorkshire, we’d sometimes get calls from producers in London who would start, ‘Newcastle, that’s near you guys, yeah?’ I imagine the Times editors calling up Hamburg on a similar basis.)

    When all the votes were counted, the red-green bloc – made up of the governing Social Democrats and Greens, with the arms-length support of the Left party – had 144 seats in parliament to 143 for what’s still known as the ‘bourgeois’ bloc, the four centre-right parties collaborating under the banner of the Alliance for Sweden. During the closing weeks of the campaign, there had been much discussion of scenarios, but few imagined the result would be quite so tight. The leader of the Moderates, the largest of the Alliance parties, Ulf Kristersson kept repeating the mantra that he would push their policies ‘right into the tiles’, a metaphor lifted from the world of competitive swimming that allowed him to hint that he would look for a way to govern with the support of the Sweden Democrats, if need be, without ever actually saying as much.

    One of the quirks of the Swedish system is its reliance on ‘negative parliamentary confidence’: to form a government, a prime minister does not need to command a majority in parliament, only to ensure that there is not an absolute majority of parliamentarians willing to vote against him or her. This makes an abstention as good as a vote of support, so much of the emphasis in building a government can go into which parties are willing to ‘lay down’ their votes and tolerate a prime ministerial candidate.

    When the new parliament met, its first act was to vote down the existing government of Stefan Löfven, the Alliance parties going together with the Sweden Democrats to create a majority against his red-green coalition. This set in motion a drawn-out process of meetings between the party leaders and the speaker of the house, with the mandate to lead negotiations on forming a government passing backwards and forwards. What became clear over the months that followed was that the strength of the far right had driven a wedge between the established bourgeois parties. Kristersson got as far as assembling the numbers to vote down the continuity budget of the caretaker government, still led by the ousted Löfven, and replace it with an Alliance budget. But on the question of forming a government – which, whatever sophistry might be deployed, would be mathematically dependent on the ongoing support of the Sweden Democrats – two of the four Alliance parties had to draw the line.

    Pushed to choose between fresh elections, tolerating a Moderate-led government reliant on the far right, or tolerating the return to power of their Social Democrat opponents, the Liberals and the Centre party finally opted for the last of these, to the indignation of their allies in the Moderates and the Christian Democrats. The far right had not conquered Sweden, but it had succeeded in fracturing the alliance between conservatism and liberalism that had composed the country’s centre-right. In this respect, the wranglings over the formation of a Swedish government prefigured the deepening divisions within the Tory party as Boris Johnson pulls it closer to the national conservatism of the Faragists.

    In the op-ed pages of the Swedish press, there was talk of the left-right axis giving way to the GAL/TAN scale: Green, Alternative and Libertarian voters on the one side, Traditionalists, Authoritarians and Nationalists on the other. The conditions under which the liberal parties agreed not to oppose the new government included tax cuts for the highest earners and other reforms that built on the agenda of the earlier Alliance governments, and at the last minute, the negotiations almost fell through, as the Left party threatened to vote against the formation of a new government on these terms. Meanwhile, commentators began to speculate about the emergence of a new conservative bloc. Recent polls show the combined support for this putative alliance the Moderates, Christian Democrats and Sweden Democrats averaging around 45%: strong, but not enough to take them to power.

    As a weakened red-green coalition settles into its second term of office, Swedish politics remains in a precarious situation, its politicians unsure how to absorb the lessons of recent elections; in other words, it resembles the ordinary condition of most of the Western democracies today. There is a sense of a phony war, a not-quite-convincing simulation of normality, but along what lines would such a conflict be drawn? It is easy to imagine ourselves in a reenactment of the 1930s; the rhetoric is borrowed from that decade, often enough, and any complacency towards the ghosts of history should be gone by now. Yet this reading of the times may be too easy, a way of avoiding harder tasks for the political imagination.

    Some clues as to what these tasks might look like can be found in Bruno Latour’s recent book, Down to Earth. Though far from complete, it contains sketches for a new political cartography that starts from the assumption that widening inequality, mass migration and the oncoming climate crisis are far more tightly interconnected than we have known how to talk about. The politics towards which Latour is gesturing is one that grasps the stakes of the 21st century and the challenge of finding common hopes on the far side of the failure of modernity. It finds in the figure of Donald Trump an embodiment of that which needs to be opposed, but it does not pretend that opposition can take refuge in the reanimated forms of older liberal or progressive politics. Its implications deserve an attention beyond the scope of this essay.

    Meanwhile, in the absence of such a politics, one of the winners of Sweden’s phony war has been Annie Lööf, leader of the Centre party. Born out of the Farmer’s League that helped Per Albin Hansson form a government in the 1930s, Lööf’s party has mutated into a vehicle for social and economic liberalism. Their parliamentary votes and her leadership were decisive in holding the line against the Sweden Democrats, preventing the creation of a government over which the far right would exercise power, yet Lööf herself is a self-professed admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Ayn Rand.

    I met someone who had lunch with her a few years ago and he told me an interesting story. He’d asked what she thought were the greatest challenges that lay ahead for Sweden in the coming generation. An ageing population, the automation of work and climate change, she answered. He pressed her on the last of these: did she really think that technology was going to get us off the hook, that we could continue on our current path of economic growth and ever more consumption? ‘I am an optimist,’ she declared, her smile firmly in place. A statement of faith. An end to the conversation.

    *  *  *

    Before we go, there’s just time for one last question, and this one comes from a caller in New York – the friend who sent me the article that set me writing. ‘How much of this is true,’ he wants to know, ‘according to you?’

    Well, it’s true that there’s a lot of disinformation about Sweden, much of it painting a dystopian picture. Among the actors involved, there surely are dark forces from other corners of the world, though they are far from having a monopoly. As we have seen, the New York Times itself is quite capable of playing its part in the promotion of a distorted view of this country.

    There is a party with neo-Nazi roots that has found that a defence of the political tradition of the folkhemmet has a broader appeal than the direct messages of racial hatred that it used to trade in. This party has established itself as the third largest parliamentary force in Swedish politics. For any of us to whom such politics is inimical, for any of us who bear the mark of otherness or care about those around us who do so, there can be no complacency here.

    As with its associates in other countries, the growth of this party has been fed by an online ecosystem, a digital shadow media, parts of it homegrown, parts of it fuelled by global networks of social media designed by Silicon Valley to profit from antagonism and addiction. Within that ecosystem, as the Times has demonstrated, there are strange alliances and bad actors, some of them state-backed, seeking to stoke hatred and anger.

    From the experiences of people I know, it’s clear that there is a poison at work in Swedish society that is far more toxic than the well-scrubbed, TV-friendly spokesmen of the Sweden Democrats want to admit. It shows itself when people think they are talking among friends, or through the safety of keys and screens and usernames. It spreads fear and despair among those who understand themselves to be its targets.

    In the end, the least convincing part of the Times article is its headline: the claim that a global machine lies ‘behind’ the rise of the far right. As we’ve seen, this argument stumbles on the timeline. It’s not just that the 2018 election result fell short of the Sweden Democrats’ ambitions. As pointed out by Christian Christenson, a Stockholm-based American journalism professor, while the international media reported a ‘surge’ in its support ahead of the election, the party had in fact been flatlining in the opinion polls since 2015. This seems hard to square with the idea that ‘the workings of an international disinformation machine’ lay behind its success, unless we are to believe that the power of this machine had begun to wane, back before Trump had emerged as a contender, before the Vote Leave campaign had started to gear up.

    Sinister as they may be, the connections which the New York Times is able to reveal are at most an exacerbating factor in what has been happening in Sweden. To place them at the centre of the story is to use them as a comfort blanket, a way of avoiding harder thoughts. This kind of comfort, we can ill afford.

    Västerås, 30 August 2019

    First published on Bella Caledonia, 13 September 2019.

  • The Fall of the Murdoch Wall

    The Fall of the Murdoch Wall

    The morning after the UK election of 2015, I posted a set of bleary-eyed thoughts under the title The Only Way is Down, and it became one of the most widely-read things I’ve ever written. Two years on, that title might have felt prophetic, but I had no intention of trying to write a follow-up. Still, the unexpected surge in support for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn prompted these reflections on the way in which the media has sabotaged democracy in the UK for most of my lifetime – and the possibility that this is coming to an end. So for those who like my writings on political disorientation, here is The Fall of the Murdoch Wall.

  • The Fall of the Murdoch Wall

    The Fall of the Murdoch Wall

    The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux, soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us…

    Tony Blair, 2 October 2001

    I didn’t make it to bed on election night, so it took till Saturday morning to have the experience of waking up in this new reality. All day, I felt a lightness, like the laws of physics just changed slightly — and scrolling through Facebook, I see others trying to make sense of this strange sensation. Mixed in among these posts, though, there are others that boil down to, ‘Will you all stop smoking whatever it is you’re smoking?’

    With that in mind — and with one or two sobering caveats — I want to explain why I’m convinced what happened last Thursday is among the two most important and hopeful events in British politics in my lifetime. And why that’s still true, even if you have no time for Corbyn’s politics or his party. (In which case, you can probably skip the next couple of paragraphs.)

    First, the sobering bit. Labour lost — it just lost less badly than everyone expected. May is back in Downing Street, promising another five years of Tory rule, only this time propped up by the even-nastier party. There’s plenty been said already about why the role of the DUP is troubling — not least, its potential to jeopardise what must be the most important and hopeful development in British politics in most of our lifetimes, peace in Northern Ireland. Oh yes, and meanwhile, a prime minister who couldn’t manage a competent election campaign is about to embark on the multidimensional chess of the Brexit negotiations.

    Now, you can come back against some of that: Labour’s vote grew by more than at any election since 1945, the party has momentum on its side, and neither May nor anyone else will be leading a Tory government for a full term. If it doesn’t fall sooner, a handful of lost by-elections will wipe out this government’s majority. (A thought sure to concentrate the minds of by-election voters — and Westminster averages about five by-elections a year.)

    But I want to talk about something more important.

    We’ve just had an election in which the full weight of The Sun and The Daily Mail was thrown at destroying Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party — and, by any standards, failed to do so. This is so big that, among the rest of the post-election turmoil, I don’t think we’ve grasped what it means yet.

    Since the 1980s, British politics has been locked in a basement by a gang of abusers, systematic perverters of democracy, chief among them Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre. 8 June, 2017 should be remembered as the day that we escaped.

    That look you see on the face of Labour MPs who spent two years opposing Corbyn at every turn — it’s the baffled gaze of battery chickens who find the door to their cage left open. Their every reflex was formed by fear of a corrupted and corrupting media. Now, they are disoriented by the possibility of freedom.

    I want to talk about why the current Labour leadership is strangely well-placed to take advantage of this new altered reality — and why seeing what just happened in these terms may be more helpful, when it comes to bridging divides, than assuming that resistance to Corbyn within the parliamentary party was all about ideological divisions.

    So, there are going to be four parts to this story: the first is about the British media, the second about Labour, the third about the Tories, and the fourth about what kind of an event this is — and where things go next.

    The Media

    When Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour party, the British press went into overdrive. According to a study by LSE researchers, only 11% of articles about Corbyn represented his views without alteration; in 74% of articles, his views were either ‘highly distorted’ or not represented at all. The leader of the parliamentary opposition was systematically delegitimised ‘through lack of voice or misrepresentation’, ‘through scorn, ridicule and personal attacks’ and ‘through association’ with terrorists and dictators.

    A newspaper can be as partisan as its editor and owner want it to be, but UK broadcasters are subject to a duty of impartiality. Yet the BBC seems to have been at best powerless to stop — and at worst complicit in — the capture of British democracy by a small ring of powerful abusers. It became so systematic, so embedded in the culture, that complaints weren’t taken seriously: when the BBC Trust upheld a complaint over a report in which Laura Kuenssberg made it look like Corbyn was answering a different question to the one he was asked, the director of BBC News dismissed the finding. Eighteen months later, in the final days of the election campaign, that misleading clip was still being shared widely with nothing to alert viewers to the upheld complaint. Overall, the role of broadcasters has been to recycle and amplify the newspaper attacks on Corbyn—something Barry Gardiner called out the Today programme over early in the election campaign.

    The intensity of the press attacks on the current Labour leader may have been unprecedented, but it is part of a pattern of abuse that goes back — well, how far? I’ll be 40 this year, I’ve followed every UK election since 1987 (listening to Radio 4 on a transistor radio in the school playground), and I can’t remember a time when we had a normally-functioning democracy.

    But the point where it became undeniable was the 1992 election and the famous front-page claim: ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’. Whether that was true hardly matters — for the next 25 years, British politics has been conducted on the assumption that it was. Until last Thursday.

    The Breaking of Labour

    Like a lot of the manoeuvres accompanying the birth of New Labour, Tony Blair’s courtship of Rupert Murdoch could be cast as a necessary evil. Yet there was always an excess to it; a suspicion that submission to Murdoch left him feeling excited, rather than sullied. The sense of betrayal which many Labour people feel when they think of Blair is usually explained in terms of Iraq, or of a preference for purity and principles over power; but when you think about what The Sun had done to Labour the last time around, the way Blair cultivated — and took pleasure in — his power-friendship with its owner was a fuck-you to the movement he was meant to be leading. And the impression of a weird edge to their relationship was bizarrely confirmed, after he’d left office, when he first became godfather to one of Murdoch’s daughters, then got accused by News Corp insiders of having an affair with Murdoch’s soon-to-be ex-wife.

    Gordon Brown’s experience with the press was more straightforwardly miserable. He fretted about what Murdoch would say, but lacked Blair’s knack for flirting with Labour’s natural enemies, and his attempts came off clumsily. (Remember the time he invited Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street?) Thinking back on the tormented figure he cut, the stories of rages and sulks and thrown computer hardware, I’m wondering now — was this the behaviour of a decent man who thought politics was a serious business, but found himself trapped instead inside a game where every move had to be calculated for how it would play on the front of the next day’s Sun?

    This brings us to Ed Miliband. Of all the politicians from New Labour’s ‘next generation’, he came closest to seeing the possibilities which Corbyn has now made a reality. Even his much-mocked meeting with Russell Brand in the closing days of the 2015 election campaign looks a lot less daft, given the wave of young and disenfranchised voters who showed up at the polls last week. But the instincts that drew Miliband in this direction were tripped up by a tendency to hesitation and to pessimism about politics.

    Two quick stories that show this.

    First, in December 2010, as the student movement started kicking off, Miliband apparently wanted to come down to the UCL occupation and talk with the students — an idea that divided his advisors, and that ultimately didn’t happen. Now, we can all guess what Corbyn would have done in his place, but the point is that Miliband’s instinct was to do the same thing — yet the supposed boundaries of what you can and can’t do in British politics, without getting destroyed, made him hesitate.

    Another story… Ten years ago, I became an internet entrepreneur by accident. A small project snowballed into an educational web start-up, and by the summer of 2007, one of my co-founders was faced with a decision— was he willing to commit to the responsibility with which we were about to find ourselves? When we met, he’d been working at a think tank with close ties to New Labour — and one Sunday morning at a festival, he ran into an old friend who was now Miliband’s speechwriter. As they were talking about the choice he faced, Miliband himself strolled up and sat down beside them. Having listened for a while, he said, ‘You know, if I could start again, I’d be a social entrepreneur. That’s how you really change the world.’

    And then came Jeremy Corbyn. What mattered about this Labour leader was not that he came from so far to the left, but from so far outside the game of ‘realistic’ politics which had led the likes of Miliband into that kind of pessimism about what politics could do. Meanwhile, the certainty of all the players within that game that he was headed for destruction meant he was spared the counsel of the kind of cautious advisors who fed Miliband’s hesitancy — because, for the past two years, those people just wouldn’t touch Corbyn with a bargepole.

    The Spoiling of the Tories

    The damage done to British politics by this decades-long cycle of abuse is obviously asymmetric—maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t see many areas in which the Tories’ desires have been constrained by the influence of Murdoch and Dacre. Yet, in their different ways, both parties have been deformed by that influence.

    While the systematic abuse of democracy bred a broken generation of politicians in the Labour party, it gifted the Tories a spoiled generation:

    • Some of them appear to truly believe the grim picture of the country they aspire to govern peddled by papers like the Daily Mail.
    • Others were trained in the arts of distortion and fabrication through earlier careers as journalists and columnists — and assume these skills are adequate to the task of governing a country.
    • None of them has had to engage in a real democratic tussle over the direction of the country, where their opponents don’t enter the ring already hamstrung.

    That’s how a party once led by Winston Churchill ends up with a prime minister who resembles a malfunctioning robot — and a clownish con-man as its leader-in-waiting.

    Again, this story goes back decades — but it came to a crunch in the past year. For just when, in Corbyn, Labour at last had a leader who didn’t fear the right-wing press, the Tories found themselves led by someone who aligned herself more tightly to them than her predecessors. Theresa May sought to govern Britain as an avatar of the Daily Mail. As Anthony Barnett wrote in October, this meant a shift away from the dominance of Murdoch — which had lasted from the Thatcher era, through the New Labour years, and survived the phone-hacking scandal (in which David Cameron’s director of communications, the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, was sent to jail). More than this, as Will Davies points out, the economic irrationality of Brexit left May’s Conservatism more dependent on both Dacre and Murdoch: in contrast to Thatcherism, ‘it can’t rely on cheerleading from the CBI or the Financial Times.’

    So the scene was set for the general election of 2017. It was not the threatened Brexit election — nor was it quite an election on the radical promises made by Corbyn’s Labour. (That’s what the next one will be about…) Rather, what we got was a Tory prime minister who had tied herself to the masthead of the Daily Mail versus a Labour leader with the guts to bet that the emperors would turn out to be naked. If the question was ‘Who governs Britain?’, the surge in support for Labour gave a resounding answer: not the Dacres and the Murdochs.

    And yet, among the rest of the past week’s noise, not everyone has heard — with Michael Gove returning to the front bench, the chatter is of Murdoch’s influence over the Tories rising again. Well, long may that continue.

    What kind of event was this election?

    This feels like the angriest and the most hopeful thing I’ve written in years. Thinking about the role of Murdoch and Dacre and their co-conspirators, the hold they’ve had over democracy in the UK, I keep coming back to phrases that suggest sexual abuse — and maybe that’s distasteful, I don’t know, but the anger hits me like it did when the BBC finally had to face up to having filled our childhood afternoons with celebrity paedophiles. Maybe it’s because of how long it’s gone on, how many people have known and treated it as just how things are. And maybe I’ve no right to use such an analogy, because it’s not something that’s ever been done to me. Honestly, I don’t know.

    What I do know is that we have another frame of reference for what happens when a gang of unelected bullies takes political control over a country and turns its ‘democracy’ into a pantomime, staged within limits which they get to determine. When I was a kid, half of Europe fitted that description — and then, one autumn, young people called the bluff of the people who thought they ran their countries, and it all came down faster than anyone could believe.

    I’m not saying what just happened is as big as the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the hope that’s mixed with the anger is because I think it might just be the same kind of event.

    What do I mean? Well, firstly, that this isn’t a swing of the pendulum. Word is that Murdoch stormed out of The Times’ election party when the exit poll was announced — and well he might, because we are never going back to a world in which he gets to determine what the Labour party can or can’t do. And that means that Britain is a democracy again — not a perfect democracy, and with an electoral system that’s badly in need of reform, but a country where real democratic change feels possible.

    The generational nature of what happened matters, too. Because it gives the lie to all the smug bullshit about young people not caring — and because those young people will be back, next time around — and because, just in terms of demographics, it means that the fear-fuelled, tabloid Toryism of this election campaign is on its way out.

    A wall that ran down the middle of British society has been breached, and my guess is there are still more people pouring through it in the days since the election. That breach isn’t going to go away because the Tories find a less robotic front-person.

    As for Labour, it’s a strange chance that not only does the party find itself with a fearless and vindicated leader, but, in Tom Watson, a deputy leader who took on the Murdoch empire with courage over phone-hacking — making him a strikingly appropriate figure to help the party orient itself to a world in which Murdoch and his like are no longer to be feared.

    A final thought (or three)

    A few years ago, I sat in the office of an editor in Prague, a man who had been among the crowds in Wenceslas Square in those late autumn weeks of 1989. He’d been a student, then, and we talked about the disillusionments that followed.

    ‘I’ve lived 21 years under communism,’ he said slowly, ‘and 21 years under capitalism — and I can tell you what’s wrong with both.’

    Did he ever regret what they had done, I wondered?

    ‘I don’t regret what we did,’ he replied. ‘I regret what we let the grown-ups do, after we went home.’

    The fall of the Murdoch wall may be a huge thing for British democracy, but its rise was part of something bigger that stretches far beyond the rainy islands where I did my growing up. One day soon, I need to write up a set of thoughts that have been gathering for a year or so, about how we map the politics of ‘neoliberal realism’ and the search for the exits — a story that takes in the Brexit vote and Corbyn’s rise, but also the shifting political landscape in other corners of Europe.

    Meanwhile, beyond all this, there is the low background roar of loss, the knowledge that we are living in an age of endings. I’m writing this late at night, after the first day of a meeting on ‘rapid decarbonisation’ — and the message from the scientists here is beyond sobering. At times, it’s hard to hold in view the different scales of crisis: the unravelling of an economic ideology that’s less than a lifetime old, playing out against the backdrop of the end of a 10,000 year mild period in the Earth’s climate which happens to have encompassed all that we’ve known as civilisation, and an ongoing mass extinction, the sixth the planet has seen in its long life. All these endings are entangled with each other. We have brought about an almighty bottleneck, and it’s hard to say in what shape our kind will come through it, except that the journey will change us in ways beyond the imaginings of the things I’ve been writing about here.

    But if I stare at these realities and still, despite the woeful absence of such matters from the debate in this election, see some hope in the unexpected wave that just washed through Britain’s political system, it’s because it will take waves like this — sudden ruptures that spread like rumours through the spaces of conversation and networks of relations that make up our lives — if things are to turn out better than often seems likely in the tight times that lie ahead.

    I was going to wrap this up by saying something like, ‘Don’t go home and let the grown-ups fuck it up.’ But then I read Dan Hancox’s piece this morning on the extraordinary surge of grassroots campaigning that produced last week’s results, and I’m like — go home? As if you would. As if any of us are about to do that, now.


    Published on Medium in the wake of the 2017 UK general election.

  • You Want It Darker

    As things stand, I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.

    Martin Shaw, Dark Mountain: Issue 7

    The regular mechanisms of political narration are breaking down. The pollsters lose confidence in their methods, the pundits struggle to offer authoritative explanations for events that they laughed off as wild improbabilities only months before.

    It’s a measure of how badly things have broken that, over the past year or two, members of the strange crew that meets around Dark Mountain have found ourselves filling the gap. I’m thinking of posts we’ve written in our various corners of the internet that were read and shared far more widely than most of us are used to, seemingly because they helped readers find their bearings in a time of deepening disorientation.

    There’s a role for this kind of writing now that seems clearer than it did eight years ago, when we started this project. That’s why, today, we are launching a fundraising campaign – asking for your help to build and launch a new online publication. It won’t replace the Dark Mountain books, but it will run alongside them and provide an online home for writing that seeks – as my co-founder, Paul Kingsnorth put it at the start of this series – ‘to make sense of things, and to examine our stories in their proper perspective.’

    At this point, if you want to head straight for our fundraising page and make a donation, then be my guest – but in the rest of this post, I want to make a few suggestions about why this kind of writing matters now, based on what Dark Mountain has taught me over the past eight years.

    * * *

    Let’s start with a few of the pieces I mentioned – the chances are you already read some of these, but setting them alongside one another, something else comes into view:

    These are posts that got shared and reblogged and quoted and seemed to travel halfway around the internet. Mostly, they were written for our personal blogs or websites – but the authors are editors or regular contributors here at Dark Mountain. You can see places where we spark off each other’s ideas, as well as significant differences in perspective. If you read them all, you’ll probably find some that jive with you and others that jar. But I want to point to some common ground.

    For one thing, while we draw on different political traditions, this is writing that starts a couple of steps back from the familiar terrain of political debate and analysis. I’m reminded of an answer I gave, years ago, when asked if Dark Mountain was a political project: ‘I think there may be times when it is necessary to withdraw from today’s politics, in order to do the thinking that could make it possible for there to be a politics the day after tomorrow.’ Or as Paul put it at the opening of this series, ‘Sometimes you have to go to the edges to get some perspective on the turmoil at the heart of things. Doing so is not an abnegation of public responsibility: it is a form of it.’

    If you start exploring the work of any of these writers, you’ll find that mythology is a recurring reference point, a deep element in how we make sense of things. At the end of his post from the morning after the Brexit vote, Martin Shaw wrote, ‘Television, radio and internet will be able to tell you all the above-ground implications of what’s just taken place.’ When these surface accounts fail to satisfy, though, there’s a hunger that is fed by the underground currents of old stories.

    One of the things that marks out this writing, then, is a willingness to enter territory that we could call ‘liminal’. It’s a term that comes from the study of ritual, given to the middle phase of a rite of passage: the preliminaries are over, you have shed the skin of an old reality, but not yet acquired the new skin that would allow you to return to the everyday world. The liminal is the space of the threshold, with all the vulnerability and potential of transition: the costliness of letting go, with no guarantee of what will come after. The liminal phase of a ritual is the moment of greatest danger – or rather, ritual is a safety apparatus built around the liminal. Whichever, the liminal is where the work gets done, where the change happens.

    So here’s the first suggestion I want to make: if this writing is filling a gap left by the failure of more conventional kinds of political narration, it’s because it is able to operate in the territory of the liminal, and these are liminal times.

    * * *

    It’s not just the broadening audience for this writing that points to its timeliness. The past year also saw more conventional voices getting drawn into the territory that Dark Mountain has been exploring.

    Take Alex Evans, a former advisor to the UK government and the United Nations, who just wrote a book called ‘The Myth Gap’. After a career based on belief in the power of ‘evidence, data and policy proposals’, his experience of global climate negotiations brought him to a crisis, and to a sense of the need for something more than facts and reasoned arguments. ‘We’ve lost the old stories that used to help us make sense of the world,’ he says, ‘but without coming up with new ones.’ And he quotes Jung: ‘The man who thinks he can live without a myth is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or the ancestral life within him, or yet with contemporary society.’

    Or check out the series on ‘spirituality and visionary politics’ that the political strategist Ronan Harrington edited for Open Democracy last year – and Jonathan Rowson’s report on spirituality for the RSA. ‘Scratch climate change confusion long enough,’ writes Rowson, ‘and you may find our denial of death underneath.’

    There’s lots to say about these examples, but for now I just want to take a couple of points from them. First, that the call of the liminal is making itself felt ‘above ground’. But then, that there is a danger of wanting to jump straight to rebirth, to promise bright visions and new positive narratives. Evans draws on Jung, but I’m not clear how much room there is here for the shadow – nor for the loss and uncertainty, the darkness and disorientation that are the price for entering the liminal.

    Then again, by the end of 2016, others were ready to make the descent. I once spent an hour on stage with George Monbiot pounding me over the pessimism of Dark Mountain, so it was striking to read his list of ‘The 13 impossible crises humanity now faces’. Then you had John Harris discovering Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. Watching experienced journalistic commentators move in the terrain that Dark Mountain has been exploring for the best part of a decade, it strikes me that there is another danger. To navigate at these depths, you need a different kind of equipment. Facts alone don’t cut it down here.

    This brings me to the other aspect of Dark Mountain which may be crucial to finding our bearings within the liminal – the centrality of art and culture to the work of this project.

    * * *

    A man is whispering in your ears, disorienting you, playing tricks with your perception, even as you watch him alone on stage with little more than a few bottles of water and a cast of microphones. This is Simon McBurney’s The Encounter, one of the most staggering pieces of theatre I witnessed in 2016: a show that leads you into the story of a meeting between a photographer lost in the Amazon and a tribe whose world is under threat. Their response to this threat takes the form of a ritual, a journey to ‘the beginning’, which is also a deliberate bringing to an end of their culture in its current form.

    The concept of liminality was first used to describe the structure of rituals like the one at the centre of The Encounter, but its application as a term for thinking about modern societies is connected to the study of theatre and performance. The anthropologist who made the connection, Victor Turner, distinguished the ‘liminal’ experiences of tribal cultures – in which ritual is a collective process for navigating moments of change – from the ‘liminoid’ experiences available in modern societies, which resemble the liminal, but are choices we opt into as individuals, like a night out at the theatre. This distinction comes with a suggestion that true liminality, the collective entry into the liminal, is not available within a complex industrial society.

    Now, perhaps this has been true – but here’s my next wild suggestion. The consequences of that very complex industrial society are now bringing us to a point where we get reacquainted with true liminality. To take seriously not just what Dark Mountain has been talking about, but what Monbiot and Harris are touching on, is to recognise that we now face a crisis which has no outside. The planetary scale of our predicament makes it as much a collective experience as anything faced by the tribal cultures studied by Turner and his colleagues.

    If this is the case, then where within our existing cultures do we go for knowledge about how to navigate the terrain of liminality? Not to the sources of factual authority, much as we need them, but to the places where liminoid practices have endured – to the arts, especially those forms in which people gather and share a live experience, and also (Turner would tell us) to those traditions and institutions that deal with the sacred.

    In 2016, I came to the end of two years working as leader of artistic development with Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre. The collaboration came about because their artistic director had been strongly influenced by the Dark Mountain manifesto. In the workshops we ran together, writers, directors and performers met around the question of what art can do, in the face of all that we know and fear about the depth of the mess the world is in.

    The answers that emerged began with a rejection of the usual invitation to put our art to use as a communications tool to deliver a message on behalf of scientists, policy-makers or activists – not out of some misplaced sense of ‘art for art’s sake’ purity, but because this isn’t how art works. 

    Instead, many of the possibilities I caught sight of during this work had to do with the liminal. Art can hold a space in which we move from the arm’s-length knowledge of facts, figures and projections, to the kind of knowledge that we let inside us, taking the risk that it may change us. Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down. Like the bronze shield given to Perseus by Athena, art and its indirect ways of knowing can allow us to approach realities which, if looked at directly, turn something inside us to stone. Art can call us back from strategic calculations about which message will play best with which target group, insisting on the tricky need for honesty – there’s a line I kept coming back to, from the playwright Mark Ravenhill, that your responsibility when you walk on stage is to be ‘the most truthful person in the room’. Art can teach us to live with uncertainty, to let go of our dreams of control. And art can hold open a space of ambiguity, refusing the binary choices with which we are often presented – not least, the choice between forced optimism and simple despair.

    These are strange answers. For anyone in search of solutions, they will sound unsatisfying. But I don’t think it’s possible to endure the knowledge of the crises we face, unless you are able to draw on this other kind of knowledge and practice, whether you find it in art or religion or any other domain in which people have taken the liminal seriously, generation after generation. Because the role of ritual is not just to get you into the liminal, but to give you a chance of finding your way back.

    Among the messages of the liminal is that endings are also beginnings, that sometimes we need to ‘give up’, that despair is not a thing to be avoided at all costs – nor a thing to be mistaken for an end state. 

    * * *

    Somewhere in the tumbling days that followed the US election, I saw it go by in the stream of social media. ‘It’s basically Breitbart vs Dark Mountain now, isn’t it?’ someone wrote, like we’re the last ones left whose worldviews aren’t in smithereens after the year that just happened. And like a few things in 2016, it had the taste of a bad joke that might have more truth in it than you’d want to be the case.

    In the last weeks of the year, as we were putting together this series of reflections, a discussion got started among the Dark Mountain editors about what the role of this project should be, in the years ahead. Bad jokes aside, it’s clear that the work we’ve been doing has taken on a new relevance, and with that comes a sense of responsibility.

    A couple of things are clear. The books we publish will always be at the heart of this project – and the work of artists, the makers of culture, will always be our starting point.

    Every year, thousands of copies of our books go out to readers around the world. By the standards of an independent literary journal, it’s an achievement, and it’s through the sale of our books that we’re able to pay for some of the work that goes into Dark Mountain. (The rest of the work, as you can imagine, is a labour of love.) 

    A sobering realisation this autumn, though, was that the audience coming to this website each year is a hundred times the size of the number of people ordering the books. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – but over the years, we’ve given only a fraction of the attention to this site that goes into each of our print issues.

    So we came to the conclusion that it’s time to do something online that comes closer to the richness of the books we publish (and will go on publishing). Exactly what form this takes, we’re still working on – but it’s going to be an online publication, something more and different to a blog – and a site that reflects more of the web of activity of the writers, thinkers, artists, musicians, makers and doers who have taken up the challenges of the Dark Mountain manifesto.

    To make this happen, we need your help. 

    We’re asking for donations to cover the costs of building and launching a new online home for Dark Mountain. You can send a one-off amount, or set up a small monthly subscription – or if you’d like to talk about other forms of support, then you can get in touch. Everything you need to know is here, on our new fundraising campaign page.

    How ambitious we can be with the next phase of Dark Mountain depends on the level of support we get, so at this stage we’re not setting a fundraising target or a deadline – but we’ll tell you more as we go along. 

    Meanwhile, thank you for reading and sharing the work we publish. From the crowdfunding of the manifesto onwards, everything Dark Mountain has done over the years has been made possible by the support of friends, collaborators and readers. We don’t take that for granted – and wherever things go next, however dark it gets, we’re thankful for the journey we’ve been on with you.


    Published on the Dark Mountain website as the closing essay in a series reflecting on the political events of 2016 — and to launch the campaign that crowdfunded the new online edition of Dark Mountain. Over the following six months, we succeeded in raising over £37,000 to fund the creation of a new online edition which launched in June 2018.

  • When the Maps Run Out

    I have been thinking about the slipperiness of history, how it escapes our grasp. When we study a war in school, the first facts we learn are the last to be known to anyone who lived through it: when it was over and which side won. Those who do not remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, but hindsight is very nearly the opposite of memory. To remember is to be returned to a reality that was not yet inevitable, to recall the events which shaped our lives when they might still have gone otherwise.

    The Dark Shapes Ahead’ (2012)

    The world is in flames and if you think it’s all the fault of those people — the uneducated, the bigoted — I urge you to think harder.

    When the values of social liberalism got hitched to the mercilessness of neoliberalism, it kindled a resentment towards the former among the latter’s losers. The deal was summed up in Alan Wolfe’s formulation: ‘The right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war and the centre won the political war.’ He said that in 1999. It was under Bill Clinton’s presidency that the ‘centrist’ settlement between progressive cultural values and There Is No Alternative economics was consummated. Two decades on, that made Hilary Clinton the dream opponent for a candidate running on the fuel of resentment.

    Here’s a stony truth to stomach: today, across the western countries, the culture war to defend the real social achievements of the past half century is grimly entangled with a class war against the losers of neoliberalism.

    If we now lose many of the unfinished achievements of the struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia, the Clinton generation of politicians will share the responsibility.


    I came home on Tuesday thinking Clinton was going to win, just like I came home in June thinking Britain was going to vote Remain.

    It turns out you can spend the best part of a decade talking “collapsonomics”, writing about the dark shapes ahead and the unravelling of the world as we have known it, and still let yourself get lulled into believing the status quo will hold a little longer.

    It helps that I voted Remain. I would have voted Hilary if they gave the rest of the world a vote.

    Still, the day after the referendum, when everyone was sharing that chart that showed that Remain voters were better educated, it filled me with an anger that stopped me writing. Were so many of you really so blind to the link between education and privilege?

    Back before I was that Dark Mountain guy, I worked as a local radio reporter in a city in the north of England. In the newsroom one day I saw a set of figures that are fixed in my memory: among 19 year olds with a home address in the leafy suburban southwest of that city, 62% were in higher education; on the council estates and terraced streets to the northeast, where my sister lives, the number was 12%. A kid from the right side of town was five times more likely to get to university than a kid from the wrong side of town. That’s when I got it: for all the other things it does, the major social function of higher education today is to put a meritocratic rubberstamp on the perpetuation of privilege.

    All those posts pointing out that graduates voted Remain, they seemed to imply that the higher you climb the ladder of education, the further you can see, the better equipped you are to make important decisions. But there are truths that are seen more clearly from below. Which side of town would you imagine has a clearer picture of the link between education and privilege?


    On Twitter right now, pundits who seem unhumbled by all the ways they didn’t see this coming throw around snapshots of exit polls to prove that this was or wasn’t about misogyny, racism, or a working class revolt.

    Start with a different set of numbers.

    Last September, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a study that showed that the death rate for middle-aged white Americans had started rising back in 1999. For every other group in the population, the death rate continues to fall. Among middle-aged white Americans, it is those who left education earliest who are doing most of the dying. They are dying of suicides and overdoses, alcohol poisoning and liver disease. The number of deaths is on a par with the AIDS epidemic at its height, but the causes bring to mind another historical parallel, to Russia in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet this American fall has taken place uneventfully, almost unnoticed, even by the gatherers of statistics: by their own account, Case and Deaton stumbled on their findings by accident.

    In March, after Super Tuesday, the Washington Post plotted the death data against the primary results. In eight out of nine states, they found a correlation: the counties where death rates for middle-aged whites were the highest were the counties where the vote for Trump was the strongest.

    I don’t know how you can look at that and say that Trump’s election is only about racism and misogyny, that it is not also a consequence of something that has been going terribly wrong in the lives of those white Americans with the lowest cultural capital.


    All year I’ve been watching sensible respectable well-paid commentators flailing to catch up with the collapse bloggers: these fringe thinkers off the internet, narrators of America’s long decline, people I’ve been reading (and occasionally publishing) for a decade or so, were the one group whose models of reality could handle what was happening.

    John Michael Greer lives in the Rust Belt and writes The Archdruid Report, a blog that rolls out every Wednesday, a kind of midweek sermon on nature, culture and the future of industrial civilisation. He called the election for Trump back in January. He is an actual archdruid, as it happens — as well as an SF novelist, a freemason and a self-described ‘moderate Burkean conservative’.

    In a series of posts this year, he sketched out a take on the long backstory to this election which goes something like this:

    Politics is about how a society deals with the collision between the interests of different groups. The great contribution of the liberal tradition was to show that politics can also be about values — but the corruption of that comes at the point when values are used as a cover for interests.

    The policies of globalisation, the deindustrialisation of the US economy and its increased reliance on illegal immigration as a source of cheap labour, were the result of political choices. These choices served the interests of those Americans with salaries and a higher education, while going against the interests of wage-workers. But instead of this collision of interests being negotiated within the political sphere, the results of these policies were presented as inevitable and universally desirable. In particular, any attempt to talk about whose interests were served by the role of illegal immigration was immediately derailed into an argument about values where anyone questioning immigration was accused of racism.

    Trump’s campaign played on this in two ways. First, by deliberately outraging the socially liberal values which had become so entangled with the interests of the salariat, he could build a rapport with other parts of the electorate. Then, by focusing on immigration, jobs and protectionism, he gave those voters a sense that their interests might actually have found a political vehicle.

    The danger of this kind of analysis is that it downplays the uglier forces on which Candidate Trump fed for his success, the forces which President Trump will embody. But it gives you a sense of how the election can have looked in the Rust Belt towns, to the low income white Obama voters who swung to Trump, in the places where all that dying is going on.

    More than anyone else I’ve read this week, Greer seems persuaded that the dangers of a Trump presidency have been overstated. It’s possible to hope that he is right, I suppose — and, meanwhile, to assume that he is wrong and prepare accordingly.


    The blogger who goes by Anne Tagonist (or sometimes Anne Amnesia) is less sanguine. ‘What Trump’s boys have for me is a noose,’ she wrote, back in May, ‘but that’s the choice I’m facing, a lifetime of gruelling poverty, or apocalypse.’

    Yeah I know, not fun and games — the shouts, the smashing glass, the headlights on the lawn, but what am I supposed to do, raise my kid to stay one step ahead of the inspectors and don’t, for the love of god, don’t ever miss a payment on your speeding ticket? A noose is something I know how to fight. A hole in the frame of my car is not. A lifetime of feeling that sense, that “ohhhh, shiiiiiit…” of recognition that another year will go by without any major change in the way of things, little misfortunes upon misfortunes… a lifetime of paying a grand a month to the same financial industry busily padding the 401k plans of cyclists in spandex, who declare a new era of prosperity in America? Who can find clarity, a sense of self, any kind of redemption in that world?’

    When I interviewed Anne for the last Dark Mountain book, I learned a little more about her background in zine writing and travelling and roads protests, working as a street medic, then on ambulances, and from there to medical school and research. She doesn’t write so often, but when she does, what I appreciate is her willingness to puzzle through a question, to include her uncertainties, rather than making a neatly rounded argument.

    And that post in May was scorching. It starts with the Case-Deaton death rate study, but seen through the eyes of someone living in one of those counties, someone who has been sitting in with the Medical Examiner:

    A typical day would include three overdoses, one infant suffocated by an intoxicated parent sleeping on top of them, one suicide, and one other autopsy that could be anything from a tree-felling accident to a car wreck (this distribution reflects that not all bodies are autopsied, obviously.) You start to long for the car wrecks…

    Unlike the AIDS crisis, there’s no sense of oppressive doom over everyone. There is no overdose-death art. There are no musicals. There’s no community, rising up in anger, demanding someone bear witness to their grief. There’s no sympathy at all. The term of art in my part of the world is “dirtybutts.” Who cares? Let the dirtybutts die.

    You know, I could just repost every other paragraph of that piece here, but really you should go read the whole thing.

    From where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that.


    Is this OK, I wonder, just bombarding you with a reader’s digest of the apocalypse?

    It’s not the apocalypse, of course, it’s just history, but if you thought the shape of history was meant to be an upward curve of progress, then this feels like the apocalypse.

    Midway through the night, when the New York Times projection had slipped from Likely to Leaning to Tossup, as I broke open the whisky and let rip on Twitter, my friend Chris T-T replied, ‘I love that your reaction to fear is a splurge of analysis.’

    There’s a rawness in the aftermath of nights like that, a sense that the callused outer skins of our grown-up selves have been ripped off. For a day or two, maybe longer, we can feel things with the intensity of children again. (Or as someone in my timeline wrote, ‘The OH FUCK! comes in waves.’)

    It reminds me of the conversations that sometimes happen in the last days of a life, or on the evening of a funeral. In the underworld of loss, we don’t get to bring our achieved identities with us, so there’s a chance of getting real.


    The morning after last year’s unexpected Conservative election victory in the UK, I wrote some notes on how to make sense of the loss. As political bereavements go, it looks quaint now by comparison — don’t you feel nostalgic for when the worst thing that could happen was waking up to find David Cameron was still prime minister? But one thing from that post sticks out, the part where I was building on a line from the mythographer and storyteller Martin Shaw: ‘This isn’t a hero time, this isn’t a goddess time: it’s a trickster time.’

    When people like John Berger (one of my heroes) were young, it was a real thing to believe in the heroic revolution that Marx had seemed to promise. Today, the only kind of revolution that is plausible is a foolish one, one where we accidentally stumble into another way of being human together, making a living and making life work. (And whatever that might look like, it doesn’t look like utopia.)

    I wrote that thinking of the weird cameo role that Russell Brand had been playing in British politics: not thinking of him as a candidate to lead a trickster revolution, only as a clue to the motley in which change would need to come in a time like this.

    I’m pretty certain it was Ran Prieur, another of the collapse bloggers, who put me onto the idea of Trump as trickster, but the best treatment of that thought I’ve found is Corey Pein writing for the Baffler.

    He starts with the story of Allen Dulles, later the director of the CIA, who recruited Carl Jung as an agent during World War II to provide insights on the psyche of Hitler and the German public. ‘Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the Allied cause during the war,’ Dulles wrote afterwards. We do know that, in an essay in 1936, Jung had written, ‘the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all [proposed] reasonable factors put together.’ (As Pein goes to some lengths to acknowledge, such thoughts are quite a stretch for the early 21st century western imagination: if you’re struggling, try telling yourself, ‘Obviously Jungian archetypes are just metaphors,’ and then remove the ‘just’ from that statement.) If Wotan could be awoken in the collective psyche of a nation, Jung added, then ‘other veiled gods may be sleeping elsewhere.’ Which is how Pein comes to Trump:

    Just as Hitler was not known to crack wise from the podium, Trump’s stump speeches do not call to mind ‘storm and frenzy.’ Trump is no Wotan, no berserker — he is a wisecracker, adept in the cool medium of television. He represents an entirely different Jungian archetype — namely, the pan-cultural mythological figure of ‘the trickster,’ who arrives at moments of uncertainty to bring change, often of the bad kind.

    Pein is being a little unfair on the trickster here, I think. Lewis Hyde gives a subtler account in his marvellous book, Trickster Makes This World. He identifies trickster as a low status character within the local pantheon of a culture, a mischievous messenger boy, a nuisance under normal circumstances, but who takes on an altogether more important role in moments of deep cultural crisis: when those who hold high status within the existing order of things are helpless, trickster can shift the axis, find the hidden joke that allows the culture to pass through into a new version of itself.

    If you’ll grant that such uncivilised ways of thinking could help us make sense of political events, I’ll tell you that Donald Trump is a shadowy parody of a trickster. That takes me to something the poet Nina Pick says in a conversation in the latest Dark Mountain:

    We’ve lost the power of metaphor. You can see it in American politics at the moment for example; there’s a deficit of imagination, of the imaginal life, of myth… and without that level of myth and of metaphor I think we start to get lost as a culture.

    When we lose sight of myth and metaphor, we don’t leave it behind, we just become unaware of the ways in which it is still at work in our culture.

    Or, as Martin Shaw, who set me thinking about all this, would put it:

    The stories that we are being fed now are not myths. They are what I would call, toxic mimics. But when we are deprived of the real thing, we will take even an echo and grab on to it. So in other words, the most horrible lies always have a little bit of truth in them.

    So there you have it, that’s my hot take: Donald Trump is a toxic mimic of Loki.


    At this point, there are a couple more things we need to talk about, before I try and leave you with some blessing for the dark times that are gathering around us.

    There’s something more to say about the work that lies ahead, if it’s seriously the case that we are in territory where archdruids and zine writers and collapse bloggers and mythtellers are the ones who still have maps that seem to make sense.

    But first, we need to talk about Hitler.


    If there is any meaning left in a word like fascism, then let’s call Trump a fascist.

    Heck, even John Michael Greer’s first take on the Donald’s campaign, back in the summer of 2015, was that it ‘is shaping up to be the loudest invocation of pure uninhibited führerprinzip since, oh, 1933 or so.’

    But it’s worth lingering over that ‘if’… Words like ‘fascist’ are mostly used these days as a stop to thinking, a shorthand that saves us the work of knowing our enemy.

    Anthony Barnett walked this line in an essay for Open Democracy, the night before the election:

    It is essential to be able to distinguish between different kinds of evil and judge them accordingly… As a rule, therefore, never talk about ‘fascism’ or ‘Stalinism’ in political or polemical writing… They are used to mobilise an attitude that pre-empts scrutiny. And even interest. If something is fascist we should be able to ask what kind it is and how bad it might be, but the concentration camps make such an approach taboo.

    ‘For the first time,’ he goes on, ‘I break the rule.’

    And if the hesitation adds force to his doing so, it also leaves room for a qualification. Trump is a fascist, Barnett writes, but unlike Hitler, he does not have financiers, storm-troopers or an organised movement. What he now has is the office of President of the United States and a seemingly compliant legislature.

    Another line of caution about the Hitler comparison comes from another of Anne Tagonist’s essays — written just after Super Tuesday, when she was already taking the likelihood of a Trump presidency seriously — in a genre she calls ‘clumsy writings about why history doesn’t work the way you think it does.’

    The systematic study of mass behaviour, she points out, is largely a post-World War II phenomenon.

    In 1945, Germany was in ruins, the world had entered the atomic age and the cold war, Americans were starting to realize exactly how many civilians had been exterminated in “labour” camps, and yet no consensus narrative had emerged how such an unthinkable sequence of events could have happened… The Third Reich was a very good reason to go out and learn more about how humans behaved in groups.

    And so, with the contributions of Adorno, Arendt, Milgram and others, within twenty years, an intellectual consensus emerged about how Nazism had come about, how it had achieved such adoration and power, and how it enlisted so many Germans in the systematic perpetration of horrors.

    We had a system custom-built to explain the Nazis, that explained the Nazis. A side effect is that now, every large-scale bad social movement looks a bit like the Nazis.

    Remember, she is not making this argument to tell us there’s no need to worry, this is Anne who also wrote that ‘What Trump’s boys have for me is a noose.’ What she is getting at is the danger of readying ourselves to fight the last war. Literally.

    Actual historians don’t tend to think history repeats itself, or if they do, they find celebrated yet incomplete examples that don’t assume the world began a century ago and only one bad thing every happened in it.

    But OK, let’s say that this is our January 1933.

    We don’t know the shape of the war that could be coming, nor how that war will end, and not only because we cannot see the future, but because it hasn’t happened yet: there is still more than one way all this could play out, though the possibilities likely range from bad to worse.

    Among the things that might be worth doing is to read some books from Germany in the 1920s and 30s, to get a better understanding of what Nazism looked like, before anyone could say for sure how the story would end.

    Another thought, from that post I quoted at the start, written four years ago, on a journey I made in search of cultural resilience:

    If someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be: to take responsibility for the survival of something that matters deeply. Whatever that is, your best action might then be to get it out of harm’s way, or to put yourself in harm’s way on its behalf, or anything else your sense of responsibility tells you.

    Some of those actions will be loud and public, others quiet, invisible, never to be known. They are beginning already. And though it is not the bravest form of action, and often takes place far from the frontline, I believe the work of sense-making is among the actions that are called for.


    I notice that there is a part of me that would like not to be serious, that would like it to be secretly a bluff, a puffing of the ego, when I say that it feels like there’s a new responsibility landing on the ragtag of thinkers and tinkers and storytellers at the edges, one edge of which I have been part of over these last years. And for sure, this is only one map I’ve been sketching, others will have their own that may or may not overlap.

    But the way it looks from here tonight, the people who are meant to know how the world works are out of map, shown to be lost in a way that has not been seen in my lifetime, not in countries like these.

    I am thinking of one of the smartest, most thoughtful commentators on the events of this year, whose analyses have helped many of us make sense of what Brexit might mean, the director of the Political Economy Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, Will Davies. In an article for the Washington Post, a week after the referendum, he drew the parallel to the Republican primaries. He too had picked up on the Case-Deaton white death study and the correlation between mortality rates and Trump support.

    ‘Could it be that, as with the British movement to leave the EU, Trump is channelling a more primal form of despair?’ he asks. But as the article approaches a conclusion, the despair seems to have spread to its author. ‘When a sizeable group of voters has given up on the future altogether… how does a reasonable politician present themselves?’

    All of this represents an almost impossible challenge for campaign managers, pollsters and political scientists. The need for candidates to seem ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ is as old as television. Now it seems that they also need to give voice to the private despair of voters for whom collective progress appears a thing of the past. Where no politician is deemed ‘trustworthy,’ many voters are drawn toward the politician who makes no credible pledges in the first place. Of course government policy can continue to help people, and even to restore some sense of collective progress. But for large swaths of British and American society, it seems best not to state as much.

    As I read them, these are the words of a person who is running out of map, though one who gets closer than many to seeing how deeply the future is broken, how far the sense of collective progress is gone.

    While the victorious political centre of the Clinton and Blair era has gone on insisting that everything is getting better and better, some of the smartest thinkers on the left have recognised the breakdown of the future and responded by setting out to reboot it, to recover the kind of faith in collective progress that made possible the achievements of the better moments of the twentieth century.

    If their attempts have struggled to gain traction, one reason may be that the left is better at recognising the economic aspects of what has gone wrong than the cultural aspects, which it tends to ignore or bracket under bigotry. There are great forces of bigotry at work in the world, they will have taken great encouragement from Trump’s election and they need to be fought, as they have been by anti-fascist organising in working class communities, again and again. As a teenager in the northeast of England, my first activism was going out on the streets against the British National Party with Youth Against Racism in Europe. Still, without pretending that they can be neatly disentangled, there are other aspects of what has gone wrong that belong under the heading of culture, besides racism and xenophobia.

    In the places where it happens, economic crisis feeds a crisis of meaning, spiralling down into one another, and if we can only see the parts that can be measured, we will miss the depth of what is happening until it shows up as suicide and overdose figures.

    Without a grip on this, the left has struggled to give voice to those for whom talk of progress today sounds like a bad joke. And yeah, maybe Bernie could have done it — he’d surely have been a wiser choice for the Democrats this year — but the thing is, we’ll never know. Meanwhile, across the western countries, too often, the only voices that sound like they get the anger, disillusionment and despair belong to those who seek to harness such feelings to a politics of hatred.

    This is where I intend to put a good part of my energy in the next while, to the question of what it means if the future is not coming back. How do we disentangle our thinking and our hopes from the cultural logic of progress?For that logic does not have enough room for loss, nor for the kind of deep rethinking that is called for when a culture is in crisis. But that is another story, and a longer one even than this text has become, and I must get up in a few hours’ time to go talk about that story with a conference full of hackers.


    On Wednesday morning, the snow was falling hard. Before I finally got to bed, I had given my son breakfast and taken him to kindergarten, pushing his buggy through the snowstorm. Last time we had snow, he was still a baby wrapped inside a pram: now he is fifteen months and discovering everything. After dinner that night, he danced with me and we laughed together like fools.

    I want to say that this is also history, though it doesn’t get written down so much: the small joys and gentlenesses, the fragments of peace, time spent caring for our children, or our parents, or our neighbours. These tasks alone are not enough to hold off the darkness, but they are one of the places where we start, one of the models for what it means to take responsibility for the survival of things that matter deeply.

    Fifteen months and every day now he is playing with new words in his mouth. I can see the time coming when the words become sentences and questions, when he starts to want the world explained to him.

    ‘How can I get through it?’ a friend asked.

    This was earlier that morning, before the snowstorm.

    ‘We’ll get through because we have to,’ I wrote, ‘the way we always have, one foot in front of another. Hold those you love tight. Be kind to strangers.’

    ‘I’m really not looking forward to telling my kid he lives in President Trump’s country,’ another friend wrote.

    ‘Our kids are going to be the ones who get us through this,’ I told her. ‘That’s how long this journey will take.’

    What am I doing here, I wonder now? I don’t even live in America. Though somehow we all live in America, because it fills our ears, spills out of screens and teaches us to dream. But also because we can feel it coming, see the same gaps widening in our own societies, watch the same complacency or helplessness on the faces of the old leaders and the ugly smiles of those who are sure their time is coming.

    Everyone who said they knew what they were doing has failed. How badly things turn out now, we can’t say for sure. But there is work to be done.


    First published as Issue 11 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter.

  • Labour Through the Looking Glass: 15 Early Morning Speculations on the Corbyn Surge

    Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”

    “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

    1. If only Labour had a reason to exist…

    I keep thinking of Landon Kettlewell, the dot com entrepreneur from Cory Doctorow’s novel, Makers. At the start of the book, he has just bought up the exhausted shells of Kodak and Duracell. To an audience of puzzled Silicon Valley journalists, he explains that these companies have history, infrastructure, administrators, facilities, supplier relationships, distribution and logistics. All they lack is a reason to exist.

    To their own and everybody else’s surprise, the Labour establishment looks to be losing their party the same way they lost Scotland. That’s what set me thinking about Kettlewell. A month earlier, the Corbyn surge would have sounded impossible, a piece of wild political science fiction. Now, they were throwing every trick in the playbook at the Islingtonian candidate, to the opposite of the intended effect, and casting around for explanations as to what the hell is going on.

    So here’s one more explanation to try out: Labour is Kodak, Labour is Duracell, Labour is the shell of something that has lost its reason to exist. As it currently stands, it is useless, but it is also the heir to a whole stack of resources that could be very useful indeed, if only it had a purpose.

    Kettlewell has a solution for ‘Kodacell’: he is going to turn it inside out and put the companies’ resources at the disposal of a network, a grassroots network of tens of thousands of hackers and makers. Between them, they will make it useful again.

    And so the absurd thought came to me: what if this is what Jeremy Corbyn’s election ends up doing to the Labour party?

    2. What does this look like, if it works?

    Bear with me, this will take some time, but there may be pieces here that start to fit together.

    I’m thinking about what it looks like, if this works. No need to ask now whether Corbyn can win — that was last week’s question — but winning is the easy part and there are plenty of scenarios circulating for how things then go wrong. Could we construct a scenario for how things go right? Is there a plausible account of the next few years, in which a Corbyn victory turns out to be the best thing that had happened to the Labour party in a long while? And how would current events look, from that looking-glass future?

    I’m not a member of the Labour party, I don’t have a vote in this leadership election — and I’ve hesitated to join the ranks of the registered supporters who will get one. But in the raw hours of May 8th, I wrote something that resonated with a lot of people who would have preferred some kind of Labour-led government to five more years of rule by the rich, for the rich.

    Here’s a taste of that post:

    What we have seen is a failure of politics, a failure of democracy at a cultural level, part of a larger story playing out across the struggling countries of the post-industrial west…

    Labour is about to endure a tug of war between those who believe it needs to go leftwards and those who believe it needs to go rightwards. The truth is, neither of these directions will be much help. Right now, the only way is down.

    That came from a place of loss; I’m writing this now from the vanishing point where scepticism and hope converge. My first reaction to the Corbyn surge was that this is wishful thinking, a shortcut, an attempt to bypass the journey down the hole into which we had fallen. But it’s worth at least trying out the alternative, the possibility that this might be one route into the upside-down world we need to learn to navigate.

    A caveat, before I try to trace that route. My post-election post was about larger social and political currents. This one is about the Labour party, an organisation I only know from the outside. So it’s probably best to take what follows as one more piece of wild political science fiction. (Especially the part where I start writing Corbyn’s victory speech.)

    It is after three in the morning, the sky is getting paler, and this is a story a man is telling himself to see if it sounds believable.

    3. On the appropriate response to losing an election

    Labour, as it currently existed, was useless. If the election campaign had left any doubts, these were buried by Harriet Harman’s attempt to explain why the party would not be opposing the welfare bill.

    ‘We can’t simply say to the public, you were wrong,’ explained the acting leader of the opposition. (Except, that was, the 75% of the public who hadn’t voted for the Conservatives, or hadn’t voted at all.)

    This wasn’t an aberration, it was an unusually clear expression of a mind-set that suffused the Labour establishment. According to this mind-set, the appropriate response to losing an election is not to do a better job of making your party’s arguments, nor to do a better job of coming up with convincing alternatives that embody what your party stands for, but to do a better job of imitating the party that just beat you.

    Those who thought of this as ‘realism’ thought of themselves as the heirs to New Labour, but this did New Labour a disservice. Whatever you felt about it, once upon a time, New Labour had worked. Some combination of Blair’s talent for summoning up conviction on demand, Brown’s brute cunning and the times in which they found themselves made it a formidable operation, until the men at the heart of it spun off into various flavours of self-delusion. But if Blair and Brown had been the Gallagher brothers of Brit Pop politics, the current Labour frontbench was a dodgy Oasis tribute act. The tunes might be the same, only if you thought they were going to wow an audience, you hadn’t really grasped how this works.

    Harsh? Sure, but this matters, because it was the backdrop against which Corbyn’s leadership campaign started to make sense to far more people than even he could have expected.

    4. An unexpected legacy

    Let’s just say the Corbyn thing worked out. We’ll come to how this happened, but one consequence was to recast the Miliband legacy.

    He became the leader whose reform of the way that Labour chooses its leaders paved the way for one of the great transformations in the party’s history. And there was a certain poetic justice to this, because inside the conflicted soul of Ed Miliband, there was a politician who wanted to be in the place where Corbyn now found himself, riding a wave of networked radicalism.

    But in truth, it was a piece of luck. A reform designed to solve one problem accidentally solved another: the great conundrum of British politics, south of the Tweed, as of 2015. Like most other western democracies, a strange insurgent political energy was bubbling up from below the surface of politics as we had known it. But how could this energy ever break through in a parliamentary system locked up by first-past-the-post?

    The solution was to take over one of the existing big parties — and Miliband’s legacy was to create the conditions under which this could happen.

    5. The Return of (Groucho) Marxism

    If it took Miliband’s reforms to make it possible, it took a candidate like Corbyn to realise that possibility. The day that nominations closed, he told an interviewer he was standing because ‘It was my turn.’ As Diane Abbott and John McDonnell had carried the standard of the Labour left in previous contests, he had been persuaded to do so this time around.

    His lack of ambition was palpable — and this turned out to be his attraction. Here was the rarest thing, a politician with no hunger for power. The sincerity of this was unfakeable, backed up by the evidence of thirty years’ unfashionable dedication to his principles. (Another kind of left-winger — the roguish kind, a Livingstone or a Galloway — would not have had this effect.)

    Well beyond the natural constituency of a politician with his views, there was an appetite for this, a kind of electoral version of the Marxist theory of clubs: ‘I don’t care to vote for any candidate who is after my vote.’

    Meanwhile, as they tacked leftwards in response to Corbyn’s unexpected appeal, the other candidates seemed to embody that other Marxist dictum: ‘These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.’

    6. Occupy the Party

    As the newspaper columnists woke up to what was happening, they reached for easy historical parallels. Among the most popular was the Militant tendency, the Trotskyite group whose entryist tactics saw them expelled from the Labour party in the 1980s.

    The comparison reflects a failure to understand how the world had changed in the intervening decades. A takeover might be under way, but it was of an entirely different kind.

    Militant was a party-within-a-party, a Marxist sect with an ideological leader, hierarchical, disciplined in its tactics, wedded to its own ‘correct analysis’. It belonged to another era, an era in which you met someone who told you a totally different story of how the world worked to anything you’d ever heard, gave you a newspaper and invited you to a meeting. An era in which almost the only way to develop and sustain a critique of the society in which you had grown up was to adhere to an alternative orthodoxy, a support group of people who schooled you in a different way of making sense of the world.

    This mode of politicisation belonged to an era in which Google and Wikipedia were unimaginable. You had no way of checking or filtering the information and analysis on offer from your new friends, little chance of exploring and developing it. The experience resembled joining an evangelical sect.

    The survivors of these sects may have got excited by the Corbyn surge, but the character of the surge was quite different: it resembled the waves of networked disruption that first broke into view in the events of 2011. This was not a stealthy entryist takeover, years in the planning, it was a spontaneous movement to Occupy the Labour party, a suggestion taken up with an energy that took everyone by surprise. Such networks are like a mood in action, a rolling conversation that gathers momentum and brings the boundaries of possibility into question.

    One of the characteristics of such a network is that it learns, experiments, adapts. In Greece, Spain and Scotland, the energy of the network had already evolved from the horizontalist purity of 2011 into a series of experiments in interfacing with the top-down forms of institutional politics. On each occasion, this had happened rapidly and unexpectedly. Now, it seemed to be happening again.

    7. After all the wild words

    So much for the events leading up to Corbyn’s election and how they came to look in hindsight. Now the hard part: what had to happen after September 12th, for this not to turn out to be the disaster so widely forecast?

    The new leader had to reach out to three different groups: a parliamentary party that would never have chosen him in a million years, the movement of members and supporters that he had enthused, and the wider electorate.

    After all the wild words that had been thrown at his campaign, he had to claim the ground of common sense and pragmatism. Opposition to austerity was not some revolutionary project: it was a position backed by some of the world’s best-known economists, Nobel laureates among them. A government’s finances don’t work like the finances of a household — and yes, this is harder to explain than the ‘maxed-out credit card’ story that the Conservatives had been offering for the past five years, but so far Labour had not even tried to counter this.

    ‘From now,’ he told them, ‘our job is to challenge austerity, to help people learn about how finances actually work and how the decisions that shape their lives are taken.’

    To do this, we need to work with everyone who shares our desire for a fairer, more just and more liveable society. If Labour could join forces with the Tories and the Lib Dems to campaign for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom, then we should be willing to work with other parties, social movements and groups within society to campaign for an alternative to austerity. That doesn’t mean we stop being the Labour party, or that we form electoral pacts that take away people’s chance of voting for a Labour MP, but we need to take up our responsibility as the largest and one of the oldest forces within a wider movement for social justice.

    8. The MPs

    The talk of an instant coup came to nothing: even the hardest Blairites could see it was suicide, and no one was really enthused by the prospect of importing another Miliband. But the parliamentary party was biding its time. Corbyn wasn’t their second choice of leader, he was their last choice, the leader no one had expected.

    Meanwhile, another unexpected effect of his victory was the split between the Blairite true believers and the bulk of the party. While it prospered, New Labour had justified itself on the grounds of pragmatism: your heart might lie to the left, but your head accepted the need to move rightwards. When Blair said he wouldn’t want the party to win with Corbyn in charge, he revealed the unspeakable truth: that he would prefer a Tory government to what most still thought of as a ‘real’ Labour government. This surprised no one, yet now that it was spoken, the internal coalition on which New Labour had been built began to unravel.

    As it became clear that, against everyone’s predictions, Corbyn was holding his own at Prime Minister’s Questions and establishing himself in the leadership, a couple of the true Blairites left parliament to spend more time with their careers. In the resulting byelections, with candidates drawn from the grassroots movement, rather than the party machine, Labour saw its majorities increase, and this steadied the party a little. Perhaps the new direction was not electoral suicide, after all.

    A surprising number of MPs began to rediscover the reasons they had come into politics in the first place. The renewal of the parliamentary party would not be complete, though, until the arrival of the 2020 cohort. For the first time in a generation, it felt like Labour was represented in parliament by people who were recognisable to their voters, who had worked in ordinary jobs, been self-employed, knew what it was like to live on the minimum wage or to queue at the job centre.

    9. The movement

    Over the past weeks, tens of thousands of people have found a faith in politics, a faith they never had, or thought they had lost long ago. It is not a blind faith nor an unquestioning one, it is not dogmatic. At its root, it is a faith in each other, as human beings, that we are something more than just self-serving consumers.

    The future of the Labour party under Corbyn’s leadership would depend on what happened next with the movement which had grown up around his candidacy. ‘The job of this movement is not over,’ he told them. ‘There are four and a half years until the next election. We can’t wait that long to start rebuilding society, we need to start today, in the places where we live.’

    There were three things that needed doing, now, he went on.

    First, to start conversations that went deeper than doorstep canvassing, those five million checkbox encounters that had amounted to so little in the general election campaign. Labour needed to listen to people, not just when they fed back the soundbite opinions circulating in the daily papers, but in spaces where they had room to reflect on their own experiences, and to start making sense of the forces shaping their lives. The task of creating those spaces started in people’s kitchens, in rooms above pubs, in empty units in shopping centres, with house parties, meet-ups or pizza nights. Members of the leader’s team would show up to these events, sometimes the leader himself, and party organisers helped find guests and speakers, people to get the conversations started and to carry ideas from one town to the next.

    The second task was for members of this movement to get active in the places where they lived, offering practical help and support to those hit hardest by austerity. ‘There’s a word for this,’ Corbyn told them, ‘an old fashioned word: it’s called solidarity.’ This was a movement for a society where no one would need a food bank, but while food banks existed, its members were going to be there, alongside the people running them and the people dependent on them, because these were the people with whom society would be rebuilt.

    The final task would be a voter registration campaign on a scale that Britain had never seen.

    10. The voters

    The panic and despair of the Labour establishment at Corbyn’s victory was based, more than anything, on their certainty that he could never deliver electoral success. (That the same people had been certain, two months earlier, that he could never succeed in the leadership election did not cause them to question this.)

    What were the factors that proved them wrong? The effectiveness of the voter registration campaign — not only in getting people onto the electoral roll, but in generating a wider sense that, this time, voting would matter — was clearly part of the story.

    But another part of it was the gap between the way the political establishment thought about voters and the messier reality of the voters themselves. Most people don’t have a political opinion or identity in the way that people who dedicate their lives to politics tend to think of these things. The left-right spectrum is irrelevant to them, not because they subscribe to any of the analyses used to argue that this frame is obsolete, but because the words just don’t mean much. What they do have is a gut-level feeling about the direction in which society is travelling and a trust in their own intuitive judgement about whether someone trying to persuade them of something believes the words coming out of his or her own mouth.

    Mainstream politicians had tried to respond to UKIP by borrowing as much of their rhetoric of xenophobia as they could get away with. Just like Gordon Brown with Gillian Duffy, the assumption was that UKIP voters were bigots, it’s just that bigots had now been identified as a target demographic. Yet this was too simple an interpretation of UKIP’s support, which was rooted in a deeper, vaguer sense that things were headed in the wrong direction, had been headed that way for a long time, and that nothing these voters heard from the mainstream politicians seemed to acknowledge this or reflect the experience of their lives.

    11. The obstacles

    Among the reasons people wrote off the chances of Corbyn’s Labour was the hostility of the press. Yet so much ink had been thrown at Red Ed and his Britain-hating dad, there was no stronger vocabulary left with which to damn his successor, so the message that Labour was lurching dangerously leftwards just sounded like more of the same. Except that what viewers identified when watching Miliband was his awkwardness, the constant sense that he was trying to work out who you wanted him to be, whereas you could see that Corbyn knew who he was and was happy with it.

    Meanwhile, somewhere in the shadows of the defence and intelligence communities, contingency plans must have been drawn up for the possibility of a prime minister committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from NATO. But whatever its calculations, there were no outward signs of the deep state moving against the Labour leader.

    The other predictable source of hostility, big business and the City, was preoccupied with the fall-out of the second wave of the global financial crisis, which broke in the autumn of 2016. It was that October that Labour first took a clear lead in the polls. The party also benefited from the damage done to the Conservatives by the deepening paedophile scandal.

    12. Back to the allotment

    Of course, in the end, the people who said Jeremy Corbyn would never become prime minister turned out to be right.

    In September 2018, in his conference speech, he announced his intention to step down as leader. The leadership campaign that followed could hardly live up to the drama of 2015, but it was historic for another reason, as it led to the election of Labour’s first woman leader. Three years earlier, when she was among the backbenchers elected to Corbyn’s first shadow cabinet, few would have identified her as on the left of the party, but the platform on which she stood combined the anti-austerity commitments of her predecessor with a pledge to reform the electoral system.

    As for Corbyn himself, he was only too happy to leave the despatch box and get back to his allotment.

    13. Beyond a nostalgia for social democracy

    It is August 2015, it’s getting close to six in the morning, and this is a story a man has been telling himself to see if it sounds believable.

    Does it even come close? I’m not sure.

    I can convince myself that there is a movement happening that could go far beyond the leadership contest, that the reach of the kind of politics Corbyn represents could go a lot wider than those who identify as on the left, and that a Labour party that confidently made alternative arguments would have a decent chance of reshaping political debate, despite the hostility of the media. (A hostility that hardly goes away if the party tries to play it safe, instead.) The hardest part is imagining the parliamentary party coming together around a Corbyn leadership, or at least giving it a chance.

    At the level of political ideas, despite a lot of what’s being written, Corbyn’s platform hardly comes across as ‘hard left’. (For comparison, try watching this televised debate with Militant from 1982, where Peter Taaffe declares that Labour should nationalise 80–85% of the economy and ‘introduce a socialist plan of production’.)

    What I do get from his campaign is a distinct flavour of ‘the Scooby-Doo theory of neoliberalism’: the idea that, if it hadn’t been for those meddling neoliberals (Friedman, Thatcher, Reagan, Blair), we could have got away with a social democratic end of history. That way of thinking always feels like it gives its enemies too much credit, makes them masters of events, rather than the opportunists that they were. Neoliberalism today is hollower than it appears, but that doesn’t mean we know what an equivalent of social democracy looks like for a world of international capital and networked individuals — or what an equivalent of social democracy looks like that knows how to include the people crossing the Mediterranean in leaky boats and climbing fences at Calais.

    These are hard questions, but the space in which we can articulate them and think carefully about them seems to be opening up. Whatever else comes of the Corbyn surge, it should help to enlarge that space.

    The most encouraging thing I’ve noticed in his campaign is the crowdsourcing of policy ideas: 1,200 people contributed to theNorthern Future document. This has to be better than a policy-making process concentrated among the London-based thinktanks and inner circles populated by PPE graduates who have never worked anywhere beyond Westminster. It seems like the best chance for developing the principles of those supporting Corbyn into a policy platform that is not simply nostalgic for the golden age of social democracy. And it’s how Landon Kettlewell would make policy, if he took over Labour.

    14. The reality-based community

    There’s one other line that’s been ringing in my head as I read the churn of comment pieces, the phrase that Karl Rove used to Ron Suskind. ‘Guys like you,’ he said, ‘are in what we call the reality-based community.’ For many, it summed up the delusions of the Bush regime, and belonging to the reality-based community became a badge of pride. But I always thought that Rove had half a point, when he made that distinction between those who study reality and those who create it.

    The alarmed voices of the Labour establishment surely think of themselves as the reality-based community. The panic grows as they find those enthused by Corbyn are seemingly immune to reasoned arguments. But reality is complex, it isn’t just composed of facts, those facts are always entangled with perceptions, and with stories that shape those perceptions. A lot of the reality to which Labour’s realists are currently appealing is made up almost entirely of perception, since its facts consist of the results of opinion surveys and focus groups. It’s worth asking whether these methods borrowed from the market research industry really plumb the depths of the electorate, or even its shallows. Not to mention, at what point perceptions that have become dislocated from the facts get to overrule them, whether in relation to the effectiveness of austerity or the impact of immigration.

    Another chunk of the reality to which the realists are appealing consists of stories. For a story to work, it needs to show a certain respect to the facts involved, but there will often be more than one story that fits the facts. When Polly Toynbee writes that her heart lies to the left of Corbyn, but the 1983 election result tells her this would be futile, she is invoking what has been the definitive story of Labour’s wilderness years and its return to power under Blair, the story of ‘the longest suicide note in history’. Other stories are available, though, including one which might mention that, when the Tories took the seat of Lewisham East from Labour at the 1983 election by a margin of 1,909, they were helped by the 9,351 votes polled by the breakaway SDP, whose candidate was Polly Toynbee.

    15. You get one chance

    It’s nearly time for breakfast. I’ve been practicing like this, the last few mornings, because I want to believe that there is a constructive insurgency going on, a wave of networked disruption that will renew the Labour party, remind it why it exists and open up the politics of the country where I did my growing up. I want to believe that the party can take this and not just tear itself apart.

    Give me a few more days, maybe I’ll have got enough practice.

    Meanwhile, here’s one thing I am sure of: if Corbyn doesn’t win, there will never be another chance for a grassroots surge of this kind within the Labour party. The system for electing a leader will be reformed all over again, the gap that Miliband opened will be sealed and the control of the parliamentary party reasserted. And perhaps the result will be that the pendulum of politics continues to swing jerkily from blue to red and back again, as if by some ahistorical force of nature, but my hunch is that the gap between the reality talked about by politicians and the realities of people’s lives will continue to grow, the pressure will continue to build, and sooner or later it will find a way to break through the cracks of the existing system. Since I’m writing this from Sweden, which many of you still think of as the spiritual home of social democracy, let me remind you how ugly that can look.


    First published on my old blog, the week that Jeremy Corbyn took the lead in polls for the 2015 Labour party leadership election.

  • The Only Way Is Down: 18 Thoughts on the UK Election

    The Only Way Is Down: 18 Thoughts on the UK Election

    So, good morning. I’m afraid it’s true: that nightmare you had, it wasn’t a dream. Let yourself feel the shock, the rawness of disappointment sharpened by sleep deprivation. If you ached for an end to five years of government by the rich, for the rich, then what you are feeling today is a blow to the soul. Stay with that for a while, before the pundits and the candidates in the coming leadership elections start to rationalise what just happened. There are other levels on which we need to make sense of this cruel result.

    Labour is about to endure a tug of war between those who believe it needs to go leftwards and those who believe it needs to go rightwards. The truth is, neither of these directions will be much help. Right now, the only way is down.

    What we have seen is a failure of politics, a failure of democracy at a cultural level, part of a larger story playing out across the struggling countries of the post-industrial west. For now, it may look like the Tories have won, but it is a fragile victory. If you want an image for the state of English politics today — Scotland is another story — then think of three cartoon characters who have run off a cliff. Two of them have just plummeted and flattened themselves into the ground, while the third is still hanging there, feet spinning in the air, oblivious to its situation.

    The one cold comfort that Labour — and perhaps even the Lib Dems — could take from last night’s results is that events have forced them into a confrontation with reality, while the Tories will continue to govern on the basis of delusions, with ugly results, for a while longer, before gravity catches up with them. This could give the defeated parties a head start, but only if they are prepared to enter into a kind of soul-searching deeper than anything we have seen in British politics in a very long time.

    For that to have a chance of happening, it will have to start somewhere else, somewhere beyond the party machines and the earnest, highly-educated, decent people at the centre of them, who are almost entirely unequipped for the journey to the political underworld which is now called for.

    What follows are a set of notes that might help us get our bearings for this journey, some of which may turn out to be wildly off the mark. But I hope they are some use, this morning. Take care of each other. Give someone a hug today. Look out for the moment where you catch a stranger’s eyes and recognise the loss you have in common, a loss that goes deeper than the tally of seats. Grieve for the inadequacy of the ways in which we have tried to stand up to greed and fear and exploitation. But hold your disillusionment gently, don’t let it harden into damning conclusions about human nature. Get ready for a dark ride ahead. We are going to have to rethink politics on a level this election didn’t touch.

    Everything is broken

    1. Three tribes go their separate ways. About the only piece of commentary from the election campaign that felt truly prescient last night was Paul Mason’s analysis of the fragmentation of the UK into three distinct political geographies: a Scotland dreaming of a future as the warm south of Scandinavia, a south-east held up by asset wealth, and a post-industrial remainder of the union. There is no party that is now a major contender in all three parts of the country and their divergence means that there is no unified pattern of swing at a national level.

    2. Labour talked to five million people, but it didn’t know how to listen.The sincere bewilderment of Labour figures as the exit poll turned out to be accurate says something about the failure of the “ground campaign” in which activists had five million doorstep conversations over the past four months. How do you talk to that many people and come away having misread the mood of the country this badly? Two easy answers will be given to this: Labour talked to the wrong people and/or people didn’t tell them the truth. There’s probably truth in both of these, but there’s a third reason that goes to the deeper levels of what just happened: the conversations they had on the doorsteps weren’t real conversations. We badly need new ways of having political conversations — and if we’re to start regrowing a democratic culture from below, it will start with finding ways to bring such conversations together.

    3. The Lib Dems totally misunderstood their own voters. One of the most striking features of the night was the splintering of their vote in every direction: in some constituencies, it appeared to be dividing equally between Labour, Tory, UKIP and Green candidates. Some collective delusion convinced the Lib Dems that their MPs had earned the loyalty of local voters. It seems truer to see the party as having been a depository for vague dissatisfaction of a variety of flavours, whose raison d’etre disintegrated when they became an adjunct to the Tories.

    4. People who are into politics just don’t get how puzzling and alienating it looks to the rest of the population. This is a broader version of the problem the Lib Dems had. Over the past week, I’ve worked with the #dontjustvote tour, a tiny playful art project making its way across the south of England on its way to Westminster, starting conversations about the election in all the places they stopped along the way. The stories they gathered along the way, snatches of which you can find on their Facebook and YouTube pages, brought home to me the sheer confusion, mistrust and disconnect with everyday reality which is most people’s experience of politics.

    5. Social media is not delivering on its promises to change politics.There are lots of reasons for this, including that many of the promises were hype. But here’s one element in the mix. If you’re old enough to remember when Google was new, then think back to the first time you saw the Google search page: how long did it take before you got why it was good? Not much longer than a few keystrokes and a click. Then think back to the first time you saw Twitter: how long did it take you before you got why it was good? Probably months. Or maybe you’re still not convinced. The social technologies that have grown up over the past decade layer a depth of social and cultural subtlety on top of the technical platform in a way that wasn’t true for the information technologies of the internet in its earlier phases. This creates an under-recognised gap between the people who have invested the time to get initiated in the kind of active, engaged use of a tool like Twitter and people who don’t get it and aren’t likely to get it any time soon. So it’s not just the self-selecting echo chambers we create that make social media problematic, it’s also the unrepresentative section of the population who are actively present there and the detachment this fosters from the rest of the population.

    6. Is it time to ditch the expensive American advisors? Hell yes!When I was a broke student, I spent my summers selling educational books door-to-door for a US company, first in the UK and then in California. Nothing prepared me for the difference in psychology between how Brits like to make “buying decisions” and how Americans do. Just because we share a common language, doesn’t mean American experts are well-placed to help British politicians.

    A 200-year moment?

    7. The unmaking of the English working class. The long trend underlying all of this is the unravelling of the social settlement that slowly emerged from the Industrial Revolution, from the destruction of pre-industrial ways of living to the emergence of the labour movement to the social democratic consensus of the mid-20th century. We have inherited political parties that belonged to a kind of society we no longer live in. As I rushed out the door yesterday morning, I found myself grabbing E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, a pre-history of the labour movement that covers the period between 1790 and 1830. The period we’re in has many resemblances to that. (If I were a cartoonist, I’d be tempted to draw Cameron as the Prince Regent…) None of the forms of left-wing politics that we’ve inherited are adapted to the times in which we find ourselves — and the process of regrowing a democratic culture is, I suspect, going to require a search for new and unexpected political forms that resembles the history that Thompson tells. The roots of the popular political movements that grew up in the 19th century were deeply entangled with grassroots self-education movements — and something equivalent to this is going to be needed in the years ahead.

    8. The British media make a joke of democracy. A handful of tax-avoiding billionaires control the agenda of almost all the national papers which then indirectly controls the agenda of the broadcasters. The grip of a cynical and decadent establishment is another feature that’s reminiscent of the period Thompson describes — and the creation of new grassroots media was part of the process that led to the emergence of the labour movement.

    9. Love him or hate him, Russell Brand might just be our William Cobbett… It’s neither a precise analogy nor an unambiguously positive one, but Cobbett found a voice that captured the popular imagination, speaking in dramatic language about the monstrousness of the times. He was also a fantastic egoist. “Cobbett’s favourite subject, indeed, was William Cobbett,” writes Thompson. “But… his egotism transcended itself to the point where the reader… is asked to look not at Cobbett, but with him.” (I don’t know whether Cobbett also swigged from over-sized bottles, but if he did they probably weren’t full of water.)

    10. Brand provides a clue to the only kind of revolution that is still even conceivable. The week he went on Newsnight and predicted a revolution, I’d been in England, giving a lecture about “the failure of the future”, in which I suggested that one of the symptoms of this was the impossibility of taking seriously the idea of political revolution in the way that had still seemed possible in the 1960s. As the video went viral, I wondered if I was wrong. And then I remembered something Martin Shaw says, one of his mythic metaphors for making sense of the kinds of times in which we’re living: “This isn’t a hero time, this isn’t a goddess time, it’s a trickster time.” When people like John Berger (one of my heroes) were young, it was a real thing to believe in the heroic revolution that Marx had seemed to promise. Today, the only kind of revolution that is plausible is a foolish one, one where we accidentally stumble into another way of being human together, making a living and making life work. (And whatever that might look like, it doesn’t look like utopia.)

    A journey to the underworld

    11. This is not just a battle of ideas, it is a battle for the soul.Another thing that Brand is onto, in his inimitable way, is what he would call the “spiritual” nature of the revolution. Margaret Thatcher was explicit about how deep the project of neoliberalism went. Two years into her first term, she told the Sunday Times:“Economics is the method: the object is to change the soul.” The left has never taken this seriously, we have never even tried to contest neoliberalism on the territory of the soul. The people at the top of today’s Labour party, a few of whom I’ve crossed paths with over the years, are in no way equipped to operate in the territory of the soul — so it’s probably going to take the help of some of us who’ve been a long way outside the pale of politics-as-we-know-it, if we’re going to work out how to do this. But one of the wrong notes that Miliband hit in the past few weeks, for all his decency and awkward charm, was his repetition that this election was “a clash of ideas”. The political battle in which we are engaged is deeper than that, it’s a battle for the soul, and until the left feels that, I don’t think it will find its way to the kind of new politics we are going to need.

    12. We need to be willing to go to some dark places. I had a public conversation last summer with Steve Wheeler in which he sketched out a set of thoughts about the need for a politics of “depth”. I must edit the recording and get it online, but the thrust of it was that the left has associated depth and the darker, less rational side of ourselves with the worst kind of politics. His argument — which parallels the one Zizek makes about Nazism in his Perverts’ Guide to Ideology — is that it’s a terrible mistake to cede the territory of the intuitive, the emotional, the unconscious, the irrational to the far right. It’s only by people of good will engaging with these sides of ourselves, at a cultural as well as an individual level, that we can prevent a political “return of the repressed”. We need to go there vigilantly, but we need to go there.

    13. We need to understand the amount of fear in the equation.Miliband used to talk about the “squeezed middle”, but it turns out the Tories can still count on the worried middle. As I’ve said before, there aren’t enough people doing well in Britain to deliver a Tory majority, but there are enough people who are worried, who hope the brittle prosperity of the housing bubble will sustain their way of living a little longer, who hope that what happened to the poor, the young and the disabled over the last five years won’t happen to them. The puzzlement I see in the despairing posts of friends on Facebook over the past twelve hours comes, I think, from the difficulty we have in understanding this. Somehow, we need a space for conversations where people can speak honestly about their fears, their disillusionment, their lack of belief in the possibility of change for the better — without trying too hard, too quickly to convince them they are wrong. Presenting big ideas or retail policies is no substitute for this.

    Regrowing a democratic culture from below

    14. Democracy doesn’t end at the ballot box. The aftermath of the Scottish referendum proved this, wrong-footing the entire UK establishment. Below the surface, barely capable of being translated into election results (except in Scotland), there is an extraordinary welling of anger, disillusionment, disgust with the lot of them. I wouldn’t like to predict the circumstances in which this will take louder, more visible shape, but it was one of the running themes that emerged from the #dontjustvote tour. The Scottish precedent needs to be the inspiration for an ongoing grassroots process of democratic renewal.

    15. This needs to start outside of politics as we know it. Politics today is broken in ways that go deeper than our political institutions or the people who inhabit them are able to reach. While the kind of regrowth of a democratic culture that I’m talking about is not non-partisan in some detached, objective way, it can’t be on behalf of any one party, either.

    16. Build a movement that starts by being present in the place where you are and supporting the most vulnerable. Look at the role that the grassroots movements around Syriza have played in helping people to endure the hardships of austerity in Greece. That needs to be one of the models for whatever happens in Britain, as five more years of austerity are piled on the weakest. And for heaven’s sake, work with the churches (and the mosques, synagogues, gudwaras and temples) — whatever the rational differences many on the left may have with people of faith, the everyday engagement of religious communities puts most of us to shame. And the churches have shown more courage in criticising austerity than most of the Labour frontbench.

    17. Another party is possible. The FPTP system may be a steep obstacle, but we live in strange times. Look at the polls in Spain. Look at the polls in Iceland, one of the few countries hit harder than the UK by the banking crisis — they are now in the third (or fourth?) act of some kind of political revolution, where a left outsider coalition gave way to a centre right government, but that government is now losing support as the Pirate Party lead the opinion polls. Strange times, really.

    18. Come to Sweden (but lose your illusions). I’m writing these notes in Gothenburg Central station, about to rush off to the Congress of the “popular movement” that owns the national touring theatre for which I currently work. Since the exit polls came out last night, I’ve had a stream of people, with varying degrees of seriousness, asking me if they should move to Sweden. I wish I could help you fulfil your wishes, but there are far more similarities between the reality of politics today here and the British situation than you would like to believe. The work that needs to be done here is much the same as the work that needs to be done there — though, for now, the harshening grip of neoliberalism is better hidden here, and we have been spared the kind of austerity the UK has seen. But precisely because the work that needs doing is similar, maybe there are possibilities to host conversations here that bring together people from both countries who want to engage in this work. I’m certainly interested in helping to make that happen.

    Alright, enough words. Be kind to each other. And be wary of the tendency to allow a situation to be defined by the oppositions present within it. This is going to be a time for redrawing the maps, a time when things we overlooked or undervalued may end up making all the difference.


    First published on my old blog, the morning after the UK general election of 2015.

  • Let’s Get This Party Started!

    I spoke to Claire on Skype last night. She’d just done an interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 News. It’s strange to be in touch again: until last month, I hadn’t heard from her in 20 years, not since we were kids knocking about in small-town County Durham, back when Major was prime minister and my idea of political engagement was marker-penning the anarchy symbol on the back of my German army jacket. She still has the accent that I mislaid somewhere along the way.

    ‘I just keep asking myself, what if nobody actually turns up? I’m going to look like a right…’

    ‘Don’t be daft! It’s been trending on Twitter every day for a fortnight. You’ve started a bigger fuss than when Billy went on The Voice in his orange tights.’

    That made her laugh, at least, but I couldn’t blame her for feeling nervous. It’s that moment when you’ve organised a party and there’s nothing left to do but wait for the first guest to arrive.

    I check Twitter on my phone as I’m waiting at the bus stop. It’s still early, half six here is half five in the UK, so my feed is mostly Californians, but as I scroll through I see a few early risers. A knowledge management consultant in Surrey just Instagrammed two vacuum flasks and a tartan picnic blanket—hashtag #streetparty—and an artist I used to share a house with in Sheffield has what looks like a stack of old-school deckchairs on a bicycle trailer. Lots of people are RTing a late night blog from Paul Mason: ‘20 reasons why the #streetparty could win tomorrow’. I don’t think Claire needs to worry.

    I said it was 20 years, but that can’t be right. Sometime around 2007 we must have reconnected on Facebook. Still, I don’t remember the last time I’d seen her name in my feed, until the morning after the second debate, when some faceless algorithm decided I would want to read her original #streetparty post. The algorithm got it right, and I wasn’t the only one: by the next morning, more than 300 of us had reposted it. 

    I hadn’t seen the debate, but when I found it on YouTube, I understood why people were reacting. It wasn’t like five years ago, when Clegg had his fifteen minutes of popularity. This was just grim. No one shone under the spotlight, Cameron’s face reddened and Miliband fluffed his lines, and everyone shouted over everyone else. It was a bad-tempered mess.

    ‘I watched them all just now and I thought, my kids are better behaved than this,’ Claire wrote. ‘If it’s down to this lot to run the country, then we’re screwed. I’m not saying we don’t come out to vote, because for those of us who aren’t millionaires like Russell Brand, it makes a difference which of them wins. What I’m saying is, we don’t go home again thinking that’s the job done.

    ‘I see us all having our rants on Facebook about the library closing, people getting their benefits stopped, rich twats who think paying tax is voluntary. But sometimes I think we enjoy getting angry more than we actually want to figure out what’s going on and why, and how things could be different. So I’m saying, let’s vote for whichever of them seems the least worst, but then let’s have our own party—a street party, on election day, outside every polling station.’

    She was running a cafe, two doors down from the record shop where we used to hang out on Saturday afternoons. On May 7th, she was going to shut it for the day. They’d take chairs and tables up to the playground of the junior school that was the local polling station. Free teas and coffees all day. Everyone was invited to sit down and join in a conversation about what we were going to do about the state of the country.

    When I wrote a blog about it, two days after the debate, I still saw Claire’s street party as a cute idea that was happening outside one polling station in the town where I grew up. But I thought it had echoes of other things that had happened since the last time Britain had a general election: the Indignados and the Occupy camps, the beginnings of the Arab Spring, the final summer of the Scottish independence campaign. 

    It was in Scotland that it started to spread, as people set up their own #streetparty events outside their local polling stations. The SNP picked it up and so did the Greens, encouraging their supporters to take part. Miliband was asked about it on a visit to a hospital and his reply was non-committal; then an unnamed backbencher was quoted saying his leader would probably be more comfortable at a #streetparty than leading the Labour party. As more events popped up around England, Cameron did his staying aloof thing, but Theresa May was reported to have asked police chiefs to look into public order concerns and whether these events constituted an attempt to intimidate voters. The next day, Boris Johnson told a crowd of reporters on Uxbridge High Street that he thought a street party sounded like a splendidly British expression of the democratic spirit, although his invitation seemed to have been misdirected in the post.


    I didn’t do much to help—a blog post, a couple of introductions to journalists who would have been contacting her anyway, the rate that it was spreading. I don’t even have a vote these days, since I left the country. But I feel involved and here I am, all day, watching the streams of images coming in, trying to figure out what this thing is that my old friend has started. Does it make a difference to how people will vote? Does it make a difference to what will happen tomorrow, when everyone sees just how weak the connection has become between how many votes a party gets and how many seats it has? And will this mean anything, five years from now, or will we see it as one of those occasional waves of popular madness that pass through a country?

    My phone buzzes, a DM. ‘Have you SEEN how many ppl came to our party???’

    As I’m starting to reply, I suddenly remember another party, one summer more than twenty years ago when my parents left me home alone for a week.

    ‘Hope plenty of them come back tmrw to help you clean up! Watch out for breadsticks under the carpet… :-p’


    This short story appeared in 28 Days, a one-off newspaper published during the 2015 general election campaign.