Keynote Speech Stuart Hall Foundation Launch
I left London for the US at the end of 2002, with the drums of war beating to a deafening crescendo. In Britain almost the entire political class was united against the majority of the population; in the US the politicians, the media and the populace spoke almost as one. As I speak now slightly different drums are playing to the same rhythm, as though the moral, military and political failures of the last 13 years never happened. Plus ca change.
This August I left the US, a country undergoing a profound, extended and uncharacteristic period of self-doubt. Internationally it has retained its appetite for global domination but no longer has the stomach for what that role entails. It wants to project power without risk and bend the world to its will without force. There is a desire for America to do “something” about the chaos they see in the world and feel threatened by but no idea as to what that thing might be. “We’re not trying to preside over America’s decline,” saidBen Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communication. “What we’re trying to do is to get America another 50 years as leader.” But to what end – and through what means – remains unclear.
Domestically, the enduring rise of Donald Trump who has lead all but four of the last 47 polls of the last four months, alarms many – not least on the right. Belatedly much of America has come to realise that his candidacy, like his hair, may be brazen, ridiculous and ostentatious, but is in fact real. Incoherent in his principles and incandescent in his rage, he channels the frustrations of a section of white America for a return to their local privileges and global status – a time before social mobility stalled, wages stagnated and when jobs were secure.
And finally the nation has proved that it can put a black man in the White House – twice no less – but has yet to prove that a black teenager can walk down the street without being shot dead by the police or their surrogates. Since Obama’s election the gap between black and white Americans in wealth and income has grown. The disparity between black and white unemployment is the same now as it was in 1963 during the March on Washington; the disparity between black and white wealth and incarceration has grown since then. As such Obama’s position as commander in chief, while symbolically very important has, in substance, not shifted the dial on matters of equality. As George Carlin once said symbols should not be left to the symbol minded. But while symbols should not be regarded as insubstantial, they should not be mistaken for substance either. “There’s a model of diversity,” Angela Davis told me a few years ago, “as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change.”
Meanwhile each passing day provides more footage of mostly, but not exclusively, black men being gunned down by trigger-happy police officers. This is not a new phenomenon; nor is it growing. All that is growing is the awareness that this is the daily reality for a sizeable secton of the country that has long been abandoned to post-industrial decline, social neglect, institutional racism and state violence. The American polity and media episodically “discovers” this reality in much the same way that teenagers discover sex – urgently, earnestly, voraciously and carelessly, with great self-indulgence but precious little self-awareness. They have always been aware of it but somehow when confronted with it, it nonetheless takes them by surprise.
So it is that in the nation I have just left the question of whether it is possible to elect a black president has been settled while the sanctity of black life has yet to be resolved.
Twelve years, 4 books, 30 extra pounds and 2 children later I came back to the UK in August. I arrived here, somewhat flustered and overwhelmed and told if I wanted a place for my son in a school in my borough I must physically present him to Hackney Learning Trust with my gas bill. Renovations on my house dragged on leaving us in temporary accommodation; gas bill or no gas bill (my gas meter was actually stolen) the schools in Hackney were full and it would be five weeks before my son found a place.
And then, whenever I looked up from my own woes, the obvious yet trite fact that there were far worse immigration stories out there. I hadn’t imagined the standard of conversation could get any worse when it came to migrants, since it was pretty bad when I left.
In the times when I had been back to visit I had noticed significant changes in this regard– not least the opening up of the EU to the east after 2004. On visits to London I soon simply stopped assuming white people spoke English. As a result the once unbreakable link between race and place seem to have been decoupled. Whereas pollsters would once have lumped immigration and race together, conflating non-white people and immigrants, they now stood apart. When, shortly before the 2010 election, Gillian Duffy was cornered by Gordon Brown in Rochdale – a town where one in five are muslim that saw a 58% increase in Bangladeshis in the previous 10 years – she specifically asked about Eastern European migrants. Meanwhile equality being what it is, some black and Asian people were exercising their equal right to be as bigoted as white people had been regarding immigration and found their contributions showcased in debates and party literature.
I landed in a continent in the grip of economically illiterate policies and politics of austerity where budgets were and are being balanced on the backs of the poor and public space – from libraries to youth clubs, evening classes to pensioners’ centers – was shrinking while the the systemic flaws that had created the economic crisis remained firmly intact. A stifling consensus within the political and media elite soon emerged that the root causes of the economic crisis lay in exorbitant public spending, overpaid public employees and welfare recipients. The public, by and large, did not agree with this analysis but had few plausible electoral outlets to express their dissatisfaction.
Not surprisingly, with a gap in the market, ideological speculators moved in peddling their wares. Fascism – and its 57 varieties of fellow travellers in denial – shifted as a political current from marginal to mainstream to central in Europe’s political culture. In the elections to the European Parliament in 2014 Nationalist and openly xenophobic parties topped the polls in three countries – Denmark, France and the UK – and won more than 10% in another five. There was, it seems, nothing to ugly you could call immigrants, including cockroaches and vermin – and no price to pay for leveraging those sentiments for electoral gain. Labour produced mugs saying it would be tough on immigration; the Tories produced policies.
Finally I returned to a political culture, once so tightly scripted, poll-driven and mediated that all you had to know were the actors and you could write the scenes yourself, that was suddenly ad libbing in a manner that had the media and political elites in shock. Labour party voters looked poised to signal a clear departure from the last 20 years.
Nobody saw this coming. The Labour left were in two minds as to whether to put up a candidate at all; Jeremy Corbyn was their fourth choice. He didn’t stand to win but to make a point. He scraped on to the ballot with seconds to spare with the help of MPs who didn’t want him to win but wanted to ensure the voice of the Labour left could at least be heard – a tokenistic gesture to demonstrate the party still had roots even if they weren’t showing. Nobody expected that voice to be heard so clearly, understood so widely or taken so seriously by the membership. Party grandees thought his presence would offer a debate about austerity; few assumed he would win it. He understood his candidacy as demonstrative; his detractors saw it as decorative; none of them saw it as viable. Once it became clear he was a contender former Labour leaders and mainstream commentators belittled his supporters as immature, deluded, self-indulgent and unrealistic, only to express surprise when they could not win them over. His summer trajectory conformed to that dictum for radical reformers generally attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
And then there was Paris and for a moment – a moment that we’re in right now – it was like the previous 12 years never happened. Only they did happen. For better and for worse – and it is mostly worse – for richer and for poorer – and it is mostly poorer – we are not where we were. And however much people deride Labour for going back to the eighties or the war machine of going back to 2003, there is no going back. If politics is the art of the possible then radical politics, the kind of politics that Stuart espoused, must at very least engage with, showcase and promote new possibilities. And right now we are in need of imagining and articulating new possibilities.
So I want to talk today about the space that is available for political debate at this point, the deleterious effects on the tight confines in which most of our political discussions are taking place and the necessity to expand that space so that progressive discourse can have the room to breathe.
For the process by which political issues enter and exit mainstream conversation, on what terms, by what means and to what end is not a matter of merit or relevance. Political and media elites apply themselves to the task with great prejudice and to great effect.
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood,” argued John Maynard Keynes. “Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
Sometimes those voices are clear. A study showed that in the six weeks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, for example, a third of the extended interviews about the financial crisis on Radio 4’s Today programme, were the representatives of the financial services industry. During that time they interviewed just one trade unionist. Little wonder the mainstream debate about bailing out bankers rather than jailing them.
And sometimes they are more oblique. I used to be on the national committee of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The huge CND march in 1983 was the first big demonstration I went on. It’s an issue I care about. Yet somewhere along the way, and granted I was in America for more than a decade, I simply stopped thinking about it. When Labour party ditched its commitment to unilateralism a generation ago, arguments around nuclear deterrence gradually vanished from the public square. With a handful of exceptions, UK politicians stopped discussing it; newspapers stopped writing about it; pollsters stopped asking about it; nobody I knew was still debating it.
I honestly, and perhaps shamefully, forgot that we still had Trident. I can’t tell you what I thought happened to it. But with the end of the cold war and the rise of terrorism I just assumed they’d found something else to waste their money on. Over the past 15 years, in particular, we’ve been told the central threat to our security comes from disaffected teenagers with their backpacks. For all the talk of modernisation of public services I imagined Trident had gone the way of free school milk and phone boxes: declared obsolete and dispassionately retired.
My point here is not about Trident per se. Reasonable people may disagree on whether Britain should keep Trident and whether that subject need become totemic. But the notion that such an issue is worthy of debate seems beyond question – particularly in the wake of Paris and the midst of fiscal restraint. In 2009 54% of Britons were in favour of unilateral nuclear disarmament, a year later 63% said they favoured getting rid of Trident to reduce the budget deficit: and this is without any major UK party championing its cause. People didn’t stop having opinions about it. They just stopped having a political or media outlet for those opinions.
This is the thing I find interesting – and important – about Corbyn’s election. And I should say at the outset I think the least interesting thing about the Corbyn phenomenon is Corbyn himself. Not because he’s a dull person. But because, as I alluded to earlier, he is the accidental lead in a global drama he never seriously auditioned for.
What intrigued me, arriving while his ascent was still being processed, was the degree to which for all the column inches and air time spent on why and how he was succeeding, relatively little was devoted to why his opponents were losing. For in all sorts of ways they represented much about the limited and limiting political space available in this moment. They were born into it. With varying degrees of milquetoast managerialism. They were not only barely distinguishable from each other but had platforms that were forgettable even when they were decipherable. Short of perhaps a speeding ticket, they didn’t appear to have a single conviction between them. If any stood for more than office it was not clear what.
This was not a local problem. After more than a decade of war and almost a decade of austerity, social democratic parties across the continent and beyond had failed to develop a programme or strategy that could engage with their traditional bases. They no longer spoke the language of reform but instead containment. Their project, it seemed, was to limit the damage inflicted by international capitalism, not to prevent it less still to reverse it. In most cases smaller, but growing formations sprouted and grew to their Left. The Greens in England, The SNP in Scotland, Podemos in Spain, Syrzia in Greece, Die Linke in Germany, Parti De Gauche, in France.
Meanwhile a range of social movements emerged, on both sides of the Atlantic, that sought, with varying degrees of success, to address these deficits. The anti-war movement, Occupy Wall Street, #blacklivesmatter, tuition fees, Ukuncut, the US pro-immigration Si Se Puede marches, gay marriage. For the most part these upsurges – which have featured far more young women at the forefront that movements of yore – have taken place almost entirelywithout reference to electoral politics. That was just as well since, for the most part, even as they shifted the dial in terms of public discourse, the centre-left parties treated them with at best indifference and at worst contempt.
But there has been an itinerant quality to these movements, often caffeneited through social media, that left them burning brightly and then fading away only to make way for the next. The approached the single-issues of concern to them less as programmatic than systematic, eschewing concrete policy proposals for systemic analysis. As such they raised questions they could not answer – and indeed had no intention of answering – and advocated for changes they could not implement – and had no intention of implementing. As such there has been a homeless, drifting quality to the Left in this time. Each movement more powerful and hopeful than the last; each too narrowly focused and lacking the social or economic base to sustain it. Each having to create new structures, practices, goals and methods from scratch.
These contradictions were most glaring in Britain in the run-up to the Iraq war, when London saw the biggest demonstration in its history. My guess is that the overwhelming majority who attended that march, including many here, voted for the government they were demonstrating against and at least a plurality, including many here, voted for them again. All of this comes less by way of criticism than description.
The nature of their targets are often elusive. One of the reasons occupy wall street could catch on globally so quickly was that in a sense Wall Street is everywhere. It has insinuated itself into the lives of every pensioner, student, parent, library user, bus passenger, public employee and homeowner. It needs no translation. Every country has one. Every town and hamlet feels its influence.
But it’s very ubiquity also made it a particularly slippery adversary. Unfettered by national boundaries, unregulated by supine politicians and unaccountable to anyone, neoliberal globalisation is a force without a face and a system without a centre, offering little in the way of identifiable, resonant, physical targets. So if Wall Street is omnipresent, it is no less unreachable : it’s everywhere until you try to find someone responsible for the mess we are in, and then it disappears.
A similar point can be made about racism. Nobody with any credibility doubts it exists. But you try finding a racist and you’ll be told they’re virtually extinct. “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks,” President Nixon once explained to his chief of staff. “The key is to devise a system that recognises that while not appearing to
In this, at least, they were successful. Today the signs are down, the abstract rights exist, the physical barriers are gone. And yet inequality has not arrived. Racism is so utterly embedded in our institutions – from the courthouse to the schoolhouse – that to unpick one part is to make the whole thing unravel. So literally where do we march? To the jail; to the police stations; to the courts; to the governers’ mansion? And when we get there what do we demand? An end to racism? What would that even look like? Police cameras? How much good did that do Eric Garner?
With those systems, be they economic, racial or political, in place the process of dismantling them would be a mixture of Sysphean and Herculean.
So long as the goals were abstract and the movements ephemeral, the challenges were primarily symbolic. But a few years ago that calculus started to change. Gradually, with varying degrees of success in a handful of places, the Left has cohered into the kind of electoral coalitions that can actually command pluralities if not majorities. This is evident in Greece with Syrzia, with less ideological clarity in Scotland, and has most recently taken root in Portugal where a Social Democrats lead a government, comprising Communists, both reconstructed and unreconstructed, against austerity. And notwithstanding Obama’s actual record, may have seen its first iteration in the US, where against all odds, he rallied a coalition of minorities, progressives and youth to defeat the Democratic machine and then added white women and white union members to defeat the Republicans.
As such Corbyn should be understood as the conduit for a moment, in which a resurgent Left, newly oriented towards electoral politics, has surprised itself with its ability to both challenge and even win, but what he’s not is the product of a movement that can sustain that challenge once it has been made.
If this really were a return to the eighties, as some suggest, then he would have a peace movement making his case for him against war and a vibrant trade union movement making the case against austerity. As it is he doesn’t even have a party he can rely on. He did not emerge to the labour leadership organically from a deeper organisational base but disorganically from a wider, amorphous, alienated sentiment.
I want to emphasis once again this is not an argument, excuse for or an attack on Corbyn. It simply describes this challenges of this period in which becoming electorally viable raises the question – once we have made the space, to whom do we entrust it, what shall we do with it and how do we protect it. People complain that Corbyn’s not electable. They might be right. Electability is not a science. But the more pertinent question is imagine if he was?
When Lula won the presidency in Brazil on a redistributive manifesto in 2002 the invisible hand of the market tore up his electoral promises and boxed the country around the ears for its reckless choice. In the three months between his winning and being sworn in, the currency plummeted by 30%, $6bn in hot money left the country, and some agencies gave Brazil the highest debt-risk ratings in the world. “We are in government but not in power,” said his close aide, Frei Betto. “Power today is global power, the power of the big companies, the power of financial capital.”
The limited ability of national governments to pursue any agenda that has not first been endorsed by international capital and its proxies is no longer simply the cross they have to bear; it is the cross to which we have all been nailed. The nation state is the primary democratic entity that remains. But given the scale of neoliberal globalisation it is clearly no longer up to that task.
This is not a new problem. Indeed, it is precisely because it has gone on challenged, but virtually unchecked, for more than a generation, that political cynicism has intensified. Whoever you vote for capital gets in.
This was the experience of Syrzia in Greece. After standing on an anti-austerity platform, winning the election, and putting its negotiating position to the test in a referendum and winning Syriza was forced to buckle when confronted by the might of the European Union leadership. The party was later reelected to implement austerity in much the same way as the centre-left party it eclipsed had done.
Each case, in its own way, has demonstrated both the potential of electoral engagement and the limits of democratic control. This stands less as a criticism than a critique. The left is finally developing the strategic skills to gain office; it has yet to work out how to exercise power in the interests of those who put it there.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” argued the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
We see those symptoms today in the fundamentalisms of Mohammad, the military and the market. The war on the poor; and the wars without end. We are winning arguments and losing battles; gaining support but draining efficacy. We are clearing space – but we have yet to decipher a way to build on it.
Gary Younge, a feature writer and columnist for the Guardian, is the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the American South, and The Speech: The Story Behind Dr Martin Luther King Jr's Dream.
Inspired by the life and work of Professor Stuart Hall, the Stuart Hall Foundation seeks to support new generations of creative thinkers to challenge the status quo and provoke original thinking, debate and research, illuminating connections between politics, culture and society.