interviews

by James Brown

On the evening of January 11^th, which was actually the early morning of the 12^th for the Australia-based interviewee, our Staff Writer James Brown spoke with the head of the Sydney Policy Lab, Marc Stears, about his new book Out of the Ordinary, in which he argues politics needs to reconnect with ordinary life.

You can read James’ review of the book for Strife Journal here.

This is Part Two of our interview with Marc Stears. Part One can be read at this link.

JB: Moving back to the contemporary scene, how does a political party go about connecting with your Ordinary? In the last ten years, there have been four general elections in Britain and the Ordinary has still been missing. But have fringe parties perhaps done a better job of tapping into it than the major ones?

MS: I think what the fringe parties have been able to do is move into the void. It is as Peter Mair says in Ruling the Void, probably the definitive book on this in politics, which says that mainstream parties have become much more elite-centric, much more professionalised, much more divorced from organisations like local trade unions or churches, or cooperatives et cetera. And as a result, there is a space – a gap – and you have ordinary people thinking about how they can get involved in politics, if they want to, but there is no answer for them anymore. So, what you have seen is fringe parties, populist parties, and single-issue parties move into that space to mobilise people, at least briefly, and get some level of excitement and engagement.

But that is not a long-term solution because most of those parties are in the manipulation business, not in the representation business. I think the only real way to do it is to is to stitch back together the big political organisations, the Labour Party or the Conservative Party in the UK, with these intermediary institutions which once were effectively a sort of communications device between people’s everyday lives and the public policy process.

That is what we tried to do during 2010-15 in Labour and what we talked about a lot during Ed’s period as leader of Labour Party. Ed always talks extremely movingly about his efforts with Arnie Graf, the American community organiser, to try to resuscitate local Labour parties and connect them to churches, mosques, synagogues, football clubs and community groups – to try to get the party to be a lived part of everyday life.

Once again, when Ed tells those stories, he says that the cultural reaction at the top of the party to Arnie’s arrival was just shocking. They did not want to do it because they felt they knew how to do it already through old fashioned door knocking and party-political broadcasts. But they do not know how to do the slow, often more mundane process of building a party up at the community level. Our experiment did not work, but I do think it was an experiment in the right direction. One thing I would add is that, if people are looking for successful examples of what we tried to do, they should look at what Joe Biden did at the Democratic Party’s national convention this year, which was basically organised on Arnie Graf-style principles.

Biden had a whole series ordinary people telling stories about why Donald Trump was not the answer to the problems of the country. He had janitors and people who work on the trains doing what we call ‘testimony’ in community organising – just telling their story. This was a very unusual way of organising a mass convention. But it was extremely effective at showing the way that Biden wants to run his presidency: not as a distant elite, but as somebody who is in touch and connected with the lived experience of ordinary Americans. That was really interesting.

JB: Let us say that one of the major British or American party leaders reads your book and they think its ideas are good, are there any problems in using what are now quite old ideas, as powerful as they are? How would one negotiate some of their problematic attitudes?

S: That is absolutely right. I do not think that you can just take something from the 1930s, forties, or fifties, and put it in contemporary politics. For one reason, attitudes to gender, sexual identity, and race and empire have dramatically changed in the close to one hundred years since these folks were writing.

That is a fundamentally important issue. Also, the world today is just more disruptive. Back then, they were dependent upon community life, which although struggling through things like the Depression, nonetheless had a rhythm to it which was much more predictable. People were born and brought up in communities that they spent their whole life in.

That clearly is not the case anymore. I have always been struck by the work of people like Hillary Cottam today. Hillary calls herself a social entrepreneur. She tries to create profound solutions but working with local communities.

So the kind of big social injustices that we face, and the spirit of Hillary’s work in rectifying them, I think are extremely familiar to anyone reading my book. It is the 1930s and forties made new for the 21st century, if you like. It has all of that democratic spirit, that everydayness, that localism, that willingness not to rush but go slowly, to listen to people, to build solutions that cannot be scaled. Sometimes they are bespoke solutions for certain places, but they can have a profound impact upon people’s lives.

So, there are modern examples of this going on at the moment and what I would always encourage politicians to do when I speak to them is to look to experiments like the ones Hillary runs and think about how they could support endeavours and initiatives like that.

JB: We have mainly talked about domestic politics. Is there any sense in which international politics and international relations could benefit from some kind of reconnect with the Ordinary?

MS: One of the most exciting things I have done in the last few months is working with a man called Glen Weyl, who is at Microsoft in the US and also an international commentator on politics. Glenn has got this overview of the whole pandemic crisis, which basically cleaves the world into two sections: there are countries that have fared terribly during COVID-19 and there are countries which have done pretty well. He argues that the primary distinction between the two is that the countries which have done badly have looked for big, moonshot solutions.

From the start, their leaders thought there had to be grand answer as to how to beat COVID. They were focused on the big ideas, like herd immunity. Whereas the countries that have actually done well have thought about small, localised solutions like contact tracing run by GP surgeries or public health programs which are based upon giving people the ability to stay at home in their communities.

Glen points to Taiwan and Australia as examples of the type of route they should have taken. What is really interesting about Glen’s work is that he takes this idea, which can seem mundane and parochial, and brings it up to the global level. He says that at a global level, there are two pathways open for us at the moment: this obsession with grandeur and the better ability to look to the micro. And he is trying to get people at big corporations, in diplomacy, and international governments to look at what they are doing at the local level and at the micro level. He asks them to look at how they are empowering people there. Because the big problems that we have are going to have to be solved at that particular sort of level.

JB: Thank you for bringing us onto the virus because that was my next question. We will take Britain as one of the countries that has done awfully. Britain also had a moonshot obsession with regard to the virus. Would you envisage that the failure of these grand projects is going to lead to a reassessment in the long term in Britain about what went wrong and lead to an identification that the cause of what went wrong was a detachment from the Ordinary? Do you think that will take place over the next decade?

MS: I very much hope so. The story is just astonishing. Twenty-two billion pounds spent on a test and trace system which did not work because it was run by people who had no experience in public health and were completely detached from the communities that they were designed to serve. I mean, it is just outrageous. And you compare that to where I am currently living in New South Wales, which has a contact tracing system which is the envy of the world. It is phenomenal. And it has had almost no new investment in it because it already existed as an integrated public health system, which had its origins back in the HIV situation in the 1980s. You had contact tracers already on the public books who knew their communities, who knew where different kinds of people worked, where different kinds of people lived, and were able to work in tandem on the ground from day one. It has been an astonishing success.

That contrast really should stand in sharp relief when Britain holds any Royal Commissions after the pandemic, and people ought to be really clear about that. Britain’s failure is twofold: bigness over smallness and private over public. You have to have public solutions on the ground if you are going to be able to tackle issues like the pandemic.

In the public policy world of academics and think tanks, I think people are very well aware of that. There also are certain journalists like John Harris at the Guardian who are also very well aware of it. But I do not think it has yet penetrated into political debates, and that is quite shocking. For example, however well or badly we think Labour are doing their job of opposition, they are not really making this point that you need localised, micro solutions which share power with people on the ground if you are going to be able to tackle these problems. I know it is hard to find a political language which makes that sexy but it is what was required, so we better get on and try and come up with a way of expressing it.

JB: That is the end of all my formal questions, Marc. I suppose the last ones I would ask are: what projects have you got coming up, do they touch on the virus in any ways, and is there any chance you might be sweeping back into British politics to bring the Ordinary back?

MS: I really miss British politics because for all my critique of it, the best people in my life were engaged in that 2010 to 2015 period. It did not result in electoral victory and that obviously will haunt me for the rest of my life, but we did surface some extremely important issues and we began a conversation which I think is really important to continue to have. Allies, like John Cruddas who I have mentioned, Ed himself, Rachel Reeves, I just have a huge amount of respect and time for them.

I think that they still are a vital force and I would love to do anything I can to help. In Australia there is a very different situation, essentially that we have a successful response so far to the pandemic and politics here is very localised. It is federal system and power rests with the States and not the federal government. It is kind of the opposite of grandiose, but incredibly parochial, and that showed its strength during the pandemic process. I think our challenge here in Australia is to get the scale of the challenge accepted. Where we have to look for answers is at the local level, but sometimes people’s eyes are not on things like that. For example, the intensity of the climate emergency that we face, or the depths of social injustice which affect all liberal democracies right now. So here in Australia, I spend my time paradoxically trying to get people to think bigger while not losing that strength that they have from being connected so powerfully to everyday life.

James Brown is a PhD candidate in history at Northumbria University. His focus is on Soviet dissidents and their use in the politics and international relations of the Cold War. He previously studied at Glasgow University, doing a Master’s in East European, Russian, and Eurasian studies. During this time he studied Russian and wrote his thesis, ‘Returning to Machiavelli: Giving Belarus-Russia relations the Original Realist Treatment’, which received the prize for best dissertation from the Centre for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at Glasgow.

James is a Staff Writer at Strife.

by James Brown

On the evening of January 11^th, which was actually the early morning of the 12^th for the Australia-based interviewee, our Staff Writer James Brown spoke with the head of the Sydney Policy Lab, Marc Stears, about his new book Out of the Ordinary, in which he argues politics needs to reconnect with ordinary life.

You can read James’ review of the book for Strife Journal here.

James Brown (JB): First of all, Marc, could you give me a break down of your recent history, of what you have been up to – you were of course at the Labour Party with Ed Miliband during 2010-15 – and then talk a little bit about what you’re doing at the Sydney Policy lab.

Marc Stears (MS): Most of my career I was an academic, mainly at Oxford as a political theorist and historian of political ideologies. I then moved into politics around about 2010, when Ed Miliband became the leader of the Labour Party and there was all sorts of excitement about potential renewal for social democratic politics, which lasted for five years of ups and downs.

The biggest down of all was losing the election in 2015. It was pretty grim, and Ed himself is just beginning to talk and write about what happened, why it happened, and what it felt like. And I guess ever since then, I have been trying to find a way of resuscitating some of the most interesting arguments we were having back then. So, I ran the new economics foundation as CEO for a couple of years, and then moved to Australia where I am running the Sydney policy lab, which is an effort to combine academic research in public policy with community organising, grassroots mobilisation, participant research, and policymaking. Essentially, we try to bridge the gap between academia and community organisations.

JB: You talk about bridging the gap between community organisations and academia, and that definitely comes across in the book. Just to begin with, could you sum up some of the key arguments that you are trying to get across in Out of the Ordinary?

MS: I remember when I first thought about moving from academia into politics. We used to go up to Parliament and meet MPs, and I was really struck by how almost all of them were obsessed with what I would call ‘bigness’.

So, the very first question you got was, ‘what’s your big idea?’ And they would be looking for this kind of moonshot – the one big thing which is going to solve all the problems in British society or the economy or politics. At the time I kind of struggled with this because, I guess, I did not have one big idea.

Over a while, I just came to think that it was kind of a silly question, really, and that political change and social change does not happen like that. It is not a sort of big boom which sorts everything out. Instead, it is a much slower, calmer, sometimes harder process, which has to be rooted in people’s everyday experiences, in their everyday lives.

And so, that became an obsession when I was in politics – that so many people were looking for the big, easy answer, rather than the complicated, small answer. I became obsessed with discovering whether this argument was a new one or whether it had been around before. I was working a lot at that point with Maurice Glassman – Lord Glassman as he is now – and Morris always had the argument that everything had gone wrong in 1945 because the Attlee government had been such a success and given everyone this idea that you could have a big, single reforming government which did something amazing, like create the NHS, and that that should be the model for politics. Maurice always said that the model of politics should instead be located in people’s neighbourhoods, in their families, their local communities – not always in that big answer.

Because 1945 was that kind of moment, I wanted to look at what had happened before that and what happened immediately after it to try and discover whether this argument between bigness and smallness had been present at the time. And essentially that is what the book claims. It says that actually, right from the 1930s and forties through into the fifties, people were really having that exact debate about whether you should be looking for a big utopian answer to all the problems of the country and the world, or should you be thinking more local, smaller, or incrementally? And I tried to kind of paint a picture in the book of the people on the second side of that debate.

JB: How would you describe all these people advocating the Ordinary, like George Orwell and J.B. Priestley? Would you be prepared to call them a school of thought, the ‘Ordinary school of thought’ perhaps?

MS: I basically think that is right. I mean, it is a struggle, this one really, because what I discovered in the book is that these people in some cases did not know each other, while others really disliked each other. Dylan Thomas’ view of J.B. Priestly was extraordinarily bad while Orwell was incredibly dismissive of almost everybody, especially the people that I put him in a group with.

Then others, like Barbara Jones, were very much individualists. They did their own work and they very rarely cited or engaged with others. So, they are not a school in the sense of people who sit down in a seminar room or in a common room and come up with a collective view. They never published collectively and they did not write manifestos, but the claim in the book is that, nonetheless, there was a spirit or a sentiment which animated their work and which they all had in common. They did actually feed off each other as they created their work.

One of the things that I am pleased about in the book is being able to show that these characters – who are so different, and as I say, who often disliked each other so much – nonetheless inhabited a shared intellectual viewpoint.

JB: So in the book, you bring all these people together and establish this Ordinary school of thought as the solution to what you diagnose as a political health crisis in Britain. You say that Britain cannot get a grip on its past and cannot build an inclusive national identity. Would you go as far to say that Britain faces a culture war, or is that just a hyperbolic label? What is going on in the country with its identity?

MS: I think that is a great question. Look, my instinct is that it comes down really to disdain. I mean, I think there is still an incredible amount of disdain that many, otherwise very well-meaning, politicians have for ordinary people.

That disdain takes different forms. For example, on the populist right, there is a view that ordinary people can be manipulated and should be manipulated – that you should play the lowest common denominator of xenophobia. This is something that is more pronounced in the US than in the UK, but it is clearly present in Britain too.

On the left, meanwhile, I think it is more often this sense that people do not know their own interests and that they are not smart enough to be able to design programs of policy or change. That is a kind of more well-meaning disdain, in a way, but it still is disdain in the sense that it argues that the person in Westminster knows best. And this is very deeply ingrained.

When I was in politics, we used to float ideas about devolution or democratisation and Ed Miliband was fabulous at trying to advance those arguments. But the vast majority of the political establishment was extremely sceptical that you could have a politics which was more participatory, more bottom up – more grounded in everyday life – just because they thought that ordinary people were not up to it. Everybody always quoted that mythical bit of Oscar Wilde, that is not actually an Oscar Wilde quote, when he says, ‘there aren’t enough weekends for socialism,’ meaning that ordinary people do not really want to be engaged in politics.

So, I think that is the fundamental culture issue: Westminster-first, Whitehall-first, centralisation and elitism are the dominant forms of thinking about politics across left and right. The people in my book were struggling against that and trying to argue intensively against it. We have seen other versions too, though. That same debate was had in the 1960s, and then again in the eighties. More recently, there have been instances where people have argued that to solve political problems, you have to have more faith in everyday people’s capacity to be active agents in that process.

JB: Why is it that the Ordinary was completely left out of politics from 1945 onwards and is to this day – how did that come about?

MS: There was a big argument on the left throughout the 1930s about how to achieve reform after the Depression, and then again after the war. There were those who thought that the solution had to be small scale, had to be localised, had to be democratised. For example, people had plans for workers control of industry and localised health and welfare responses. But this argument was beaten by big, welfare state solutions, nationalisation, and for the public corporation model of nationalisation – which is really just like a private company but owned and run from London.

So, the opportunity was missed in 1945. But as Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP, has shown, Attlee himself was torn between the two different approaches and there were parts of Attlee that wished his government could have gone for the more localised and more democratic roots, but it just did not happen. Over time, the alternatives became forgotten. You got a process of path dependency and it just got harder and harder to move out of the direction in which the country was headed.

This is Part One of our interview with Marc Stears. Part Two can be read at this link.

James Brown is a PhD candidate in history at Northumbria University. His focus is on Soviet dissidents and their use in the politics and international relations of the Cold War. He previously studied at Glasgow University, doing a Master’s in East European, Russian, and Eurasian studies. During this time he studied Russian and wrote his thesis, ‘Returning to Machiavelli: Giving Belarus-Russia relations the Original Realist Treatment’, which received the prize for best dissertation from the Centre for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at Glasgow.

James is a Staff Writer at Strife.