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James Brown

The New Football War: How capitalist greed and a democratic deficit are killing the beautiful game

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A game is played at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, the home ground of Real Madrid. The Spanish club have historically been one of the richest and most dominant in world football and were one of the of the clubs to sign up to the European Super League. Photo Credit: Vienna Reyes/Unsplash

In 1969, a football match between the national teams of El Salvador and Honduras sparked a four-day military conflict among the teams’ respective governments. Bilateral tensions had been simmering for some time and a hotly contested World Cup qualifier precipitated fighting that left thousands dead. Ever after, this conflict became known as the Football War and stands testament to the unquestionable influence of the sport on politics, identity, and society. In 2021, a new conflict inspired by football is taking place, this time not over territory, but for the soul of the game itself.

In April, twelve of Europe’s elite clubs announced the formation of a new European Super League (ESL) that would have dwarfed all existing leagues in terms of wealth and exposure. This sparked outrage across the sport, with major fans’ protests held at Chelsea FC and elsewhere, while governing bodies of the sport like UEFA prepared sanctions for clubs taking part. Eventually the proposal collapsed under the weight of this pressure. Nevertheless, even following the ESL’s failure, demonstrations continued such was the level of anger, with a match between Manchester United and Liverpool having to be abandoned as fans invaded the pitch.

For those who do not follow football, this may seem a trivial issue, irrelevant at a time when there are many more pressing problems like inequality, economic disempowerment, and wilting democracy. Yet these issues are at the heart of the anger felt towards the ESL, which is only the latest symptom of the huge democratic deficit in the world’s most popular and lucrative sport; between the fans who give their loyalty to their club and the owners who give theirs to their bank balance.

Modern football was born in Britain’s industrial heartlands during the late-19th century. It had previously been the reserve of gentlemanly amateurs, but the sport increasingly became popular as an escape for overworked factory labourers suffering under the unregulated conditions of 19th-century capitalism. A final break from the aristocratic amateur culture came with the professionalisation of the sport, whereby the factory workers who became the stars of their day were allowed to be paid, albeit modestly, by their clubs, to support themselves and compensate the loss of earnings they incurred by playing. From these humble origins, football spread to become the world’s most popular sport in the 20th-century. Yet for the majority of its life, despite its successes, football never lost its working-class and democratic roots. Clubs remained tied to their local communities. The majority of players and supporters came from everyday walks of life, and many of the players never earned enough to be able to retire upon completing their careers. My own ancestor, Norman Smith, a stalwart of Charlton Athletic in the 1930s, sometimes went without pay while taking his club to league success.

Something began to change in the 1990s, however. Football became a product in the newly globalised economy. The English Premier League, which attracted new-found riches through lucrative TV-rights deals, inspired a new type of success that meant money could transform middle-ranking clubs into global powerhouses, which could then accrue even greater wealth for their owners. With this, came a new type of owner, one who runs a club as a business.

As money became the decisive voice in the game, left behind were the supporters. Owners who are universally reviled by their club’s fans are able to stay in post despite their unpopularity. Newcastle United, an English club with a large fanbase, have for years been run by a detested owner who has exploited the club as an advertising mechanism for his company and the lack of voice given to fans has led a group of them to attempt to buy back some of the club and place it into fan-ownership. Their mission is folly; they can never match the riches of the owner; but their anger highlights what is central to the problems within the game: an undemocratic culture. Many things are wrong with the game, but fans are unable to take action in a sport that priorities money. The ESL was just the latest extension of the pattern, as it aimed to promote already rich clubs over national leagues and televised exposure rather than real participation at games.

Canada and China play at the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Canada. Women’s football has enjoyed growth recently, but COVID-19 has had an unequal impact compared to men’s teams and the ESL would have further hindered its development . Photo Credit: IQRemix, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0

This is not to idealise the history of the game, however. There have always been callous owners and corruption. But the fans’ ability to do something about either issue seems more restricted than ever before given the unequal distribution of wealth. Furthermore, the ESL was announced at a time when two of football’s most serious problems, racism and the unequal position of the women’s game, are only just beginning to receive due attention from the footballing authorities. In a sport where racism is highly visible, among both supporters and professionals, and women’s football is still unfairly underdeveloped and financially undernourished, to announce a new elite competition sent the wrong signal about the level of priority these issues hold within the sport and the ESL would have in fact diverted resources away from the development of European competitions for women’s football.

What can be done to fix football’s democratic deficit? First, a mandatory quota of fans on clubs’ boards and those of international confederations. Second, a minimum percentage of clubs’ shares should be in fan ownership. Something similar is familiar to German football fans to ensure consensual decision making, with the majority of shares at clubs in the hands of supporters (with a few exceptions). This would prevent ownership changes being made without a say from the fans. The unregulated manner in which clubs can be bought and sold in Britain has led to the complete breakdown of clubs, a process which the pandemic has only accelerated. Bury FC was famously run into the ground by its incompetent owners.

The infrastructure which supports provincial clubs like Bury, whose homes are often small, economically struggling towns, are vital to the wider well-being of the urban areas football clubs are located in. With fans on boards, the prosperity of their local communities could be defended and kept in the equation, rather than disregarded by owners who have no connection to the place. And in the bigger picture, the ease with which large, multi-million pound assets such as football clubs can be purchased and misrun, reflects a larger problem whereby international moguls can acquire national assets, like housing, with little regard for people’s economic well-being and the national security of the countries where they invest.

Some of football’s greatest clubs have seriously damaged their relationships with supporters through their part in the ESL saga. It has forced all of those committed to the sport to take stock of the state of the game and realise that it is not healthy. Hopefully, this can be a formative moment for football, one where the sport decides to finally get its whole house in order. Because, disruptive and painful as the ESL announcement was, as former player and anti-racism campaigner Clinton Morrison has said, it is regretful that the ESL prompted a greater level of action than the many calls to tackle racism in the game. If clubs and governing bodies can work together to defeat the ESL, why not the same for eliminating racism in football? Perhaps the energy present within the sport now can be redirected in constructive directions towards solving the sport’s problems.

The Cold War is back, though not as you think: Appropriating Cold War times for our time

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by James Brown

A bust of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin along with the hammer and sickle, two enduring symbols of communism and the Cold War era (Steve Harvey)

There is continual debate in journalism and academia as to whether a new cold war has begun. The main motivation for claiming there to be a new cold war is the growth of competition between the United States and China over the past two decades. In his analysis of US-China relations, Robert Kaplan has gone as far to attest that ‘future has arrived, and it is nothing less than a new cold war.’ This author is not yet as ready as Kaplan to conclusively state that there is a new cold war comparable to the original one. The cold conflict that gripped the world from the end of the Second World War till the collapse of communism during 1989-1991, had a bipolar and ideological character which does not exist to the same extent in the current Sino-American economic confrontation, though ideological differences have become more pronounced in recent years, as Kaplan says.

A second factor that leads others to suggest we might have a new cold war on our hands, is the revanchist revival of the successor to the other key combatant of the original Cold War: Russia. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine in 2014 made clear how far Putin was willing to go to assert Moscow’s influence in the post-Soviet region and brought Russo-West relations to Cold War levels of cool. Again, we cannot call the current confrontation comparable to the Cold War, lacking as it does that conflict’s overtly ideological and bipolar appearance, though culture and Russian values are increasingly important to the Russian state. Yet what we can conclusively say has resurrected itself from the Cold War world, is the use of the era’s trademarks, namely communism and dissidents, by interested, usually conservative, Western political parties to wage the culture wars of right versus left that grip Western democracies today.

As conservatives reach for new rhetorical weapons, they increasingly seek to revive the Cold War. Recently, for example, a group of British libertarian conservatives, ‘Brexiters’ as they are known locally, established a ‘museum of communist terror’ ‘to advance the education of the general public in the subject of totalitarianism’. The intention seems to be to persuade British voters that their democracy once faced a great threat from left-wing radicals in the form of the Soviet Union and that somehow this threat exists once again today.

Meanwhile, the intensification of political persecution within Russia and the emergence of Alexei Navalny as the standard bearer of opposition to Putin, as well as ongoing events in Belarus, have made East European dissidents politically fashionable once more in the West. Historians of the Cold War increasingly identify the ways in which dissidents were used by politicians in the West for political capital. Conservatives and Cold War liberals opposed to détente with the USSR, which entailed a degree of Western muteness on Soviet human rights abuses, made common cause with Soviet dissidents arguing staying silent on their persecution entailed a betrayal of Western values. Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan evoked the spirit of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a famous Soviet dissident, in their speeches calling for the need to take a hard-line in relations with USSR.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny speaks at a rally. Following his recovery from a chemical poisoning which allies accuse Putin’s government of perpetrating, Navalny was imprisoned by the Russian state in February 2021. (“Navalny” by intelligencya is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Today we find contemporary politicians and commentators invoking historical, as well as present-day, dissidents in a similar way. Dominic Raab, the British Foreign Secretary, in calling for sanctions against Russian officials in an act named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who died in prison after accusing the Russian government of corruption, described Magnitsky as the ‘Solzhenitsyn of his generation’ seeking to add moral weight to his case.

Solzhenitsyn’s name is also often invoked on the alt-right, most of all by the commentator Jordan Peterson. Peterson perceives there to be an assault on free speech and Western values of freedom in present society. He appropriates Solzhenitsyn, who wrote powerfully about the threat of totalitarianism and his experiences as a political prisoner in the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn argued that communism was responsible for the crimes of the USSR and warned the West that it too faced becoming totalitarian if it did not stand up for itself. Peterson has sought to revive this argument in his attacks on political correctness within Western society today, even writing a foreword to a new edition of Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago, developments which have understandably alarmed prominent historians of the Gulag and USSR.

What this revival of Cold War tropes goes to show is the indelible imprint left by the conflict on Western political consciousness. The experience of the Cold War has clearly not been forgotten, nor has its potential political capital which will only rise in value as cultural and political debates become more fractious. Yet the appropriation of Cold War tropes also has implications outside politics for the academics who study the topic. As the Cold War is increasingly appropriated within simplistic political narratives, there is greater urgency for historians to continue to interrogate this period to ensure the shape of our understanding of it stays balanced.

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.

At Northumbria, he is a member of several research groups, including the Conflict & Society and Histories of Activism groups. James also has a keen interest in literature, especially Czech writers, and had a poem on Jan Palach published in Edge Magazine. Additionally, he remains interested in the Chernobyl disaster, on which he wrote his undergraduate thesis, ‘A Long Half-Life: Responses to Chernobyl in Soviet and Post-Soviet Society’.

Capturing the humanity of the Cold War

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By James Brown

A picture taken by renowned Czech photographer Viktor Kolar; his work captured the everyday experience in Ostrava, an important industrial town in communist Czechoslovakia. (Image: Viktor Kolar/Monovisions)

The history of the Cold War has a rich scholarship. The field encompasses International Relations studies, economic history, and, increasingly, cultural approaches, exploring the imprint of the conflict on art, film, and everyday life. Interest in books on the Cold War will likely increase this year as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And while narrative histories of high politics and culture no doubt assist in improving our understanding of the Cold War, the works which will be most important as we reflect on the conflict’s legacy are those dealing explicitly with the psychology and human impact of the Cold War. With the rise of China and continuing instability following the COVID-19 pandemic leading to repeated suggestions of the potential for a Second Cold War, most important in our engagement with the Cold War is appreciating the human mindsets which created that conflict, and those which it created amongst people in turn. We need to ask ourselves what led the world to be so divided for nearly half a century, and then how to avoid the same happening again.

Interrogating this aspect of Cold War history is indeed difficult and few authors truly succeed in illustrating the psychology of the era without resorting to cliche. The Cold War was a conflict defined by high politics and domineering ideologies of capitalism versus communism. Writers, especially academics, have found it hard to move beyond these abstractions to capture the human experience of the Cold War.

In this regard, it has been authors of fiction who have often been more successful. The works of the late great John le Carré endure in the popular imagination as among the most defining portraits of the moral compromises forced on individuals by the ideological restraints of the Cold War. Meanwhile, Francis Spufford’s fact-based novel, Red Plenty, gives insight into how Soviet citizens genuinely began to believe that communism’s material promises would be realised under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev (1956-64). In writing Red Plenty, Spufford, himself acknowledged the difficulties non-fiction authors face in trying to capture the essence of the Cold War’s ideas and their impact on people. He explains how his initial attempts to tell the tale of Red Plenty as a piece of non-fiction fell short and demanded he shift the book to the ‘border between fiction and non-fiction.’

Other Cold War authors, meanwhile, have successfully managed to bridge this gap between storytelling and fact while remaining truer to the latter. Among the most significant are Anna Funder, principally for her renowned book Stasiland, and the 2015 Nobel Literature Laureate, Svetlana Alexievich. These two authors are already widely acclaimed but it feels necessary to revisit their work as we approach the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the USSR, as they capture better than most the human impact of the Cold War, especially east of the Iron Curtain.

Funder’s brilliant Stasiland has been described variously as a personal history and a ‘journalist’s first-person narrative’ that can ‘read like a novel’. The book, through a series interviews intertwined with Funder’s own narrative, captures how the state ideology of the German Democratic Republic created an alternate, corrupt moral reality for its subjects and those who defended it: the notorious Ministry for State Security or Stasi. Funder, however, is not exclusively condemnatory of the former watchmen of state socialism. Her interviews are occasionally sympathetic with former Stasi employees, though without ever failing to address the violations they committed. On the other hand, Funder gives voice to those who resisted the regime and put themselves in extreme danger in desperate attempts to escape to the West. Funder’s main achievement is to shine a light on a society where ideology reigned supreme in a way it rarely does now, while still keeping the human experience firmly at the forefront of her prose.

Alexievich’s works, meanwhile, are less about how people were driven to extremes by ideology, and more about the everyday lives continuing in spite of or in accommodation with ideology. Alexievich’s method sees her conduct interviews with hundreds of witnesses to life in the USSR, focusing on formative events like the Great Patriotic War (1941-45), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979-89), the Chernobyl Disaster (1986), and the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991). Her excellent Secondhand Time tells the story of the end of communism in the USSR and the responses of its citizens. Alexievich lets her subjects speak for themselves, sympathising with them. What emerges is a portrait of how the Soviet people inhabited a distinct culture of their own in the USSR and that while the political reality of the Soviet Union may have ended in 1991, left behind were millions of Homo-Sovieticus traumatised by the sudden collapse of their generations-old everyday reality.

If history is about authentically recreating the unique conditions of an era or culture, both Funder’s and Alexievich’s books stand as among the most accomplished studies of the Cold War, even though neither author may be exclusively considered a historian; two other worthy examples are Donald J. Raleigh’s Soviet Baby Boomers and Bridgett Kendall’s The Cold War. Furthermore, both women’s books hold relevance in understanding pertinent contemporary issues in international politics, especially Putin’s Russia and the historical factors which drive Russian foreign policy.

Modern Russia cannot be understood without an appreciation of the impact on Russian leaders of the loss of superpower status conferred by the USSR’s collapse. Nor can the contemporary rise of the far-right in the east of Germany be understood without knowledge of East German history. Throughout the 2010s, and now in the first years of the 2020s, observers have continued to speculate whether we have entered a new Cold War-style period of international relations. Understanding the human experience of the original Cold War seems a more important exercise than ever as we prepare ourselves for the new era, whatever it brings, and Funder and Alexievich offer the best place to start.

 

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.

At Northumbria, he is a member of several research groups, including the Conflict & Society and Histories of Activism groups. James also has a keen interest in literature, especially Czech writers, and had a poem on Jan Palach published in Edge Magazine. Additionally, he remains interested in the Chernobyl disaster, on which he wrote his undergraduate thesis, ‘A Long Half-Life: Responses to Chernobyl in Soviet and Post-Soviet Society’.

Smallness over bigness – the way to a healed politics: An interview with Professor Marc Stears (Part Two)

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by James Brown

Marc Stears speaking on CNBC in October 2019 about Brexit
Source: CNBC

On the evening of January 11th, which was actually the early morning of the 12th 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.

Smallness over bigness – the way to a healed politics: An interview with Professor Marc Stears (Part One)

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by James Brown

Professor Marc Stears speaking in 2016 at the 12th Univ Annual Seminar and Buffet Supper, The Royal Society, London
Source: University College, Oxford

On the evening of January 11th, which was actually the early morning of the 12th 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.