What does the left want?

The only thing everyone on the left seems able to agree on is that things aren’t going well for Labour. A year into the Covid-19 pandemic and the government has presided over a crashed economy and the highest death rate in the world, but still the Tories are ahead in the polls.

Everyone has their hot take on this. Is Labour not patriotic enough? Is Labour not socialist enough? Is Labour too focused on winning back the Red Wall? These questions are missing the bigger point: what is the change that we want to see?

It’s worth discussing this bigger question. I want to expand it beyond asking “what does the Labour Party want?” to asking, “what does the left want to achieve as a movement?” Or “what are we fighting for?”

What are we fighting for?

By asking this question, I want to involve more people than just those on the left of the Labour Party. The answer should include the Greens, the more left-wing members of the SNP or people who don't associate themselves with any political party, but do consider themselves part of the broader cultural and political movement sometimes called The Left.

One thing we all want is the defeat of our common enemy: The Tories. It may look like the Tories are destined to be in power forever, riding the wave of Boomer resentment of modernity, but it’s certainly possible to get Labour into power. In 2007 Labour looked unbeatable, but three years later they were in opposition. Labour can get into power and use the enormous power of the British state to make people’s lives a little bit better.

If this is our goal, then we have to start thinking tactically. What will cause the voters we need to move over from Tory to Labour? The answer to this might require some compromising over Labour being seen as patriotic. Patriotism is something I find distasteful, but might be needed to get Labour into power.

Labour in power

If the plan is to get Labour into power and then to use the power of the state to sand off the worst edges of capitalism, then we need to have a discussion about whether Keir Starmer can do this and whether Labour’s current strategy will work.

Undoing the damage of a decade of austerity would make a real difference in the lives of many homeless people, people with insecure work and people who are struggling to put food on the table. Labour can stop a lot of poor people suffering by ending austerity, and stop a lot of migrants suffering by ending the hostile environment.

To get Labour into power in 2024 will require Labour winning back the voters who switched from Labour to Tory in 2019. Voters who want Labour to be more patriotic and are opposed to identity politics. This fact is inescapable.

The left and patriotism

I don’t like patriotism and the steam roller effect it has on political debate where everything associated with patriotism is good and everything not associated with it is bad. However 75% of British voters consider themselves to be very or slightly patriotic, so patriotism needs to be reckoned with. [### link]

Labour (and the left more broadly) needs to either find a way to convince some of that 75% that we’re patriotic or convince these people that actually they don’t care about patriotism. It’s one or the other. Saying “yuck, patriotism” and hoping it goes away won’t help.

We need a plan if we’re going to convince 75% of the public that patriotism is toxic and it isn’t something we should expect from politicians. If we can’t do this then, as someone who is comfortable in my middle-class existence, it would be callous of me to say to poor people they must continue suffering under austerity because I don’t want Labour to embrace patriotism.

A bigger change to society

Does the left want to achieve a bigger change than this? Do we want to end capitalism and build a radically different society? Do we want to create a national or international identity that doesn’t rely on a patriotic, nostalgic version of Britain?

There’s lots of energy around making a big change. Every talk or meeting I attend has representatives from groups fighting neo-liberal capitalism or systemic racism in one way or another. However, the impact has been low. Capitalism remains entrenched. The racist systems that underpin society remain unchanged. The power of the banks and the right-wing media isn’t going to end any time soon.

If we want to achieve a bigger change then we need a strategy. Our strategy can’t be: wait until the climate and all the wars created by capitalism are so bad that even Daily Mail readers wake up and realise what’s going on. Too many people will be dead by that point.

The left’s identity crisis

All over the world, left wing parties don’t know what they stand for in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. The Third Way between left and right has been discredited. Does the left now stand for ending capitalism and stopping the constant cycle of crises it produces? Does the left seek an accommodation with capitalism, where taxes can be used to finance government programs to protect against its worst excesses?

We’re no closer to the answer 13 years on from the financial crash and one year into capitalism’s latest crisis.

Lessons from the last five years

For the last five or so years the left’s plan has been to put a good person in charge of the state. The Corbyn project didn’t provide a solution to the left’s identity crisis or a template for left-wing change elsewhere. Neither has Joe Biden’s victory in the US.

I’m sure that Jeremy Corbyn would have been a good Prime Minister and made sure that the Covid-19 crisis didn’t fall most heavily on the poor and marginalised. However, the fact that the left didn’t have a plan beyond “make Corbyn Prime Minister” has left us adrift now that he has gone.

A better idea of what we want

The left taking over the Labour Party to get what we wanted didn’t work. If we have learned anything in the last five or six years is that we can’t fight everyone from the soft left to the far-right all at the same time and win. We need a better idea of what we want and a plan to get it.

A clear answer to what the left wants will inform our strategy. Are we being big and ambitious or small and realistic? Anything can be achieved if we know what we’re aiming for.

Labour Party picture taken by Andrew Skudder and used under creative commons.

Labour needs a message and to stick to it

Usually watching England play in a major football tournament is a depressing affair, which is why I was pleasantly surprised at how well the team did in the 2018 World Cup. I’m not a football expert, but it seemed like new manager Gareth Southgate had got the team to function better as a single unit. The ball was skillfully passed and players were on point to receive it. 

When it all fell apart in the semi-final against Croatia, the formerly well-functioning team had turned into what I called “Shit England”, as it seemed they were just hoofing the ball up the pitch and hoping for the best.

This is how I feel about Labour right now. Like England, a change in manager seemed to deliver some good results initially. Keir Starmer introduced himself to the country and received a positive reception from people who don’t follow politics closely. The polls were moving in the right direction and Starmer had avoided the initial landmine of being accused of playing politics during the outbreak of a deadly disease.

Seeing what sticks

Recently the slick performance has given way to an undisciplined fumble. Like Shit England, Labour are throwing out anything and seeing what sticks. This reminds me of some of Ed Miliband’s cringe-worthy mistakes, such as constantly trotting out new era-defining buzzwords - One Nation, predistribution - only for it to be forgotten a week later in the desperate search to find something to make the Labour Party popular.

The latest example of this is the idea that Labour should be more pro-business. This annoys me more than the last idea, seemingly thrown out at random, that Labour should be more patriotic. Making Labour look more patriotic is about how the party is presented to the voters, not about policy. Patriotism can equally accompany neoliberal or radical economic policies. If Labour wants to appear more pro-business, this will require specific pro-business policies.

Politics for the wealthy

Britain doesn’t need another pro-business party, when we have the Tories (the party of the wealthy) the Lib Dems (the party of the wealthy with a bit of a conscience), UKIP (the party of the people who think that Britain is both a company and an Empire and should be run according to the worst aspects of both) and the SNP (who will turn Scotland into a low tax, low regulation, tax haven to lure away business from England).

Politics is already slanted towards the interests of the wealthy, without another party attempting to court the votes of the rich (and the confused people who aren’t rich, but seem to think it’s important to make life as easy as possible for those who are).

A vision for the future

All this flailing around is distracting people from the important work of outlining an alternative to the Tories. It comes at the same time a Starmer attempting to outline his vision for the future.

Starmer argued that Tory ideology made the UK more vulnerable to Covid-19. This framing came alongside a platter of policy announcements, including that Labour would “keep the universal credit uplift, end the pay freeze for key workers, prevent council tax rises, extend business rates relief and the VAT cut for hospitality and leisure, and renew the furlough scheme.”

LabourList editor Sienna Rodgers’s said: “It tied together the themes we’ve seen in Labour’s interventions over the past year: family, dignity, security, fiscal responsibility and long-term thinking.”

Tackling the problems of Britain

It’s good that Starmer is making the argument that 10 years of Tory rule led to the UK having the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world, but how does being pro-business fit alongside this?

Being pro-business is at odds with a number of the things a Labour government needs to do to fix the problems with this country. Can Labour be pro-business whilst taking on the fossil fuel companies destroying the planet? Can Labour be pro-business whilst tackling the issue of slum landlords and sky-high property prices, which blight the poor and the middle-class? Can Labour be pro-business whilst fixing the problem of too many companies offering low pay and insecure work? A commitment to tackling these problems puts the Labour party at odds with “business”.

Starmer’s pledges

When Starmer stood for Labour leader, he made a series of pledges. Many Labour members, myself included, took this as an indication of his commitment to a left-wing policy platform, or at least a commitment to a centre-left socially democratic policy platform.

The first of these pledges was: “Increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations. No stepping back from our core principles.”

Is decreasing the income of the top 5% pro-business? Or is it the politics of envy, advocated by greedy socialists who want to take money away from hard-working innovators and give it to feckless teachers and nurses? The sort of thing Jeremy Corbyn would do?

Who will this win over?

The idea of chasing the support of business (or the people who enjoy a good lick of a millionaire’s boot) are at odds with what the Labour Party should stand for. There is a middle ground between Lenin’s War Communism and whatever “pro-business” means in actuality, such as taxing the wealthy a bit and using the money to offer a helping hand to the poorest in society.

This is not what Labour should stand for and it’s another example of Labour being Shit England. This “pro-business” idea is just hoofed out there to see if it scores a goal by accident, in the absence of anything resembling a strategy.

Who is this designed to win over? Everyone who voted Labour in 1997? It will take more than Keir Starmer praising Richard Branson as a job creator to achieve that.

Losing momentum

Starmer has lost momentum (in more ways than one), since the start of the year. He pitched himself as the competent alternative to the Tories, but as the government has successfully rolled out the vaccine program the wind has come out of Starmer’s sails.

There’s no better illustration of this than this recent video from Joe.co.uk talking to Red Wall voters.

Labour needs a clear communication strategy and not jumping from framing to framing, as they did under Miliband. Talk about being pro-business or more pro-flag is distracting from making the case that Starmer outlined in his speech about the future.

A message that needs to be repeated

As Sienna Rodgers said: “the argument that the Tories left the UK exposed to the worst of Covid must be repeated ad nauseam.” This simple message is what Labour needs to stick to. Just as David Cameron repeated over and over that Labour’s spending caused the financial crash or how “take back control” became ubiquitous during the referendum campaign.

Labour pitching themselves as pro-business is just throwing out things that Corbyn wasn’t in the hope that the polls will narrow. It’s the same as Shit England, firing the ball around and hoping for the best. It looks desperate even to the untrained eye and no amount of energetic kicking is a substitute for a solid strategy.

"File:Official portrait of Keir Starmer crop 1.jpg" by Chris McAndrew is licensed under CC BY 3.0

How the left should tell stories about poverty

The evidence is in: putting money directly into the pockets of poor people is the best way to address systemic poverty. This simple approach is the most effective solution to poverty. Doing something clever involving vouchers that can only be spent at certain shops is simply less effective.

A recent study from Oxford University has found that giving money directly to poor people protects them against external economic shocks, is easier to distribute than food (or other goods) and it stimulates the economy.

In a blog post about the report, researchers said: “There are anecdotes of welfare queens: people spending their welfare money poorly. But the anecdotes just do not bear out the reality in large samples of people. There is really no good evidence of waste. A review of 19 studies by the World Bank found cash grant recipients did not increase spending on alcohol or cigarettes.

UK welfare policy

This should inform welfare policy in the UK. In this country, we have seen the impact that cutting the amount that goes to the poor has had over the last ten years. Child poverty is up, homelessness is up, food poverty is up, child malnutrition is up. Who knew there was a simple answer to this?

So, why don’t we give more money to the poor? Well, you can imagine why. The reason is the bluster that would explode all over the right-wing press if the government were to do anything as nice as giving people who need money, some money. 

This means we have reached a point where most people in society (or at least a vocal minority) are dictating that the government follow a strategy for poverty elimination not supported by evidence. According to The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 56% of people living in poverty in 2018 were in a household where at least one person was working, but we still hear stories about scroungers and the work-shy.

Stories about poverty

Why? Because most people have an image of poor people being lazy and feckless that has been built up in their minds over years. Mainly by right-wing tabloids, keen that the government stop doing anything that will help anyone who isn’t already rich, but also through cravenly opportunistic TV shows eager to jump on a stereotype as an excuse for topical programming. These stories, from Benefits Street to Daily Mail headlines about single mums, have a greater effect on the public than the evidence of a report from the country’s leading University.

This is because stories that we connect with work better than evidence in changing our minds, or re-enforcing that we already believe. This is something that the left has struggled with for a while, as this post by Alina Siegfried points out. It’s mainly focused on American politics, but it applies equally to the UK. Especially when she says: 

“Using the examples of the election of Trump, the leave vote of Brexit, and the complete failure of our global society to meaningfully address the threat of climate change, [Alex] Evans points out how the left places undue value on rationality and reductionist scientific reason above other ways of knowing, as if that’s the only way to win an argument and change behaviour. We forget how crucial a role story, narrative and myth play in our lives and our psyches. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump alike crafted a mighty compelling myth. Just think of the slogan, Make American Great Again. Taken at face value, what American wouldn’t want that?”

Bleak stories about poverty 

The solution to this? The left need to tell stories about welfare and poverty that contradict the right-wing narrative that is ever-present in society, instead of relying on facts to win the day. However, these need to be the right kind of stories to have the desired impact.  

It’s tempting (especially from the point of view of a middle-class person, like myself, who didn’t grow up in poverty) to make these stories as bleak as possible. We could paint a picture of a bedraggled underclass who toil all day in thankless jobs yet are unable to feed their children whilst paying rent on their damp, draughty bug-infested flat on a forgotten council estate. Something between a modern Charles Dickens and Cathy Come Home for the 2020s.

This would be a mistake. The evidence shows that using images that are bleak for depicting poverty doesn’t work in creating empathy or promoting social change. Instead, this makes everyone feel hopeless and it alienates poor people who feel stereotyped.

Stories can change minds

This applies for stories as well as photography (which is what the article above specifically dives into). Political storytelling is more than just words, creating a narrative that challenges the dominant perception of the poor will require the use of photography, video, writing and other techniques across a variety of platforms, from social media to the news bulletins on music radio.

There are several organizations in the UK who are telling these stories, some of them are charities such as Shelter and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, some are publications such as the Guardian. These stories are having an effect, as public opinion is (slowly) moving away from rapid anti-welfare sentiments and towards more sympathy for the poor. Recently a number of Tory MPs supported an increase in the rate of Universal Credit. Was this sudden outpouring of care a result of more people (and more middle-class people) claiming UC because of the pandemic or a sign of a wider change? Only time will tell.

A narrative against austerity

The left needs to think hard about the stories about welfare that we want to tell. Public sector debt has risen during the pandemic and the narratives of austerity, with its insistence on the need to cut public spending, look likely to come roaring back into politics. It’s important that the left has a counter narrative to this. A narrative about the importance of welfare as a safety net that isn’t based on depressing depictions of poverty, but ones that empower poor people and challenges stereotypes about the work-shy.

 By putting the needs, stories and opinions of the people living in poverty at the centre of any political narrative, the left can win the argument and guarantee that welfare is available to help the poorest in society. We already have the facts that show that this works; now we just need the narrative to convince everyone.

 Cover image by Victoria Johnson and used under creative commons.

Why the environmental movement needs mindbombs and critiques of capitalism

Getting people to care about climate is difficult. Years of raising awareness about the looming environmental catastrophe have not resulted in popular demand to enact systematic change. The far less existential threat of Covid-19 has had a far bigger impact for the simple reason that people saw an immediate danger to themselves and acted.

For those of us who want to change society to mitigate the worst of rising global temperatures, there remains the elusive goal of finding a message that will cut through and finally effect real change. A message that will escape the echo chambers of middle-class lefties and convince people of the immediate need to act.

Social media noise

Social media seems to be the ideal tool for this as it allows climate activists to go directly to the public without the need to filter their message through the traditional media, much of which is hostile to the message that rapid social change is needed. However, more than 15 years of social media (Facebook was founded in 2004) has not moved us any closer to achieving the goal of a widespread awakening to the need for environmental change. 

There is a lot of noise on social media, so for a climate message to cut through it needs to be attention grabbing. Remember it needs to hold people’s attention in a world where Donald Trump and Kayne West are creating a lot of noise.

Mindbombs

To find what works in the age of social media, inspiration can be drawn from the pre-digital age. It’s worth looking at Greenpeace, who pioneered a strategy they called the “mindbomb”. A 2015 article by Karl Mathiesen defines the mindbomb as: “an image that sends a collective shock through the world leading to action.” This can be seen as a precursor to today’s viral memes.

The original Greenpeace mindbomb was footage of a Russian whaling ship, hunting whales with harpoons in the Arctic, shot from a rubber speed boat in 1975. Over the years Greenpeace has been adept at creating images that stick in the public's mind and prompt action.

Jerry Rothwell, who directed an award-winning 2015 film about Greenpeace called How to Change the World talked in Mathiesen’s article about the importance of bearing witness to an event in creating mindbombs. “Things like Ferguson, the witnessing of an event can still have the power to get people to active and out on the streets and protesting,” he said.

The problem with relying on social media

So, we need to create social media mindbombs that grab attention. However, to cut through all the noise on social media these mindbombs have to be really attention grabbing. Rothwell had criticisms of many contemporary activists, he said: “There’s been a tendency within the organisation to just paint a banner and hang it off a famous building and I think that just doesn’t wash, it’s just not interesting enough.”

There is a problem with relying on social media to deploy mindbombs to spread a story, which is that social media can distract us from or distort our goals. Social media is very good at getting our attention. It’s on our phones, carried with us everywhere we go and is constantly using push notifications to get us to stop what we’re doing and pay attention to it. Social media is good at holding what psychologists call the “spotlight” of our attention - i.e. what we are focusing on right now - but in doing this it distorts our desires and goals.

Distorted goals

Former Google employee and winner of the Three Dots prize James Williams explains this in his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy that as well as distracting our spotlight, what we are paying attention to now, social media can distract our “starlight”, which is our ability to navigate by our higher goals and values, our guiding stars.

Williams argues that social media distracts our starlight by changing our actions so that we are no longer guided by our values, but instead we are guided by the goals of social media platforms. Williams says that when our starlight is distracted it makes us want simple pleasures over complex ones and short-term rewards over long-term ones. It means that we can’t live our lives according to the values we want to live by.

This happens when reach, shares, clicks and engagements on social media take the place of our higher goals such as changing minds or prompting people to take action. 10,000 shares is not 10,000 people convinced. It’s probably not 100 people convinced. It’s just more time spent on social media, seeing more ads and having more of our data extracted to sell to advertisers.

Owning the libs or being owned by platforms?

This becomes political when a movement’s higher goals become replaced by reaching people on social media. Political movements become distracted from their starlight when they focus on increasing their metrics on social media platforms instead of winning people over to their cause. This happens when a political movement believes that 10,00 shares is 10,000 people convinced.

This can be most easily seen with the America right. They have become obsessed by sharing videos of Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson “owning libs” as their support shrinks to a narrower and more radicalised section of society. The US right’s goals have been replaced by that of social media platforms to such a degree that they are constantly sharing content that holds attention, whilst not stopping to think that a video of Shapiro shouting over a college student isn’t convincing anyone who wasn’t already signed up to their agenda.

Stories not content

This should be a lesson for the environmental movement when creating social media mindbombs. Yes they get attention, but are they serving our goals or the goals of social media platforms? It might be better to create attention grabbing stories, rather than attention grabbing social media content.

We need a story that people can believe in, that becomes their goals or starlight. When we are all motivated by our starlight to make this world a greener, fairer, better place changing the world will be easy.

Middle-class, hipster environmentalism

As middle-class environmentalists it's tempting to make this story we want to tell a reflection of our values and lifestyles. Our advocating for economic change needs to go beyond wanting the economy to be based locally, producing organic craft beer and avocado toast. These specific examples are deliberately stereotypical, but they serve to make the general point that we mustn’t make the story we tell about a greener future one where we shop differently but everything else is the same.

Something that appears cool and desirable to middle-class Westerns might not be desirable to everyone. Vijay Kolinjivadi, in an article for Al Jazeera, said:

“In theory, ‘coolness’ just is. It is imbued with all the things that reflect deep relational values of care, affection, creativity, connection, authenticity, and meaning. It should have no racial, gendered or socio-economic boundaries and likewise, have no impact on those fronts either.

“In practice, it involves the reproduction of a particular way of being which invariably sets in motion new avenues for capital to expand, allowing everything that has meaning to be hollowed-out and commodified for profit.”

A critique of capitalism

We need to be aware of a story that is environmentally progressive, but doesn’t include a critique of capitalism, racism or other power systems that are preventing the social change needed to stave off an environmental catastrophe. The story we want to tell needs to be transformative in many ways and not just environmentally.

We see this with gentrification. When middle-class people move into an area of a city, we often see a focus on green living reflected in the changes to the local economy, such as zero-waste shops or organic cafes opening.

This overlooks the damage done by gentrification to lives of poor people. As Kolinjivadi said: “In the process, the implicit socio-economic violence behind gentrification will be invariably ‘greenwashed’ and presented as development that would make the area more ‘sustainable’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘modern’.

“Thus, immigrant-owned grocery stores, halal butcheries and community centres will soon be replaced by vegan chain restaurants, hip vintage clothing joints, organic food stores and coffee-shops galore, as landlords push out poor tenants to make space for more well-to-do ones.”

A story that wins support

The story we tell about the change we want to see in the world must not be a story about changing consumer patterns, but instead focus on ”resistance on externally-conceived and profit-driven developments as a moral and even survivalist imperative and work to re-establish community through solidarity economies, replenishing those relations severed by the growth-centred logic.”

If we want to win over people to believing in our story about a better, greener future then it needs to offer more change than making everyone an environmental hipster. It needs to tackle the root causes of injustice, such as capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia. etc.

Planet of the Humans

Now is a time where we need challenging narratives about a better future where we have overcome the problems created by capitalism or racism. Optimistic stories about the environment are threatened by eco-fascist narratives, doom and gloom narratives about there being no hope and narratives about the environmental movement itself being suspect.

The most recent example of the latter is Michael Moore’s new film Planet of the Humans, which spreads disinformation about the climate movement. To give you an idea of bad it is, singer-songwriter and climate activist Neil Young described the film as: “erroneous and headline grabbing TV publicity tour of misinformation. A very damaging film to the human struggle for a better way of living, Moore’s film completely destroys whatever reputation he has earned so far.”

Moore’s film blames overpopulation for the looming environmental disaster and spreads disinformation about how the green movement has distracted attention from overpopulation as the cause of climate breakdown.

Unexpected praise for Michael Moore from the far-right

Moore doesn’t offer any answer to the question of “what do we do about there being too many humans?” The audience can make up their own mind and many people have jumped to the worst possible solution. Unsurprisingly, this focus on too many humans as an environmental problem has led to the film being heralded by the most extreme parts of the right.

Bill McKibben, one of the people Moore targets in the film, wrote a response in Rolling Stone where he reports that “Breitbart loves the movie” and that so does “every other climate-denier operation on the planet”. I don’t think it was Moore’s intention to make a climate film that energises the far-right (I think he wanted to bolster his reputation as an edgy provocateur by taking on the liberal establishment), but his environmental narrative of too many people aligns with the far-right narrative of certain groups of people being a threat to society. 

This is what happens when the basis of the narratives we tell about the environment are not positive stories about the better world that we can create. Doom and gloom stories can be easily co-opted by eco-fascists and turned to their ends.

Freeing people trapped by doom and gloom narratives

This is why the environmental movement needs mindbombs AND critiques of capitalism. We can win people over to the idea of a better tomorrow, with an attention-grabbing story that offers solutions to the loom environmental catastrophe that tackles many of society’s social and economic problems.

Our narrative needs to be informed by what worked well in the past, such as Greenpeace’s mindbomb approach, which can be adapted for a social media age. However, we need to be aware of the problems of social media and make sure that the goals of tech platforms do not substitute our goals. We must be guided by our Starlight, which is our goal to make a better future.

There are many people captured by environmental doom and gloom narratives who think that the problem is too many people and not our economic and political systems. Our story about a better tomorrow can free these people and make the world a better place, if we can tell it right.

It’s a mistake for Labour to want to talk about race and economic issues separately

How should Labour respond to the recent Black Lives Matter protests across the UK? I know how I feel about them: systematic racism is a big problem in the UK, you just have to look at the higher death rates from Covid-19 for people from Black and minority ethnic (BAME) groups people to know that the UK has a problem. I want the Labour Party and its leadership to be a vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and work to dismantle systemic racism wherever it is found.

One of the sad things about politics today is that there are voters who would be put off voting Labour if Keir Starmer became a prominent supporter of BLM. Part of me wants to say “fuck those guys, we don’t need them.” However, I don’t know if Labour can win power by only appealing to people who support BLM. It seems unlikely. 

Labour needs to win an election to be in power so that it can implement meaningful reforms that address systemic racism. For example, Labour could carry out the recommendations of the Lammy Review: “An independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the Criminal Justice System.” The Tories aren’t going to do this, but Labour needs to win power first.

Conscience against compromise

This leads to the age-old political dilemma: conscience against compromise. Say what you feel or play a tactical game to win power and then make changes. I don’t envy the position that Starmer is in. Making the wrong strategic decision on BLM, or a host of other issues, could hurt Labour’s electoral chances, prevent them from winning power and then using the power of the state to address systemic racism in Britain.

It appears that Starmer has chosen compromise. He was photographed taking the knee, in a show of solidarity with those protesting the murder of George Floyd by police in the US, but he also criticised the removal of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. I can see the pragmatism in this approach, it aims to keep onside voters who support the removal of the statue and voters (and potential voters) who weren’t in favour of it.

It’s worth bearing in mind that a recent YouGov poll showed that 40% of those asked supported “the statue being removed, but not in the way in which it was done” and that 33% “disapprove of the statue being removed.” This could be read as 73% of voters being opposed to the toppling of the statue. It’s a courageous Labour leader who takes a stance that 73% of the voters oppose, so I can see why Starmer has opted for compromise here.

Identity politics

It’s also worth remembering that the Edward Colston statue is just one event in a long campaign against systemic racism. A single poll on one event doesn’t mean that Labour should be shouting loudly about keeping up statues of slave traders. The poll does highlight one of the key problems for Labour: what is the story that they can tell that will unite Labour voters who were glad to see the statue torn down and those who would want to see it staying up?

The discourse around events such as the removal of the Edward Colston statue are often referred to as “identity politics”. This phrase is usually evoked by people opposed to “identity politics” as a way to dismiss the voicing of objections to systemic racism or the oppression of LGBTQ+ people. However, there are a lot of voters who are alienated by identity politics and Labour might need to win some of their votes to be in power.

There is a view within the Labour Party that it needs to stay away from issues related to identity, from Black Lives Matter to trans rights, and instead tell a story that is entirely about economics.

An economic message

A form of this argument is made in the recent report from Labour Together into the 2019 election defeat, which concludes: “Our potential voting coalition shares much common ground on economic issues”. This argument is also made in Steve Rayson’s new book about the 2019 general election: The Fall of the Red Wall.

Both of these investigations into the future of Labour recommend a focus on economic issues over identity issues. The reason is that the party’s current supporter’s beliefs on identity are divergent from the rest of the country. Only a story about a radical economic change can unite its current supporters with the supporters the party needs to win, because they are so far apart on other issues.

Race and class

It is a mistake to think that Labour can win power by telling a story about the country they want to create that is only focused on economic issues, while either talking separately about racial equality or ignoring it all together. Gary Younge recently wrote in the New Statesman that he wanted the left to “end the futile attempts to engage race and class separately.” He said: “They do not exist in silos but are two interdependent forces, among many, and they are either understood in relation to each other or are misunderstood completely.”

In his article Younge talks about how people from the BAME community are more likely to be in poorly paid service industry jobs that make them more at risk from Covid-19. He said: “For historical reasons, related to migration, some groups are more likely to be concentrated in the health service, public transport and care work, while the modern economy has created significant concentrations of certain ethnicities in cleaning, taxi driving and security.

“12.8 per cent of workers from Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds are employed in public-facing transport jobs such as bus, coach and taxi driving, compared with 3.5 per cent of white people. These are all areas where workers are most at risk.”

Measures to improve the conditions for people in low paid, service industry jobs fit perfectly into the economic story that Labour wants to tell about the country, but are also part of the story about racial equality that Labour feels it needs to sideline. The two issues are fundamentally linked and can’t be talked about separately. Pushing discussion of racial equality to one side and labeling it as “identity politics” is a failure to understand the details of the story that Labour needs to tell.

Informing, not undermining, solidarity

As Younge said in his article: “The effort to relegate race, gender, sexual orientation, disability – the list goes on – to mere “identity politics” has ramped up of late. The disproportionate number of deaths among minorities, the spike in domestic violence during lockdown, the manner in which disabled people were marginalised at every step – all these factors exemplify the degree to which we have experienced this moment differently in material ways that are not, solely, about economic. Acknowledging that doesn’t undermine solidarity, it informs it.”

Labour should urgently find a story that it can connect racial equality with its economic message. Talking about racial equality is not separate from discussing jobs, education, health, economic distribution and regional inequality, all issues that Labour need to be talking about as part of their economic message to the voters. The two issues are fundamentally connected. There’s no need to separate out the “identity politics” that some voters don’t like from the economic message that they will like.

Labour needs to tell a powerful story that connects the reasons why it’s wrong that we had a statue of a slave trader in Bristol, to reasons why we have so much regional variation in job prospects, all the way through to why the economic gap between rich and poor is growing. Labour cannot tell a story that addresses some of these questions separately. It needs to tell a story that addresses them all together.

"File:Official portrait of Keir Starmer crop 1.jpg" by Chris McAndrew is licensed under CC BY 3.0

The Fall of the Red Wall by Steve Rayson shows the role that narrative played in Labour’s defeat

When the votes were counted after last year’s general election, and the Tories had won 41 historic Labour seats in the North and Midlands, it became clear that a realignment in politics had happened. 

Some of these seats had returned Labour MPs for over 100 years and were now returning Tory MPs despite being blighted by deindustrialization under Margaret Thatcher and austerity under David Cameron. Now that the dust has settled, we can begin to ask: why were ex-coal miners and factory workers turning their backs on Labour and voting Conservative?

This is the subject of a new book by Steve Rayson that is published today. The Fall of the Red Wall: 'The Labour Party no longer represents people like us' doesn’t seek simple answers to the complex question of how politics appeared to change so much in such a short time. It doesn’t reach for the obvious answers of “Brexit” and “Jeremy Corbyn”, but locates these in a wider story of social and political changes that were all brought to a head in December 2019.

The role of narrative

Rayson has conducted a lot of detailed research and thoroughly explains the causes of the fall of the Red Wall. He draws on a range of sources, from academic research to statements made by MPs, to focus groups, to polling, to articles by journalists. The book is certainly comprehensive. Rayson makes a lot of good points about what happened during the last election, but to save time I’m going to focus on the element that interested me the most: the role that narrative played in the fall of the Red Wall.

In Rayson’s words: “In traditional Labour constituencies across the Midlands and the North, a ‘never Tory’ generation put aside historic narratives of being Labour towns and Labour people and voted for the Conservatives.” He details how the dominant narrative of “Labour towns and Labour people” was defeated by a challenger narrative of “the Labour Party no longer represents people like us”. Again, this wasn’t caused by Brexit and Corbyn, although both were factors.

For many decades the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative had been weakening until it finally broke in the last general election. Many Red Wall voters’ sympathies had been with the Tories for some time, but they kept voting Labour because of the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative. It required a certain number of people to publicly voice their support for the Conservatives for the taboo of voting Tory to be broken. New stories about the Tories surging in the polls in former Red Wall seats finally caused the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative to collapse and voters’ preferences for the Tories to be revealed.

A long decline

The decline of the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative can be traced back to the 1980s and the decline of the trade unions that maintained this narrative. It was weakened by New Labour who pursued a new coalition of voters - more middle-class, more affluent, more centrist - and didn’t engage as much with Red Wall voters. New Labour thought they had no one else to vote for and, for a long time, they didn’t. This led to Red Wall voters feeling at best taken for granted or at worst looked down on by Labour’s metropolitan leadership.

This narrative was further weakened by people who were likely to have a strong preference for Labour leaving these constituencies. Younger, more liberal and more educated voters have moved to large cities where there are better job prospects. This had led to a demographic shift in Red Wall seats, making them older, less well educated and more socially conservative: i.e. much more like the typical Tory voter.

Rayson writes about how political changes also made it easier for voters to switch parties. Voters are more volatile now, Rayson writes: “party loyalty has declined over many years and we now live in an increasingly volatile political world. In the 2017 election 33% of people changed their vote from 2015. Over the four elections from 2005 to 2017 around 60% of people voted for different parties.”

Rayson also argues that more elections (EU elections, local elections, mayoral elections, referendums) make it easier for voters to experiment with switching parties before a general election. There is also the possibility of UKIP or the Brexit Party offering a half-way house for voters switching from Labour to the Tories. 

What next?

The Fall of the Red Wall mainly describes what happened, which is essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of the Labour Party. What I was most interested in is the book’s final part: what next?

Rayson states that Labour needs a new narrative, which I strongly agree with, and that the lack of a coherent narrative was a major weakness of the 2019 campaign. He also agrees with a recent Labour Together report (which he cites in his book) that Labour needs to focus on an economic message, as left-of-centre economic views and dissatisfactions with our current economic system is one thing that unites the various disparate groups that Labour needs to win the votes of to get back into power.

The Fall of the Red Wall also makes the case that this needs to be more than a message, it needs to be a narrative. The story that Labour needs to tell must run deeper than economics, it needs to take into account how voters in the Red Wall and beyond see the world, their fears and their aspirations for the future. The story that Labour needs to tell needs to unite people in a shared vision of the country a Labour government will create.

Cultural divide

There are many challenges to this. Rayson states that: “in developing a new narrative Labour has to be cognisant of a significant divide on cultural issues. Analysis by Datapraxis for the Labour Together review indicates this divergence on social and cultural issues [between Red Wall voters and 2019 Labour voters] is growing. This presents a major challenge for Labour in developing a narrative that realms the audience’s sense of identity and reflects a sense of shared values.”

Rayson is not the first writer to point out the difference in values between former and current Labour voters. The generational aspect of this divide is not discussed enough, nor is the fact that Labour needs to hang on to young voters as the party's future and their activist base.

I was also hoping for more details of what the different values are, beyond the clear differences in views on patriotism, law and order and immigration. Understanding exactly what the values difference is will be crucial for the new Labour narrative.

Moving to meet Red Wall voters where they are

It’s not enough to just to look at how Labour’s current supporters are out step with the rest of the country on the issues of patriotism, law and order and immigration. The book shows that the voters in these Red Wall seat’s economic views are far to the left of the median voter, but their social views are far to the right. This allowed the Tories to appeal to them on social grounds with a message of Brexit, toughness on crime, and patriotism. 

Rayson makes a strong case about moving to meet Red Wall voters on social issues could alienate many voters because of how far to the right Red Wall voters are on social issues. This books chimes with a recent article by Lynsey Hanley who argues that: “Labour will win by changing minds – not pandering to rightwing voters” and is part of a wider body of evidence that Labour shouldn’t jump to the obvious conclusion from the loss of the 41 Red Wall seats.

Labour needs to know how to speak to Red Wall voters in a way that resonates with them. If Labour focuses simply on issues like patriotism, law and order and immigration to win back Red Wall voters they risk alienating the median voter (as well as Labour activists) as Red Wall voters are significantly to the right of the median voter on these issues.

My view on the narrative that Labour needs

The story that Labour needs to tell needs to offer more than moving the party closer to where the median voter is on the issues of patriotism, law and order, and immigration. Labour can wave the flag more, talk up the police (additional police has been Labour policy under Ed Miliband’s and Corbyn’s leadership) and bring back their “controls on immigration” mugs, but this won’t be enough to win over Red Wall voters.

I don’t think that many voters see a difference between what Miliband and Corbyn stood for in terms of patriotism, crime and controls on immigration. The difference between the two might have defined Labour’s civil war for the last five years or so, but from the outside it looks like Judean People’s Front Politics. Is Starmer seen as any different? He might be closer to the average voter (if not the Red Wall voter) on these issues, but is that a meaningful enough change?

My concern is that Labour is not appreciating the huge task ahead to winning back the votes that have been drifting away for most of my lifetime (and I’m not a young man). I don’t think that choosing Keir Starmer as Labour leader is a solution to the problems of Labour not being seen as representing Red Wall voters, despite the fact he’s from a different Labour tradition than Corbyn.

A step on the road towards reckoning with what went wrong

The publication of this book is a step on the road towards Labour reckoning with what went wrong last year. The detailed research and insights in this book highlight how the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative crumbled. I hope this will be a wake up call to the fact that getting rid of Corbyn isn’t the answer to Labour’s problems. Labour needs a plan to win.

Understanding why the Red Wall fell and the role narrative plated in this fall is essential for understanding what Labour should do next. The Fall of the Red Wall is an essential tool for this as it outlines what the narrative that Labour needs to tell to start winning again might be like.

Labour is still a long way from having a strategy and narrative that can win. What The Fall of the Red Wall shows is that Labour needs to understand what went wrong and then start thinking about how to fix the problem. 

The Fall of the Red Wall: 'The Labour Party no longer represents people like us' is out today and can be purchased from Amazon.

Labour Party picture taken by Andrew Skudder and used under creative commons.

Ecofascism, Malthusian economists and why we need less fearful stories about the environment

Fear is a powerful motivating force. The fear of Covid-19 made us change our entire society very rapidly from one that seemed perfectly designed to spread the virus to one that is perfectly designed to contain it. 

It makes sense that fear would be a strong enough motivator to do the kind of society wide changes that are necessary to stop a climate disaster. The data tells a simple story: that if we don’t change our behaviour soon there will be huge impacts and massive suffering caused by climate change. Amping up the fear of this makes sense as a strategy to encourage the changes that are needed to prevent a climate catastrophe.

This seems self-evident, but decades of raising awareness in the hope that fear of a climate disaster would lead to a more environmentally friendly society have not worked. The story being told by the environmental movement has been consistent, but temperatures and CO2 levels keep rising.

Avoiding an oncoming train

A report from Futerra entitled Sell the Sizzle outlines the problems with a story that uses fear as a motivator for environmental action. The fear of danger is only a good motivator if the way to avoid danger is clear. The fear of an oncoming train works well as a motivator to avoid being hit by a train as the solution is simple: get off the train track.

A more recent example is Covid-19. Fear of coronavirus (and what it can do to society if it spreads unchecked) created social change because it's clear what you need to do to stop the spread of the virus: stay home. It’s that simple.

Sell the Sizzle says that when the solution to the frightening thing is not clear, the fear response produces a sense of resignation rather than action. Narratives about how we’re all doomed unless we change our lifestyles don’t work if it's not clear what we need to do.

Climate stories and white nationalism

The narrative of doom and gloom used by the environmental movement is creating more problems than just failing to motivate the change to society we need. It’s also feeding into the rise of far-right politics and white nationalism.

In an article for Gizmodo, Brian Kahn outlines the ways in which white nationalists have been using climate rhetoric. He describes Patrick Crusius, a white nationalist who killed 23 people in a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, and a manifesto he posted on 8chan that contains “ideas central to the mainstream environmental movement.”

Crusius wrote: “[O]ur lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources.”

The rise of ecofascism

Kahn explains how rhetoric like that used by Crusius is part of a new trend in far-right politics towards “ecofascism,” a right wing ideology that links white nationalism with a twisted form of environmentalism. What ecofascism and the mainstream environmental movement have in common is they both tell a story of a society that is sick, dying and ultimately doomed. Both say: through our decadence we are destroying the world and we need to turn the clock back to a simpler, better time to avert a disaster.

The idea that stories about a looming environmental disaster should fuel the far-right makes sense when you think about how people react when they’re afraid. Fear of something bad happening can be a good motivator, to make someone stop smoking or go to the gym more, but fear also brings out the worst in us. It makes us act suddenly, or do things that if we were calmer we wouldn’t do.

Fear leads to other negative emotions such as anger and hatred. Anger at whoever caused us to be afraid. Hatred of the people who have awakened these fears. This is especially true when our fear relates to things like our homes, our children or our futures. Things we feel strongly about. Things that stories about environmental doom and gloom play off.

If everyone is afraid of environmental devastation in our future then they’re likely to want someone to blame, someone to be angry at or someone to hate. For a lot of people that is the corporations who have poisoned the planet or the politicians who have failed to constrain them. However, for some people their fear about the future is causing them to hate the people they already fear and hate: immigrants, poor people and people of colour. This is the fuel that sustains ecofascism.

“Overindulging in apocalyptic thinking”

In the Gizmodo article above, Kahn interviews Betsy Hartmann, a professor emeritus at Hampshire College, who studies the connections between white nationalism and environmentalism. Hartmann said: “There is a deeply problematic, apocalyptic discourse about climate and conflict refugees that is quite common in liberal policy circles and even documentaries.”

She also said: “The environmental movement in the U.S. has, I would say, overindulged in apocalyptic thinking for a long time. There’s that kind of apocalyptic bridge and then the nature-race-purity bridge. What’s so horrifying and shocking to me is that these [far-right] manifestos are openly Malthusian environmentalist arguments. I don’t think we saw that quite as much before in the armed white nationalist movement.”

18th century economists and 21st century problems

Mentioning Thomas Robert Malthus is interesting. Malthus was a cleric and economist who had “ideas” about the problems of a growing population. In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus set out his thesis that people, mainly poor people, would breed and breed and there would not be enough food. 

Malthus predicted mass starvation in the near future and said that charity, or state aid, to help the poor would only make things worse as any attempt to alleviate the suffering of the poor would lead to more poor people and thus not enough food. The solution, according to Malthus, was to stop people breeding so much.

A lot of problematic environmental stories that are fueling ecofascism are descended from Malthus’s ideas. When we tell stories about how there aren’t enough resources on planet Earth to sustain the human race at the rate at which we consume, we risk drifting into telling Malthusian stories about how the problem is that there are too many people. This leads people to suggest 18th century economic solutions to 21st century problems, i.e. there should be less people. It’s easy to see how this fuels ecofascism.

A question of distribution

The problem with Malthus’s work is that it’s too mathematical. He only considered that there were too many people and not enough food. He didn’t look at the social or political reasons why there wasn’t enough food. He didn’t consider distribution or power structures that keep people hungry. 

Eleanor Penny said it best in a recent essay on Malthus when she said: “His problem is more fundamental: he framed human suffering as purely a scientific and mathematical question - recasting the effects of a brutal economic system as the dispassionate mechanics of nature. He rewrote a political problem of production and distribution as a biological problem of reproduction and consumption - distracting from its causes, exculpating its architects from any responsibility, and blinding us to possible solutions.”

Modern Malthusian environmental stories

The environmental stories we tell risk drifting into these overly simplistic Malthusian narratives that can fuel ecofascism. Stories that paint a picture of a world where poor people of colour have been driven from their homes by a climate disaster and have to move to richer, whiter nations are Malthusian.

These stories make us - those of us in wealthy countries - worry about how our nation will accommodate climate refugees. They make us worry that there won’t be enough to go around in the climate-addled future. They make us frightened of poor people, people of colour and migrants. They fuel ecofascism.

We tell these stories with good intentions, to motivate people to change the world for the better, but stories about climate refugees are only fueling the fear of migrants that spread white nationalism and fascism. If the story is that the problem with the environment is that there are too many people, then we all know what a fascist solution for the problem of too many people is.

Hartmann said when interviewed by Kahn: “Using this highly militarized and stereotyped Malthusian discourse about poor people of color is dangerous and counterproductive.” She added that: “I would say the internet and right-wing media certainly plays a role in spreading them. But we can’t ignore how Malthusian ideas about overpopulation and the environment are taught in high schools all over the United States.”

From Malthus to Michael Moor

The lesson to learn is that we need to tell stories about the environment that are more complicated. Stories that take into account social and political issues and not just the fact that we are consuming too much or that there are too many people.

There is a serious risk of the stories we tell about the environment - with the best of intentions of improving the world for everyone - spread a message that white nationalists and ecofascists can use to spread their ideas. Penny said: “Everywhere we read lazy affirmations that we are the problem; humanity and its fatal tendency to multiply is plundering the earth of its natural wealth.” Even Michael Moore is at it in his new documentary Planet of the Humans, which lays the blame for the worsening environment on there being too many people.

Somewhere to jump to

As the Sell the Sizzle report found, promoting fear without a plan a clear plan for what we’re changing into to avoid disaster doesn’t work. We can’t jump out of the way of the train without somewhere to jump to. If we are going to use fear of an environmental disaster in the stories we tell to motivate change then we need to identify where we’re jumping to. If it’s not clear, people will blame the wrong people or people in general for the looming environmental disaster, or reach for the usual scapegoats.

We need somewhere to jump to. We need to talk up the positive aspects of the new society that we are going to build that will be fairer, greener, healthier and happier.

Jumping towards a solarpunk future

Recent examples of stories about positive vision of a future can be found in solarpunk: an art, literary and design movement that is centered showing what a greener, fair future might be like. Its rebellion against the dystopian futures of cyberpunk, a genre very much concerned with frightening narratives about environmental devastation. Solarpunk gives us something to aspire to whilst showing us what a better future would be like.

There are many problems with fearful environmental narratives. They don’t motivate us to change society for the better, they promote at best nihilism about the future and at worst ecofascism. We need better environmental stories.

The solution to too much pessimism is some optimism. We don’t need stories with a naive optimism that things will just get better. We need stories that say that if we all pull together, a better world for everyone can be achieved.

"Extinction Rebellion-11" by juliahawkins123 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

Why Labour needs a narrative about how the country can rebuild better after lockdown

Recently, I wrote about how the Labour Party needs a new narrative to start winning again. Labour needs to tell a story, which connects with the electorate, about how things would be different under a Labour government. This story needs to resonate with people outside the echo chambers of left-wing social media and reach out to people across the country.

This needs to be a story about how things will be better after the Covid-19 crisis. As I write we are still in lockdown, the virus is a major threat, people have lost of their jobs, the economy is likely to experience a huge contraction and there is no clear sign of when we’re likely to get back to anywhere near normal. Right now, people need hope to get them through this difficult time.

What would give us hope is a narrative about how the world will be better post lockdown. We don’t need a story about how we’ll get back to normal. Normal wasn’t very good for a lot of people. It wasn’t good for the people with low paid insecure work. It wasn’t good for the people on Universal Credit who are struggling unable to feed their families. It wasn’t good for the people living in poor-quality housing. It wasn’t good for the people who don’t have anywhere to live at all.

The planet cannot afford for us to go back to normal

Normal wasn’t good for the environment. We have less than 12 years to make some really serious changes to the way we live if we’re going to avert the worse of the environmental catastrophe. Before March this year, it didn’t look like it was possible for human society to change so dramatically. Then we found that, given the will to act, huge social changes can be delivered quickly. The planet cannot afford for us to go back to normal after the Covid-19 crisis. We need a new normal, for the sake of both the environment and the people who inhabit it.

There are encouraging signs that some people within the Labour Party are thinking about the need to rebuild differently after the Covid-19 crisis. In a recent Guardian article former Labour leader and current Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband said that “the current moment is a contemporary equivalent of what happened after 1945.”

He added that: “It’s never too early to start thinking about the future, to think about what kind of world we want to build as we emerge from this crisis. I think we owe it to have a sort of reassessment of what really matters in our society, and how we build something better for the future.”

Miliband gave a few more specifics saying: “I think we should be aiming for the most ambitious climate recovery plan in the world,” and that: “That should be nothing less than the government’s ambition. The old argument that you can have economic success or environmental care is just completely wrong.”

Engaging young voters

The need for this to be a green recovery is especially pressing for a key group of voters, a group that has remained loyal to Labour through Miliband’s and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the ups and downs of Brexit: the young. Of course in British politics, the young is everyone under 45. I don’t feel young, but apparently I am, which is nice.

The divide between young and old is one of the starkest dividing lines in politics. The young generally voted Remain and are more engaged with Black Lives Matter and trans rights. On the whole, the young favour more left-wing economic policies and, crucially, care more about the environment than the old. The environment is a key issue for us young voters and leading with this is a good way for Labour to keep the young onside.

The young are also much more likely to be hit hardest by the recession that is currently unfolding (just as we were more likely to be hit hardest by the last one). A recent study from the Resolution Foundation found that more than 600,000 more young people could become unemployed this year because of coronavirus.

Own the future

A narrative about how the country could be a better, fairer, greener place after Covid-19 is what young people need now to give them hope that something good can come from the suffering that the coronavirus has unleashed. While Tories are struggling with the present - enforcing the lockdown, keeping the economy on life support, dealing with whatever stupid thing Dominic Cummings has done this week - Labour need to own the future. They need to tell a story about what happens next.

This story will energise young voters who are already fired up about Labour. It will also reassure them that Kier Starmer’s Labour party values their support as much as Corbyn’s Labour did. It will also offer them encouragement that issues that they are concerned about, from social justice to the environment, are the ones a Labour government will champion.

A story about what a better post-Covid-19 world is what the country needs right now. It’s a story that can transcend the group of people who already support Labour, break out of the left-wing social media echo chambers and bring the country together behind the vision of a Labour government.

Does the left live in a bubble?

The day after the 2019 general election, Nick Cohen tweeted: “Never mistake your Twitter feed for your country”. He was implying that those of us on the left, rooting for Jeremy Corbyn to win the election, were out of touch with the average voter as we’re cocooned in an internet echo chamber filled with people who agree with us. 

I don’t make a habit of agreeing with Nick Cohen, but he did have a point. I had mistaken my Twitter feed for my country. I had mistaken my country for one where people cared about other people. A country where we didn’t vote in a posh buffoon simply because it was the fastest way to make Brexit go away, so that most people can go back to ignoring politics while everything else gets worse.

I wanted a Corbyn government that would tackle rising homelessness, child poverty, crumbling schools and the looming environmental disaster. The country (or at least large parts of it) had a different idea. I had made a painful mistake. If I could move to my Twitter feed I would.

Does the left live in a bubble?

It’s not just the day after a general election that I feel like this, although it’s particularly strong on those days. The left is frequently accused of living in a bubble. Another example is this Helen Lewis piece claiming (supported by a lot of evidence) that the Twitter electorate isn’t the real electorate.

Lewis cites the example of the response to Rebecca Long-Bailey’s use of the phrase “progressive patriotism” in her pitch to be the next Labour leader, and how this was seen by some on the left as dangerously close to racism. Lewis states that “to read so directly across from ‘patriotism’ to ‘racism’ is a fringe position.”

I had criticism of the use of this phrase, but as Lewis said: “Some 67 percent of Britons describe themselves as ‘very’ or ‘slightly’ patriotic. Telling two-thirds of the country that they are secretly racist is a courageous electoral strategy.” I guess my dislike of the idea of progressive patriotism is proof, if anymore where needed, that I’m out or touch with the general voter and live in a bubble.

Personal bubbles

I wonder if this is mainly a by-product of the fact that most of our politics is done online? I don’t get my political news, views and discussion from BBC news bulletins. I get it mainly from the internet, and predominantly from what is served up to me by Twitter and Facebook algorithms.

These algorithms look at the things that I read, the post I interact with and the people I follow to build up a picture of me. They then filter the content that Facebook or Twitter shows to me to reflect my interests: i.e. left-wing politics. This personalisation of content is done to keep my attention focused on Facebook or Twitter for longer so that they can show me more ads, which is how they make their money. 

This all seems harmless until a general election rolls around and I’m left bewildered by the fact that everyone didn’t vote for the party offering more money for schools, hospitals and homelessness prevention, despite the fact that all this was very well received by my Twitter feed.

“The common ground of news”

Adrienne LaFrance said, in an article for Nieman Reports: “The fear that personalization will encourage filter bubbles by narrowing the selection of stories is a valid one, especially considering that the average internet user or news consumer might not even be aware of such efforts.” 

LaFrance interviewed Judith Donath, author of “The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online” and a researcher affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, who said: “You may have friends or colleagues, and you read the same things in common. You may decide different things about it. Then you debate with those people. If you’re not even seeing the same news story, it leaves you with a much narrower set of people with whom you share that common ground. You’re losing the common ground of news.”

This is what happened to me. Twitter wasn’t showing me the posts from the people who thought that all the nice things that I wanted from a Corbyn government were a waste of money, or posts from the people who wanted to “get Brexit done”, or the people who thought Corbyn was insufficiently patriotic to be Prime Minister. If Twitter had shown me these comments I would have logged off in a sulk and they wouldn’t have been able to show me more ads for hotels in Croatia.

Techno-fixes

There is a technological fix to this, as explained in this Ted Talk on filter bubbles by Eli Pariser. He said that the issue is that Twitter and Facebook give their users an information diet consisting of only things they like, which he calls “information desserts”. However, as any parent knows, it's best to give your children a balanced diet, not just what they like.

Sometimes children need to be given things they don’t want to eat for their own good. I’m referring to us all as children because that’s how the tech platforms treat us and it’s also, frankly, how we act online. According to this idea, it would be good if Twitter showed me some posts of people yelling about how immigrants are stealing the country and we need to vote Tory to stop it, even if I wouldn’t like it.

In principal I’m in favour of this, as long as there's a Daily Express reader somewhere having videos by Hbomberguy dropped into his timeline after he tweets “Get Brexit done” a certain number of times.

Would this work?

I can see the benefit of a varied information diet. According to Pariser it’s a diet of: “Some information vegetables. Some information desserts.” Vegetables, in this case, being people saying that Corbyn is a softy, unpatriotic, metropolitan, immigrant loving liberal and desserts being people saying that maybe the government should do something about all the people sleeping in the bus station every evening.

I’m a little skeptical if this would work. There is lots of evidence that facts (or other people’s opinions) don’t change our minds. Although I am heartened by this story of a young man who fell down a YouTube hole, became alt-right and then changed his views when he encountered left-wing YouTube.

Is this a left-wing problem?

The Facebooks and Twitters of this world might be creating filter bubbles through personalising our timelines, but that’s not specifically a left-wing problem. Everyone is on the internet, even my 69-year-old mum (hi mum, I’ll reply to your email about socks after I’m done writing this).

The accusation of living in a bubble is mainly levelled at the left, specifically the radical left. You don’t see Brexiter, Tory voters being accused of living in a conservative bubble where everyone is frothing about immigrants or Cultural-Marxism destroying Britain. No one says they should be given information vegetables in the form of Owen Jones or Laurie Penny columns.

The views of people who complain about immigrants or metropolitan elites are taken to be common sense. Occasionally, people point out that common sense can be wrong, but that still accepts right-wing views as the default position of most people. I guess if right-wing is the default position then the fact that I disagree means that I do live in a bubble and I’m disconnected from reality.

Centre or right?

Maybe the majority of people in the country are conservative. The evidence for this is a few minutes looking at the supposed “centre ground” of British politics. In January this year, former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron wrote an article in the Guardian about what “progressives” need to do to win. In this he said: “At present, Labour’s brand is so terrifying that it pushes voters into Conservative arms.” From reading this you would think that 2019 Labour manifesto includes pledges for a massive war to liberate Palestine, the abolishment of prisons and gender, and confiscating all money above what the average Labour voter earns.

I can see why most people might find that programme a bit too spicy for their bland British sensibilities. However, only the most brain-dead, Daily Mail mainlining, Little Englander would think that’s what a Corbyn government would have been like. Then again, it’s probably what Tim Farron, supposedly in the centre of British politics, thinks a Corbyn government would have been like. Apparently, money for teachers and nurses, helping the homeless, cheaper public transport and green jobs is “terrifying”.

My bubble is my happy place

If you haven’t guessed from my tone so far, I’m not happy with the world outside my bubble. I don’t think most British people are Nigel Farrage, but if this is Tim centre-of-politics Farron’s reality then I don’t want to live in it. So, I’m currently looking at moving to my Twitter feed and I must say that, judging by the pictures, some of these flats in Animal Crossing are very nice.

I don’t know where this leaves the Labour Party. The sad truth is that we do have to win over some people who think that Tim Farron is right and thought Corbyn was so scary that they had to vote Tory. I don’t like saying it, and I’m going to wash my mouth out with soap afterward, but after two defeats for Corbyn I’m starting to think that there aren’t enough craft beer drinkers in Britain to vote in socialism.

That doesn’t mean Labour has to give up on socialism and spend their time chasing some hypothetical centre ground voter. There are stories that can unite the country and break the left out of our Twitter bubbles. Next time I’m going to look into what these are.

The Labour needs an effective story to start winning again

In the last four British elections whatever the Labour Party was selling, the UK wasn’t buying. Be it centrist Gordon Brown, soft-left Ed Miliband or radical left Jeremy Corbyn, the British electorate wasn’t interested.

Whatever Labour tries it doesn’t work. They have policies, media plans, electoral strategies, but it doesn’t all come together. There’s been something crucial lacking: a story. A story that Labour can tell that ties up all their ideas and policies into a vision for the future that the voters can get behind.

Both Miliband and Corbyn tried to tell stories about where the country had gone wrong under Tory rule, but these failed to capture the public’s imagination. Both had popular policies, but the story that united them into a vision was lacking. Now that Labour has a new leader, Keir Starmer, the party needs to think about the story it’s going to tell.

Where stories are needed

A good place to start looking for a new story is the two debates of the last few years where Labour’s lack of an effective story has had the most severe impact: Brexit in England and Independence in Scotland.

Brexit and Scottish Independence have been a pox on Labour’s house. They cut across Labour’s voting coalition and have divided the party. This is because the stories that are being told on either side of these great divides don’t mesh with the stories that Labour is telling. The stories of Brexit and Scottish Independence concern national identity, a subject that Labour is not comfortable telling stories about. Labour is much more comfortable telling stories about class or social justice than national identity.

Stories and national identity

National identity is the story of the nation itself. The story of the USA is that it was created in a revolution to give its citizens life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What actually happened in American history is something else, but that doesn’t stop the story of America being a great story. One that has made America, for better or worse, the world’s flagship democracy. This story is deeply embedded in American culture, seen in media as diverse as The West Wing and An American Tale.

Other countries have stories bound up in their nation’s identity. The story of Israel is that it’s the promised land of the Jewish people as laid out in the Tora and the Old Testament and that after the Holocaust, it’s the only place where Jews can be safe. Britain and Scotland have stories behind their national identity too, which I’ll come back to.

Stories of national identity and political campaigns

The story a political party or movement is telling to win over voters needs to work with the story of the nation. Brexit works well as a political story. It’s the story that says: the country is being stolen from the good, honest citizens by a nefarious elite for their own enrichment. Again, whether it’s true or not is immaterial. It’s a great story, which people believe, and it inspires them to vote a certain way.

The story that Scottish Independence is telling is that Scotland is held back, or ground down, by being a part of Great Britain. You can interpret this story in a number of ways. You can believe that Britain is too conservative, or that Britain wants to keep Scotland at heel out of spite, or any other reason why attaching Scotland to Britain (mainly England) is bad for Scotland. What’s important is that the story tells of how much better Scotland would be if it were an independent country.

You can argue about the evidence to back up this story, which is that the independence campaign was on one level. However, it is undeniably a compelling story about Scotland that motivates people to vote for independence.

Political campaigns and counter narratives

Political campaigns are stories. Remain and Leave are both stories about Britain. Yes or No to independence are stories about Scotland. For a story to win an election there are two things to avoid.

The first is the counter-narrative to your campaign’s story that can neutralise it. For the Scottish Independence, it was a story of how much better Scotland is off in the union. The story is about the money that comes to Scotland for being part of the world’s fifth largest economy. The Scottish Tories push this counter-narrative the most. Scottish Labour has struggled to tell this story as many Labour activists don’t want to be telling the same story as the Conservatives.

Contradictions to political stories

The second factor that can cause the narrative of a political campaign to become unstuck is anything that can contradict the story that you are telling. For Scottish Independence this was anything that showed that Scotland was not a viable nation outside Britain, such as disputes on whether an independent Scotland could use the Pound or could produce its own currency.

These contradictions can be more damaging than an effective counter-narrative as they lead voters to stop believing in your story. This is why the Scottish Independence referendum became an argument over the facts that support the independence story, because if they didn’t and instead contradicted the story, then the story loses its power.

Lessons from the Scottish Independence campaign

Labour got what it wanted out of the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum because of the interplay of these two factors. The story of Scottish Independence had too many contradictions. Boring stuff such as currency arrangements undermined the story the pro-Scottish Independence side was telling.

At the same time, Gordon Brown was able to lay out the counter-narrative. He was the only British politician who could tell this counter-narrative without adding to an element of the pro-independence narrative that all British political parties are the same in wanting to keep Scotland shackled to Britain.

These two factors coming together may not happen again. If Labour are committed to keeping Scotland in the Union, then they need to come up with their own counter-narrative to that of independence. The only alternative is to use the same counter-narrative as the Scottish Tories, which only fuels the independence narrative.

The left and stories of national identity

The counter-narrative to Scottish Independence that Labour need to develop (to either win seats in Scotland again or prevent Scotland leaving the Union) needs to factor in Scottish national identity. Labour also needs a story about British (or maybe English) national identity. Labour have no effective counter-narrative to Brexit and no way of contradicting the story of Brexit, which is why Brexit won the 2016 referendum and has divided Labour’s electoral coalition since.

Labour (or the left more broadly) need to tell a story about British national identity if we’re going to start winning again. Tony Blair, for all his faults, was able to tell a story about how Britain was casting off the shackles of the past 18 years. No longer will crusty old Tories be in charge. Britain was becoming a young, energetic, dynamic nation. It helped that Brit Pop and ‘Cool Britainnia’ was happening at the same time.

Critiques of stories about national identity

On the left, we have many critiques of the story of Britain. We’re good at pointing out how the British Empire was founded on imperialism, racism and exploitation. We’re also good at saying that nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist as we collectively remember it is holding us back from tackling the challenges of the 21st century.

Now don’t get me wrong. These critiques are important. They can be used to contradict political narratives or build counter-narratives. They are also important in recognising that reality is more complicated than a story, which mustn’t be lost sight of. However, the left needs to tell a story about national identity that is different to that of the populist right, or stories about national identity will be used as a weapon against us.

The left is uncomfortable about telling stories about national identity

The left feels uncomfortable about telling stories about national identity. We prefer stories about groups of people and not nations. Stories about groups of people (bound by class, region, culture, race, religion, sexuality identity, age or anything else) are important and should not be neglected. Again, they will inform the counter-narrative to the populist right that must be laid out.

Nations are made up of groups of people and we need to find a story that means all the people of Britain can live together. Most people in Britain identify with the nation and its story, not just the disaffected white old people who voted for Brexit, so the left needs to find a way to tell a story about national identity.

Labour needs to find its story

When faced with the narrative of Brexit, Labour wasn’t part of the counter-narrative - that Brexit is a bad idea and that it’s good to be in the EU - and Labour were unable to contradict the Brexit narrative. However, Labour were not telling the Brexit story and thus the Tories were able to use this story - that disconnected politicians were trying to thwart the will of the people - to convince over enough voters to win the 2019 general election.

The problem that faced Labour was that the stories of Brexit and Scottish Independence split the Labour coalition. Labour was unable to choose a side between the narrative and counter-narrative for either, and have been caught in the middle of it.

Labour doesn’t need to tell the Brexit story, but it does need to find a way to contradict it or lay out a counter-narrative to start winning again. The same is true for Scottish Independence. Contradicting a story about something as nebulous as the future of a nation is difficult, so Labour need a counter-narrative. This counter-narrative will have to involve a story about national identity.

Brexit has happened and a second Scottish Independence referendum looks unlikely during the coronavirus outbreak, but Labour still lacks a story they can tell to convince the voters to buy what Labour is selling. A story about national identity. Unless Keir Starmer can come up with an effective story that includes British and Scottish national identity then he too will lose elections as his three predecessors did.

Labour Party picture taken by Andrew Skudder and used under creative commons.

Truth, stories and pain: how do we know what is real?

This is a story that is made up of other stories. Many long stories are smaller stories pieced together. Star Wars is made up of the story of two droids escaping Tatooine, then the story of the heroes surviving inside the Death Star and finally the story of the battlestation’s destruction. Similarly, the news is the story of our civilization told through smaller stories about power cuts or votes in parliament.

This story begins not long after I finished university, when I was caught in the nether world of recent-graduate unemployment. I paraphrase Ronan Harris of Futurepop group VNV Nation: I was so far from the shores of studenthood I had left behind, still far from the shores of employment I had yet to reach. I got very good at playing Worms United on an old PS1 that I found in the basement.

At the time I was an angry young man and the focus of my anger was religion. I had recently read Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and was fired up to tell all religious people, of whatever faith, that they were wrong and that they needed to embrace the objective truth of science. Preferably through watching Richard Dawkins documentaries on DVD, which I owned quite a lot of. I know now that this attitude of superiority and rudeness to people who think differently is not helpful. I am still very much an atheist, but I do not feel the need to declare this to everyone I meet.

At the time, there was a story I told myself about who I was. The story was simple: through my life and learning I had come to see the truth of the universe: there was no bearded man in the sky who had made everything, no paternalistic father figure or jealous supernatural tyrant watching over us. I believed that the material world was all there was; no spirits or ghosts or angels or demons. My life via Scout Group church services and internet atheist forums had brought me to an understanding of this fundamental truth of the universe. It was a story that was incredibly important to me. The story was me.

Then I moved in with a group of former students in the same position as me. A group that included a High Anglican, who was considering a career in the priesthood of the Church of England, a Roman Catholic and a man who followed a diverse pantheon of gods and other supernatural beings drawn from a variety of faiths that included Buddha, nature spirits and the Norse god Loki, amongst others.

There is a finite number of hours that bored adults can play Worms United for, and so eventually we started arguing. A lot. About everything. Gradually, and through many shouting matches, something dawned on me. They were as smart as I was, probably smarter. There was not a veil of ignorance protecting their worldview that I needed to puncture. Not only that, but they had stories about their lives that had led them to be the people they were, just as I did.

This led me to think: who is the arbiter of objective truth? How do we know what is true and what is not?

In their book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Dr Hans Rolsing, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund laid out ten simple methods of defining the truth. Their tips (such as avoiding comparing extremes, remembering that things can be bad and getting better, avoiding lonely numbers and avoiding single perspectives) are useful for not being misled by eye-catching dramatic headlines, but they do not help tackle questions such as “is God real?”

Dr Rosling et al’s Factfulness ties in with post-enlightenment thinking, which claims that truth can be found in the scientific method. This appealed to me as an atheist, but the question of the existence or non-existence of God remains impervious to scientific investigation. We are no closer to a definitive answer to the question than the enlightenment thinkers were.

Technology companies claim that they have found the truth of humanity through big data. All the information gathered through our devices betrays the truth of who we are. We are more ourselves when we are alone with our phones then we are with anyone else. Big data reveals preferences and patterns of behaviour that even the most probing focus group cannot uncover. However, big data may reveal truths about human behaviour, but not about the universe.

I could not prove objectively that I was right, and that God or Loki did not exist. I did not stop being an atheist, and I still am. However, I came to see the story of my life not as a journey towards discovering a fundamental truth about the universe, but as a story of finding my truth about the universe, which was one amongst many. It was the only way to get along in a small house with no jobs, no money and little to do.

The story of my first post-university houseshare is now key to how I see myself. It includes the story that made me a hardcore Dawkins-esque atheist, but it also includes other important lessons about life such as the benefits of personal growth, the value of re-examining your thinking and the importance of friendship. This is a better story.

As well as my opinions about atheism, I have deeply held political views about the importance of being tolerant towards other people of different races, religions, sexualities, gender identities, subcultures and interests. I believe it is important to be respectful of other people and their personal stories.

The story of my post-university houseshare fitted into this. It was a story about how I was open-minded and receptive to a plurality of views and lifestyles. We cannot be certain that God did or did not cause the Big Bang, even though I believe he did not (or at least we cannot be as certain about the origins of everything as I am about the fact that the table I am leaning on exists). This also applies to the question of whether Loki is real or how tangible the spirit of Mother Nature is. I have my own beliefs, but I do not have a direct line to the objective truth of the universe. As we cannot know if our beliefs are the objective truth, it is important to be open to new ideas and to seeing the world from other people’s point of view.

There was another story that I told myself that factored into this. It was about all of history and how it could be expressed as the story the powerful trying to exploit the weak and the weak crying out in anger and frustration. This cry of frustration has echoed through time and could be felt in Moses’s demand of the Pharaoh to “let my people go,” through medieval peasant uprisings, the Levellers, Peterloo, the Suffragettes, the Civil Rights Movement, the Stonewall riots and all the way to anti-austerity protest movements. This cry of pain was captured in the works of Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, Robert Tressell, Pablo Picasso, Laurie Penny, the Selford Mods and many others. This was a single story of the shout of defiance in the face of oppression that had sounded throughout all of human history. 

In the last few years this story of being tolerant to a plurality of different views and life stories has come under attack. There are those who do not want to listen to the voices that throughout history have cried out in pain as they were clamped down on. The voices of women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, poor people and people who did not fit into the limited range of pre-set sockets that their society had provided.

Being a tolerant person was part of the story of who I am, but I also agree with Karl Popper that: "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance." Attacks on tolerance have come from internet trolls who wish to silence women who speak out in the #MeToo movement and social media hate preachers who to vent their anger at people of colour who demand basic safety and bodily autonomy.

Some of those who attack tolerance are in groups with names such as GamerGate, the Proud Boys, Incels, the alt-right or neo-Nazis. There are too many to name here and we are all too painfully familiar with the forces of intolerance. There is no general name for them all that I could use in this polite essay, so I will refer to them as the “forces of intolerance”.

Members of the forces of intolerance have two things in common. Firstly, they reject the story of history as a cry of pain from the oppressed and in doing so reject the stories of many people throughout history who have suffered at the hands of the powerful. They seek to recast themselves (they are usually white, straight men) as the real oppressed people of history, and thus they reject any understanding of political power throughout history that I recognise.

Secondly, they believe that their actions are supported by objective truths about the universe. This I find very frightening. They have no time for the opinions of others or other people’s stories. It is no coincidence that thinkers championed by the forces of intolerance, such as Jordan Peterson, are so critical of postmodernism, as postmodern ideas about there being no objective facts threaten their certainty.

When I see Ben Shapiro claim that “the facts don’t care about your feelings” and then making an emotionally-charged, subjective statement which he passes off as fact, I remember the story of my life. A story that tells me that I used to believe that certainty was on my side until I met other people who were equally certain and so learned a valuable lesson. This was a painful, frightening lesson to learn, but it was worth it to be more open-minded to the experience of others.

The forces of intolerance have not learned this lesson. They believe they are irrefutably correct. However, they have no more claim to objective reality than my former housemate who had a shrine to Loki in his bedroom.

Where does their claim to objective truth come from? It comes from stories they tell with which a lot of people, sadly, have sympathy. Narratives play a bigger role in what we think is true than ‘Factfullness’, the scientific method or big data. In his radio show The Tyranny of Story, John Harris lays out how narratives are more effective in politics than facts. He shows how Donald Trump’s story about the dangers of vaccinations was much more effective in convincing people on the campaign trail than former neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s calm facts about vaccines.

Does what you believe to be true fit into a larger narrative? Does your story tie in with a bigger story like “Take Back Control”, “For The Many Not The Few” or “Make America Great Again”? If what you tell yourself about who you are fits into one of these larger narratives, then you are more likely to think your truth is the truth.

There are many of these larger narratives and they conflict with each other. Just because I can make my personal narrative fit with “For The Many And Not The Few” does not mean someone else cannot make their narrative fit with “Take Back Control”. We all have stories, so authenticity becomes important in judging what we believe to be true.

Cambridge academic David Runciman describes this in his book How Democracy Ends as an affirmation with authentic truth-tellers. We see these people as the ones who call out the fake narratives and reaffirm the authentic ones, i.e. the ones that chime with our own personal narratives. These people can be Chelsea Manning or Tommy Robinson.

Technology also contributes to a sense of certainty. We live our lives online, tell stories about our weekend on Instagram, our careers on LinkedIn, read stories about other people on Facebook and wider society on Twitter. There are millions (and in the case of Facebook billions) of people using these platforms, which means there is too much information and it would be too disorganised for us to see all of it. All of these platforms are gathering data about us and use this to customise what we see.

What I see when I log into Facebook or Twitter is different from what you will see. On some level it is an expression of my story as represented by data points and then fed back to me as content. A news story that fits with my personal narratives, and the larger narratives about society that a technology platform knows I subscribe to, will be more significant in my circle of digital friends than it will be for someone whose data points or personal narrative is different.

This process of personalisation of internet content is dividing us into different camps, and fundamental truths can vary massively between these camps. All of this is fed by the data that technology platforms have, which we gave as we expressed our personal stories through them.

This is what allows the forces of intolerance to claim that they see the world objectively. Their message is funnelled by technology platforms towards people who are likely to see the world as they do. They do not encounter opposing views, as I did in my first post-university houseshare.

Narratives will spread amongst people in these camps and take on the appearance of objective fact, just as Harris described for Trump’s comments about vaccinations. Some of these camps can be large, with names like liberal or conservative. Some of them can be small, but the effect of a story taking on the appearance of objective truth is the same.

This process is best illustrated by the story of the “Johnlock” fandom, a subset of the fans of the BBC TV show Sherlock who believe that there was a romantic connection between the characters of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Whether or not Holmes and Watson are secretly in love with each other cannot be proven objectively, but a story about the future of the TV show can take on the appearance of objective fact.

There is a sub-group of the Johnlock fandom called TJLC (The JohnLock Conspiracy) who believed that Holmes and Watson would become a couple at the end of the fourth series of the show and that its creators, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, were hiding elaborate clues to this fact in the show.

Like any other group through which a narrative spreads and takes on the appearance of fact, TJLC is a community and its members put together elaborate explanations of why they were right. This included a 48-part YouTube series which asserted that Holmes and Watson would become a couple in the final episode of the fourth series. The final of the 48 videos claimed "it's about to happen", stating that Holmes and Watson will become a couple as a fact.

To the members of TJLC their belief was true - completely and irrevocably an objective truth. The story that they spread through the TJLC took on the appearance of objective fact, helped along by pieces of evidence such as the showrunners’ love of playing games with the fans and misdirecting them. Despite this, it was not revealed that Watson and Holmes were a couple in the final series of the BBC detective drama. The views of TJLC were revealed to be subjective opinions about where the show was heading.

Slate TV’s critic, Willa Paskin, interviewed members of TJLC for her podcast Decoder Ring, whose research I drew on heavily. When interviewing the progenitor of TJLC, who still asserts as fact that Watson and Sherlock will become a couple, Paskin states that she is becoming convinced of this fact despite the fact that there are currently no plans to make any more series of Sherlock. In the podcast Paskin said: “there is something compelling about being in the presence of so much passionate certainty."

The certainty with which TJLC asserted their subjective view of the reality of the Sherlock TV show led me to believe that everyone sees the world subjectively, based on their own personal story, the narratives about wider society they subscribe to, the personalised information environment they get from social media, and the community bubble they live in  made up of their friends, family and other people who are likely to be similar to them. Within our own subjective lives there are things that are objective truth to us, but they are all in reality subjective. We all live subjective lives.

Fake news is a part of this. It reflects the subjective lives people live and the fact that they think their subjective truth is an objective truth. “Pope Endorses Trump”? This is an objective truth to the people who support Trump and shared this fake news story on Facebook. To them, how can the Pope not support Trump? How can this not be true?

The forces of intolerance do not see their subjective view of reality as subjective. They see it as objective reality, just as members of TJLC did. This inability to see other people’s subjective truths as having validity equal to theirs is one reason why they cause so much pain. 

In their minds, it is an objective truth that saying racist, sexist or homophobic things is acceptable. In their minds, the symbols of the Confederate flag or Nazi swastika represent an objective truth about the universe that everyone else does not understand. They are wrong, but this does not stop them from causing lots of emotional and physical pain. I am writing on the two-year anniversary of Heather Heyer being killed by neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This showed how dangerous people can become when they believe they have objective truth on their side.

There are many other subjective narratives that cause pain. In some people’s minds it is an objective fact that vaccines have a risk of causing autism. This narrative causes real pain for children who catch the diseases for which vaccines are available. It also causes pain for the people who cannot get vaccinated and so rely on herd immunity to keep them safe.

Narratives that deny climate science or seek to minimise the threat posed by the climate emergency also run the risk of causing real pain when communities are destroyed by rising sea levels. A subjective truth backed up by a story has a huge amount of power to hurt people.

There was a story I told myself about the world not having an objective truth in it. This story helped me understand the person who I was. However, I had to outgrow it to live with other people and to understand that they had their own story informed by different ideas, different personal experiences and different facets of the world. This allowed me to understand that the world is made up of subjective truths which might appear objective, but are not.

The world is made up of subjective truths, but this should not minimise the pain that these truths can cause. Pain is real and it is the only universal truth, so we must do what we can to minimise it, and even if we don’t understand someone’s pain we should do what we can to help them. The forces of intolerance do not see the pain that their narratives bring, and therefore their narratives must be opposed.

This is a story about how we can live together by recognising the subjectivity of each other. However, we can’t live together if it means that our own subjective truths lead us to inflict pain on each other. We must learn there is no objective truth and we must learn not to hurt each other.

"Richard Dawkins no Fronteiras do Pensamento Porto Alegre" by fronteirasweb is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0