Multiculturalism Will Save The Working Class | Ash Sarkar meets Jonas Patrick Marvin

I I often talk about multi-racial sovereignity which is we have a multi-racial working class our project is for those people to be sovereign right which means that people that are white and from this country originally people who have ference that migrated to this country 20 30 years ago and people who just came to this country have a right to be sovereign over their lives in this country and that has to be the shared project of the left. I I I often think about David Starky and you have this in your book. You talk about this is very central to your argument about the white working class. Uh the the whites have become black and what is my response to that. That's that's a good thing. >> Who speaks for the working class? The likes of Nigel Farage and JD Vance in America would say that it's them. It's right-wingers who understand and articulate the damage that mass immigration has wreaked on the white working class. And recent elections and polls would suggest that increasing numbers of voters agree with them. Reform UK aren't just popular with shia tries. They've been able to pick up vast numbers of votes in Britain's postindustrial rust belt, too. But my next guest, Jonas Patrick Marvin, whose new book, The Breaking of the English Working Class, is out now, argues that this isn't just an oversimplification. It's actively misleading. It's a lie whose purpose is to break down the bonds of solidarity and therefore political possibility that exists for workingclass people the world over. His analysis of class in the two cities he's made home, London and Stoke on Trent, lays bare a 60-year project of class fragmentation, in which different fractions of the working class are set against each other in competition, rooted in both research and firsthand experience. It's a ferocious defense of class solidarity, radical struggle, and workingclass multiculturalism. I hope you enjoy the interview. Jonas Patrick Marvin, welcome to Downstream. Are are you professionally including the middle name to distinguish yourself from other Jonas Marvin or >> you know it's the Cuz that's my married name technically Marvin. Patrick is like my family name. So my granddad's a Patrick. I've got several uncles that are Patrick's. And when I got married I was like I still want to make sure that kind of Irish name is in there. >> Yeah, I think that's good. >> Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Um, I know someone who has Murphy as their middle name from their mom and then married a Murphy. So, >> Murphy Murphy >> Murphy Murphy, but like other surname in the middle. So, I was like, maybe it should be Murphy squared, >> you know? >> Very good. >> But she she was like, "No, that's going to make me uh feel ridiculous." So, um, you're here because your book, The Breaking of the English Working Class, is out, but haters are calling this the least ambitious crossover event in podcast history because you are also one-third of the life of the party. Um, and so we're also going to be talking about British politics at this particular moment. But to to start with the book, um it it offers a really interesting provocation, which is to say that um class has been um redefined as a kind of identity >> which invites us to frame it in racial terms, geographic terms, um educational terms, cultural terms more broadly. But but actually it's a it's a matter of struggle and it's a matter of of your place in the struggle. So could you just tell me a little bit about your your journey to that place intellectually? >> Yeah. Well, I think one of the first things was like actually trying to make sense of my experience in life and trying to make sense of what was a massive schism um in experiences of class. So like in 2016 we had like the Brexit referendum, right? And in the Brexit referendum you had two big sides. You had the leave side and you had the remain side. And on one side you had loads of working-class people most mostly concentrated in the kind of post-industrial north uh and the West Midlands and on the other side you had loads of working-class people concentrated in the bigger cities London, Manchester, Leadeds. Um and I kind of wanted to get to the bottom of why is there this big schism in working-class imaginaries in working-class politics? If you go back to the 80s, there was a sense of commonality and solidarity in working-class communities, right? the London mobilized really strongly for the minor strike. For example, um miners would go down to London to Notting Hill Carnival and they'd have badges which say we oppose police violence. Oh wow. >> Um and they, you know, there there's a there's a discussion there between different communities who experience different forms of oppression. But like the kind of world that I feel like I grew up into, we lost the language of class. We lost the language of class as like you say both struggle but also as like power and domination and the sense that across different experiences of time and space depending on where you live and what kind of jobs you do or what kind of jobs you don't do. we lost a sense of unity between different sections of the working class and and part of the book was trying to explain that schism. Um trying to explain why um different experiences of class has eroded a class language and a shared sense of uh unity and commitment to a horizon. And I think like for me it was like I've gone through a succession of social movements like I went through you know I was late to the student movement. I didn't do the student movement but I was like sympathetic to it from the sides. Uh I experienced the riots glory hunter >> but I did one better and experienced the riots a year after uh and then kind of went through a succession of anti-racist movements uh corbinism Palestine solidarity movement uh and all of these different mo moments and movements in different ways had experiences of class and spoke to different languages of class often in quite subtle and shrouded ways and but through all of them it's like we weren't having experience experiences that institutionalize memories of class struggle. >> And what do you mean by that? >> So like for example, we weren't creating institutions and organizations that could link the struggles that we're going through now to struggles in the past, but then could also try to generalize from the struggles that we're taking part on in. So like to try and spread those struggles elsewhere and to try and build essentially a kind of shared sense of what classes across the country. Uh uh for me what's important is a majoritarian sense of class. A sense that we despite our different ways in which class manifests. If you live in London and you're working class, you'll likely rent. If you live in Stoke and you're workingass, >> not always, but you're more likely to own a house, for example. Uh and so I wanted to really tackle some of those dilemmas and those dynamics that we confront, basically. >> I mean, so London and Stoke are actually the sort of two big cities in this book. And that's they're the two big cities of of your life. So both of us grew up in North London in the 1990s. Um what was your experience of class and and how did you first come to understand the reality of class oppression >> in that context at that time? >> Yeah. So like um I should say I always do this. I have to confess I was born in Norwich. >> Get out. >> Get out. Because my mom grew up in northwest London, Irish family and you know she had a not so great experience of both being from an Irish family and of class. Moved to Norwich thinking maybe we can when she was about to have me thinking maybe we can have a more comfortable experience. >> Then got really bored basically and moved back to London. Um and the experience was you know she got kicked out um she got kicked off um benefits basically quite young. she bounced between different uh jobs always in um both council housing and then when we went back to London eventually housing association um and for me coming of age there was this sense that we were promised >> and that she was promised as well we were promised like university education lots of stuff that would come from university education and none of that promise was realized and that's really bad for her because this is someone who put lots of time and effort and work into trying to raise someone who could then go to university and have a great comfortable life with all the savings and all of that sort of stuff and the sacrifices involved in that. But it's also really bad for me and for our generational cohort in terms of particularly in London at this time feeling like I had a foot on my neck basically in the sense of growing up around multi-racial communities and seeing lots of my friends experience and me sometimes experience forms of state harassment >> uh in >> by which you mean like like what did that mean on like a dayto-day level? stop and search asboat orders, those sorts of things. The sort of criminalization of just being able to want to take your own space in life to to absorb what London is, to absorb the parks and the spaces of London. >> It felt like at that time, and this is a bit more early 2000s, so thinking about like David Blunket, he's the home secretary. I remember the hoodie band from Blue Water Shopping Center, >> massive deal. I remember asboss and I remember the overwhelming feeling if you were a teenager in multi-racial working-class London was you shouldn't be outside. >> Yeah. Yeah. Walking in like we used to go to Brent Cross for example for a weekend out. Uh which is crazy when I think about it in hindsight, but that used to be our weekend out. We'd go get the 232 to Brent Cross, have a weekend out there and it was just like you go in, if you're wearing a hoodie, not even if you got your hood up, if you're wearing a hoodie, it's just like n me, you're not getting in. Um, and so like that was a kind of microcosm of the experience. But as you get older, it's also like basically from the age of 18, I think I left my mom's house for the for the first time at like 20 years old. It was the second year at university. Um, I then, you know, start renting and from the age of about uh 20 to 29, just back and forth. >> Yeah. between crap extortionate places to rent from often with friends and having nice experiences but like uh being >> but like not all the corners of the bathroom meet up. >> Yeah, exactly. Or just like an absolute hatchet job loft conversion. And I've worked in construction and I did loft conversions and it was not right. It's like a ladder trying to get into the loft conversion rather than a set of stairs. It's crazy. Um, and then so just feeling steadily squeezed out of the city and often having to move back in with my mom and then eventually made the decision to just leave. >> Um, you know, incentivized by the relationship I was in and the fact that there was a different path for the person I was with at the time. Um, but yeah, just having this really strong sense that I just can't live comfortably in this city anymore without living on my mom and dad's sofa bed. Uh and yeah so eventually went to Stoke on Trent where the experience of class is is very different. >> I mean I mean you talk about these different experiences of class and I I you know unlike you I didn't let a northerner take me out of the city. I made him come down here >> good work was like >> I was like you're you've taken too many of our women already. >> He's better for it. >> It was like my fair lady. You know what I I may repeat the rain in Spain forced mainly on the plane. Um but like I I I do often feel that when I look at many of my peers in London that there is a sort of suspended adolescence and there is an element of hedonism to that. You know you are 31 and your life doesn't look that different from when you were 21 and how you spend your time doesn't look that different from when you were 21. Um, and for people who are outside of London, who are, you know, still workingass but perhaps have a mortgage, it looks very different. More likely to be in a committed relationship, have children, have a very different orientation towards um I guess going out, night life, so on and so forth. Um, and and I sort of see that being um like embodied in some ways with with my partner and his brother, which is his brother is younger, but has actually all the trappings of what you would expect from someone who is is further along in terms of life stages, kids, car, dog, etc. >> Yeah, I think that's totally right. I mean, like the I mean, I refuse to drive even stoke on Trent. I've still got that bit of London in me. uh but like the the different experience of a class where you can settle down more if you're at a certain position in the kind of economic social hierarchy in a place of Stoken in like a place like Stoken Trent. Uh and you do have just like more access to assets basically because the housing market is cheaper. Uh you're more likely to be able to buy a house even though wages are cheaper which is another kind of dynamic that we don't talk about that much. Yeah, you can buy a house but also wages are much lower. Uh but I I would qualify the kind of story there which is like one lots of people make their own fun in in a place like Stoke and um sometimes not enough when I think about all of the kind of vacant abandoned brownfield land there is in the city. Like I often think about Stoke in like reference to like New York City in like the 70s because in in actually in lots of ways there are similarities like both the industrialized, both abandoned, both lots of free uh space sat on a pipe by landlords basically you know until they can earn the bus best buck. But the I guess the difference is is like you have a sense in a place like Stokon Trent where you have like really high rates of economic inactivity. So you have sections of the working class, I you know, I'd call them class fractions if you like, a fraction of the working class in Stoke who can live a bit better off because the cost of living is cheaper. But you also have sections of the working class, and I see this on my estate for example, where um the housing conditions, the working conditions, uh the kind of spatial conditions, like the state of your area. Like if you walk up my road, for example, you're sandwiched between what is now a retail park, which you know was one of Thatcher's garden festival experiments where she tried to kind of recreate post-industrial spaces and turn them into kind of low tax, low regulation, low pay, neoliberal havens for uh for big retail firms. And on the other side of my road is uh basically an abandoned what used to be pot banks then turned into a chemicals company. Uh the other day there was a fire engine outside going for towards it putting out a fire and a bunch of us were just terrified that this would be a wildfire right in the thing because you have weeds which are like double the size of my head basically like sorry double the size of me uh and I'm a big guy. Um and so there's this really this real sense of being shut off and there are loads of spaces like that around the city where people are just abandoned and certain communities are organized for abandonment. And going back to your first question, I think that's one of the real themes for me in the in the book, which is that like it's, you know, the book isn't a totalizing picture of every working-class person and their experience. I think that kind of book is impossible to write basically. Um but it is it is trying to grapple with an experience of class which is kind of liinal which is people that are often uh between the boundaries of what is acceptable working class and what is not the acceptable working class and trying to grapple with like how you can construct different unities between people based on those experiences. >> Briefly interrupting this downstream to tell you about not one but two events we've got coming up at Navara Media. The first is an event with Katherine Louu and Darren McGarvey aka Loki at Earth Hackne on the 21st of September about the commodification of trauma and what we can do about it. And hot on their heels will be talking to the great Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor about their new book on technofascism in Brighton on Thursday the 1st of October. Ticket link can be seen on screen and also in our bio. So I hope to see you there. Let's talk about the big dog. Let's talk about Karl Marx. All right. Yes. Um who whose um thumbrints are all over this book, but not just in a reverent way. I think that one of the things that you're trying to grapple with is something which many sociologists and political theorists of the later 20th century and now the 21st century tried to grapple with is that Mark sort of goes everyone's going to fall into the industrial proletariat >> basically. Um and so this fiction that we have of there being a middle class or the existence of a sort of artisan self-employed class the petty bourgeoisi the the distinctions are going to sharpen right it's going to be bourgeoisi it's going to be proletaria and what you're dealing with and and I think this comes across very well through your your um choice of the phrase class fraction is that you've got this kind of um segmentation where people have very different experiences. Their sort of material habitat looks really different from each other, different cultural um sort of expressions, different sort of outlooks, dispositions. >> Does that mean like how how badly did Marks [ __ ] up here in >> Oh, I'm going to be canceling car marks. Um I think it's it's difficult, right? because he sees a particular agency within an industrial working class who have this kind of socialized industrial experience. >> And by socialized industrial experience, it means you're all working in the factories. You're all living the same way. You're living in the same place. You've got loads in common. >> Yeah. Which in his own time, we could complicate. Yeah. Right. You know, there were workers from different ethnic backgrounds who would often have uh like in you know, in Stoke for example, you had the potteries, right? And if you were a young person, uh, and when I say young person, like 13 working in a pot bank, right? This is what we're talking about. If you were Irish or if you were woman, you know, your working conditions would be incredibly different, um, from someone who might be a white male worker. But even then, right, conditions for the white male worker would be would be terrible as well. Um, so there's kind of that story, but there's also a story within Markx where even back then, feminized domestic laborers were a majority of the working class. uh it's just he didn't ascribe the same agency to those groups of workers that he did to industrial workers for example. And in some respects, even though it's obviously a kind of um a rough spot for him really conceptually, uh in some ways there's a bit of sense that makes there's a bit of sense making there, which is at least you could say with those industrial workers, they make lots of revenue and lots of profit in a way that those feminized domestic laborers at the time didn't. You couldn't argue that now. If you're a domestic laborer now, whether that's in healthare, whether that's in retail, whether that's in different forms of services, you're actively contri contributing towards the profit making the of of society and of the capitalist class. >> How >> uh because you basically have big corporations that uh sink their claws into the healthcare industry and rely on really cheap uh low paid labor uh with low power, low regulations. uh worked extremely hard hours to to reproduce and to produce the money um that you that you earn as a capitalist basically. Um so so there's some of the differences. I mean there's a kind of bigger question here which is that Markx has this kind of idea that yeah you produce lots of profit uh in the industrial working class going back to the the 19th century but also you have this kind of um socialized experience which is you all live the similar lives. uh you all go to the same workplace, you all have a kind of collective power that you could draw upon. Uh and you know there are lots of big workplaces still today, a hospital for example, uh an Amazon packing factory for example, but you know the conditions of kind of collectivity in our social world are just not the same as they were back then. Which isn't to romanticize those worlds, particularly the kind of life worlds that which was which were stronger and more inflected by militancy. the kind of life worlds of 20th century workingclass social movements, whether that's the little Moscow of Glasgow or uh the South Wales minds or or elsewhere. It's not to romanticize those worlds, but it is to say we live in a kind of fundamentally different moment where people have what I call in the book different moral economies. Um you know, they haven't been constructed around their lives haven't been constructed around industries, around working-class movements with power. And we have to speak to that because it also comes handinhand with the fact that people's lives are much more privatized, right? The you have to pay much more for everything. Capital and rontier own much more of everything and and as a result of that added with the kind of digital platforms that dominate our lives and the smartphones that dominate our lives, we all feel much more lonier than we have in the past. >> I was going to I was going to talk about that which is our lives have become a lot more privatized. So yes, you know, there is this thing of, you know, you step outside, you've somehow spent 20 quid and you're like, how did that happen? >> But there is also another dimension which is has become a lot more comfortable >> to be alone and stay at home. >> Um, and I would compare it to like empty calories, right? So like you know being on your phone you sort of go oh well I'm getting like interaction like I'm getting um sort of um a kind of contact but you're not getting real connection through it and so it's like an it's like a nutrientfree food. Um obviously people's houses are better than they used to be in the late 19th 20th century. um you know is there something there which is that there is a kind of convenience which is hollowing us out as well like we like to talk about it in terms of you know the you know oppressive forces of neoliberalism but there is also something about it's a bit too comfortable to be where we are. Yeah, I think the comfort is complicated, right? Because it's like one because the comfort feels better at the, you know, on a Monday when you've had your first hard day of work after the weekend and it's just like, yeah, let me go and get like a ros from the Greek takeaway down the road and just have a chill one rather than try and make food. Um, but then when it's the end of the month and you don't have that money, it's just like, oh wait, no, the comfort kind of erodess. And I think the comfort comes from a place of discomfort. Basically, it comes from a place where our lives in lots of ways are harder than they were 30, 40, 50 years ago. I wouldn't compare it maybe to 150 years ago. I think that would be uh naive on my part. But the that kind of experience of you have less time in life. >> Um like you you have less access to kind of community and to a social world and it's kind of for me an imposed comfort. >> It's kind of a compulsion. uh and you know it it it may it does make life easier for some of us to go and get a takeaway from down the road but it doesn't make life easier for the gizer that's delivering the takeaway right so there are some sections of the working class who really suffer >> um from this and that's often associated with their citizenship status uh with their ethnicity with the kind of um migration system that exists in this country um yeah >> I want to sort of I guess talk about what class means now in the present because in In so many ways, that's what you're grappling with. And in each chapter, you're looking at what are the things which which make and break um class composition in a in a variety of ways. >> Um to ask you something really annoying, can you define class? >> Uh so like my basic definition of class would be you are divorced from the means of social reproduction. I'll unpack that. So the means of social reproduction simply mean your ability to reproduce yourself as a human being. So your ability to reproduce yourself as a human being and subsist in terms of the roof over your head, in terms of the food you eat, in terms of the water you drink, uh in terms of the sociality you need as a human being. You know, for me, culture plays quite even though I kind of rail against understandings of class that boil things down to race and geography simply. I'm not trying to argue that race and geography aren't important here. They're really important. And I think culture is one terrain where we have to think about uh the ways in which class manifests and to simply say okay you're divorced from your means to reproduce yourself isn't quite enough because we also have to talk about well who does that what are the institutions that do that what are the mechanisms through which that takes place uh and for me there are a bunch work is an obvious one um you are compelled to go to work lots of people to reproduce yourselves um to make sure that you can put food on the table and >> I always liked Philip Larkin's line about this. Um, uh, why must I let the toad work squat over my life? >> Indeed. Um, I think also there's a question about, um, the role of landlords in this and the role of the ownership of physical space and of housing. Um the fact that, you know, unless you're going to make a bet on the future and getting a mortgage, which is something that's increasingly off limits to more and more people, particularly more and more young working-class people, if you're renting uh extortionately from a landlord as well, um and even the way in which social housing and house associations um both preside over forms of housing um that are increasingly not fit to live in uh and increasingly more pricey as the state tries to offload its kind of so-called fiscal crisis onto working-class people. That's kind of one mechanism of class. And then I think one of the things that we don't talk enough about is the state >> which is I think we have this kind of force that is all over the place in lots of way. And that's one of the big themes in the book particularly in the context of Britain. Uh but still functions to enforce all of this to enforce the power and domination of one or two or three groups of people because you know our classes as working-class people is complicated and is full of different um people in different places, different industries or uh different housing situations. But their class is complicated. The ruling class is complicated and full of different types of people as well. Property developers, big employers. Um, and for me, one of the things that ties that together is the state, both in terms of how it legislates to back up um, employers and landlords, but also proactively how it kind of demonizes and represses different types of working-class communities, which it terms as um, problem communities. So, on my estate, for example, uh, there was an attempt to demolish the estate by John Prescott um, under the the the Blair government. Um, it was called the Pathfinder Scheme. It was Blair and Prescott and Brown's attempt to rail against problem working class sinker states they called them. Uh and so there are some of the the different ways in which class manifests >> in in contemporary society. Um, I'm gonna I'm gonna be the voice of the hater and be like, well, you've you've used a lot of words to get away from hard numbers. And also, does this not mean that someone who is renting, is a graduate, is experiencing that sort of diminishing graduate premium, as the FT likes to call it, but you know, at some point they're going to inherit, you know, £500,000 or something from their parents. Isn't there a problem with having such an expansive definition of class that ultimately it can include people who are going to be fairly comfortable at some point in their lives? >> Yeah. So, one complication I would make going back to Marx is one of Marx's famous lines is and Engles as well in the Communist Manifesto is workers have nothing to lose but their chains. Right. And in the book I try to revisit that line and say well actually workers have a little bit more to lose than their chains nowadays. Right. Um, some workers have houses, which if they lost that, that would be a little bit more than just your chain to lose. Uh, we also, like you were referencing before, have kind of uh attachments to different forms of consumer culture. We also are indebted, right? You use a lot, you lose a lot more than your chains when you're in that um situation. So, we have that situation there where class has been complicated over the course of the last 60 to 70 years. And I say 60 to 70 years because often in the left story it's right to buy that does this right. Um fat says you can buy your council housing now and you can become a member of a property owned democracy and a member of the bourgeoisi the ruling class. Uh but this story is a bit older actually. The council housing massively grows in the postwar period under labor governments and Tory governments but so does private home owners home ownership. People talk about a property owning social democracy and I think that's worth taking seriously which is social democracy and it's laborism that's really implicit in the dissemination of private home ownership and a consumer culture. So you have that on the one hand. >> One thing that I would say to your question directly is that like lots of those people we talk about as graduates are also people who come from working-class backgrounds in post-industrial northern towns. Right? in uh in the north it's just under 50% of 16 to 24 year olds that leave often over the course of our lifetimes those people have been people like us um people who have worked uh people who come from working-class backgrounds and become uh graduates and end up moving to a place like London or or perhaps a place like Manchester so there's that kind of that story where there's that promise of a better life and a more aspirational life that's eroded but also one complication I'd add to that story is that a lot of people who have parents who own their own houses and might expect a bit of a windfall from that when their parents pass away. That's going to be complicated by the fact that we live in a demographic agent society and the costs of care are extortionate and lots of people who own houses won't be able to pass that on neatly because they'll have to remortgage those houses even in a kind of era of quite high interest rates to sustain their elderly care. I mean, so we spoke to Eliza Philby last year who wrote a book called Inheritocracy, the bank of mom and dad, and she's really looking at that and she's she's looking at the difference being um who's going to inherit amongst the millennial cohort and who's not and how much. >> Um and she told us with frustration when we were talking about what is class, is it an identity? Is it an expansive um sort of economistic definition? What is it? She said, "You can't self ID when it comes to class." Um, and so I suppose because you're interested in struggle, do you think it's more important that the left has a sort of precise and maybe even exclusionary idea of class, which means that you don't just let in every, you know, middle class Johnny come lately who didn't inherit much as they thought they were going to or that you have the more expansive one which is sort of constantly folding in people who expected to have a different sort of trajectory in their lives and and ended up falling short of it. >> For me, I'm interested in a in like a majoritarian politics like the I don't think we're close to a kind of radical leftwing majoritarian politics in our current moment, but I'm interested in having the biggest coalition possible to uh conquer the state to try and take power in this country in the interests of working-class people. That's my kind of horizon. Uh part of that, I think, is having an honest assessment about who is and isn't workingass. And I mean that in a kind of really specific coalitional and policy sense, right? Which is that like there are people part of the left coalition uh who you could characterize as petty bourgeoa uh middle class people that might be small business owners for example much more likely to be on the right. Um but there is actually as people realize that their aspirations can't be met through the state or through different forms of employment that they go and set up a business to do that right and some of these people have leftwing aspirations as well media. Case in point, comrade. Um, so there's that there's that kind of story which I think is really important and I think the left has to do a better job of speaking to those people and and it's not going to work by just saying, "Oh, yeah, you guys are all working class too." They have different experiences of class and they live in different classes and you have to speak to that, right? Uh but there are also commonalities in that coalition, right? If you are uh someone who wants to set up a bookshop, for example, uh or someone who wants to set up a restaurant, your two biggest biggest problems are business rates and landlords, right? And if landlords is one of your problem, well, there's a concrete example of where you can have a serious coalition with working-class people. Um, so there's that. Uh, but I'm also really not interested in uh kind of having a bit of a test and making sure that when people come through the door of leftwing politics and leftwing organizing, how workingass they really are. Don't get me wrong, I say this from a position of someone who had to leave London, who often feels a kind of resentment about that, even though I love Stoke and I've learned to love Stoke. Um, but the I just think it's really clear that like we degrade the barriers to entry on leftwing politics rather than erect them. >> Well, I suppose like on that I was thinking about a conversation I had with Peter Mertens who's obviously from the Belgian Workers Party and he talked about the tendency that middle class people have especially graduates to sort of dominate the spaces that they're in and to take their preoccupations and the things that are important to them and sort of go well isn't this the case for everyone? And so coming back to this thing about majoritarianism, like there's one view which is majoritarianism is everyone get in the [ __ ] tent. >> Yeah. >> Right. Everybody in. >> And there's another view of majoritarianism which says and I don't I don't know if I think this I'm just trying I'm trying this idea out like a jacket. Um >> but like actually you let some of those like more shall we say on the middle class edge of the working-class coalition in and they're going to actually bring in a whole bunch of minoritarian [ __ ] like they're gonna bring in a whole bunch of stuff which is like that's what they care about. That's how they talk. That's how they like to sort of um police and negotiate social space. You know, it's going to be loads of liberal identity politics like without very much of a like material or class understanding. It's all going to be language policing and that is actually going to cut off the potential of the movement from accessing other workingclass people. I mean, what what do you think of that? Like actually in order to maybe make it do the majoritarian work you have to be like I'm sorry Sophia like >> I think you have to have >> the drawbridge comes up. >> I think you have to have political projects that have a sense of purpose that have a sense of a proactive sense of knowing who they're talking to. So I'm part of a political project in Stoke uh called Bread and Roses and you know we're a kind of new and fresh political project but like one of our kind of ethos and our aims is to break out of the silo and it's to try and talk to people for whom the left doesn't speak to. Um and that's not a kind of right-wing ventriloquis and there's a lefty saying oh why aren't you speaking to these white working-class people and these white working-class estates? It's to say in a place like Stoke there are loads of working-class states some of them are white some of them are multi-racial. There's a great conviviiality in a place like Stoke, by the way, which just gets um pushed to the sides by people in the mainstream media. But it's a say you have to go and meet those people and talk to those people and have a sense of like what are the day-to-day issues that really can I swear on this? What are the day-to-day issues that really [ __ ] up your life basically um and kind of lead in that and try and build a focus and a sense of aim and combination of targets from that. Um, and I think if you have a serious idea about what the political project is and you have like an open political culture in your political projects, uh, I get less worried about people who bring their kind of own um, fantasies and inhibitions to to politics. I think you just have to be straight with people. You have to build an honest culture and you have to be outwards looking as possible. And I think part of the problem with the left over the course of the last 15 years in particular is we lost a sense of that. though I feel a bit of optimism about that despite having seen the kind of disaster of your party. >> I was gonna be like, >> don't get me wrong, but like >> did you emerge with optimism because you also had a head injury or >> I did actually have a head injury this year. So maybe the two are related, but no, for me maybe it's like the kind of narrow sectional world I'm in. Uh but I I have a real sense from the people I organize with uh from the people that I kind of work with and talk to that there's a kind of shift in sense of no, we have to stop talking to each other. we have to push out of the bubble uh and we have to find ways of figuring out how class manifests itself and how we can speak to those and organize around those in a way that's um conducive towards more involvement from working-class people. I I definitely want to come to that, but before I do, just because it is something you mentioned in your book, like what do you make of the workingclass boy done good model that we seem to celebrate so much in Britain of like Alan Sugar and Charlie Mullins, where millionaires and billionaires who manage to hold on to their accent of origin become the voice of what is and what is not workingass. >> Oh, it does my editing. I hate it. I mean, partly it's like a resentful thing is I'm definitely not a working-class boy. Done good, right? I mean, I'm on the VA media to be like, if you want to talk downward mobility, here it is. >> But, you know, like I struggle to pay the mortgage, you know what I mean? I struggle to like get by. So, I'm kind of resentful about it in one way. Uh, I find it frustrating because it's not a majoritarian experience of most working-class people. um you know either people are kind of in our current moment either people are really struggling to get by uh or people were on a downwards trend right you talked about the graduate about a future earlier right they're the experiences of class uh which predominate I also hate it because you know I I don't always like using the language of the kind of post 2008 American left but it's a kind of form of punching down right which is that like they use that language to then indulge in the politics which basically goes for people who are on benefit s people with disabilities, people who are excluded from the labor market and I just have no truck for it actually. I'm also there's a part of me that like I have a fondness for skyvers, >> you know, I'm a little bit lazy and I think, you know, we Paul La said we have a right to be lazy and that's that's worth defending. >> Um I'm not going to tell any of my colleagues that like you know it's a real um outside of work embrace laziness. inside work stanovism like a real >> um so like I I I guess to there is a thread of autobiography through this book in a way which is is really interesting like it's not sort of frontloaded but it just like comes in every so often and you can really tell that this is coming from a place of of drawing on what have I lived and what have I seen and what do I understand about other people. Um, and in your opening chapter, you do you write about your uh, granddad, Patrick. Um, and I was just wondering if if you could talk about um, something that you wrote, which is you said that despite having experienced anti-Irish racism, he bought into a story which secured him a part in the national fabric by placing his interests against black workers and those on the doll. Like what what did that mean in concrete terms? Like how was he situating himself in that story? I think I think practically it mean I mean it's really complicated with my granddad actually um because he's like one of the he could be a bit grouchy sometimes but he's also one of the sweetest men you ever meet um and so like you know I remember distinctly as a kind of sweet memory that like >> the kind of example that we're talking about in the book is that like he had a tendency to be racist towards other groups of workers basically uh less so now um but the I want to kind of qualify that with there's a complexity to people like that which is at the same time he can also for example see uh the Caribbean kid who walks to school every day who walks past his house to school every day and one day turns around and gives him a bike that he found right so there's like a people are really complex right and people who are involved in really competitive logics all the time which is part of the industry he was in right he was in construction it's an industry which is saturated with zero sum thinking with competition where there's been a concerted attempt not just to blacklist groups of workers over the course of the past 40 years uh of which there's been numerous struggles that people can read about and learn about but also to uh to our earlier conversation frame these people so they're not working class right to frame these people as members of a middle class or people who uh are strivvers rather than skyvers and who don't belong to a collective called a working class and so you know he's kind of lived in that environment uh and so like I guess I'm qualifying my own statement a bit which is to say Yes, there was a kind of uh a racialized competitive logic where he saw himself in some ways uh as part of this country against people who were new arrivals to this country uh and kind of got all of those kind of mythos and stories from the right-wing press. But at the same time, someone like that still lives multiculturalism. >> Like they still live complicated experiences from people all over the world and make all sorts of friends. So it's it's not straightforward. And that's kind of my optimism about politics, which I think like with people like that, you can change their minds and you can build coalitions. >> I suppose one of the things that I was interested in reading that sentence was, "But if he was putting his thinking in his own words, what would he say back to you, right?" Because you obviously frame it where there's a value judgment. You go, "Well, you've become invested in this and it's basically because you've absorbed a form of dominant ideology." But if he was speaking back to you and he could offer his rebuttal, how would how would that go? >> Oh, he he'd probably tell me to sod off and then walk away. He doesn't mince words. >> But seriously, that that's it. I think like, you know, he comes from a completely different generation to us. Um he he's he's a hard man to ventriloquise. >> Um and yeah, I think he's he's not necessarily interested in debate, right? Yeah. Um and you know, that's with someone younger than him. if there's a person older than older or the same age as him. He's 80 now having that conversation with him. Actually, you know, I think he'd have a more respectful conversation with that person. Uh even if maybe he'd be a bit he'd slagged them off behind their back when he walked off. I mean, so so I suppose like kind of like where I'm I'm getting to with this is that like one of the things that that's come up in our conversation so far and something which also comes up in the book is that like the um fragmentation and the lack of a sort of collective experience of being workingass is part of the position of disempowerment that we're now in. >> And there would be people right so you know this is kind of a blue labor position. This is kind of a David Goodhart position who would say, "Yeah, and there's immigration on top of that, right? All these people who come from very different culture, speak different languages, have different priorities and interests, they are part of that story of working-class disempowerment." Um, and I was just wondering what would your response to that point be, that that specific one? >> Great. I want people from all over the world in the place that I live. I have people from all over the world in the place that I live. And it's awesome. Even though we go through all sorts of adversity as a community, like we're basically abandoned and sectioned off by the state. Um we are, you know, constantly subject to forms of consultation by the state that never go anywhere. Uh we have an oil refinery at the bottom of the road as well, which is uh both polluting the area, but also means that we live in a blast zone. You we go through all sorts of horrible stuff, right? And that's not even talking about the kind of particulars and nitty-gritty of class. Uh but there's an amazing conviviiality uh where I live. This is in Stoke on Trent, a place where it's constantly labeled as the white working class, right? There's a amazing conviviiality. >> And by that, what do you mean? >> I mean people from all over the world live together in one place and it works and it's good fun and people will go down to John's Bar, which is a great West African Caribbean bar on a Friday night after payday and you have the time of your life, right? And for me that's something to be celebrated and to be cherished. And I think for the left um it's really important to me that we take the front the kind of front foot on this because we live in a moment where through questions of climate change through questions of kind of war between different countries. Migration threads through all of the major political questions of our moment and it's becoming the animous of the right. It's been the animous of the right for the last 40 to 50 years. Right. Enoch pal, it's all about the numbers. We have to get the numbers down, right? That kind of thread has existed through British politics through our lifetimes and before. But for me, um, you know, I I I often think about the David Starky and you have this in your book. You talk about this is very central to your argument about the white working class. Uh, the the whites have become black and what is my response to that. That's that's a good thing. That's that's an example of a kind of cultural intermingling that we should celebrate. Uh now are there more tactful arguments that we have to attach on to that about uh do migrant workers drive down the wages of um white working-class people? Yeah, they don't by the way and most of the evidence suggests they don't. Um there are more tactful arguments, but I think we really have to be on the forefront. Sorry, we really have to be on the front foot in our moment um and take seriously uh the idea that if you live here, you're from here. >> Right. I'm going to I'm going to read you some stats from Yuggov. Britain are more likely than they were in 2016 to say that immigration over the last 10 years has been mostly bad for the UK. The negative view of immigration has now supplanted the balanced view as the most common amongst the wider public. So I share your view of lived convivial multiculturalism. I live in Tottenham. The football team makes me suffer. Everything else is great. Right. Like like and and and that's not to romanticize it. It's not to say that there aren't real problems um of deprivation, housing problems, serious youth violence, all these things, but like if if you walk around Tottenham, you go, there is a lived multiculturalism here and it's it's everywhere and it's great and people do really get along. So, I am in agreement with you, but you and I are on the minoritarian side of basically all the polling on this in the UK at the minute, >> and it's going in one particular direction. And so what do you do you think of that as a tension that there is a tension between I want a majoritarian workingclass project but I am actually going to be very much um in opposition to what the majority of working-class people think about immigration. >> Yeah. I mean I think of it as a task rather than attention. Right. It's a job and we've got to do it right and it's a big job. Uh one qualification I would make. You're absolutely right about the numbers and about how people feel about immigration, but at the same time, you know, the reason my granddad's an interesting example is because all of those people do have a lived experience of conviviality. And you know, the um whilst the kind of politics of society have massively polarized over the course of the last 20 to 25 years and the right has become increasingly stronger and stronger and the kind of the politics of the faggous right in particular have become increasingly stronger. Uh at the same time, large parts of society have become more socially liberal. Uh and that's not just a city phenomenon. That's also a phenomenon in places like where I live. So there's that as well. And I think one of the tasks for us is to connect that experience of becoming more socially liberal with a class politics which says which says, you know, there are all these kind of forms of domination that exist in society and we have to like kind of thread an anti-racism through our struggle against those forms of domination. For me, that's really crucial and really important. every way in which we talk about class for me if we're going to get over the hill on this has to be about threading anti-racism through that and not just anti-racism but a popular vision of what it means uh to have a kind of I I often talk about multi-racial sovereignity which is we have a multi-racial working class our project is for those people to be sovereign right which means that people that are white and from this country originally people who have parents that migrated to this country 20 30 years ago and people who just came to this country have a right to be sovereign over their lives in this country and that has to be the shared project of the left. Uh you get a problem at the minute where the right are able to talk about sovereignity and pitch that against the left, right? Because they frame the question of power and sovereignity through the matter of borders and the left has to get much better at talking about power and powerlessness in society as ways of talking about class. Um yeah, >> what should determine the overall level of immigration in a society? For me, I'm not interested in police and numbers. Like, for me, it's just not I'm not interested in at all. I'm also not interested in having a kind of liberal uh depiction of racism which says we need more people to come here because we need to fill particular industries. Uh we live in a world where people are having to escape where they live because of climate change, because of wildfires, because of imperialist wars. For me, the project isn't to have a numbers game. for me of the project is to say you people are welcome here if you want to come here and also to struggle against the kind of compulsions of why you come here in the first place. I think the left forgets that often which is to say we don't want wars and we don't want climate change. So we have to kind of stop these two things as well because they're ways in which people are forced to leave where they live because it's not a nice thing to leave where you live and come here. Um so we have to think about that as well. Um, and for me they're the two central kind of paradigms of thinking about the relationship between class and migration. >> I'm going to do my last devil's avocado question. And my last devil's avocado question is this is that there are going to be um people watching this who may write for such a publications as the Times and the Telegraph. Um and and and one of the things that you get from people of color who are on the right >> is that they'll look at you saying this and they'll go thanks. You've just made racism 10 times worse in this country. Like if you sit there and you're saying there is no number which is too big. There is no level of immigration which is too much. There is no sense of what is the culture of this country that we want to conserve and pass down to future generations. There is no um you know pressure on housing. There is no pressure on on on wages. Thanks. You've just made racism worse, right? That like that's something that you would hear from from that corner. And again, I'm just I'm interested to hear what's your rebuttal to that particular set of arguments. >> I I would flip them off. Like honestly like I seriously like I think like these are people that preside over those forms of recrimination and competition. These are people who are in hot to property developers. If we're talking about for example a layer of black and Asian tries in particular that have risen to the top of the Conservative party and some respects the Labor Party. These are people who have presided over the the devastation of working-class lives over the last 15 years. Right. Not exclusively. There are loads of white Tories and white labor people that have done that as well. Hey, hey, do not eliminate my girl Pretty Patel's achievements in the field. >> She walked so so well I could run. >> She does well on her own terms. I'm not going to argue against that. But I just don't take any truck with it. These people have have ruined people's lives. And these people are my enemies. I don't care where they're from. Like in in pure class terms, I would not take anything these people would say seriously. And in terms of like fan in the flames of racism, am I a fan in the flames of racism more than Sella Braman who labeled Palestine protests, hate marches directly fueling the race riots that we saw in 2024? I just don't take any truck with these people seriously. I think there's a kind of bigger point which is that like we you know culture is an ever evolving and developing thing and for me that's something to be cherished and celebrated right people come to this country they don't just overtake the culture that exists in the country they rearticulate it they renovate it they make it their own they absorb it right so like I don't buy the kind of people are just coming here and storming through our culture and devastating our our national fabric for me that makes no sense it's not my experience Right. My experiences of a living culture that's always always um made fresh and a new when you have new layers of migration. I mean some of the things that I grew up loving grime jungle like are you telling me that culture is a bad thing and migration is a bad thing? I don't take it seriously. I mean there is a point which maybe is one that I agree with with is that the left in the UK can sometimes only talk about um English history, British history in the negative. >> Slavery, colonialism. Um you know we didn't even have a proper revolution was all it's all elite revolutions. Yeah. >> Um and my my partner just came back from a a big conference in France where they had a light show and the first face in lights was robes Pierre and I was >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Um and and and the attitude to to history is different now >> French people you may yell at me. Your history is no less steeped in blood than ours. >> Absolutely. >> Um also you got [ __ ] at a core. Um but like but it it it's no less um steeped in blood than our own history. But because of of the the moment of the French Revolution and this idea of well this is when the idea of the citizenry is born. This is when the idea of the nation is born is that you can you can have um a relationship to history which um tells a story of political possibility and we the left in the UK don't do that right and and we keep getting caught in these discussions of you know we've got Paul Gilroy on one side who says like you keep looking for a redeemable Englishness you scrape and you scrape you're not going to find it you've got Billy Bragg on the other and you say well you need a progressive patriotism Um, and I think that maybe I've I've moved from a a hard Gilroy to like a a brag light, by which I mean like you just you you just you do actually have to if if you're going to talk about the the future of this country and you're going to talk about wanting wanting to improve the conditions of this country, you do actually have to have something of a loving attachment some of its history. So that doesn't mean I go slavery that was [ __ ] great. But it does mean that I I'm I'm drawing on traditions of of literature, of of folk music, just the fact that we've got so many [ __ ] accents in this country. Love that. Um the the the twists and turns of of English history, right? Like, you know, >> I'm a big Hillary Mantel fan. You you have to love this [ __ ] right? you know, is there something of um a kernel of truth when people are like, you know, the left don't really like the history of Britain? They don't really like Britain because they don't like British history. >> I saw that light show at that uh Lean Fee, which is the festival of Leaf France, the leftwing French party uh led by um Jean Luke Melan. And it was remarkable because it had Robespier in the in the sky, but then it had Louise Michelle, the leader of the Paris Commune. And then it had Thomas Sankara, >> Bikina Faso, anticolonial leader, right? They kind of had no discomfort absorbing Thomas Sankara into their tradition. Uh, which, you know, perhaps for good reasons. I think people on the radical left in Britain would have discomfort um drawing people from the Irish Republican movement or Irish socialism into their tradition, right? There's a kind of tension there on that. >> Taking more Irish [ __ ] We've been doing it to the >> Well, exactly. Right. There's a tension there, right? The French have no trouble doing that, right? I also think there's a kind of deeper history there, which like you say, they chopped the heads off their kings and queens. Uh, >> we only did it once and then we did a real takes these back seas. >> Exactly. But there's also a kind of a second and third story here, which is they're fighting battles in the 2010s and the 2020s that we lost in the 80s and we lost in the 90s, right? So that process of um restoring capital's power and defeating the kind of um radical workingclass subjects and coalitions that were alive in the 60s and 70s is just much deeper here. So those kind of zero sum recriminatory logics that dominate our politics today are really just like hegimmonic and apparent. But at the same time I think there's a kind of another factor here which is their electoral system. Their electoral system means that you can have a political party like Lef France and Samese that can store up votes in the Parisian banlurs amongst multi-racial working-class communities in a way that doesn't really uh apply here. So, we have to think a bit more about how we do coalitional politics and how which I'm trying to do in the book speak to different experiences of class in different places. Um, I also think we have to be a lot prouder of the radical traditions that exist in this country. I mean you write about some of the radical traditions of Stoke on Trend in particular. Um what are those radical traditions and how did you learn about them? >> Uh go to the Chartist festival in Stoke on Tren. Honestly, it's amazing. They have this big theater production which thinks in depth about the kind of chartist movement uh and both the repression of the chartist movement uh the chartist movement is a big social movement for um kind of democracy and republicanism in Britain in the in the course of the uh uh 18th century. um they talk very heavily in depth about that but they make it accessible in a way that relates to people's lives. Uh and that's a big feature of what happens in Bersham which is one of the six towns in Stoken Trent. So that's great like that's a great way of talking in in of about popular class history. Um there's you know there's there's such a there's such a kind of frequency of radical traditions in a place like Stoken Trent in Silverdale which is just next door. Proud Valley is made. Proud Valley is which I I watched recently as part of a um a film festival in Stoke. Um really well attended really good film festival. Proud Valley is a film that has Paul Robson in where it's kind of it's it's formerly set in South Wales um but it's filmed in Silverdale which is a minor sound. >> So Paul Robson for people that aren't familiar um was an American black singer and actor. I think he was sort of like a star >> and a communist >> and a communist. Um, and he he came to the UK and he uh I'm more familiar with his visits to South Wales, but it was sort of it was like the equivalent of seeing just like this this massive star of like stage and screen like a Lady Gaga who was also a communist sort of like you know touring Muridville. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Um and there are all of these pockets of real serious radicalism. I mean, one of the characters in the book is someone called Rose. Uh, and Rose was a minor's wife. Um, and Rose was, you know, part of the working-class movement. Um, she was organizing in different workplaces throughout her early adulthood while she was also having children. Uh, and then she's heavily radicalized by the minor strike in a time where people were becoming less radical in lots of ways. In the late 80s, she becomes more radical, right? And she has these kind of connections between the different forms of domination and repression that exist in a place like Stoke on Trent and uh Irish Republican prisoners who are on hunger strike or the South African anti-aparttheide struggle and you just have a history in so on Trent that's littered with people like that and people are aware of it. The question for me is like how you're able to construct those stories and build a wider story that I think like is is is a part of what GSKY Antonio GSKY the Sardinian Marxist um called national popular right which isn't about getting in a kind of tizzy about trying to reframe nationalism but it's like you live in a country you can't avoid the fact that you live in a country how do you construct a politics that draws on the popular radical histories that exist and connect it to the present the French are so much better at doing that because they had a successful bourgeoa revolution. We've got to get much better at doing that today. >> I was also thinking about how reluctant we are to draw some of those connections for fear of appropriating. >> Yeah. >> Um and I was thinking about you know that Gil Scott Herren song Johannesburg >> which I [ __ ] love. Love that song. And you know there's the bit towards the end where it's you know um what's the word Johannesburg and then it's like London is Johannesburg New York's like Johannesburg like and just goes through all these places to say like wherever you find racism wherever you find racist violence that is Johannesburg whereas I kind of feel like if at the the height of BLM right um there was going to be a you know everywhere Where is Missouri, right? What, you know, and and drawing comparisons of different kinds of racialized violence or islamophobic racialized violence. That would be a very much like kind of >> 100%. Um, it's a real problem. I mean, the there's a kind of arts community project on my uh estate and they had these kids draw like big signs uh which kind of say something about your estate. Um, say something you want people in your estate to hear and the powers in in your estate to hear. and and one of them who lives on the back of uh a steel works put we can't we sorry put we want oxygen right and it's just just coming off the back of the BLM movement right and it's like how how and for me that's like so similar to the slogan we can't breathe right and in Greece for example when you had the struggles against the troa and against the attempt to impose austerity we can't breathe was a slogan there as well right for me I'm so much more interested in how you construct similar imilarities between different experiences of oppression and class and and and racism. Um, and I think we have to get much better at doing that. I I said earlier about that example of the Stafford miners going down to Notting Hill Carnival having the time of their lives and talking to people both about uh the riots in 81 and the experience of police oppression and the minor strike and thinking about them as shared experiences as two different communities of resistance. Right? We have to get back to thinking in those terms like we're not going to get anywhere if we just try and recriminate against each other and if we try and compete. >> Um I want to ask you about something which is really important to this book is that class isn't just how do I think what's my economic relationship like >> it's actually what is it that is disciplining and conditioning my life. So I suppose a question for you is how does class status impact physical health and and what did you find in researching this book? >> Well, I mean this was really provoked like during the pandemic um you know all of a sudden it just felt like the kind of doors had opened and there was a flood of people with just like really bad health problems. But of course this goes back like I mean it goes back generations but even if we just start from just before austerity uh Michael Marmma uh is commissioned to write this report >> sir professor Michael Marmmet >> I don't entertain the profess >> like the what was it um fair society healthy lives I think the report was was called uh and he writes it he by this time you have a different government the conservative government of David Cameron and George Osbbor he hands it to them here are all the problems like the we have all of these big health inequalities. They're massively affected by people's class position. These huge class determinance of where you work, where you live, your housing. Uh we need to do something about this. David Cameron, George Osborne, they turn around and say, "No, we're going to go ham with austerity. We're going to implement austerity." And 10 years later after the first report, he does a second report. What do we see? Life expectancy has stalled. It's now declining. uh we see people's living conditions have absolutely you know deplorably declined. Um and you know this really bursts out into the open during the pandemic where not only do you have huge cohorts of working-class people who are far more sensitive to the pandemic um because of where they work, the types of jobs they do, the places where they live. Um but you also then I think you have a kind of health consciousness basically and this really affected me because during the pandemic I started getting uh TMJ temporal mandibular disorder. What's that? >> It's like where you basically clench in loads at night and I had this thing called tension muscle dysphonia and so I was you know and I constantly thought I'd got COVID and I was really paranoid and I hadn't. I had these two other things. Uh and so it made me just it forced me to think a lot more seriously about the relationship between stress, capitalism and health. And obviously you know this is a central problem for uh the political class and the right. The talk about neither in education, employment or training, the talk about uh declinism, right? Nigel Farage says our society is in decline and one of the key vectors of that for him is a population problem. On the one hand we have the wrong people having the wrong kids. they're migrants. Uh but on the other hand, we have all of these people who are pretending about their mental health conditions, their muscular sceal disorders. And so on the one hand, capitalism makes us sick, but on the other hand, it panics about the fact that we are sick and we're not doing what capitalism wants us to do, which is being really productive and working all of the time. And so in the book, I'm really trying to get to that. And for me that foregrounds a type of left politics which is a type of left politics which we actually have to take the question of leisure more seriously. The social wage which is the kind of wage that you earn not from having to go to work but is a universal right for everybody. Um and also >> so so what is it what does that look like in in concrete material terms? >> Concrete material terms I think universal basic services right stop making people pay for things that should be human rights whether that's health whether that's housing um whether that's the basic goods you need to reproduce yourself in society. um the there's open questions about whether we should have a universal basic income for example um which means that everybody would get a certain amount of allotted money uh from the state. That's a whole big question that I'm thinking about and don't want to necessarily get into right now because I haven't worked out what I actually think about that. Rare moment of honesty on YouTube. >> Yeah, the rest has been [ __ ] for this. >> Um so that's what the social wage could look like. Um it's also about how you expand the scope of the state. uh and you expand people's influence within the state to make sure that they have more uh autonomy in life and more determination of over the and more determination over their living conditions. Um so that's what the social wage would looks like and for me this is really important because uh Nigel Farage has been saying this thing increasingly which is that he represents alarm clock Britain. That's horrible to me and I think that's horrible to a lot of working class people. >> You mix that from Ed Milliband. >> Oh well that wouldn't surprise me. I remember alarm clock Britain was a was a ed millibandism which was like how do you talk about the sort of >> um what you're trying to frame is like the median person right so you had Mondo man you've had working man you've had Stevenage woman and there was alarm clock Britain and I remember it because it felt like there was this arms race like what was the most benile [ __ ] [ __ ] you could say >> yeah yeah yeah totally and so it's it's wedded to this sense of politics it's really really dominant both at this in the center and on the right which You know, in fact she was chief at this, right? Which is you have to assert a difference between the productive and the parasitic, right? So people that are leeches and people that are good, hardworking citizens. And for me, the left part of our task is breaking that. Basically, it's breaking that division between the productive and the parasitic. And I think in the kind of context that we live in now, there is an opportunity for it, which is that we have demographic aging. Um so the question of pensions and and and um the kind of size of the welfare state is becoming a huge question. We have people being sicker than ever. Um we have people being lonier than ever. Um and we have all sorts of kind of uh injuries that come from work. And we have this kind of mass youth unemployment which is phrased as neither in education, employment or training. And for me that represents an opportunity to talk about a politics that isn't simply your life starts and ends at work. Nigel Farage is looking at you and going, "Yeah, that's nice, mate, but I'm still winning workingclass voters." Yeah. Um, what is it about reform which has meant that you do have such strong support, yes, of diehard tries who are doing quite well in life, but also workingclass voters. Uh I think it's this politics of decline right which is on the one hand as we've talked about earlier in this interview there's a question of uh the way they've wielded race and racism which is a politics that goes back through fat and then to Enoch Pow um a famous Tory right-winger from the 60s and 70s um where the numbers game is really important and you attach that to a sense of people's decline in sovereignity in society decline in control but there's a real factor right now when I talk declineism uh which is that people feel in their everyday lives that society is on a downwards trajectory. They see it in the brick work in their school their kids school crumbling. They see it in the fact that they can't get a bus. They see it in their own kind of health conditions. And Nigel Farage takes advantage of this and he speaks this language of declineism to say that one like I said before we have a pro population problem and we need to get to the bottom of the population problem and that's about migrants and people having to work harder and women having to have more children. He's very clear about those three things as kind of axes of that politics. Um but then on the other hand, he's very clear about who's responsible for decline. So for him, it's the asylum seeker who's moved down the street, the person with substance abuse problems, who lives in the abandoned house on your estate. Um um it's those kind of people who are the figures of declineism. And that's why for me this division between productive and parasitic is really important. Uh is we have to assert a politics that says we leave no member of our class behind. So, I'm I'm going to move on because you're obviously onethird of the life of the party. Um, which is I'm a I'm a longtime listener, first- time caller. Um, and it it really started out as trying to think about what will the sort of politics and structure and lifeblood of a new left party, what would that look like? Now, it's sort of looking at how does the left organize itself in all sorts of ways, right? It's it's I would say that it's um its interest has broadened. >> Yeah. >> But to go back to what you were first interested in, >> what is your take on why your party collapsed? >> Uh the reliving of trauma. How nice. Uh >> would you like some tramodol to >> I wouldn't say no. Um for me it's a really clear thing which is that we took a shortcut. Basically, we're in a moment where we're trying to carry out a kind of generational rebuilding of working-class power, organization, and capacity and strength. And we had this really promising and appetizing shortcut, which is that people that we loved and venerated, Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana, we're going to set up a new party. And that party was a condition for then hundreds of thousands of people saying, "Let's get involved." And overnight, you have a mass socialist party. Now I think there's an aspect of us kidding ourselves a bit which you know I mean an aspect of us kidding ourselves in a bit that we didn't think people who had gone through the experience of Corbinism would have lots of hostilities and tensions with each other. Um >> you guys like each other right? >> I think there was a sense that like not me so much in this instance but a lot of a lot of comrades were thinking this will be the majoritarian project and we'll be competing in the next election. uh which I I you know I thought at the time and I still think now is in terms of the greens for example is is is deluded like the I think that like we're looking at a much slower process here and that's complicated by climate change which makes us want to do stuff urgently. Um so there's that kind of uh dynamic but also our dependence on these two figures to be the people that bring this political party into being meant we were relying on their idiosyncrasies and their character flaws and their tensions that they already had with each other. And as soon as those things came to the four >> and boy did they >> and boy did they it was a disaster basically uh and now we're in the kind of ruins of that where you have tens of thousands of people who are really demoralized by that experience and sorry just to add to that like that's that's that's baked in by the parliamentary system. We're dependent on those people because we don't have lots of leftwing MPs ready to break from labor or even not ready to break from labor but left loads of leftwing MPs full stop who we can rely on and who are able to get in through the first pass the post system. Uh it's a big problem for us basically. >> You've said that Andy Burnham is doing vibesbased politics. Um many of his policies are thin and aesthetic. God wish I was thin and aesthetic. >> Me too. Um, all that being the case, uh, the Greens seem to have stalled and fallen back somewhat since K Star left number 10. >> Um, if you were advising Zack Palanski, what would you advise him to do in response to Labour's new direction under Andy Bernham? >> I think there's a bit of a danger of them believing Burnham's hype a little bit. like you know there's a danger of like a project like the Greens just going hard on the issues that um the left already is really comfortable with going hard on right which is uh Palestine which is something that we should still shout about and make noise about um migration again we should still shout and make noise about it especially because uh there's there's no difference between Andy Berlin's government and Kistan's government on that front um and of course climate change which actually there's an argument over the last two or three months that Zach Palansky should have gone harder on that question when you see wildfires all over the country. Um, so there's kind of that bit there which they could do and they could do well. Um, but there's also the bit of like I I say this stuff is thin and aesthetic because it is, right? Because Andy Burnham's got all of the vibes of Aaram Mani. I wouldn't necessarily say the good looks, but we can we can argue about that. >> He ain't got the dimple. >> He ain't got the dimple. Um >> but but he's able to do some of that like feelgood humanto human stuff. >> Yeah. And in lots of ways like some of the stuff that he's saying isn't that big a change like getting £3.75 less because he's cut the VAT on your energy bills. Less than a pint by the way a month for like the that's actually not a huge shift in people's lives. There are some stuff that he's done that's good like two pound bus fairs is good right? We should use those things as opportunities to demand more. Right? the fact that he's saying that councils could get more money. Well, that's that's an obvious opportunity for the left to turn around and say, "Okay, how are we what what has that money got to be spent on and how do we struggle and organize to make that happen? And how do we have a voice in the Greens and in other projects to assert that, right?" Uh because Andy Burnham, you know, on the one hand, is someone who's got a lot of kind of futile um nods to wanting to get neats out of the kind of crisis they're in. Very futile. I mean, like the announcement, for example, that you're going to have 10,000 work experience placements at Sainsburries. Any of these people going to get paid, right? This is very similar to new labor. This is very similar to making a slick labor market that gives people seemingly more opportunities, but not actually any long-term um prospects. Uh so you have that but at the same time he's also someone who if you were uh a lefty even if you were a labor lefty uh in Manchester you'd probably if you were part of a housing union be against some of the stuff that he's done in Manchester in terms of regeneration. So there are all of these fault lines that the the left outside of Labor and to be honest with the left in Labor should take advantage of but I fear we've bought the source a little bit too much when it comes to Andy Bernham. See, listening to that and look, I'm no fancy big city strategist, but it still sounds to me that it's a much more reactive place than Zach Palansky was at the beginning with K Star. Zack Palansky becomes Green Party leader and he's blazing a trail on wealth tax, right? He's shifting what other people are having to react to with the things that you've laid out. It's like, well, how do you react to something that Andy Burnham's doing, which sort of tells me already >> we're in a different psychological and emotional space. And so I'm quite interested in like how what is the the trail that can be blazed which actually makes Labour and Andy Burnham follow which changes the center of political gravity rather than just being like oh this thing you're doing you could do it better you could do it more. So I agree, Zach Palansky, the left had to be far more propositional, right? And I think part of that is just not buying this talk about re-industrialization, for example. Re-industrialization orientated about around war uh and uh developing military capacities in the Northwest that actually don't offer that many jobs, right? Uh is something that we have to be >> bad multiplier effect. >> Yeah, exactly. is something that we have to be like really serious about talking about how you can have a kind of um sustainable repurposed way of thinking about how you build jobs in these regions. So you have that on the one hand, but it's also nonsense. The idea that Britain, plucky little Britain, provincial Britain, is going to re-industrialize itself in a country in in sorry, in a world where you have China and Southeast Asia um who are much better at industrializing when you have de-industrialization across uh Europe in particular in Germany where you have huge manufacturing over capacity across the world is just eluded and it's a it's a delusion that has that every government in my lifetime has entertained. Northern Powerhouse, right? All of this kind of stuff. And I think for us, we have to have a positive agenda of how people can live life that isn't orientated around industry, right? There's in orientated around principles of care, repair, the good life, right? I feel like and there are policies that we've talked about through the course of the show that could supplement that, right? And there are challenges to that in terms of how you'd articulate a fiscal politics around that and all of those sorts of questions. But for me, that's the game that we should be playing in. like the whole project is very thin and it's very geared towards how can we manage people better. >> Um my final question and it's just because towards the end of the book you you talk about someone whose work is very near and dear to my heart. What was your favorite song off of Dizzy Rascal's Magnum Opus Boy in the corner? >> It's a brand new day, new opportunities. What can I say? >> And what a place to end. Jonas, thank you so much for joining us on Dream. >> Thanks for having me.