Birmingham Momentum activist day – March, 2017. Flickr\/ Gwydion M.Williams. Some rights reserved.Like many of the political events of recent years, the surge in support
\nfor Labour under Jeremy Corbyn at the UK general election was supposed to be
\n\u2018impossible\u2019 until it happened. Soon after the election, Dougald Hine and Keith
\nKahn Harris began this exchange, asking whether recent developments vindicate
\nan earlier optimism about the potential of networked political movements \u2013 and
\nhow the strange renewal of Labour in the UK relates to the situation of new and
\nold political parties elsewhere in Europe. <\/i><\/p>\n
This conversation is published ahead of <\/em>The Art of the Dougald Hine ( DH):<\/strong> So you and I met in 2011, in that moment just after the Wikileaks At the end of that year, at your suggestion, the To be honest, I\u2019ve tended to look back on that book \u2018The longer it goes on, the more hatred is So, fast forward to the summer of 2017, and without \u2018A trend, a direction, an idea-virus, a meme, a And so I thought it was time to compare notes, \u00a0<\/p>\n Keith Kahn-Harris ( KKH)<\/strong>: How is all this looking from my point of view? In a word: confused.<\/p>\n You mentioned Wikileaks. That seems to be an I\u2019m finding that kind of crushing disappointment And of course these are just examples from \u2018my sort Yet I said I was confused, not despairing.<\/p>\n What I\u2019m confused about is that hope has not been And yes, we\u2019re talking the Labour Party here, and Leaving aside for the moment the question of Corbyn That is heartening and thrilling: that sense that Yet I can\u2019t help sensing the darkness penetrating And over and above all of this, there is a point Do you feel any of this too?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n DH:<\/strong> Well, as you Now, having said all that, the morning after the You quoted the line about politics as \u2018the art of In the years since we did the Invisible From the Brexit referendum to the presidential You listed some of the blind-spots of the political Remember that line from Thatcher: \u2018Economics are \u00a0<\/p>\n KKH:<\/strong> I\u2019m not sure That need for balanced, hopeful wariness, perhaps There is always going to be some kind of \u2018gap\u2019 To a limited extent I empathise with this tendency. But while I can understand this tendency, I can\u2019t The problem is that the suppression of complexity Like you, I joined the Labour Party since Corbyn I lasted less than a week before I gave up. I just And yet, and yet\u2026 I agree with you that there is an Indeed the intense focus on Corbyn himself – by It remains to be seen whether a Corbyn-led movement It seems to me then that part of the task ahead is Do you share my framing of the task ahead? And, if \u00a0<\/p>\n DH: <\/strong>Well, this There\u2019s lots of stuff I could pick You\u2019re absolutely right that Now, a FPTP system like the UK\u2019s Take Denmark as a comparison: there, What\u2019s happening with the Labour In the longer run, it\u2019s probably Will we be disappointed? Of Don\u2019t mistake me for an optimist, then. \u00a0<\/p>\n KKH: <\/strong>I\u2019m glad you brought up comparisons with the state Yet on further reflection, I wonder The problem arises when one I kind of yearn for the Labour You mention Compass and I agree It struck me that there is an analogy I\u2019m not arguing for a conflict You mention the importance of What if Labour \u2013 or any other Now that<\/em> might open up new In the book I wrote on the What if we were to see the In short, what if we saw politics \n Birmingham Momentum activist day – March, 2017. Flickr\/ Gwydion M.Williams. Some rights reserved.Like many of the political events of recent years, the surge in support for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn at the UK general election was supposed to be \u2018impossible\u2019 until it happened. Soon after the election, Dougald Hine and Keith Kahn Harris began this…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nImpossible<\/em>, an event which Dougald Hine is hosting at Newspeak House in London on
\nthe evening of Monday September, 4.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nembassy papers release, at the height of the student movement in the UK and in
\nthe first weeks of the Arab Spring. There was an evening early that year when
\nsome friends and I sat in a pub across from the British Museum, talking about
\nit all with this guy from Newsnight, and the next morning he wrote a post
\nlisting Twenty Reasons Why
\nIt\u2019s Kicking Off Everywhere which went
\ncompletely viral. It was a time when there was a feeling, firstly, that the
\nways in which people were using networked technologies had suddenly arrived<\/em>
\nas a historical force \u2013 and, secondly, that this could be a very hopeful
\ndevelopment. <\/p>\n
\ntwo of us edited a book together \u2013 a quickfire, networky, thrown-together sort
\nof book \u2013 called Despatches from the
\nInvisible Revolution<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\nas the end of a period in which I was optimistic to a degree which seemed
\nembarrassing in hindsight. History has gone on being as weird as it was in
\n2011, but when I remember the way my Twitter feed surged with enthusiasm for
\nwhat was happening in North Africa and the Middle East … well, in retrospect,
\nit\u2019s uncomfortably close to those images of crowds cheering young men off to
\nthe Front in the summer of 1914. Speaking of Paul Mason, I was struck by a column he wrote at
\nthe start of 2016, five years on from that
\noriginal Twenty Reasons post, in which he was deeply pessimistic about how the
\ncollision of networks and politics has played out since:<\/p>\n
\nexchanged on Twitter, the more irrationalism is stirred up by demagogues, the
\nharder it becomes to see this phase of world history ending with the
\nde-escalation of tension and the reinstallation of multilateral order.\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n
\nwanting to wipe away all the grounds for being troubled by the shadow side of
\nnetwork politics, I can\u2019t help feeling a kind of hope in the wake of the UK
\nelection which has sent me back to the stuff we were writing in 2011-12. Not
\nleast, what makes me hopeful is that the hold of Rupert
\nMurdoch and Paul Dacre over British politics has been broken and this has a lot to do with the ways in which people are using
\nnetworks to inform themselves, connect and organise. Then, just after the
\nelection, I was flipping back through the book-length version of Why It\u2019s
\nKicking Off Everywhere<\/em>, looking for a reference \u2013 and I came across the bit
\nwhere Mason quotes your Naming the Movement article, where you seemed to discern:<\/p>\n
\nsource of energy that can be traced through a large number of spaces and
\nprojects. It is also a way of thinking and acting: an agility, an adaptability,
\na refusal to accept the world as it is, a refusal to get stuck into fixed
\npatterns of thought.\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n
\nbecause I\u2019m curious how all of this is looking from your point of view?<\/p>\n
\nexample of the occlusion of hope that some of us have experienced. What seemed
\nto be \u2013 and what could have been \u2013 a utopian project for radical transparency has
\ndegenerated into a monument to the vanity of a nihilist lover of dictators. <\/p>\n
\nalmost everywhere I look these days. One example: a radical Jewish activist who
\nI know, someone who has been consistently at the forefront of developing the
\nnew forms of activism and community that so inspired me in 2011, recently
\nargued that clickbait leftist sites like The Canary were a positive development for the left. He didn\u2019t see it as a problem
\nthat such sites ape the pseudo-journalism of the right \u2013 he thought it was a
\ngood thing that the left now had its own Breitbart. I found that heartbreaking.<\/p>\n
\nof people\u2019. On the \u2018other side\u2019, everywhere I look things have fallen apart:
\nBrexit, Trump, Putin, ISIS, climate change denial \u2026 you know the list.<\/p>\n
\nextinguished and has even been rekindled in the most surprising ways, at the
\nsame time as it remains enmeshed in darker tendencies.. <\/p>\n
\nmaybe to an extent developments in the US Democratic Party, the stubborn
\npersistence of Podemos and similar movements that people like Paul Mason have
\nchampioned over the years.<\/p>\n
\nhimself, the movement that propelled him to the Labour leadership and to
\nbetter-than-expected election results evokes some of the hopes of both Occupy
\nand the earlier anti-globalisation movement: that a diverse multitude (the
\n\u201899%\u2019) imbued with a conviction that \u2018another world is possible\u2019 might just
\nbring about radical change. <\/p>\n
\nthe future might be less crushingly determined than we thought; that the old
\ndictum that \u2018politics is the art of the possible\u2019 may mean more than cynical
\npragmatism and soul-deadening triangulation.<\/p>\n
\nthe light. I can\u2019t help seeing the more regressive tendencies within the left
\nof the Labour Party: the lust for purges, the bullying, the blindness towards
\nor open embrace of repressive regimes, the lack of willingness to confront or
\nacknowledge anti-semitism. Certainly, unlike some critics of today\u2019s Labour
\nParty, I don\u2019t see these tendencies as the beginning and end of what the party
\nmeans today, but they still exist.<\/p>\n
\nwhere hope becomes blindness. I get what it feels like to be part of a movement
\nwhere it feels like anything is possible. But I can\u2019t discard the need for
\ncritical thinking, for hard questions, for reserving judgement. <\/p>\n
\nknow, I\u2019m one of the founders of Dark Mountain, so I\u2019m not exactly inclined to blind optimism. These days it feels
\nlike I spend part of my time out on the mountain, which I think of as a place
\nof retreat \u2013 in at least two senses of the word \u2013 where certain kinds of
\nreflection and perspective become possible, but in order to gain that
\nperspective, you\u2019ve withdrawn from any kind of immediate agency. And then,
\nevery so often, I come back in and try to write about how we make sense of what
\nis going on, politically, here and now. And I guess
\nthe common thread is that I\u2019m looking for a sense of hope that doesn\u2019t feel
\nlike wishful thinking.<\/p>\n
\nelection, I joined the Labour party. I hadn\u2019t done it sooner, mainly because I
\nlive in Sweden these days and I was hearing such conflicting things from
\nfriends back home, which made me hesitate. Like a lot of people, I guess, I\u2019d
\nbeen in the position of that poster in Mulder\u2019s office in the X-Files: \u2018I want
\nto believe\u2019. In what? Not in a heroic leader, but in the possibility that
\nsomething is happening here that can open \u2018a crack in history\u2019, to use that
\nbeautiful phrase of Subcomandante Marcos. <\/p>\n
\nthe possible\u2019, and a lot of the time that\u2019s the limit of aspiration for
\nparliamentary politics \u2013 I\u2019ve met decent people who went into politics who I
\nthink saw what they were doing in precisely those terms, attempting to work
\nwithin the bounds of what is \u2018possible\u2019, to limit the damage. For me, the
\nquestion has always been: how do those bounds get set, how do they change, and
\ncan we contribute to their changing?<\/p>\n
\nRevolution<\/em> book, so many of the major political developments around the
\nworld have been events that were meant to be \u2018impossible\u2019 until they happened.
\nThe effect<\/em> of these events is to shake the certainties, to unsettle the
\nbounds of what is understood to be possible\u00a0\u2013 the bounds of history, as
\nMarcos is talking about it \u2013 yet, very often, the content<\/em> of these
\nevents is deeply alarming. <\/p>\n
\nelections in the US and France, we have had a series of binary choices which
\nseemed to boil down to \u2018vote for the politics of fear and hate\u2019 or \u2018endorse the
\nneoliberal status quo\u2019. (Let me just say, in passing, I think the Brexit vote
\nis more complicated than the other two, but that\u2019s another discussion.) With
\nthe UK election, there was actually a choice to vote against neoliberalism,
\nwithout voting for anything that could be interpreted as the politics of fear
\nand hate \u2013 and this ignited the imaginations of enough people to produce a
\nsupposedly \u2018impossible\u2019 surge in support for Labour.<\/p>\n
\ntradition that Corbyn is coming out of \u2013 and I could probably add to the list.
\nBut his leadership is a vehicle for something larger and potentially a lot
\nbroader than it\u2019s mostly been painted. There\u2019s a chance here to redefine the
\nboundaries of \u2018possibility\u2019, to break out from the kind of realism that has
\ntaken hold over recent decades, that accepts not only the economic ideology of
\nneoliberalism \u2013 with its devotion to markets and competition and deregulation \u2013
\nbut also the idea of what humans are<\/em> (or ought to be) which lies at the
\nheart of that ideology. <\/p>\n
\nthe method: the object is to change the soul\u2019? I don\u2019t think the left has a
\nmonopoly on rejecting the spiritual poverty of neoliberalism, the inadequacy of
\nthe story it tells about what people are like. Actually, I think it\u2019s a bit
\nlike the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, a hegemony with hardly any true
\nbelievers left. But equally, the example of the fall of the Soviet Union and
\nits aftermath might give us that wariness about how all this could play out
\nwhich I think you were trying to point to?<\/p>\n
\nthat neoliberalism is quite as exhausted as the Soviet Union was in the last
\nyears. There are no shortage of true believers who are intensely committed to the
\nfree market dogma they spout. Yet the example of the Soviet Union is still an
\napt one \u2013 both 1917 and 1991 raised enormous hopes that were ultimately dashed.
\nThat doesn\u2019t mean that those hopes were unwarranted then and can never be
\nwarranted in the future; only that hope and wariness always need to be
\nbalanced.<\/p>\n
\nrelates to another perennial problem with the pursuit of political change: how
\ndo you marry reflection, long-term thinking, critical thought and the like with
\nthe immediate (and often very messy) realities of day-to-day politics?<\/p>\n
\nbetween these two tendencies and that\u2019s fair enough. But one of my concerns
\nabout the Labour Party is that, in some cases at least, the gap seems to have
\ngot wider and wider. The \u2018wanting to believe\u2019 that you identify seems to be so
\nstrong that it sometimes overwhelms or smothers the expression of doubt,
\nambivalence and nuance. It feels like I\u2019ve seen some of the best minds of my
\ngeneration fall into a morass of clickbait, denunciations of the BBC and
\npetitions to purge the enemy within. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nLabour activists now scent victory and possible new elections within the next
\nfew months. The sense that power may be in their grasp with \u2018one more heave\u2019
\ncan make activists disinclined to do anything that may undermine that effort.
\nBefore that, the near-constant attacks on Corbyn since his election as Labour
\nleader has meant that even some of the more ambivalent supporters have been
\nreluctant to criticise him in public.<\/p>\n
\nhelp asking the question: if not now, when?<\/p>\n
\nand doubt can become a habit that is hard to break. The temporary putting aside
\nof difficult questions can become extended indefinitely. That was, after all,
\none of the terrible shortcomings of New Labour: the focus on \u2018discipline\u2019 and a
\nunified message was born out of the trauma of the multiple Labour defeats in
\nthe 80s as the party tore itself apart. But even after a landslide election
\nvictory in 1997, the inability to tolerate debate and difference turned from a
\ntemporary strategy to a permanent condition. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\nbecame leader. I joined just after the Brexit vote, as Corbyn faced a
\nleadership challenge. I felt that I wanted to be part of the debate. I felt
\nthat those of us who were on the left of the Labour Party but had serious
\nreservations about Corbyn needed to speak up. <\/p>\n
\ndidn\u2019t see a space for me. There didn\u2019t seem to be a thoughtful penumbra
\nsurrounding the cold, hard politics. The logic of \u2018with us or against us\u2019
\nseemed to permeate everything.<\/p>\n
\nintoxicating sense of possibility here; a moment in which what seemed solid
\npromises to melt into air. It\u2019s just that I think that the Labour Party is an
\noutcome of this moment as much as it brought it about. One of the dangers of
\nhope that has been unleashed is that everything that has happened can
\nretrospectively be portrayed as planned; as though Corbyn saw all this coming
\nand sparked everything off. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\nboth supporters and detractors – really worries me. It seems to reduce what is
\na complex, multi-layered set of possibilities down to something
\ntwo-dimensional. This goes back to what I said about the gap between political
\naction and deeper reflection. Ironically perhaps, the tantalising possibility
\nof real political change has caused the tantalising possibilities of real
\nsocial change embodied in what I called in 2011 'the movement', to wither. This
\nis oddly disempowering – an outsourcing or displacement of hope onto one man
\nand the party he leads.<\/p>\n
\ncan birth something genuinely new, whether it can escape the sterile cycle of
\npurge and counter-purge that the Labour Party has often fallen prey to, whether
\nit looks to past models of socialism or can grasp the tremendous (and maybe
\ncalamitous) changes we are about to face. <\/p>\n
\nto reduce the gap between political action and more reflective kinds of work.
\nWe need to find a way to build political movements that make space for
\ndifficult questions, for diversity, for ambivalence.<\/p>\n
\nso, do you have any thoughts on how it might be tackled? <\/p>\n
\nexchange has been running along slowly, and now it\u2019s late summer. More than two
\nmonths have gone by since the election. There was the awakening of hope at the
\nunexpected result \u2013 and then, while everyone was still processing that, the
\nhorror of Grenfell Tower, which we haven\u2019t even touched on here. There\u2019s a line
\nfrom a piece that Will Davies wrote for the LRB which has been stuck in my head
\nfor weeks: \u2018The coincidence of the Corbyn surge
\nwith the horror of Grenfell Tower has created the conditions \u2013 and the demand \u2013
\nfor a kind of truth and reconciliation commission on forty years of
\nneoliberalism.\u2019 I think there might be a clue there to the kinds of work that
\nare needed.<\/p>\n
\nup on in your last reply \u2013 I think you may be overstating the part about
\n\u2018displacement of hope onto one man\u2019, for example. It\u2019s hard to disentangle
\nwhat\u2019s going on from the stories that get told about what\u2019s going on \u2013
\nincluding the stories that are being fed by the same elements within the
\nBritish press that wanted to convince us that Ralph Miliband was \u2018the man who
\nhated Britain\u2019. Democracy in the UK has been sabotaged by the likes of Murdoch
\nand Dacre for most of our lifetimes and the BBC, where I used to work, has
\nstruggled to perform \u2018impartiality\u2019 against a background of systematic bias.
\nPart of the hope right now is that we saw the press do its worst to Corbyn and
\nit failed to destroy him. As I
\nwrote straight after the election,
\nthat\u2019s not just hopeful if you\u2019re a Corbynite, it\u2019s hopeful if you believe in
\ndemocracy.<\/p>\n
\nCorbyn\u2019s Labour is the outcome of a moment, not the author of that moment. It\u2019s
\nbeen said before, but it\u2019s depressing how rarely analysis of what\u2019s happened
\nwith Labour looks beyond the shores of Great Britain to the crisis of social
\ndemocracy playing out across Europe. You have countries like Greece or even
\nFrance, where historic parties of the centre left have been obliterated, and
\nthat opens the ground for new political forces. Elsewhere, you get a social
\ndemocratic party that used to count on 30-40% of the vote and that\u2019s slid back
\nto 25-30% \u2013 and what you see is stagnation. You bring in a new leader with a
\nfanfare, like Martin Schulz in Germany, and six months later you\u2019re back down
\nat 25%. <\/p>\n
\nis basically rigged against the emergence of new political forces \u2013 and
\nordinarily, that sounds like a formula for stagnation. Except that, under
\ncurrent circumstances, it\u2019s forced a cohabitation within the structure of the
\nLabour party which puts it in the strange position of being the one historic
\nsocial democratic party in Europe that is not asleep at the wheel, but has
\nactually found a way to renew itself. <\/p>\n
\nthe Social Democrats are on 25% and they resemble the mainstream of the
\nParliamentary Labour Party, and then you have four other national parties with
\nsignificant numbers of MPs out of which you can build a left-of-centre
\nparliamentary bloc. That includes a couple of established parties to the left
\nof the Social Democrats and it also includes a political start-up like The
\nAlternative which is (as far as I can see) a non-leftist, anti-neoliberal party
\n\u2013 very network-oriented and close in spirit to the kind of movement you and I
\nwere writing hopefully about in 2011.<\/p>\n
\nparty in Britain is that, instead of being spread out across multiple parties,
\nthe equivalent elements are having to cohabit within a single party. (This is
\npart of what Jeremy Gilbert is getting at when he writes about Labour as a \u2018platform
\nparty\u2019.) It\u2019s not a
\ncomfortable arrangement and it\u2019s been far from clear that it could work, but it
\nhas the virtue of forcing everyone to wake up. The quality of debate \u2013 the
\namount of room for reflection and self-criticism of the kind you\u2019re looking
\nfor\u00a0\u2013 may not be all that could be desired, but compared to the state of
\nleft-of-centre politics in much of the rest of Europe, it looks like a
\nrenaissance.<\/p>\n
\nnot sustainable \u2013 nor is it desirable that it should be sustained, because the
\nFPTP system is a hugely problematic way of running a democracy. So if you\u2019ve
\nnot found anywhere to connect to what\u2019s going on within Labour, then I\u2019d
\nsuggest looking at some of the other things going on around this landscape: the
\nwork that Ronan Harrington and others are doing around \u2018Deep Politics\u2019 with Alter
\nEgo; the work that
\nCompass has done to build the idea of a Progressive Alliance and publishing reports
\nlike the one Indra Adnan wrote on the future of political parties; or the work that Indra is doing with Pat Kane,
\nShelagh Wright and others as The Alternative UK, inspired by the Danish example but operating as a
\n\u2018political platform\u2019 rather than a party.<\/p>\n
\ncourse, that\u2019s how history works. And if I take a few steps back up the
\nmountain, what I see is an unfolding ecological crisis that is unravelling the
\nfoundations of our way of living, that is going to call our assumptions into
\nquestion \u2013 not least, the assumptions that frame our politics \u2013 in ways we haven\u2019t
\nbegun to get the measure of. I see the best of us blundering around, talking
\nabout the Anthropocene as if it marked the latest step in humanity\u2019s conquest
\nof nature, rather than an encounter between hubris and nemesis. <\/p>\n
\nBut let\u2019s say I\u2019m right about all that: it still leaves us with choices about
\nhow we treat each other, how we make life work together as communities and
\nsocieties, what stories we tell about what it\u2019s like to be human. It still
\nleaves us with ongoing cruelties which we can accept or confront. And there\u2019s
\nstill that need to open a crack in history.<\/p>\n
\nof the left in other European countries and that you mentioned the problems
\nwith the FPTP system. I\u2019ve long felt that one of the basic problems with the
\nLabour Party is that, under our electoral system, irreconcilable factions are
\n\u2018condemned to live together\u2019 due to the non-viability of starting new political
\nparties. <\/p>\n
\nif there are not possibilities inherent in a political system in which parties
\nare always fated to be heterogeneous coalitions. All parties in the UK harbour
\nwithin them multiple think tanks, journals and the like. Much of the
\nintellectual energy within the British political system has been focused around
\nthese kinds of institutions. <\/p>\n
\nfaction within a party wins big. In both the New Labour era and today, opposing
\nfactions are threatened with irrelevance and all the position papers they
\nproduce become meaningless. <\/p>\n
\nParty of my childhood when party conferences were fractious affairs and no one
\nfaction dominated. I know that the Labour left has always intended to devolve
\npower to the conference. I worry though that this will simply lead to a kind of
\necho chamber \u2013 more raucous than the New Labour variety admittedly, but hardly
\na space of real contention. One of the problems with calls for Labour internal
\ndemocracy is that they have sometimes been calls for the domination by the left
\nof the party.<\/p>\n
\nthat its work on political parties is very promising (I was a member for a
\nwhile). While I am very much in favour of the Progressive Alliance idea, I
\ncan\u2019t help but think that they have missed a trick \u2013 Compass is more focused on
\nrelationships between parties than within them. <\/p>\n
\nto be made with another field I am familiar with: interfaith dialogue. There is
\na lot of good work that has been done to nurture both elite and grassroots
\ndialogue between members of different religions; there has been much less
\nattention to intra<\/em>faith dialogue. Indeed, some religious leaders find it
\neasier to have dialogue with leaders of other religions than with other denominations
\nwithin their own. In my own experience in working on dialogue within the UK
\nJewish community, there is a strange claustrophobic intimacy to the
\nrelationship between opposing factions that often makes for intractable
\nconflict.<\/p>\n
\nresolution process within the Labour Party, or indeed for dialogue groups. What
\nI am arguing for is a party that sees itself as a coalition that can never be
\nentirely stable. While the desire for electoral success can help to bind this
\ncoalition together, no less important is intellectual ferment. Division is not
\nsomething to be afraid of, it is an inevitability. Let a thousand think tanks
\nbloom!<\/p>\n
\nCorbyn surviving media attempts to destroy him. While I take issue with this to
\nan extent \u2013 some of the reports on his dubious past alliances raised troubling
\nquestion \u2013 I do agree that resisting the power of the right-wing media has been
\nan important accomplishment, one that opens up all sorts of political
\npossibilities. I think we need to push this further though. Regardless of the
\nplace on the political spectrum, media outlets usually construct divisions
\nwithin parties as implicitly or explicitly a damaging thing. Parties today have
\nhad to construct an image of unity to an extent that was unimaginable a few
\ndecades ago. <\/p>\n
\nparty \u2013 refused to play along with this game? What if Corbyn, or figures from
\nany party faction, were to say \u2018yes we are divided, we are diverse \u2013 and that
\nis our strength\u2019? <\/p>\n
\npossibilities. We need, as you put it, to \u2018blunder around\u2019 if we are to find
\nnew ways of responding to changing social and political conditions. That is
\nonly possible if there is room to disagree, to make mistakes, to be uncertain.
\nElectoral success has been assumed to be antithetical to any of this. What if
\nwe were to challenge that assumption?<\/p>\n
\nIsrael conflict in the Jewish community, I argued that part of the problem we faced is
\nthat \u2018politics\u2019 is seen as antithetical to decent intra-communal relations and
\nto civility. <\/p>\n
\npolitical not as a space of irreconcilable conflict, of zero-sum thinking, but
\nas a space in which we recognise our interdependence and the inevitability of
\nour flawed individual thinking? This isn\u2019t the same as arguing for a blandly
\npolite discourse, a stultifyingly \u2018reasonable\u2019 consensus. It requires a certain
\nbravery, an exposure to countervailing currents, a willingness to be exposed.<\/p>\n
\nas opening things up, rather than closing things down? \u00a0<\/p>\n
\nOn Monday September 4,
\nDougald Hine will be hosting <\/em>The Art of the
\nImpossible<\/em> at Newspeak House, London. Free tickets are available via Eventbrite.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"