A pedestrianised small-town high street in the southwest of England on a Friday or Saturday morning. Each of our group begins our conversations in different ways, but mine usually go something like this.
Me: Would you like to stop for a quick chat?
Passer-by: What’s it about? Is this a political party? (Why is this person smiling at/talking to me? We’re British, for goodness sake)
Me: We’re not from a political party. We’re just a bunch of grumpy women who think the quality of political conversation on the TV and social media is rubbish, and we think we can do better right here on the high street. Do you want to come and try it out?
About a third of the time, and also dependent on the weather, or which bus they’re trying to catch, or whether they’re late for work or to go and look after their grandkids, people say: hmm, just a few minutes, go on then.
We hand them a sheet of stickers – little round coloured dots – and invite them to place stickers in the columns for ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘?’ in response to a series of questions handwritten on a flipchart sheet. If they’ve got kids, they get to do the stickers. Who doesn’t like stickers? That’s it for technology and outlay: flipchart stand, paper, markers, stickers. A few quid for parking. If it’s a weekday we’re giving up a couple of hours when we could potentially be earning, which will have to be made up later. (A few of our informal group are retired, too).
The questions include variants on these: Do you think there’s more that unites us than divides us? Do you think young people have it better than their parents? Do you think we’re doing enough to tackle the climate crisis? Is our democracy in a good state? Did you know that less than 5% of migrants to the UK arrive on small boats? Do you think asylum seekers are being blamed for other political problems?
Of course we are interested in the answers, because we’re there to hear what people think. But the questions are also there as a prompt to the conversations that follow. Some of these conversations are fairly swift: people have a quick chat, do their stickers, continue up the street. But from each two-hour session, a few interactions are still going round my head days later.
There’s the young woman with a toddler who says, I don’t have any political views, I don’t know about all that, I don’t vote… but by the time we’ve discussed our way through the questions for ten minutes, she realises that she does, actually, have some views.
There’s the older woman who sounds fiercely anti-immigration, and I keep listening and asking questions (often just ‘oh really? why’s that?’) and a few minutes later she discloses that when she gets home after her volunteering she can’t bear the silence of her empty house, and keeps the radio or TV on, and I say, do you? – my mum does that since she was widowed, too. After that her tone changes. I don’t attempt to shift her views on immigration, but we have a good conversation about the state of the NHS, in which she used to work, and about whether Farage can be trusted with it; she thinks probably not.
There is the couple who both say, thank goodness you’re doing this, what a relief to feel less alone, we can’t bear how much hate there is when the problem is that public services have been starved of money. There are lots of people who say this.
My opening gambit is certainly true. We are grumpy about the quality of political conversation in the media. The set-up fights between needlessly binary positions, the false equivalences in the name of ‘balance’, the assumption that shouty debate is the only way to illuminate an issue. And the putting people in boxes, as if their political views aren’t in reality an idiosyncratic mishmash deriving from their material situation and what they hope will improve it, fears and convictions both consciously and unconsciously held, the people they spend time with and listen to, and things they’ve seen and read, especially most recently.
But we are also furious about the end towards which the changing political discourse is assumed to be leading, as if huge swathes of the political class (and I include journalists in that) have just folded, in advance, as a far-right party tools up for an election, and are already treating its dismal vision for the UK as inevitable. We can already see, in Starmer’s Labour government, how this giving-up looks like adopting far-right talking points. But I think this anticipatory giving-up also looks like assuming that people are already set in their views. Actually, what we’re seeing in these street conversations is that so many people – including but not limited to the many whose material lives have been made a nightmare by neoliberal austerity since 2010 – are responding to the confidence with which Reform express themselves. And yet (not unlike Reform themselves!) what is underneath people’s political views, ever so humanly and as with all of us, is often incoherent, contradictory and shaky. Certainty just makes us feel better.
Might some of the same people be just as likely to respond to a very different, positive vision, also clearly expressed – and as the Greens’ membership surge under Zack Polanski is already suggesting? Often I’ll find myself saying to someone, hang on, this is very interesting, because you said you support Reform, but to be honest you don’t sound much like a Reform voter to me? They’re not going to do most of the things you say you want.
There was the chap, affable and keen to chat, who said he thought Nigel was a great thing, he’s really onto something about immigration and how everything’s broken, but by the time we were ten minutes into the conversation we were talking about how Nigel has actually voted against workers’ rights and earns a fortune in side hustles and is on the side of his wealthy backers and not us. Then he was telling me about the Black guy he chats with in his local cafe every week (it’s true that we are in a very white area) and now, 15 minutes into the conversation, he was starting to wonder if Reform were to get into power, whether this guy in the cafe would have a bad time of it (and this was before the fascist immigration raids in Minneapolis), and I was saying, you know how you told me you don’t vote, perhaps you might need to if you don’t want that to happen, and he said yeah, and at the beginning of the conversation, I could easily have pigeonholed this chap as ‘Reform’, but look how much more there is going on than that, and I haven’t told you the half of it here.
I suspect this failure to conform to labels is going on in many places. My old mucker John Christensen, co-founder of the Tax Justice Network (and producer of the Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, a film about tax havens that anyone wanting to blame migrants for the the state of the public finances should watch before they open their mouth), told me that he’d recently been discussing the problems of neoliberal capitalism with a bunch of corporate governance and political economy professors at a university roundtable meeting. John was setting out how every previous check and balance on corporate greed and extraction (non-execs, auditors, regulators, etc) has been co-opted or de-fanged over the neoliberal decades. One of the academics present was a Hayekian (a disciple of Friedrich Hayek, the economist who was an inspiration for Thatcherism and a godfather of neoliberal ideology worldwide) – and, John recounted, “this guy told me that he agreed with everything I said. Twenty years ago he’d have hated my guts, he wouldn’t even have talked to me.”
I wondered if the professor in question was perhaps shifting his views in response to the no-longer-deniable reality that is now breaking around him, as austerity for citizens combined with the unleashing of corporate power has caused neoliberal capitalism to predate upon democracy and the very underpinnings of civil society, even within the richest nations that previously imposed this deadly recipe only on the formerly-colonised. I wondered if the conversation he had with John that day afforded that professor an escape valve from the pressure of his own cognitive dissonance: the pressure that builds up in the gap between what he thought he believed, and what he was starting to allow himself to observe.*
The point here is that if we make an assumption about someone’s views, including extrapolating from ‘if they think this’ to ‘they will also think that’, we miss an opportunity to connect and to communicate. Look, I’m not saying that everyone should go out and do what we’re doing with these street conversations. But they are, in some small way, helping to create a kind of public square. What might happen if more of us were having them? Right now, when the tech platforms are making the beast with two backs with the autocrats (see the brilliant and courageous Carole Cadwalladr’s reporting), I think we all of us need to be doing something that can subvert their power, namely, that very old social technology of listening and conversing with each other, human to human, in the places where we live.
Hat tip to another Anthea – Anthea Simmons, co-founder of the South Devon Primary – who got this going. Find out more here if you’d like to start some conversations where you are.
* (Here’s the irony, as John was pointing out: many of the intellectuals who attended the Mont Pelerin Society inaugural meeting in 1947 – the first strategy planning for the deliberate spread of neoliberal ideas over subsequent decades – were influenced by Hayek’s 1944 book Road to Serfdom, and were genuinely concerned that post-war social democracy would lead to authoritarianism. Their response, eventually put into action in the UK by Thatcher from 1979, ‘was to make the state the junior partner of capital – banks and powerful corporations – et voilà we are where we now are: capital rules, with the state acting as its henchman, democracy is being ditched, human rights are in the process of being ditched, and fascism haunts the streets as it did in the 1930s. Bravo Friedrich!’ Conversations like this are why I enjoy hanging out with John.)
This article first appeared on Anthea’s substack and is reproduced by kind permission. Please do subscribe!