The Streets were playing Alexandra Palace, performing A Grand Don’t Come for Free from start to finish, and I was reliving my youth. Joe, Bev and Chris were in on the round. Songs that soundtracked our decade of getting out of school, into uni, and landing somewhere on the other side rang out into the Haringey night. Cooler though still balmy summer evening weather had set in, honeying the event until night came and made sense of the last half hour when Skinner did a stage dive, travelling backwards over the aging crowd at what felt like an impressive clip. Must have been abetted by a team of security, but still – how did he end up there, so close to me, about halfway back, stage right?

The main set had exceeded my expectations. They were high to begin with but I guess I’ve learned not to hope for too much from nostalgia tours. Something about the pay-day vibe doesn’t always translate to the crowd, whose lives and responsibilities (and bedtimes) have shifted in the intervening years. This one did, though, royally. Skinner’s worked up A Grand into the hip-hop opera it always was, and the crowd was there for it – all of it, even the lag of slightly weaker songs that stitches ‘Fit but You Know It’ to ‘Dry Your Eyes’ (no shade on ‘Such a Twat’ and ‘What Is He Thinking’: I just didn’t expect them to bang as much, or for everyone to know the words).

The bus stop of the front cover holds the stage show together, part prop, part setting. Skinner’s taken acting lessons, and it shows, as he reclines against the glass, cocooning himself slightly from the gig beyond to build his autofictional alter-ego, Mike. On the album, he’s the hapless geezer who loses his thousand quid at the start before embarking on the full arc of a relationship with Simone, the girl who works in JDs with Dan. He loses her, has to dry his eyes, but finds the grand, fallen into the cracks of his bust TV.

Roo Savill is terrific as Simone: she acts, carries a lot of choruses, then melts into the background with her co-singer Kevin Mark Trail (also brill) to dance and keep the energy up in what can be a solemn, introverted performance from Skinner. I love the thicker flicks of mascara in the corners of her eyes, the tang of friendship, flirtation and challenge she brings. Girl next door, I guess, if you want to put it that way, though it’s cleverer than that. A big part of the effect comes from her Stone Island short suit, an exact match for Skinner’s/Mike’s. This gives their relationship an air of sibling rivalry that feels apt for the songs – ultimately, Mike and Simone are just too similar; it was never going to work out.

That Stone Island fit is also the gateway to Skinner’s calves. These, I’m sure, were once drainpipe-lean, but they’ve chunked out lately like the rest of Skinner, in ways that make me feel better about my own ever-thickening dad bod. My calves and legs are a particular source of embarrassment. Sparsely haired and pale, no matter how much I try tanning them, they seem not to match my upper half, which is capable of growing a beard and catching the sun. Then there’s the real lurking shame: varicose veins. These grimy blue-purple ripples and blotches are almost enough to make me forswear shorts altogether. Unbelievably, I had my first operation for VVs when I was eighteen and a relative beanpole, so they’re clearly something I’m just kind of destined for – though, as my GP feels duty-bound to tell me, being overweight is likely to be an exacerbating factor. Maybe I’ll get them operated on again, if I can bear to be on a waiting list to burden the NHS for something that feels mainly cosmetic.

I couldn’t get a close enough look at Skinner’s calves to tell whether he had VVs. Maybe he does. That wasn’t the important thing, though, so much as a general sense of welcome for a body such as mine, from those pasty drumsticks right up to his signature widow’s peak. Skinner was born in 1978, a good eight years before me. When I was first discovering Original Pirate Material as a teenager back in 2001, that age gap was easily enough to put him into an older generation. Not older like the bands your dad listened to; older like the daunting, alluring sixth form kids at the top of the school food chain, or the twenty-somethings who look like they belong in the club when you start sneaking in there as an underage sixth-former yourself. Skinner’s world of PlayStations, spliffs and mouldering takeaway containers always transported me into the bedrooms of certain older brothers I was allowed into on rare occasions – thrilling, occult spaces of semi-darkness, lit up by the blue light of the console screen, drum ‘n’ bass sputtering away in the background.

And now here he was, looking a bit like me, 47 to my almost-40. That’s nothing anymore, is it? Mon semblable, mon frère! The experience of recognition put me in mind of those gorgeous lines from Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’, ‘Time let me play and be / Golden in the mercy of his means.’ That couplet concludes a longer sentence that maintains some ambiguity about what ‘his means’ refers to – it could be the sun or time itself that shows mercy, or maybe a compound of the two. Here, though, it was the temporal interpretation I was drawn to – that there can be a kind of solvent mercy at play in the way time works, here silently drawing me closer over the years to my one-time hero, Skinner.

There’s a kind of mercy involved in any deeper listen to A Grand Don’t Come for Free as well. Rather like Darkness on the Edge of Town-era Bruce Springsteen, though with very different cultural details, it’s a record that gives voice to what could have been, in a less fortunate, sliding-doors version of the artist’s own life. And just like with Springsteen’s blue-collar rock, there’s a danger of condescension creeping in as the famous star gives voice to the dreams and preoccupations of those unluckier alter-egos. Springsteen keeps it at bay with a razor-sharp empathy that’s deceptively rigorous and detached. I find the blurring of character and fate in A Grand altogether messier, funnier, more psychologically fraught. The lyrics are constantly circling around brain fog brought on by weed, not in a cool or aspirational way (in contrast to Original Pirate Material, where it does feel like a lifestyle – or an older brother’s bedroom – you could want to enter). Without getting him on the couch too much, I get the impression that Skinner is giving voice in A Grand to the person he’d have been if he’d had too many zoots one day and couldn’t be arsed to get into the studio to lay down beats for ‘Has It Come To This?’

Getting over that anxiety to write something that affords grace, even redemption, to such a character must have involved a creative act of mercy on Skinner’s part. If I’m right, he had to be ready to forgive his old self but, more than that, he had to do it in a way that genuinely extended to the people he knew, who were him once, who now could only know him by listening to the album. People whose lives, maybe despite best efforts, were still summed up by that line from ‘Has It Come to This?’ – sex, drugs, and on the dole.

What makes that act of backward-looking solidarity work in the album is a tricky thing to pin down. A big part of it, at risk of being overlooked in a high-flown analysis like this, is just that the songs work – this is where he wrote anthems as well as bangers. In OPM, Skinner created something cooler and leaner that will endure differently, with no shortage of memorable choruses. But it was A Grand that saw him really flex his muscle as a songwriter in the mould of Terry Hall or Suggs or Jarvis Cocker, creating a mainstream sound with diverse textures and notes of novelty that built a bigger tent for audiences (like ours in Ally Pally) that were happy to just throw beer around and bop to the hyped-up ‘Parklife’ riff of ‘Fit but You Know It’.

The other key ingredient, though, for me, is the emotional realism of the characters, particularly the fact that they’re allowed to be dickheads. Album Mike is paranoid, lazy, a bit of a shit friend. A whole other article could be written on gender relations in the record, which to my ear seem really, really well-observed. It’s a bit ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ but in ways that feel true to the slice of life it depicts – attitudinal rather than actual. Album Mike finds women a bit dragging and nagging, sometimes trivial, and in exuberant mode he obviously rates them on a fitness scale of 1 to 10. But he also finds salvation in their conversation and trust in a way that he can never enjoy with his guy friends – a trust that never shatters on his side, though he breaks it on hers. He counsels himself to walk away at the end rather than surrendering to the macho performance of making her ‘see how much this pain hurts’. I’d welcome a feminist critical angle on the album, as I can imagine other interpretations, but for me it feels like a safe space in which dysfunctional gender dynamics can be explored. And a similar thing could be said for its politics of class.

The album’s final act of mercy arrives with the finale of ‘Empty Cans’, the closing track. This slow-burn masterpiece is the proverbial track of two halves, or more accurately three-eighths and five-eighths. The first part sees Mike backed into a corner, broken hearted, snarling, a nasty piece of work. After downing cans of special brew, for how long we don’t really know, he tells his estranged mate Scott to fuck off when he offers to help fix his telly, then gets into a fist fight with the guy from the TV company who comes round to talk about the repair – with good news, we can infer later when we hear the final twist, though he never gets a chance to deliver it before lamping Mike and running off.

Then an emergency stop; the sound of tape spooling backwards; a harsh thwack of the drums as the track starts again, apparently on the same trajectory at first. This time, though, it plays out differently. He lets Scott make it up to him and together they find the errant cash, the plot twist playing out over rising piano chords, a switch from paranoid minor to hopeful major keys. This miracle leads in the final verse to a reflection on self-reliance that instinctively makes me feel uncomfortable, though I think this is kneejerk, a red herring. Here it is:

Or maybe it’s that I realised that it is true:
No one’s really there fighting for you in the last garrison,
No one except yourself, that is, no one except you.
You are the one who’s got your back ‘til the last deed’s done.
Scott can’t have my back ‘til the absolute end
‘Cause he’s got to look out for what’s over his horizon.
He’s gotta make sure he’s not lonely, not broke
It’s enough to worry about keeping his own head above…

This starts out like one of Jordan Peterson’s rules for life: in the last garrison, each man is an island; better fix up and learn to look after yourself. But then in a gorgeous feint, the sentiment switches from Mike’s solipsism to his understanding of Scott’s plight, and why your friends’ own shit means they sometimes can’t be there for you like they’d want to be. This is a complex, social awareness, very much not Jordan Peterson, that shows how our mutual interest might be threatened by precarity.

The closing chorus is just as lovely, gospel-inflected like the piano track that’s been bolstering Mike to flop over the line with his happy ending.

It’s the end of something I did not want to end
Beginning of hard times to come
But something that was not meant to be is done
And this is the start of what was

There’s something enjoyably dippy and surreal in the expression here: ‘this is the start of what was’ has the ring of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Eight Days a Week’, or one of those other Ringoisms The Beatles knew to bottle in a title. Uplifting as it is, it’s striking how even here, with redemptive closure secured for the tale of the missing grand, all that Mike can promise is that this is the ‘beginning of hard times to come’. Other tribulations will come to replace the ones you’ve just negotiated.

Hard times couldn’t be further from our minds, though, as we sang together in the summer night. Time collapsed, as we held these songs close that were so full of details from our extinct near pasts – DVDs, shrapnel in the back pocket, ashtrays in the pub, high street betting slips rather than online clicks, TVs with backsides big enough to lose a wad of notes down. I turned to the boys and held them close. I didn’t want it to end.

Since publishing my book, How to Think Like a Poet, one of its key themes has continued percolating in my mind. Perhaps it will be easier to phrase that theme as a set of questions. One, can poetry be political? Two, can it inspire explicitly political action? Almost certainly, the politically committed poetry lover wants to say yes – but once you start to question how it goes about playing this more active role, things become a lot murkier. As we’ll see, in some respects poetic and political thinking can be at odds.

Many of the poets in my book were directly involved in the politics of their place and time. Chaucer was a career civil servant for Kings Edward III and Richard II. Dante was a city prior in Florence before civil war broke out, stranding him in exile. Milton drew strength from Dante when composing Paradise Lost in Restoration England, as he came to terms with the demise of Cromwell’s republic, a political project he assisted in numerous ways.

These are big figures in the European canon – poets I’m hoping I can refer to in passing, using single names, and trust that you will know roughly who I’m talking about. Together, they show that poetry has at least been power-adjacent for a lot of its lifetime. This turns out to be a fraught proximity, however. As I summarise in the introduction, ‘Poets … make handy functionaries and civil servants, finding in those vocations a way of funding and enabling their life of the mind … but it’s a bargain that comes fraught with danger, not least because poets are also allergic to speaking clearly and directly.’

I want to look at Dante first, as an example of how poetry has intervened in capital-P Politics. His masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is made of three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, each of which is made of numerous circles and subdivisions where different categories of the damned or saved reside. For instance, in the fifth circle of the Inferno we find the wrathful, then in the sixth we find the heretics – it’s a sliding scale from lesser to greater degrees of sin. Many people probably know that, but what’s less appreciated is how this architecture of the eternal afterlife is populated with all sorts of people from 13^th-century Florence – people who would almost certainly have slipped out of common memory by now if it wasn’t for Dante.

This creates a strange tension, because the content of the poem demands that we take a keen political interest in all these popes, generals, artists and fellow statesmen – but what makes it a great poem is, arguably, everything about it that transcends these parochial concerns. So if political education or activism is its main goal, then it pretty much fails, on the long view. Indeed, if Dante wanted to produce a particular political outcome, then he should probably have written a tight, focused prose polemic, not a rich and multilayered poem. Such a document would doubtless now be read by no one except scholars in medieval Italian history.

Here is an extract from the Dante chapter that explores this tension. It looks at the eighth circle of hell, home of the fraudulent, which itself is made of ten bolgias, or ditches, each devoted to a different category of fraud.

In the third bolgia we find the simonists, the worst fraudsters of the lot. Simony is the sin of selling ecclesiastical offices for financial gain, named after Simon Magus, a nefarious magician from the biblical book of Acts. In other words, to be a simonist, one first has to be a powerful person in the Church – somebody capable of profiting from the sale of holy office. Lo and behold, the third bolgia is full of popes. (Never let it be said that Dante pulls his punches or picks easy targets.) The bespoke punishment dreamed up for the simonists is as slapstick as it is terrifying: they are thrust headfirst into a rocky landscape filled with holes. [Mark] Musa’s translation captures the scene with a nice, pulpy colloquialism:

From the mouth of every hole were sticking out

a single sinner’s feet, and then the legs

up to the calf – the rest was stuffed inside.

The soles of every sinner’s feet were flaming;

their naked legs were twitching frenziedly—

they would have broken any chain or rope.

Dante … sees that one pair of legs is twitching more frenziedly than the others, so he asks his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, to be taken to meet him. When the man these legs belong to hears Dante and Virgil speaking, he asks, ‘Is that you, here already, upright? / Is that you here already upright, Boniface?’ Dante is taken aback – no, of course he isn’t Pope Boniface VIII! Whatever could Mr Legs mean by that? Once Dante disabuses him of this notion, it becomes clear that Mr Legs is none other than Boniface’s last but one predecessor as pope, Nicholas III. This particular hole has been carved out for bad, greedy popes, and each time one of them dies he is spirited there and jammed on top of the last, compacting all the others further down into the rock, like rubbish in a chute. Boniface’s place there has already been foretold, a fact we infer from Pope Nicholas’s double take. It’s a sizzling burn.

These could be petty pleasures: scenes of torture and comeuppance whose superficial details may be exciting, but whose deeper relevance has to be painstakingly reconstructed. There’s certainly something curious about the fact that Dante has the whole of the afterlife in which to wander, and yet ends up bumping into a lot of people born in Tuscany during the century leading up to the poem’s composition. Perhaps this is to be expected: one could imagine a modern-day Divine Comedy that gravitated towards Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela and Silvio Berlusconi. (I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination to decide which realm each of these various figures belongs to.)

This in itself touches on a useful lesson, reminding us that politics is ephemeral and culturally relative. Whatever priorities, squabbles and personalities seem dominant today will eventually be dust in the wind of history. This might not be quite Dante’s point; I suspect he fully believed in the enduring relevance of Boniface and Cacciaguida, and wanted the reader to be stunned or inspired by their respective fates. In any case, his ultimate concern is not human history but divine justice. Whether or not Boniface and Cacciaguida will be remembered by anyone except readers of the poem, their crimes and virtues are of eternal relevance to God. Nevertheless, as modern readers, we can set these theological issues aside, to some extent, to swoon at the poem’s hyper-detailed alternative reality, most of whose inhabitants might as well be characters in a fantasy novel (Dante would have been a master of the genre, one suspects). And we are free, whatever our faith, or lack of it, to use the poem as a springboard to meditation – to ponder what will endure from our own chaotic life and times, and what will perish.

It feels easy to relativise the importance of politics when looking at Dante, whose cast of characters seems so arcane to us. Medieval Italy, thank goodness, is a long way away from twenty-first century anywhere. Without occupying The Divine Comedy’s specifically Christian and temporal worldview, it’s hard to feel the ethical stakes as we might with a poem written closer to home. I’ll be turning soon to later sections of the book, which bring us into the twentieth century, where the ethical stakes become much more relevant – yet, as we’ll see, the question of compatibility between poetry and politics doesn’t exactly go away.

Perhaps the biggest shift one notices as one moves towards the modern era in poetry is its evolution from an insider to an outsider artform. The inside and outside reference points I have in mind here relate to cultural power – who has it, and who doesn’t; who has a vested interest in protecting it, and who has more to gain from subverting it. This is a vast simplification, of course: poetry has always been written by a wide array of people across all levels of society, from the poorest to the wealthiest. The difference is that poetry of the poor was for a long time maligned and ignored, apart from the small fragment of it that was rescued as part of a folk tradition. Conversely, the vast majority of poetry that survives in print form from earlier centuries – representing a small fragment of that which would have existed in total – comes from those with access to wealth and the tools of technology, education and literacy. Unsurprisingly, then, the canon skews heavily towards poets who have perpetuated their own survival through the printed word. And these poets, by and large, were committed to poetry as a form of orthodox cultural authority.

To take our trio from earlier, Dante, Chaucer and Milton all have widely different views, even in the brand of Christian theology they espouse. Their political commitments range from the implicit monarchism of Chaucer to the radical republicanism of Milton. But for all of them, poetry would have been a form of civic virtue – something that could be cultivated through instruction, and which contributes to the health and order of the body politic.

From medieval times onward, European humanist education enshrined a canon of classical poets, starting with Homer and Virgil, that one read in the original Latin and Greek and emulated through one’s own compositions. Any innovations in vernacular poetry built on those foundations, and drew their authority from the same well. The great Victorian poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold summed up this longstanding paradigm when he wrote about ‘the grand style’ in poetry, in a famous lecture on translating Homer into English. This was in the mid-19^th century, a time when the foundations of such ingrained cultural supremacy were beginning to creak. However, he came up with a brilliant swan song for this canonical, European poetic tradition, when he described the grand style as being ‘something more than touching and stirring; it can form the character, it is edifying’. This is what made great poetry more than just an ornamental accomplishment for the rich and powerful – it was something that formed the bedrock of their moral thinking. By reading Homer, you could induct a young man in the values of duty, patriotism and the will to govern. Arnold’s Homer, as I say in the book, is a Homer you could build an empire on.

Even in this canonical vein, poetry has always found ways to slip off the cultural straightjacket and be the many-splendored thing that we know it to be. In my view, that’s down to the inherent ambiguity of the form, its richness of meaning, which means that poetic language and ideas are always in tension with themselves – or at least they will be, if they’re any good. (Arnold, not coincidentally, praises Homer for being ‘rapid’, ‘plain and direct’ and ‘eminently noble’ – virtues I can concede as being part of the mix, but only if you allow for their opposites as well. Homer can be slow, complicated, meandering, and gleefully ignoble in the violence he depicts.)

The question then is, what changes? How does poetry go from being a tool of empire to an art form that celebrates individual freedom and establishment critique? There are many factors at play here, but if I had to pinpoint one it would be the rise of Romanticism in Europe. This movement emerged in the late 18^th century and lasted well into the 19^th. Romanticism hinged on what Charles Taylor has called ‘the massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths’. The key upshot of this is that beings with inner depths are going to want to shape their own destiny, not take orders from on high. This goes for poetry as well as politics. There’s a sympathetic analogy to be made between the new styles and subject matter of literary Romanticism and the new forms of social order envisioned during the Age of Revolutions.

In How to Think Like a Poet, I try to capture some of this changing of the guard in a chapter on William Wordsworth, where I contrast him with Alexander Pope, an 18^th-century poet who sums up the conservative values of the Augustan period that preceded Romanticism. After that, though, I choose to focus on poets from beyond Europe. Many of the poets in the latter half of the book were influenced by Romanticism, directly or indirectly, yet they took this Eurocentric tradition and applied it to their own local context, sometimes with a view to violently subverting European power. These are the nation builders, a seam of poets running from Walt Whitman – self-declared prophet of democratic America – to Pablo Neruda and Aimé Césaire, two poets who held political office for Marxist parties in postcolonial Chile and Martinique respectively.

The poet from this grouping I want to focus on today, though, is someone who had a much more agonised relationship with his social role. Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in 1861. He came from a wealthy, land-owning Bengali family that had made various accommodations with British rule during the time of the East India Company and the Raj. From an early age, however, Tagore bridled at empire and dreamed of a future where India would be free. His prodigious literary output was taken up as a jewel of Indian cultural pride as various national independence movements started to form. When he became the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, his national hero status was assured. Today, a setting of one of his hymns provides the Indian national anthem, ‘Jana Gana Mana’.

The irony is that this great avatar of Indian freedom felt deeply uncomfortable with the political struggle for Indian freedom. This paradox is best appreciated by exploring his tempestuous friendship with Mahatma Gandhi, and their disagreements over Swaraj or Indian self-rule. The first excerpt I’m going to read from the Tagore chapter drops in on Gandhi’s ceremonial visit to Tagore at his home in 1915, and explores the nature of their differences.

By this point, Gandhi had started to cultivate the look of humble poverty that is now synonymous with his legend: plain dhoti and khurta clothing a thin body, fuelled by a minimalist vegetarian diet; bare feet; shaven head. In stark contrast, Tagore looked every inch the prosperous zamindar (or landlord) as he welcomed his guest. Corpulent and berobed, with a thick beard and long, flowing hair, he invited Gandhi to join him on a sofa. Gandhi declined, preferring to sit cross-legged on a mat. Whether or not Gandhi intended it, these gestures opened up a fault line, not just between the two men – the ascetic Gujarati on one side, the wealthy Bengali on the other – but between their two approaches to the political questions of the day. In a nutshell, the visual iconography posed the questions, how far are you willing to accommodate the status quo? And what are you willing to sacrifice in order to change it?

It wouldn’t take long for these deeper rifts to surface in public. Tagore was a critic of non-cooperation, and wrote a rather moralizing open letter to the English missionary C. F. Andrews opining on the subject. This led to a cool but steely reply from Gandhi published in his own journal, Young India. Gandhi gave his article a title that cuts right to the heart of an ongoing debate about how, when and to what extent it might be desirable for poets to get involved in politics – ‘The Poet’s Anxiety’. Dripping with irony, it begins by skewering Tagore’s growing status as ‘the Poet of the world’. Far from the figure of respect that this lofty title implies, Gandhi depicts Tagore as a blustering worrywart weighed down by the responsibilities of his global platform.

Above all, Gandhi thought Tagore was overly concerned with how the struggle for Swaraj looked in the eyes of the British. ‘He says he has striven hard to find himself in tune with the present movement,’ Gandhi deadpans. ‘He confesses that he is baffled.’ Digging the knife in, he goes on to suggest that Tagore’s problem can be put down to his aesthetic refinement and cultured sensibility. ‘I have never been able to make a fetish of literary training,’ Gandhi writes. ‘My experience has proved to my satisfaction that literary training by itself adds not an inch to one’s moral height and that character-building is independent of literary training.’

The two men were reconciled later in life, but I believe this rift left a lasting dent in Tagore’s confidence. From the 1920s until his death in 1941, nine years before Indian independence, Tagore’s poetry becomes more open-ended and dreamy, as it reaches towards a quiet pacifism at odds with the temper of the times. Gandhi’s version of Swaraj required hard compromises and a willingness to sideline not just one’s material comfort, but also one’s freedom to dream and even poeticise. It’s only now I look at it that I see an unwitting echo of Arnold’s encomium to Homer in Gandhi’s references to ‘moral height’ and ‘character building’. The crucial difference is that for Arnold poetry itself is ‘edifying’ and able to ‘form the character’. For Gandhi, on the other hand, poetry – or ‘literary training’ – has become an encumbrance: an anxious habit of mind that creates doubt and solemnity where there should be decisive action.

Later in the chapter, I venture a short comparative reading between Tagore and the European poet I believe he most resembles, W.B. Yeats. There are strong biographical as well as critical reasons to draw the two writers together. Yeats played an instrumental role in introducing Tagore’s work to a European audience when Tagore travelled to England in 1912, bearing an exercise book filled with self-translated English versions of the poems in his recent Bengali collection, Gitanjali. Thanks to Yeats’s ministrations, these soon found their way into appreciative hands among the London literati, and from there it was a remarkably short road to Nobel success the following year.

Despite this apparently very happy ending, things soon soured between Yeats and Tagore. To pick up the story, I’ll present a little more from the book.

This complicated, unequal association may also have played a part in Tagore’s gradual fall from grace. Yeats latched on to Tagore and almost as quickly dropped his interest, in ways that seem rather cringeworthy today. Soon after Tagore’s Nobel win, the gaze of modernist London would move on, leaving him a victim of what Amartya Sen has called ‘the boom and the bust’ of western enthusiasm for eastern culture (‘A wonderful thing is imagined about India and sent into a high orbit, and then it is brought crashing down’). By the end of the decade, a jealous Yeats was pooh-poohing Tagore and claiming, quite spuriously, that the English Gitanjali was largely his own work.

Cultural exchange is rarely straightforward, particularly when there’s a power differential like race in play. For all this, Yeats remains a powerful presence in Tagore’s story. He is also closer to the Indian writer in spirit than his ego-tripping advocacy can suggest. As Louise Blakeney Williams has argued, Yeats and Tagore both came from colonies (Ireland and India, respectively) that had much in common, and both men maintained a similarly ambiguous position within their national independence movements. ‘Both authors,’ writes Williams, ‘condemned the “blood-stained nationalism,” as Tagore put it, or what Yeats described as “the violence of the mob” that often accompanied extreme nationalism.’ Both men, in short, were poets rather than guerrillas. They shrank from radicalism, and valued their own independence of mind as much as, if not more than, the collective independence that could be won at the point of a gun.

Yeats wrote two poems that capture this predicament brilliantly. One is ‘Easter, 1916’, a collective elegy to the doomed uprising in Dublin that year, crowned by the insight that ‘Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart’. This has a direct application to the central drama of Tagore’s life. He dreaded the many sacrifices that Gandhi called on Indians to make, and worried that they would ‘make a stone’ of the national heart. No less relevant is Yeats’s other great poem of counter-revolutionary ambivalence, ‘The Second Coming’. Best known these days for its prophetic third line (‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’), the poem carries forward the argument about the rights and wrongs of violent resistance:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Tagore would never have called Gandhi the ‘worst’ of anything, yet the contrast between that great man’s ‘passionate intensity’ and his own wavering conviction was plain for all to see.

Ultimately, then, Tagore’s poetry offers an eloquent excuse for stepping aside from the political fray. If you feel positively towards him, one might frame this as a commitment to gradualism, individual liberty, and other humanist values. It wasn’t like Tagore was a reactionary; he just didn’t want change to come at a cost of bloodshed and moral ugliness. One could frame his contribution to liberation in terms of spiritual inspiration. We can’t all be foot soldiers, goes the argument; some of us need to make the beautiful, enduring things that are worth fighting for. But if you were feeling uncharitable, you’d of course go the other way, lining up with Gandhi to decry Tagore’s anxious, artistic conscience. On the most radical view, his writing might contribute to a quietist fantasy that meaningful change can ever come without costs. Maybe more hearts should risk becoming stones in order to make the sacrifices necessary for revolution.

I hope that these turn out to be false dichotomies – that is, that there’s no need to choose between collective conscience or individual freedom, political liberation or private dignity. I hope, moreover, that poetry can be a way of thinking through the hard realities of politics, not a binary opposite but something like a critical friend. This is roughly how I characterise the work of the last poet in my survey, Audre Lorde (if you discount the composite figure I end on with ‘How to Think Like a Contemporary Poet’). These days, Lorde is best known for her visionary speeches and essays, which have done a huge amount to shape the worldview of the contemporary left. A self-described ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, she coined the phrase ‘Your Silence Will Not Protect You’, a motto that has at times become a slogan in recent years, and which could be brandished at any poet or fellow traveller, like Tagore, looking to keep a tactful distance from the coal face of radical action. Beyond this, perhaps her key contribution is to the concept of intersectionality, the theory that different forms of marginalisation overlap and reinforce one another. The term was first formulated by the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 but we can glimpse it, embryonically, in the terms of Lorde’s essay, ‘There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions’.

Lorde stands up as a heavyweight political thinker, in other words, as well as a poet. Not for nothing, though, does her work cleave into the categories of poetry and prose – prose, broadly speaking, for when she is trying to get something down clearly and exhort an audience to action; poetry, for when she needs to sit with the intractable emotional truth of something. Even with this apparent dividing line, however, the claims of politics haunt her poetry – indeed, her poetry can be read as an extended testament to the idea that the personal is political. What’s underappreciated, however, in discussions of her, is the way that the personal always, inevitably, complicates and distorts one’s political purpose – and this is a drama that comes through powerfully in her work.

The Lorde poem I discuss at length in my book is called ‘Power’, and it brings all these tensions to a rolling boil. Here is the opening:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric

is being ready to kill

yourself

instead of your children.

This is a fiendishly difficult sentence to parse, since it depends on a set of dense abstractions and metaphors that have the deceptive appearance of grammatical balance. (It sounds like, ‘The difference between a mammal and a reptile is that one has hair and the other has scales.’) But once you start trying to map out the equivalences, everything gets very tricky. Is poetry killing yourself and rhetoric killing your children? Grammatically, that seems to be required, but what would that actually mean? In the book, I go through several possible readings, most of which depend on the idea that poetry and rhetoric are both important and hard endeavours that cost us differently. But I finish on an alternative reading that I think gets closest to Lorde’s meaning:

But what if we looked at this in a different way, as though the meaning of the metaphor was that you kill yourself precisely to avoid having to kill your children? (Think of a bomb about to go off: which parent wouldn’t jump on it?) That’s certainly one available nuance of what ‘instead’ could mean in that sentence.

And that got me thinking again about rhetoric, and how so often it’s just another way of saying ‘manipulation’ or ‘propaganda’. Empty rhetoric. What if poetry was the form of writing we did to avoid falling into that trap – not so much the flipside of rhetoric as its antidote? Maybe, I thought, we write poems to stay in touch with the chaos of reality, so that when the time comes to clear our minds and get our considered viewpoints down in prose, what emerges isn’t the bogus promise of rhetoric, but something closer to wisdom. This is the impression that I get from Lorde in her finest essays and speeches. ‘Take me or leave me,’ she seems to say, ‘but here is where I stand. This is what liberation could look like. Now – will you join me?’

This is the best answer I can offer, ultimately, to that question which has bedevilled me today – how can poetry be political? Poetry, on this view, may necessarily be separate from political action, but in certain special circumstances it becomes a unique kind of political workbook or laboratory – ‘a space’, as I say of Lorde’s work, ‘in which all the clashing thoughts and sensations of [her] political imagination can mingle and collide’.

If I’d been more agile, or had more room to play with in the book, I might have drawn a further connection at this point. The English poet W.H. Auden wrote a brilliant elegy to Yeats when the latter died in 1939. ‘In Memoriam W.B. Yeats’ is one of the great poems about poetry, and the key question that animates it is the same as mine today, about the relationship between poetry and politics. Let’s look at the second part of the poem in its entirety, where a lot of the magic happens:

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay.
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

Before talking about the great stuff here, we should probably acknowledge that one line – ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’ – hasn’t aged so well. You see what Auden’s driving at – that the trauma and strife of Irish national life spurred some of Yeats’s best work – but it’s a clumsy, condescending way of putting it to say the least. Nevertheless, the structural role this sentence plays is important. The next line reads ‘Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still’, meaning that Yeats has lived and died without altering the basic facts of existence. Zooming out from the poem, this might seem counterintuitive. In 1922 an Irish Free State was established, vindicating the political struggle that Yeats had chronicled in his poetry. Ireland was a very different place at the time of Yeats’s death compared to what it was at the time of his birth, in 1865. But whatever role Yeats’s poetry might have played in that change is too complicated to pinpoint – as we have seen, it was a role that may often have acted as a check on the momentum of independence as much as an inspiration.

‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ is Auden’s conclusion, though this apparent admission of defeat needs to be tempered by the following qualifications: ‘it survives / In the valley of its making’; ‘it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth’. These oft-quoted lines have spawned a mini critical cottage industry over the years. They seem to provide an elegant, suitably complex solution to the puzzle of poetry and politics: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ provides the realism, deflating the poet’s messianic ambition to rise to the occasion and use their art to alter the course of history. (A corollary reading: imagine that poetry ever did make something concrete happen, in the manner of a speech act like ‘Get out of the building, there’s a fire!’ Such a poem surely wouldn’t be worth reading, right?)

But it’s the last line that provides the idealistic uplift. Poetry may make nothing happen, but ‘it survives’ as ‘A way of happening, a mouth’. This returns dignity to the poet and allows them some kind of speechmaking role in the background of public affairs. To use Shelley’s famous words, we can be ‘unacknowledged legislators’, shaping ideas in ways that may make a tangible political contribution eventually, but only in a roundabout way – after the poetry has flowed down ‘the valley of its making’ and spent some time in the ‘Raw towns that we believe and die in’.

There are different ways of reading this, of course, as there always are. It strikes me today that ‘A way of happening, a mouth’ can easily slide into something slightly self-satisfied and apolitical: poetry as a stakeholder in the marketplace of ideas, burbling away unthreateningly in the corner. This is a role that feels increasingly uncomfortable in a world where the ideals of liberal democracy are so under threat, where the marketplace of ideas too often means giving elbow room to racists, misogynists and other right-wing extremists. Is poetry just to be another impotent ‘mouth’, on a par with Louis Theroux asking civil questions to manosphere influencers? That doesn’t seem to me to be a fate worth settling for. To return to Yeats: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’

However – I do believe that this ‘way of happening’, this ‘mouth’ that Auden imagines poetry to be, can be something much more powerful as well. Read another way, these words chime with the spiritual and political work that Lorde does in her poetry, clearing space for the political writing that does make something happen more directly.

I want to close with a poem that I only encountered for the first time in April, which I believe testifies to the enduring way that poetry can be a political way of happening. The poem is called ‘It Was Beirut, All Over Again’. It was written by the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan in 1990, the final year of the civil war that ravaged her home nation for fifteen years. I encountered the poem when it was shared as an Instagram post by the Jewish Voice for Peace movement, in the context of Israeli strikes on Lebanon the day after a ceasefire had been signed with Iran. What I find brilliant in this poem is the way it plays with the word ‘Beirut’ in grammatically unexpected ways that make us newly sensitised to cyclical patterns of violence. In Adnan’s hands, ‘Beirut’ becomes more than a place – it becomes a condition, a state of being, and a node connecting struggles for liberation across the planet.

It was Beirut, all over again,
it was Beirut on the radio
El Salvador on TV
it was Sabra & Shatila
in the memory
it was Usulutan in the heart

It was Beirut, again,
when we thought Beirut went
to rest, but Beirut will not sleep
until El Salvador sleeps
and San Francisco will
not eat
until Eritrea eats
and El Salvador
will not die

Here is the whole poem, which demands to be read in full.

Severity has a conservative history, then. For Britain, it was an element in the moral frame of empire, where I imagine public smiling held a taboo for many British citizens (too incontinent, lacking in backbone) and a worse cost for subjugated peoples who might smile out of turn and be taught a lesson. This is what makes the long-running jollification of the transatlantic right feel incongruous. Forget the more remarked-on vibe shift of the second Trump presidency, which is really just a reversion to the norm. The change I’m interested in is the gradual one which has seen the right take ownership of gaiety.

I don’t know where to pinpoint the start of this phenomenon. Boris Johnson certainly accelerated the trend through his years of pranking in high office, and it’s continued on a grand scale with Trump, who for all his Sturm und Drang scaremongering embodies a certain ‘do what I like’ jouissance as well. Nowhere, though, is the hedonic impulse of the modern right better summed up than in the ubiquitous image of Nigel Farage clutching a pint with a nicotine smile, surrounded by a throng of supporters down the pub. He’s the only politician I know who can drink beer and appear entirely authentic, as though he’s itching for the next one rather than waiting for the camera to turn away so he can surreptitiously abandon it at a corner table. The incongruity is that Farage also lays claim to a large swathe of Britain’s nostalgic imagination, which isn’t supposed to be debauched. He sums up a longing for the glories of empire, even as he wipes a band of froth off his not-so-stiff upper lip and beams at his audience – a devilish trick that makes life very hard for his opponents. The British left is miles behind in understanding, much less matching, his Cheshire Cat appeal.

Here’s an image from my walk to work in Stratford, east London, that captures the patriotic right-wing land grab on happiness. I spotted it on Montfichet Street, a motorised drag along the backside of Westfield, enlivened by stickers slapped up by visiting football fans on their way to watch their team play West Ham at the nearby London Stadium.

There’s a lot, as they say, to unpack here. The Chelsea lion, a poppy for our heroes, the amazing legend ‘Carefree since 1905’ (what, even during two world wars, when those heroes were perishing?): I only wish I could make out what was in the top-right quadrant to complete the semiotic whirligig.

It’s the carefree bit that most interests me here, of course. A word that should be light and gay has been wrenched into a snarl. Wikipedia tells me that the phrase can be traced to a 1982 Chelsea away game in Sweden, where fans started singing, ‘Carefree, wherever we may be, / We are the famous CFC’ to the tune of ‘Lord of the Dance’. The chant might be intended, Wikipedia adds, ‘to demonstrate indifference, valour and possibly belligerence when in an alien and hostile environment’, and it seems hard to argue with that analysis. But what gets me is the plausible deniability of it, too. Here clearly part of a hooligan identity, the phrase nevertheless contains more than just blunt irony (we’re carefree but we’ll fuck you up). Almost silently it can be extended to a broader constituency on the soft patriotic right that wants to check out of all the woke modern drama and lead a normal happy life.

And the left, naturally, isn’t ready to grant that wish. We have good reason to be angry, so normal service isn’t an option. Years of political failure have bred an inner seriousness on the left, a hankering after rectitude and discipline. I see righteous versions of that schoolmasterly injunction – Wipe that smile…! – simmering beneath the surface of online discourse, whenever a smile comes across as too triumphant, too oblivious, too inured to injustice, too much. Taylor Swift’s engagement jamboree is a prominent recent example of this failure to read the room (connected, it should be acknowledged, to her wider pattern of silence on Gaza).

More broadly, the heinousness of Israel’s genocide has prompted discussion along the lines of, ‘Are we allowed to enjoy things while Gaza is starving?’ This is a question I take seriously, however cautious one should be about centring western liberal guilt at a time when a population is being systematically slaughtered. In this post, I don’t mean to add to that debate, as such; I merely want to point out that it’s a question that would never register on the cultural right. Try flipping the polarity of the moral compass and fleshing out the same question with different, right-wing inputs. Are we allowed to enjoy things while small boats are landing on our beaches? Are we allowed to enjoy things while foreigners are menacing our women? Well, of course we are, runs the retort, and it’s nobody’s fucking business if we do. The world may be going to hell, but we’ll have a laugh in the meantime and fight the good fight. We can handle the cognitive dissonance. Anyway, we’re on the up.

Perhaps it’s a feature, not a bug, of being on the left that we’re called to care about other people and calibrate our own behaviour in response to their needs. Deep down I think that’s why I’m left, not right, and I wouldn’t have it any other way – but it creates a fatal asymmetry when you’re trying to connect with people who, in the ambiguous language of the Chelsea sticker, simply want to be ‘carefree’. Any appeal to altruism or solidarity risks never getting out of the gate if all the other person hears is a shrill demand that they sacrifice self-interest and stub out their metaphorical fag.

For all these reasons, then, my ears pricked up when I read James Schneider’s interview with Oliver Eagleton last summer, which directly addresses the left’s mood problem. I’ve already written about Schneider and Eagleton’s conversation in an essay about political coalitions and holiday resorts that I posted back in September. I’m framing this essay as ‘Part 2’ because it returns to the Schneider-Eagleton interview and develops the concept of ‘pastoral politics’ that I floated in the earlier essay – a kind of non-toxic variation on populism that involves ‘putting the complex into the simple’ (to paraphrase William Empson) and speaking honestly to people’s desire for the good life.

Here’s Schneider’s prescription for a new political culture for the left. I’ve highlighted the hero sentence in bold, but I’ll quote the rest of the answer in full because the context is important.

In contemporary Britain, the establishment has no story to tell: it says that everything is basically fine and you should shut up about your problems. The reactionary bloc, meanwhile, says that everything is bad: you can’t get an NHS appointment, housing is unaffordable, your pay has gone down, and the reason for all this is Muslims, migrants and minorities. When these are the only two narratives on offer, then the latter is likely to win, because at least it speaks to some real grievances. But the truth is that attacking minorities is itself a minority position. There might be a certain type of pervasive racism in Britain, but most people really do not spend their time thinking about how much they hate foreigners, so there is a clear opening for a different narrative. What we should be offering instead is ‘class war with a grin’. We should reject all the pieties of the political-media-state class, for they are hated by the public, and rightly so. We should create controversies rather than retreating from them. This communicative style is often called left populism. It involves drawing a big, bold line of antagonism in which there is unity on our side and division on the other. That line of antagonism is extremely simple: the reason for our problems is the bankers and the billionaires. They are at war with us, so we are going to war with them. We should aim to baffle and outrage the media establishment with a political style that is combative but also joyful. We should have meetings like those I’ve been describing, with music and food and discussion groups, and where people can come away with clear actions to carry out. This naturally means that the party should be based mostly outside Westminster; it should not be associated with blokes in suits who spend their time mumbling disingenuously to news cameras.

There’s lots to love here. Schneider’s vision speaks proudly and instinctively to my emotional political temper. Politics should be contentious and create dividing lines for change, but also outlets for hope. At present, Westminster politics is washed-out and managerialist, which creates the conditions for Cheshire Cats to sweep in and spike the nation’s pint while it thinks it’s having banter at the bar – so it stands to reason that, to cut through, we need to create better, more inclusive banter at a different bar. Class war can be executed fairly and effectively if it’s accompanied by a grin rather than a scowl.

Rousing though it is, Schneider’s vision invites some pushback. For a start, at this moment in political life, who can be sanguine that ‘most people really do not spend their time thinking about how much they hate foreigners’? The interview was published on July 25 2025, mere weeks before Operation Raise the Colours began, bringing the British summer to a sticky, racist close. That mood has only normalised since, with Labour, the Tories and Reform competing on the same turf about migration and border policy. It would be nice to think that this mood could be dispelled with a bit of targeted class action against the bankers and billionaires, but I suspect the false consciousness about ‘Muslims, migrants and minorities’ is pretty baked in by this point. All the more reason to get cracking, then, and turn the tide with a ‘combative[,] joyful’ politics that gains ground from the racists – but it’ll be a slog, and the harder work of antiracism will sometimes sit awkwardly with positivity. We can promise solidaristic joy but nothing especially ‘carefree’.

Encouragingly, I see early signs that class war with a grin could be taking root as a strategy on the new left. Your Party is by now pretty much universally accepted to be an embarrassment, confirming early fears that it would devolve into the usual left-wing knife fight in a phone box. Despite a bad start, though, I still think Zarah Sultana can be a great asset to the left bloc at the next election. She takes the political fight, specialising in pithy takes on the issue du jour that reflect widely accepted wisdom on the left. Sultana’s takes have the advantage of being easily understood and authentic, two qualities which command respect beyond the confines of the tribal left and earn her the right to preach to a bigger choir.

That’s the class war bit, and probably the priced-in aspect of Sultana’s talent. Less appreciated, though, is her ability to do the grin. She’s a natural on social media in the Zohran Mamdani mould, even – dare we say it – rivalling Farage in her knack for meeting people IRL and catching a vibe on camera. When she posts an image of herself larging it at an Oasis gig (caption: ‘The Zarahplan’), one doesn’t automatically puke or cry bullshit as one might with any member of the cabinet. One sees the face of a person who probably did wear out the grooves on What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? as a kid, and if she didn’t – well, at least it looks that way. (Keir Starmer, meanwhile, was a legitimate indie kid at uni and probably wore out the grooves on Hatful of Hollow many times over, but resembles someone today who would consider Keane cutting edge.)

It’s easy to sniff at this and see the usual politician zeitgeist chasing. Easier still – indeed, temperamentally essential for many on the left – would be to sneer at Oasis as dad rock for dullards and Union Jack-fetishising perverts. For me, though, the strategic importance of an image like this can’t be overestimated. No, Zarah isn’t here to take away your bucket hat or your beer. She won’t be scolding you or trying to improve your taste. She wants to give you more money in your pocket and, yeah, probably knock a zero or two off Noel and Liam’s bank balance. They’re big lads, though. They can take it.

Focusing on pop cultural signifiers might feel like trivial window dressing or, worse, condescending philistinism. It’s a short hop from saying ‘people like Oasis’ (or holiday resorts, for that matter) to the kind of sentiment I sometimes see attributed to Richard Osman along the lines of, ‘Oh normal people really just like quiz shows, soaps and having a choccy biccy in their pyjamas.’ My argument isn’t that the left has to chase the middle of the cultural road and water down any hint of radicalism to get there; it’s more that you can be genuinely radical, and de-scarify radicalism, by combining it with a genuine respect for people’s pleasures. Ideally, of course, you should embrace and embody them.

I think Schneider is onto a similar point when he says this:

My dream is a party that hits with the same impact as ‘Turn the Page’, the opening track on The Streets’ debut album Original Pirate Material. Something you’ve never heard before, yet instantly recognisable; unmistakably British and rooted in everyday life, from the pubs to the pavements. A sound – or in our case, a politics – that effortlessly blends cultures and traditions, anchored in class and community but moving forward with confidence and style. We need to inhabit this sort of national-popular register.

Hear, hear – and by citing ‘Turn the Page’, practically a national anthem for my mates growing up, Schneider aligns himself more closely with my tastes than Sultana does at the Oasis gig. The principle’s the same, though. The Streets and Oasis both embody wit, attitude, endurance, style. They do poetry in the everyday, joy amid shit.

Hear the strings rising, the war’s over, the bells ring

Memories fading, soldiers slaying, looks like geezers raving

The hazy fog over the Bullring, the lazy ways the birds sing

(‘Turn the Page’)

This offers something better than ‘carefree’. It connects the things that can make us careworn – the fog and inner-city grime – to the ebullience of ‘geezers raving’ or ‘the lazy ways the birds sing’. Going out on a limb, it strikes me as a particularly Brummie perspective. When I lived and worked there a couple of years ago, I fell in love a little with the vibe – unpretentious, upbeat, multicultural to the bone, funny as hell. I’d walk back through the Bullring, hemmed in by the maligned ring-roads and deindustrialised cityscape of Digbeth, and feel at home. (Not coincidentally, in my view, the city is famously chameleonic from a political perspective, grounded in a sense of ‘fluid class mobility’, as Owen Hatherley has summarised.)

In recent weeks, another city has (re-)emerged as a centre of class warfare with a grin. On February 26, the Greater Manchester constituency of Gorton and Denton elected Hannah Spencer to be its first Green MP. Her acceptance speech has rightly been celebrated for the way it fused old school Labour values with full-throated support for contemporary progressive causes (e.g. Gaza) that the Labour Party, in its infinite, triangulating wisdom, struggles to touch with a barge pole.

When it comes to the class warfare part, Spencer says the quiet part out loud, proudly trumpeting her career path as a plumber while paying tribute to,

The people who work hard but can’t put food on the table. Can’t get their kids school uniforms. Can’t put their heating on. Can’t live off the pension they worked hard to save for. Can’t even begin to dream about ever having a holiday. Ever. Because life has changed. Instead of working for a nice life, we’re working to line the pockets of billionaires. We are being bled dry.

My ears pricked up, in particular, when I heard her go to bat for holidays. This is precisely the kind of thing I was driving at in Part 1 of this essay – the scope the left has to drive a wedge around holidays from a justice angle. OK, so she tactically skirts the question of whether those holidays are going to be virtuous, campervan staycations or short-haul flights to the Med – a distinction that presumably does still matter to the Green Party – but I think we can allow her a little fudge at this stage.

The point is that she’s not in a hairshirt. She expresses the value of solidarity and benign self-interest plausibly in the same breath. And if the grin should be any more in doubt, here’s the now-famous photo of her celebrating her triumph with a tray of chips and curry sauce.

Who knows whether this Green surge will turn out to be a flash in the pan or the real deal. For now – between Sultana, Mamdani and Spencer – I’m smiling and enjoying the experience of seeing other comrades smiling back at me. It points a new way forward for a vibrant, twenty-first century social-democratic politics that can shake off the snares of miserabilism and guilt that have prevented any viable left front from capturing the British imagination in recent years.

You’ve probably noticed, but the rhetoric around immigration has gone batshit crazy recently, accelerating into the red from an already pretty batshit baseline. Goaded on by an ascendant far-right, Britain is becoming disastrously more racist by the day, and I’m not sure anybody has an adequate grip on what to do about that yet.

We’ll all have different breaking points with this issue – different moments when the priced-in, ambient drone of British xenophobia becomes tinnitus-loud – but mine came this week on the tube as I flicked between an article by Peter Geoghegan about the Reform party conference alongside more recent reports that Farage has pledged to revoke Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) status for thousands of British residents. In the long run, this policy platform may turn out to be nothing more than a cheap and nasty promise to be dropped when it becomes convenient (Farage certainly has form for those). I don’t know, though; the Geoghegan article cited a poll that put the ceiling of support for the party at 42%, so I’m starting to worry that parts of the rancid pantomime might end up turning real. For whatever reason, ILR has has turned into an emblem of everything that could go wrong if Brexit Britain slides into becoming Reform UK. It scares me, and I can’t allow the moment to pass without articulating why.

It scares me because of what we stand to lose – not just migrants with ILR, but the rest of us with more secure forms of status who would be impoverished by their deportation. I like living in a multicultural place (Britain, yes, but more specifically the London Borough of Harrow, one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the country, which at the time of the 2021 census had a majority-immigrant population). I like having friends, relatives, neighbours and casual associates from different national diasporas and language communities. I like the delicate, organic cultural ecology that has grown up here and I don’t want it to be ruined.

I could speak more about the particular migrant stories of people I know, but I don’t think I should do so casually in this forum. There’s no need to appeal to them as individuals to argue that they deserve to be here and that they enrich my life. They are not here to enrich my life, of course, and their ‘leave to remain’ should never depend on that alone (incidentally, ‘leave to remain’: what a dreadful British euphemism, reeking of strained politesse). I mean to say only that they do enrich my life, and that it would be a grievous loss if their presence here was somehow reverse engineered.

I put it in this slightly childish, self-interested manner because I think more British nationals need to stand up and shout about what’s at risk here. Too often, the media frames immigration as a zero-sum struggle between two broad factions: (1) immigrants, who want to get into Britain and reap the benefits, and (2) British citizens, with their ‘legitimate concerns’ about what will happen if immigration gets out of control. In between, there are two smaller groups: (3) ethical allies, if we can call them that, who support immigration on social justice grounds, out of a commitment to open borders, human rights and/or antiracism, and (4) pragmatic allies, who support it on economic, neoliberal grounds – good for GDP, solves skills shortages, etc. The great far-right theory is that for decades (3) and (4) ganged up with (1) to thwart the will of (2), despite the whole ragged pro-immigrant coalition being smaller overall in size (‘ye are many, they are few’, to bastardise Shelley). Terminating this state of affairs is the reset that Farage and co are looking to bring about when they come to power, thereby restoring the democratic will of the silent majority.

All this is fine up to a point as a schema for understanding the breakdown of different ‘stakeholders’ in the immigration row. I’d aspire to stand up as a meaningful member of (3), and would agree that the most important reason to oppose anti-migrant resentment is on the grounds of justice. Any mutual benefit I may receive from multiculturalism is a secondary concern, though perhaps not a petty one.

What the schema misses, in my view, is any adequate sense of immigration as a lived social reality, and social good, for millions of people born and bred in the UK, whose belonging to the country would be under no immediate legal threat if Reform put their policies into action. If you stand up for immigration, you’re assumed either to be a do-gooder or a bean-counter, and I think we need to develop a more capacious yet realistic narrative of its value. The individual British people who would find Reform UK to be a sadder, more depleted place cut across (3) and (4) but may also be lurking in the great undifferentiated mass of (2) – a genuine silent majority who could make a positive impact if they woke up, smelled the fascist coffee, and opposed being co-opted into this hateful, paranoid vision of Britain.

To celebrate the benefits of multiculturalism has a queasy feel to it. If you’re not careful, it slips into a patronising hymn to culinary diversity (a curry house on every corner!), sporting success (let’s all do the Mobot!) and the frictionless wonder of international travel (‘Generation Easyjet!’). Perhaps some reboot of that New Labour discourse is required to buy back popular consent for immigration, I don’t know. One would rather it could be done without fetishising spicy food or the protected characteristics of Olympians, but we’re at a point where one would rather it be done clumsily than not at all.

Or perhaps – counterintuitively? – it’s the very ordinariness of immigration that we need to focus on. Immigration has been happening for a long time, as its opponents are only too keen to stress, so it is embedded in our society in ways that can’t, that mustn’t, be disentangled. To do so would cause massive damage. Couldn’t we even frame the desire to preserve multiculturalism as conservative, after a fashion? When I think about the landscapes of my own entirely British, White-bodied, middle-aged life, and try somehow to erase immigration from the scene, I can barely imagine what they’d look like.

I suppose the erasure trick might sound attractive if you hate the place you live, but I don’t – do you? That’s the question I’d like to put to people lobbying for Reform (or Reform-like) policies from a so-called ‘respectable’ position. The bully boys on far-right marches are up for tearing the place to pieces, but are you? What version of history are you looking to conserve?

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I think here of a character that Geoghegan meets in his dispatch from the Reform party conference. Not someone from the (quote-unquote) respectable core of the Reform movement, admittedly, but a member of its wilder fringes, a man who speaks to Geoghegan while ‘wearing a black T-shirt with an image of a Crusader and the slogan ‘For England’’. He’s a merry kind of racist who gladly declares that we are on the brink of ‘inter-ethnic violence’. The most chilling thing he says, though, is that Tommy Robinson himself doesn’t go far enough in his nativism – proof that even the hardest of drugs create an urge for bigger and bigger hits. ‘Tommy is a civic nationalist,’ our crusader says. ‘He believes you can become British. I think you need British ancestry to be British. A lot of people here think this.’

On the last point, at least, I don’t doubt him for a minute. A lot of people in the wider Reform movement probably do think that you need British ancestry to be British. But what does that mean? In my own metropolitan academic circles, it would be widely understood to the point of truism that ‘British ancestry’ is a pseudo-scientific, bogus category that ignores the fact that there is no stable ‘British’ nation and never has been. We’re a nation of multiple historical diasporas dating back millennia. Nonetheless, we’re at the point where we need to be making these points loudly, in non-metropolitan or academic settings. Given how ILR has reared its nasty head for certain migrants with the misfortune to have moved to this country recently, I can’t help but feel anxiety, say, about my mother-in-law, born in India, who arrived in Britain in the early ’60s. When does legally protected British citizenship not become enough to satisfy this thirst for an illusory ancestral nation?

Here are some other questions I’d like to ask if I had the platform or the guts to talk to the people in this universe, as Geoghegan has – especially the people who share the same kinds of worldview as our man in the crusader t-shirt, but would seek that alluring position of non-racist respectability.

I live in Harrow, where do you live? I look forward to my son attending a school where over 50 home languages are spoken, and growing up speaking Multicultural London English. If you recognise that social scenario but don’t like it, then why not? And if you don’t – if there are only ten languages spoken at your son’s school, or fewer – then what’s your problem? Why are you trying to destroy the fabric of my reality, on a lie? When did you last live in the ancestral land where people looked and talked the same and left their doors on the latch? Where do you live now? Does it actually exist? Who’s the real citizen of nowhere?

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My first post here started in a late summer key, just as the leaves were turning and the gears cranking again in the political calendar. In it, I previewed how I want to use this space to do some capital-p Political thinking from time to time, despite my lack of disciplinary training or wonkish know-how. As a follow-up, then, I’m going to see how that might work in practice, with a concrete topic rather than the broad strokes of my opening salvo. At the same time, this will be my first attempt at a much loved (or loathed) Substack genre, the sprawling essay you could never try to publish anywhere else, making reaches between ideas. Just to give myself (or my readers) a real baptism of fire, it’s going to sprawl across two instalments, this first one about 4500 words. Fair warning.

The context here takes us back a month or so to the start of August and what used to be called the silly season in politics, though nothing feels very silly right now. (Did it ever? For political journalists, maybe.) On holiday in Corfu for a family wedding, I read an interview between Oliver Eagleton and James Schneider on Sidecar, the blog platform of New Left Review. This had been circulating among people I follow on the (mostly literary) British left, so I’d filed it away to read on a rainy – or, as it happened, blisteringly hot Ionian – day.

Titled ‘Building the Party’, the conversation drew on Schneider’s experience as one of the leaders of the Corbynite campaign group Momentum, to examine the prospects of a new splinter group that has emerged on the British left in recent months – the exciting, chaotic, somewhat maddening movement, provisionally titled Your Party, that already, sometimes despite its best efforts, feels like a necessary and tangible Thing. I won’t get into the ins and outs of YP’s bumpy start, but I am looking forward to seeing where it goes. I like how Zarah Sultana is growing in confidence and stature as a leader and feel like an important change could be in the water. I hope they team up with Zack Polanski’s recharged Green Party to mount a serious challenge to Labour at the next election.

Morning Beer with Your Interlocking Neoliberal Logics?

Schneider’s analysis – not affiliated to Your Party, but invested in its success and uniquely informed about the challenges that lie ahead – really hit the spot. Before getting into why, I just want to return to the setting where I read it, in the lobby of the Sentido Apollo Palace, Messonghi, a pan-European mega resort where higher-level thinking was frequently interrupted by blasts of Ed Sheeran and the chatter of children taking inflatables down to the pool. It could have been the least auspicious place imaginable to read 5000 words of closely argued sparring between two leading political thinkers on the millennial left. Via some strange alchemy, however, the resort overlay served an important purpose, I think – a reality check, of sorts, as I toggled back and forth between my screen and the lobby, where coffees and morning beers were being ordered and tops-off, bellies-out dads genially bantering with the kids.

I’m cautious about venturing any armchair anthropological view about holiday resorts. The dangers of condescension, sentimentalism, generalisation, false inference and other forms of bad argument are easy enough to imagine. It was my first time staying at a hotel like that, a place I’d only previously seen satirised, lovingly or otherwise, in British popular culture, so take that for what it’s worth. (A bad anthropologist will often be an outsider communicating an ill-informed viewpoint about the Other.)

I want to take a swing at it, though, and to try to do so responsibly, precisely because what I saw there complicated my preconceptions rather than just confirmed them. It wasn’t a culturally homogenous, overwhelmingly White or monoglot place. Brits Abroad cliches sat side by side with an easy cosmopolitanism. There wasn’t any loutish behaviour that I could see, only a fully inhabited, family-oriented hedonism. People knew what they enjoyed about being there and they were doing it.

If we can make any generalisations about the kinds of people who go to Club Med-style resorts, I think it’s only this – that they represent a big swathe of mainstream culture, the likes of which any mainstream political party would kill to bottle electorally, if only there was some way of setting up a focus group at the pool bar. (‘Cheeky shot of Bucca and a survey to follow, sir?’) A slightly more fine-grained and speculative generalisation would be that they are not, by and large, left-wing spaces. Don’t get me wrong, union members, public sector workers, Labour voters and other fellow travellers would have been at the Sentido Apollo, lurking between the lines. At scale, though, it was joyfully apolitical. People ate, swam, lounged, laughed, tanned, got pissed, repeated, and from the ambient conversation you could just tell that the main voting intentions would have been soft Tory (or local equivalent) or none at all. I guess I’m just willing to go out on a limb about that.

Heed the Distinction!

Two further generalisations. One: this is the kind of demographic that Starmer’s Labour will continue thirstily to pursue, with all the clodhopping silliness of a dad at the school disco. Two (again, more of a punt): this is the kind of demographic that much of the urban, progressive left would be resigned to writing off as a lost cause. Here, I must double underline and bold-type an important distinction: I am not equating this demographic with the ‘left behind’ communities who voted Leave and are now flocking to Reform and daubing St George flags across the English landscape. For a start, I hate the way that even invoking such communities slides effortlessly into acknowledging their ‘legitimate concerns’.

Such communities plainly exist as places on the real and electoral map, though I don’t think the left has given up on trying to reach them. It would be too great an abandonment of the playing field to exit wholesale from working class areas like that – too plain an admission that leftism has migrated from the deindustrialised margins to the metropolitan centre. Indeed, I’ve seen plenty of strenuous counterargument laying out why migrants aren’t to blame for the state of the NHS, stagnating wages, the cost-of-living crisis, or any of the other ills that afflict society. Hope Not Hate and other grassroots organisations frequently work this beat, and thank god for that. This is a battleground the left has to be fighting on tooth and nail, now more than ever, doing the painstaking groundwork of antiracism. Keeping the message simple, not giving up on anywhere just because it’s become a hotbed for ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ (dreadful phrase, which I refuse to dignify by removing the scare quotes).

No, the resort crowd I have in mind aren’t in that bracket. There’ll be a bit of overlap, sure. Some of them might be from towns that have seen St George crosses slapped on roundabouts; some twat giving it large at the bar may even have honked his horn in support. But most of them are pretty chill about immigration, providing it greases the wheels of the service economy and doesn’t ‘get out of hand’. Some would be immigrants themselves, with many more besides coming from second, third or fourth generation migrant families. More to the point, really, their views on immigration would be varied enough not to be an especially salient feature in their group identity.

The resort crowd is geographically and culturally diffuse. Like an annual comic book convention, the resort becomes a place where a particular crowd reaches critical mass, drawn together from different parts of the world by a shared taste or sensibility. Unlike the comic book convention, though, the resort unites a mainstream segment of the population, not a subculture. Similar things happen at football stadiums, pubs, shopping centres, or any site of popular normalcy, if we can call them that – but stick with me a minute while I go out on my third or fourth limb of this essay and say that nowhere is quite as efficient at screening for political faith (or lack of it) as the resort.

This is a place of determined leisure, with a decent if not prohibitive price of entry, usually accessed via a fossil fuel-guzzling short-haul flight, for people who are interested in checking out and forgetting about things with their partner and kids or best mates for a couple of weeks. (How is this different, politically, from a villa in Tuscany? I don’t know, but it is.) It’s a place for people who are kind of, overall, pretty OK with how the world is, and would rather not chat about anything heavy poolside. And for all these reasons and more, it’s kryptonite for the contemporary left. I’m generalising wildly by now, of course, but by all means let’s do a deep dive and see how the hypothesis checks out – I’ll be here for the focus group, holding the shot tray.

The Simple and the Complex

All of which brings me back, in a roundabout way, to Schneider. I probably wouldn’t have come up with this grand theory if I wasn’t reading him at the time. Staying at the Sentido, I’d been dimly aware of a fish-out-of-water feeling, though at the same time I was happy to relax into it for a few days and take the place for what it was – there’s a lot to enjoy about a resort, after all, as you’d hope to be the case anywhere precision-engineered to giving you a bit of what you fancy on your hols.

I was in a buttered-up, pastoral kind of mood, then, when I read ‘Building the Party’, a far cry from the mood of despair and agitation in which I read most left-wing commentary (a mood that the worst left-wing commentary simply reproduces, and which the best left-wing commentary converts into agitation fuelled by hope). It made me want to bring my fellow guests along for the ride, through whatever form of left-wing politics Your Party might evolve into. I wanted to make sure that they weren’t written out of the socialist future we might imagine together. Equally, it exposed the gulf between much current left-wing rhetoric and the anti-rhetoric pleasures of the resort – though Schneider gave me some tools for thinking about how that breach might be repaired.

A brief word on pastoral, a specialised literary word I used in the last paragraph. In Some Versions of Pastoral, the poet and critic William Empson suggested we can think about pastoral as ‘a process of putting the complex into the simple’. Poets classically did this by smuggling big thoughts about the good life into foursquare lyrics about shepherds, though it’s a strategy that many writers have engaged in more subtly by (in Matthew Creasy’s gloss on Empson) ‘compressing a breadth of meaning and response into fictive premises that will always seem simple relative to the complexity of lived experience’. To gloss the gloss: life is tough, in various senses of the word, yet one of the magical powers of literature can be to cut through the difficulty to make things seem temporarily contained and tractable.

Some form of pastoral thinking, in this Empsonian sense, is vital to any viable progressive movement. You’ve got to cut through the noise and transport people somewhere different from the tawdry political settlement in which we live. In the face of common-sense merchants who sneer at progressive solutions, saying they’d just never work, you’ve got to capture the popular imagination with an alternative vision that distils bewildering complexity into credible simplicity. This, it must be stressed, is the opposite of snake-oil populism that lies to people about the nature of the reality (for instance, by claiming that an excess of migrants is the reason NHS waiting lists are so long) and offers simplistic solutions advancing a nefarious, often hidden agenda. The pastoral trick depends on preserving that essential link between truth and simplicity; on framing complex issues within a figurative story that many people can feel deeply and understand. Detractors will say that you’re in the snake oil business, but that’s where you’ve got to take a leap of faith and trust that you’re selling some version of the truth.

Schneider is not a pastoral thinker in this sense. His conversation with Eagleton is dense, allusive, couched in the recondite political language of the activist left. (‘Then there is the construction of popular power,’ runs a typical sentence, ‘building structured organisations that people can use to democratically control different parts of their lives, either by winning concessions from capital and the state, or by partially transcending them – decommodifying certain resources or carving out autonomous spaces.’) Nevertheless, his ideas help to bring that pastoral vision of a functioning popular socialism tantalisingly closer. He keeps things complicated for the diehards but gives us some concepts and ways of talking that could make things fruitfully simple for more people, including my fellow travellers (forgive the pun) at the resort.

There are two interrelated points from this interview I’ll talk about in what follows (no worries if you take this moment to check out, I’ll understand). One will be for today, the other for the next instalment. They are:

1. The electoral coalition Your Party has to win

2. How to win it (or ‘class war with a grin’)

A Workable Coalition

Straight out of the gate, I was hooked into Schneider’s analysis because of the way he helped me to answer a question that had hitherto seemed a proper Rubik’s cube. That is, how can a new left-wing party win a path to power? What kind of coalition do they have to get inside the tent?

Schneider’s first paragraph from the interview bears repeating in full (emphasis my own):

The task of this party should be to undertake different forms of ‘political construction’. First there is the construction of popular unity: taking the constituencies that currently form a sociological majority and translating them into a political majority. In Britain these are the asset-poor working class, downwardly mobile graduates and racialised communities. Most people think about constituencies in purely electoral terms: ‘How can we win a few more seats?’, and so on. But it doesn’t fundamentally matter whether you have fifty or a hundred or two hundred MPs unless your electoral strategy is linked to this wider social project.

Perhaps the binding idea underpinning Schneider’s vision is that electoral politics lies downstream from political and social culture – or it should do, in any case, if it’s to be capable of sustaining real power. Following this logic, it becomes clear why nothing ever seems to change in 21st century Britain: it’s because our electoral politics lie so far downstream from the broader culture of neoliberalism. Asset managers and landlords rule the roost, so any manifesto threatening their advantages is seen as the province of the loony left. As a consequence, nominally left-of-centre parties settle for tinkering at the edges of the neoliberal settlement because they despair of winning elections with any more radical programme for government – evidence, in Schneider’s view, of their myopic attachment to electoral politics at the expense of other, more far-reaching forms of ‘political construction’.

This in itself is an important insight. It proves that Schneider is a serious political thinker, not a snake-oil salesman, since shifting the ground of politics from elections to social coalitions is hard bloody work – hard conceptually, hard in terms of political labour and commitment. You can’t do it overnight, or even with a change of government, and you have to think carefully about what logic underlies the disparate existing cultures that you’re bringing together.

And this is where Schneider the complex thinker pins down a formula of appealing pastoral simplicity. The task lies in translating a ‘sociological majority’ into ‘a political majority’. Namely, it involves unifying three groups with shared but diverse interests: the asset-poor working class, downwardly mobile graduates and racialised communities. What these groups have in common, as you can tell from Schneider’s adjectives, is that they’re all losing out in different ways under the current political settlement. They are ‘asset-poor’, ‘downwardly mobile’ and/or ‘racialised’, none of them things you would want to be, ideally. Though it isn’t explicitly stated, these are also potentially overlapping identities, paving the way for a genuinely intersectional analysis. (A downwardly mobile graduate could also be a member of the asset-poor working class and from a racialised community.)

Why should it be so hard to shepherd these different yet compatible groups into the big left tent? I feel like it’s more or less taken for granted these days that ‘downwardly mobile graduates and racialised communities’ are capable of forming successful left-of-centre voting coalitions in Labour’s urban heartlands. Cue some usually right-of-centre commentator stepping in to point out that there are, in fact, numerous potential fissures in this marriage of convenience, as Sebastian Milbank recently did by claiming that ‘the causes championed by the far Left are blind alleys pointing in opposite directions’. As an apparently self-evident illustration of this fact, Milbank cites the Green Party ‘electing thickly bearded Middle Eastern gentlemen shouting Allahu Akbar’, a xenophobic formula that exposes conservative twitchiness about this emergent coalition.

Whatever: there may be something interesting and evidence-based to explore in the sociological claim that certain ethnic minority (or global majority) communities hold views closer to the hard end of the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum than might sit comfortably with the politics of your average downwardly-mobile lefty graduate. To point out the obvious, the political views of Britain’s racialised communities are not monolithic. The point is surely that such a left-leaning coalition does exist, can win power – at least locally – and remains remarkably steadfast in its intersectional strength. The shared values that bind it together are antiracism and dismay at the ravages of capitalism, in the global south as well as closer to home. Why shouldn’t that be enough in itself to prove sustainable, whatever differences in faith or moral belief might obtain between different sides of the coalition? To say nothing of the bigoted assumption that there can be no intersectional agreement between Muslims and metropolitan liberals on the subject, say, of LGBTQ+ rights (a slur that Zarah Sultana would, rightly, blow a raspberry at).

It's the third branch of that triumvirate – the ‘asset-poor working class’ – that brings the trouble. If we’re not on guard, such a phrase can shade silently into that oft-invoked spectre of the ‘white working class’, and from there, of course, we’re just a hop, a skip and a can of red and white paint away from ‘legitimate concerns’. Schneider’s choice of adjective, ‘asset-poor’, precisely steers away from this conflation by stressing the economic, not racial, basis of class identity. Yet we should be in no doubt about how the realisation of class solidarity within this group has been undermined by the nativist agenda. Simply to refer to a working-class person in most mainstream British contexts is tacitly to bring to mind a striving, honest, respectable citizen of the white majority. That’s the state of play, however one might protest, and it will take an awful lot of patient effort to reverse it.

So that’s one problem standing in the way of effectively building Schneider’s three-part coalition – the manipulation of ‘working class’ in the popular imagination as a white-coded, culturally right-wing identity. But another, less toxic obstacle came to mind as I read the article, in the form of my fellow resort-goers. The setting made me wonder why lots of asset-poor working-class (APWC) people, whatever their background, might not be keen on signing up for an oppositional political movement. These are the politically nonplussed people who are more interested in keeping their heads down and getting abroad once a year than in upsetting the apple cart or calling for radical change. They may also be temperamentally upbeat types who find typical left-wing chat doomy and annoying.

It might be tempting to bypass this apathetic sector of the APWC and build a coalition from what remains. But even if such an artificial division were possible, I don’t think the numbers would work out. (Come on, Sir John Curtice, prove me wrong!) It’s a sector that simply takes up too much of the potential pie. Without making inroads into the resort crowd, I can’t see how one pieces together a political formation that can rival the neoliberal centre. The question is how to tempt people away from that centre, which offers certain better-the-devil-you-know pleasures and conveniences – like fast fashion and attainable holidays – even to the APWC.

Here is an image that, to my mind, sums up the existing cultural zeitgeist that a new left movement has to find a way of talking to if it’s to make genuine inroads.

I saw this Orlebar Brown advert popping up across London this summer. This version I snapped at Harrow-on-the-Hill station in mid-August, and the ripped hoarding makes it tempting to infer some kind of totalising allegory about late-stage capitalism. Here you are, on the platform, waiting for the train that will take you to your horrible job, which you only stick at because the rent needs paying and it gives you enough left over to buy nice threads to go on holiday once a year, and even that small consolation has receded now till next summer, so watch this space while we tear down the ad and paste up a new one getting you couch-ready for cosy season. Takeaways and box sets, here we come!

Tempting, and not wrong up to a point, but the left has to be very careful about how it makes that argument. If it sneers at the pleasures of late capitalism – or worse, seems committed to taking them away – then a crucial segment of their potential coalition will tune out. It’s a commonplace to argue that working class people tolerate inequality because they aspire to becoming billionaires themselves. For some this may true but for many more, I’d venture, the issue isn’t so much wanting the economic freedom to hustle and make tons of money, it’s a more nebulous suspicion that billionairism is tied up in the smaller economic freedoms that you enjoy. You like the holiday, the clothes, the convenience of paying for it online, so it stands to reason that someone somewhere is making a mint off the whole production by running Shopify. You’d rather keep that situation, for all its faults, than roll the dice on something different. Moreover, the way the left bleat on, you just know they’d fuck it up by taxing flights, poking their nose in fashion supply chains, and making online shopping dearer than it should be because drivers and warehouse workers deserve a living wage.

To be clear, these are all fights that the left has to win if it isn’t going to hollow itself out in pursuit of power. I just think we need to be honest about the messaging challenge. To return to the Orlebar Brown ad, the bit we should critique isn’t the aspiration to go on holiday and wear nice clothes, but the section of the ad that has been torn off in the photo above – the fact that you are being seduced into spending beyond your means, and potentially getting into debt, by spreading out payments on Klarna. Why should leisure be financed like this, in a way that keeps you asset-poor? If the left could land a version of this argument, rather than critiquing capitalism in more general, sometimes spoilsport terms, then I think they’d get a better hearing.

An important caveat here is that for many in the APWC, life is an absolute grind. It involves working multiple jobs, living in overcrowded, damp, insecure housing, eating less than you ought to make sure that your children don’t go hungry, living gig to gig with very few employment rights, and having little to no disposable income to spend on holidays. It’s absolutely right that the new left party should have these most vulnerable people at the heart of its agenda. Schneider points to global examples of social and political organisation among the poor, such as the Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, ‘a movement of people who live in informal shack dwellings, has 180,000 members across 102 housing settlements and is carrying out land occupations in four provinces’. This is the kind of radical action (on housing and other key policy issues) that left political movements ought to prioritise. But how to do so without alienating that other part of the APWC, the Orlebar Brown customers paying for loungewear on finance?

This is what makes the APWC such a broad and fragile constituency – politically essential, electorally lucrative, but a devil to hold together because it encompasses very different perspectives and levels of relative deprivation. This is also, not to keep banging on about it, what makes the resort lens so fruitful. One would need to do a proper study to back this up, but it seems safe to say that the typical resort clientele unites two key demographics: (1) the more affluent end of the APWC; (2) middle class people with assets, usually houses. To put it more plainly, some of the resort customer base will be renters going there because it’s just about affordable, and/or because they can finance that lifestyle choice on credit; others will be there because it’s a relatively economical way to have a nice holiday while paying their mortgage.

In other words, the resort cuts the social joints in a crucially different place to Schneider’s analysis, by hiving off a fat segment of the APWC and giving them a shared experience of affluence with the asset rich. For Schneider’s coalition to work, we need to get those people to identify and show solidarity with their AP brothers and sisters who can’t get away on holiday, to see their struggles – and there will be struggles, however nice Corfu was – as related. The best way to do this, I’ve argued in this piece, is to loosen up the rhetoric of the left slightly, to make it pastoral in the colloquial sense, by appealing to a possible world where things will be easier and more pleasurable, not just a more equitable grind. A world where the pleasures you currently enjoy – or more sustainable varieties of pleasure, not a million miles removed – will be socially secured.

In the follow-up post, I’ll talk a bit more about Schneider’s ideas for realising that coalition through a strategy, to use his excellent phrase, of ‘class war with a grin’.

Political commentary doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m a creative writer and academic by trade, a critic and nonfiction writer when I have the time and opportunity. My last book was called How to Think Like a Poet. I like writing closely about literature and extrapolating from that to a broader world of values and ideas. Politics is something I engage with in my home while arguing with the radio, in the pub while arguing (in better humour – we all basically agree) with friends, or until recently in a semi-organised way by attending meetings and knocking doors with the local Labour Party. Gaza put pay to that, and in the two years since October 7 I’ve transferred that frustrated energy to posting about politics on social media, usually in Instagram stories that get read by about a hundred active followers who, like my mates in the pub, will probably agree with me 90 to 100% of the time.

Part of my motivation in starting this Substack, then, is to give this political thinking a chance to breathe, or perhaps to travel further than my real or parasocial mates. I can’t stress enough that my understanding of politics is erratic, untrained, instinctual, and I won’t have the stamina to keep up a Westminster-watching blog or anything like it. (‘A Writing Lecturer Reads the News’ would be an easier elevator pitch, if I could manage it.) What I’m interested in is politics as an ethical, interpersonal, emotional matter – something connected to current affairs and the formal pursuit of power, but not only those things.

My day job as a lecturer at UCL requires me to uphold political impartiality in an institutional capacity, so while reading this newsletter you must assume that all views remain very much my own. But I suppose I’m interested in political questions which could never be perceived as a threat to ‘impartiality’, precisely because they enquire into the partial, affective basis of politics as such – even, or especially, when a person pretends to a position of neutrality. Where do our values come from? What do they embrace or exclude? What are the stories that we tell ourselves when we’re being political? Which other motivations or ambitions might be in the mix? How far are we willing to go? These are questions that I firmly believe it would benefit everybody to consider more openly, from Farage to Mamdani, because doing so would result in better, more thoughtful people and likewise better politics. They’re also the sorts of questions to which literature might have something to contribute, or the study of it at any rate – the kinds of questions I would encourage my students to ask about a fictional text or the speaker of a poem in the classroom.

My own political formation can be traced through my upbringing in a Christian socialist family from South Wales at the turn of the millennium. I grew up on a rich diet of political myth, most of it dating from the late 19^th to early 20^th centuries, a time when the industrial Welsh Valleys came to maturity as a laboratory of social struggle. This was a story of class conflict with a happy teleology, since all the strikes, workers’ institutes, mutual welfare funds and miner’s libraries of the earlier era delivered us to the AD 0 of 1945, when the messiah Aneurin Bevan redeemed this local political vision at national level through his plan to ‘Tredegar-ise’ Britain, starting with the founding of the NHS. I take the piss for emphasis, but only slightly. The humanist optimism inherent in this story has shaped my values from top to bottom, in ways I remain grateful for. The paradox is that it has hamstrung me as a political thinker in the 21^st century, at a moment when the gains of 1945 are either dead in the water or at threat of extinction. Emotionally, I remain wedded to the solutions of social democracy, when intellectually I understand that a very different politics might be required to confront the perils of today.

So that’s a part of it – trying to find out honestly where these romantic Bevanite values can sit amid the contemporary polycrisis: how they might evolve, where they fall short, whether or not they might be worth fighting for still. But the newsletter is called ‘Beyond Mercy’, so I suppose I’d better account for that. This is the name of the poetry collection I’ve been trying and mostly failing to write for maybe three years. My last collection, Karaoke King, came out in 2021 and reflected a kind of slow-burn personal collapse I’d experienced in the years leading up to it. (The book also contains poems about Bruce Springsteen and doggies, so don’t let that put you off too much.) Since publishing it, I’ve come to an almost theological view of what it might mean to rebuild in the aftermath of crisis. The concept I keep hitting on is that of mercy – mercy as a quality conspicuously lacking from so much contemporary discourse, which it would benefit us all (yes, from Farage to Mamdani) to consider in our political and social dealings with others. Yet mercy in itself is not enough. It can be slippery and forgetful, prone to manipulation, too often masquerading as a ‘bygones be bygones’ panacea concealing continued harms. That, or centrist dad handwringing or collusion. Or the ubiquitous reminder to ‘Be Kind’. Thoughts and prayers in place of direct action.

In the famous, not to mention morally dubious soliloquy from Portia in Act 4 of The Merchant of Venice, mercy is framed as a ‘twice blest’ quality, meaning it ‘blesseth him that gives and him that takes’. This is a superbly ironic twist – one that I’m not sure Shakespeare fully intended – because it puts a transactional spin on something (mercy) that only two lines previously was supposed to ‘[drop] as the gentle rain from heaven’. Portia is upbraiding Shylock for his grabby, materialist thirst for ‘justice’, which drives him to the grotesque solution of demanding a pound of flesh from Antonio in lieu of a defaulted loan. (Hers is a thoroughly antisemitic ethical worldview, needless to say, one that assumes Jews to be marooned in Old Testament vengeance disguised as justice, in contrast to her fellow Christians, sophisticated enough to offer New Testament mercy.) Yet in Portia’s very language she can’t help resorting to a view of mercy as a good to be offered and exchanged, albeit with some magical twice-blessing quality that distinguishes it from other mere chattels. This reminds me of nothing so much as classical free market economics. It recalls the generalised prosperity that’s meant to accrue to both sides of a deal, seller and buyer alike, in a rational economy – a further irony for a speaker who is meant to be decrying grubby mercantilism in favour of good old-fashioned noblesse oblige.

For mercy to be worth a damn, then, it has to be more like the first of Portia’s definitions, something that droppeth from heaven, rather than her silent revision of the concept into a thing that passes between specific actors or communities. A contrast might be drawn here with forgiveness, a transitive activity that requires more specific conditions: namely, for agent x, the transgressor, to be sorry and seek forgiveness, and for agent y, the transgressed, to be prepared to grant it. I think of mercy as something more like an ambient culture in which wrongs can be recuperated. In Christianity, that environment is guaranteed by a god who loves everyone equally no matter how badly they sin or stray. This was the spiritual gestalt that underwrote all the overt political activity I took part in with my parents during childhood, from Labour Party canvassing to Christians Against Torture meetings and the London march against the Iraq War on February 15, 2003. (A group from our church joined a fleet of coaches travelling up for the day from Cardiff.) There was a defined understanding of wickedness, and a determination to resist it, but never a rhetoric of punishment or retribution. Welcome the stranger; hate the sin, but love the sinner. We were comfortable people in a comfortable corner of the world, so perhaps this was an easy position to adopt.

What mercy might mean in a secular, polarised political landscape, I’m far from certain. I know that I feel spiritually adrift from much of the contemporary left, even as I follow closely in the slipstream of its thought leaders. Often, the diagnosis of my comrades rings true – the analysis of class, capital, race or imperialism – yet the remedy feels lacking. One way or another, there seems to be a hardness at the root of our political language that might just be the harsh texture of reality intruding, at long last, upon my morally tender upbringing. Like I say, I’m not sure that this upbringing has equipped me to move flexibly enough in a political crisis that demands rigorous and novel ways of thinking. For all that, I remain committed to the fundamental ethos and culture of that upbringing, and I want to find out whether those commitments have anything to offer the contemporary moment – whether, in short, there might be anything beyond mercy that honours the ability of mercy, in the religious context, to foster reparation.

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Big chat, for a little Substack. To be honest, I still have no idea what I’m doing here, or how this is going to unfold. I’ve ummed and ahhed about starting this for a while and chickened out, partly out of fear of healthy dialogue with comrades on the left, partly out of impostor syndrome (who am I, a mere poet, to venture here). I don’t quite trust myself to keep to the brief, but then again that’s not really in the nature of vibrant Substacks, is it. Most likely, if it goes anywhere, this will evolve to accommodate wider views on culture, books, music, life – the usual smorgasbord on this site. (I’ve been hankering after a more regular critical outlet for a while.) But I do also want to use this space as a kind of workbook or testing ground for the poetry collection that will hopefully happen elsewhere, behind the scenes, at angles to the thinking I’ll be doing here. I have three or four ideas sketched out for pieces I hope to publish in the near future, and after that we’ll see how it goes.

The writing will be free to access, but if anyone wants to chip in to keep it going or show their appreciation, I will gladly accept that help. For now, peace and goodness, pax et bonum. Hope to see you back here soon.

Dai x

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