(Photo: Hull Daily Mail)

Readers may not be aware that I am a football fan, a Hull City fan to be precise (yes, that counts as football). Next Saturday I’ll be at Wembley to watch my boyhood team play in the Championship playoff final against ... (*checks news*) Southampton, I guess. It’s a big moment for all kinds of reasons but it’s also exactly ten years since the last time Hull made the playoffs, the week before the EU referendum. So some mostly personal thoughts on the last decade.

I remember very clearly walking down Wembley Way with 80000 other Yorkshire football fans (our opponents were Sheffield Wednesday, allow myself a giggle at what has happened to them since). The demographics were overwhelmingly white, male, and a little bit older than I was then. I have a vivid memory of thinking ‘no way are any of these people going to vote to stay in the EU’. Although I hadn’t expected Leave to win, I found myself struggling to imagine Remain could. Having grown up in small town East Yorkshire, I knew perfectly well that in much of the country there was not much time for the EU or for the kinds of liberal cosmopolitan values that had attracted me away from there. I had a sense of trepidation about the game and the more important battle a week later.

The game was great, Hull deservedly won 1-0 thanks to a beautiful goal from Mo Diamé, and we were back in the Premier League again, notching a second playoff triumph out of two (the first being in 2008, when Hull legend Dean Windass volleyed home to beat Bristol City and take Hull into the top flight for the first time ever). Celebrations seemed muted - the Hull crowd at that time tended to be quiet and morose, quick to fall into despair. The Wednesday fans made a colossal noise, putting us to shame. It felt as if something was ending rather than beginning. Indeed, Hull’s unpopular owners, the Allam family, had decided for whatever reason that they had no interest in investing in a new squad, forcing manager Steve Bruce to resign and leading matchwinner Diamé, sensing the ship about to sink, to transfer to the then Championship team Newcastle United. The lack of summer transfer activity meant the team going on pre-season tour without 11 fit senior players. Rising star Moses Odubayo, a standout performer in the Championship, was denied (forever it turned out) his Premier League debut by a devastating knee injury in one of the pre-season games. Relegation was inevitable, the post-playoff optimism spent within a few short weeks.

We all know the story of Brexit. An institutional and economic catastrophe, blowing apart the progressive coalition that only a year earlier had seemed capable of winning power, entrenching all the deadweight features of the UK economy whilst straitjacketing many of our most dynamic sectors, liberating the social resentment that had been bubbling below the surface since the Conservative party decided its only hope of survival was to embrace geriatric ethno-nationalism. Six months later America turned the same way. A world order I had long been critical of was falling apart, to be replaced by something much much worse. The football hooligans of another age were now a weighty electoral constituency of bad-tempered boomers, ready to have one last fight outside the pub.

Hull City’s halfhearted attempt at Premier League survival failed but at least kickstarted the careers of Harry Maguire and Andy Robertson, both graduating to big clubs (via Leicester in the former case), and Marco Silva, taking his first job in English football. The descent to the Championship coincided with the death of my younger sister. My nephews, both brought up in the faith, were punished further with season tickets. There was no immediate return to the PL, but at least a 6-1 thrashing of Birmingham City to enjoy. My dad cried like a baby with each goal. It was to be his penultimate game, his last one a dull 1-1 home draw with Blackburn Rovers. I can still picture him chatting amiably to a couple of young Blackburn fans on our walk to the ground. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Within three years Hull were in League One after a collapse in form precipitated by the departure of Jared Bowen in the January transfer window. The stay in League One was a short one and the club won (before empty stadiums) its first title since 1966, the year before I was born. My dad passed away in the spring, meaning we never shared the experience of Hull City actually winning anything. Of course, that was never the point. Supporting a club like ours is not about winning, it’s about suffering and the meaning of tragedy and (occasionally) triumph. The glory punctuating the misery.

Like in Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, football has meant expressing emotions that my family has always had trouble confronting directly. My way of expressing my grief for my sister was to leverage contacts to get Hull City players to sign a card for my nephews. To mourn my dad, I would watch the Covid games on TV with my mum and my brother. And this time, Wembley offers a moment of respite from a world that seems to be collapsing around me. The scorer of the 2008 playoff winner, Dean Windass, is struggling with early onset dementia, but he’ll be there. Hull is turning to Reform just as it turned to Brexit, the long neglected angrily refusing to contemplate a future that actually revolves around higher education, wind turbines and cultural revival born out of diversity and openness. Can I see light at the end of tunnel? I don’t know. But until next Saturday, I don’t care.

It has been a grim year on the back of a grim decade, but Zohran Mamdani has given progressives the right to smile again. Finally a challenge to the status quo from someone not actively trying to change all the wrong things! We have no way of knowing how effective he will be as mayor, or how much the Trump administration will be able to hold New York City to ransom to block his programme, but as far as campaigning is concerned, Mamdani is the leader progressives have been waiting for. What lessons can we draw from his win?

The first is that it helps to have talented politicians out front. Mamdani seems like a once in a generation talent. He has a poise and oratory that reminds me of Obama - well, OK, a more feisty and angry Obama. He is intelligent, but likeable - he does not talk down to voters, nor does he go for lowest common denominators. He manages to combine youthful vigour with a certain gravitas. The bad news is, there are not so many people with those assets and skills, but the good news is his message is also available to less charismatic voices. And that message is: power to the people, essentially.

Since the end of the Cold War, mainstream politicians have increasingly given up offering hope to voters, on the grounds that using political action to improve people’s lives seemed outdated or ineffective. Politics ceded ground to the market economy as the route to citizens’ happiness and fulfilment, partly because it seemed the right way for individuals to express what they wanted, partly because the constraints of globalisation appeared to make the alternative impossible. Politics as a way of mobilising large numbers of people around a project to improve their lives through redistribution and public goods withered away, and with it the sense of direction of politicians on what became the ‘centre-’ left.

This changed in 2008, when incompetent politicians and regulators allowed incompetent and or greedy bankers to wreck the global economy, destroying livelihoods and leading to years of grinding austerity and stagnation. It took a little while, but widespread discontent generated protest movements and created the space for political outsiders to win unexpected electoral successes by very explicitly pitching themselves as anti-establishment, anti-system candidates. The word ‘populist’ was widely used to describe this, and for all its ambiguity, it captured a common theme: established political and financial elites were untrustworthy, potentially corrupt, and unable to represent the interests of ‘the people’. The mainstream political parties were a ‘caste’ or ‘cartel’, and populists set out to break it up.

These anti-system movements could be found on the left, the right and even in some cases with no obvious left-right identity at all. But the dominant narrative about populism in this period has been to associate it with the right-wing xenophobic authoritarian variant represented by figures like Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Orban and others. For them, the ‘people’ is understood as an ethnically and culturally homogeneous population, whilst the ‘elite’ is pitched as a motley crew of ‘woke’ intellectuals and do-gooders who refuse to defend the nation against foreign threats. The idea of a populism of the left focused on mobilising the whole people against the actual elite of businesses and financial markets has received much less attention, despite the successes of figures such as Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc Melenchon, or Pablo Iglesias.

Mamdani’s success puts left populism back on the map, and shows that populist or anti-system politics does not have to have the stench of Trump’s xenophobia and corruption. Mamdani celebrates immigration not as a threat but as an asset, indeed as the heart of the city. His electoral strategy has been to represent in particular the working class and young urban voters often ignored or taken for granted by the Democratic establishment. He pitched his campaign as the people against the elite: in this case, quite literally the billionaires who seek to dominate New York politics and hoped to condition the election by funding Mamdani’s opponents, including the disgraced Democratic former Governor who had lost the primary election. To do this, Mamdani needed to mobilise a mass movement of enthusiastic volunteers, and deploy smart online campaigning at which he clearly excels. His campaign was built around not only his identification with the underdogs - the immigrants, the low-paid workers, the young renters - but also on three concrete and resonant policy promises: free buses, rent freezes and subsidised childcare. And he won over 50 per cent of the vote in the city that symbolises American plutocracy.

Can any of this magic be bottled up and exported elsewhere? New York is hardly a typical city, and the unpopularity of Donald Trump’s brand of show business fascism is easier to mobilise there than in most places. The Democrats won elsewhere yesterday with more moderate candidates, vindicating to some extent the leadership’s strategy of sitting back and allowing voters to turn against Trump’s failures to raise living standards. But Mamdani’s success is also a reflection of a large pool of potential support for anti-system politics on the left as well as the right, and proof that populism does not only swing one way. When right-wing authoritarians get hold of power, they then own the failures of the system. Promising to restore a more respectful and polite version of elitist rule is not the way forward, for the left or for liberals more broadly. There is an appetite for change and the last thing progressives need is to be associated with conserving the status quo.

Let’s run through the wrong reasons first.

One: Americans are racists! But wait, were they only racists after 2016, but not in 2008 and 2012? What do we do about the majority of Latino voters that apparently supported Trump this time? Or the fact a non-negligible number of 2016 Trump voters had voted for Obama in 2012? Many Americans are racists, but this is hardly a novelty. Trump is.

Two: It’s misogyny! Well, again, there are reasons to suppose that his appeal to a certain kind of masculinity probably worked on a chunk of the electorate. And it’s also true he has only ever won against the only two female candidates in US history. But a majority of white and Latino women appear to have supported him, probably not because of the misogyny.

Three: It’s the media/a Russian plot/Elon Musk. No, it isn’t. Legacy media were broadly pro-Harris. Social media gives you what you reveal your preferences to be. Yes there’s a lot of manipulation but two sides can play at that game. Harris raised colossal amounts of money. The ads didn’t work.

Four: People are stupid. Well, duh. But again, people have always been stupid, if that’s what you want to call it. Philip Converse, a pioneer of opinion surveys in the 60s, famously concluded that most citizens have ill-informed, incoherent and unstable views on most questions. Electorates are more educated now, for what’s its worth.

So if these usual suspects are not it, why did Trump win again, bigly? Because voters just don’t inhabit the same world as online progressive-minded highly educated people - ie most of the people I interact with on a daily basis. And - this is the killer - the latter are exactly the kind of people who these days run the mainstream political parties of the centre and left in western democracies. Kamala Harris may have worked in a Mcdonald’s and been the daughter of immigrants, but she is also the daughter of two professors.

Education has become the key divide driving our electoral politics in recent years. A college education, once the preserve of the wealthy and a predictor of conservative political alignment, has become far more widely available, and increasingly a strong predictor of progressive political identity (see this chart, from Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, Harvard University Press, 2020):

Yes, the college educated tend to have more liberal social values, which amongst a certain very politicised slice of them seem to have become the cornerstone of what it means to be a progressive. The less than college educated are more likely to hold conservative values, which explains part of the success of Trump’s far right rhetoric amongst the non-college educated.

But this is not all of it. The college educated have become the biggest winners in the post-industrial, globalised, service-oriented economy we have today. Here is some data from the sociologist Philip Cohen (from his blog):

White men without a college degree are falling behind historically less privileged groups in income terms. This is by now well understood, but the political consequences simply don’t seem to have been taken on board. They don’t like it! And guess what, there are lots of them in the electorate! There is an implicit, or sometimes even explicit, discourse I have encountered again and again online (Cohen cites one example), that this is either their own damn fault for not studying, or the righting of a historic injustice, but either way not a political priority. And when they vote for Trump, well, any residue of sympathy for large groups of economic losers goes out the window.

This is entirely understandable from the point of view of a genuinely egalitarian vision of global justice, and I’ve felt this resentment myself at practically every election. But let’s not kid ourselves that the left’s apparent indifference to, and occasional borderline celebrating of, the status decline of a large chunk of the population is not a huge, huge political problem. It is the bedrock of Trump’s success, and is fuelling what is likely to be a very grim period in American, and hence global, politics. It is also much the same story in Europe. The same drivers of far right electoral successes can be seen in Italy, France, the UK, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands… need I go on?

And what is more, Trump’s appeal wasn’t limited to white non-college educated voters, but extended to the majority of Latino voters too. We were promised that the Madison Square Garden hatefest would have mobilised Puertoricans and Latinos more generally behind Harris. It looks like this just didn’t happen. Maybe it’s not about the racism after all. Maybe, just maybe, a lot of people, and especially non-college educated people, like what Trump is selling. Yes, a lot of his programme is regressive, unrealistic, harmful or just plain mad. But the Democrats didn’t manage to convince these voters that they have their back. As one economist on Twitter put it ‘we need to understand why working class voters have turned their back on the Democrats’. Maybe we need to flip that question around.

In recent weeks we have heard a lot of economists and pundits hail the remarkable performance of the US economy since Covid. It’s impressive no doubt, and even the inflation was not supposed to have derailed this, because - I kept reading - real wages were up! Surely the Democrats would get some credit for their successful management of the economy? There are just two problems with this.

First, voters didn’t believe it. Polls showed voters’ economic confidence was as low as at any time since 2008. But, but, unemployment is under 4%! Real wages are up! Why didn’t Americans appreciate the booming economy? This must be the echo chamber and Fox News! But second, it wasn’t really true. Real incomes grew faster under Trump than under Biden:

(Source: @benchu.Bsky.social)

Yes, this isn’t an indication of better policy, and Bidenomics in many ways has proved a big success. But voters weren’t feeling it. And the more economically insecure voters - the ones Democrats might be expected to be focused on - were particularly likely to vote on the economy (and not abortion, deportations, and the other less materialist issues we heard so much about during the campaign).

This could be just bad luck, and having to take over an economy reeling from the pandemic made Biden’s task Herculean (of course without the pandemic he may not have won in 2020 anyway). But the reason the Dems are so vulnerable is that they have no real claim to represent the working class anymore. Under Clinton they became enthusiastic free traders, bringing China in from the cold with all the consequences we know about. Under Obama they continued to align with the interests of the financial sector and other significant business groups, failing completely to reset the economic agenda and ‘wasting the opportunity’ of the 2008 crash. Biden probably did as much as he could to change the policy mix, but in four complicated years was never going to be able to make up for the 30-odd years of the working class getting battered by globalisation and technological change.

I remain convinced a Harris administration would have been better for all income groups, quite apart from the benefit of securing democratic rule and basic rights and doing *something* to edge the US, and therefore the rest of us, towards a more sustainable future. But it’s not hard to see how the appeal of not being Donald Trump wasn’t enough for less politicised, hard-pressed voters more concerned about meeting rent payments or paying for groceries. If there is one generalisation we can make about voter behaviour in democracies over the past decades it is that people are less and less likely to trust politicians. In an age where there is a widespread perception that the system is ‘rigged’, Donald Trump has managed to place himself - a loathsome, self-obsessed, entitled billionaire - as the anti-system candidate, the man who will shake it all up to the benefit of the ordinary guy on the street. The Democrats are the establishment: the party of continuity and the entrenched elites. In a world where things seem to be getting worse for many people, that is not where you want to be.

I met my now wife in Florence, but she’s from Bologna, and as a result I’ve spent on average a couple of months a year there for the last 32 years. Sitting on the edge of the Po Valley, Bologna has its pancake flat expanse to the North, and the Apennine mountain range to its South. It is famous for its university, its food (now the source of a slightly irritating but rapidly growing tourist industry), and its portici, an architectural feature which provides handy shelter from inclement weather - be it the hot sun in the summer or the drizzle in the winter - that I’ve always thought we should import to Britain. One quirky tourist sight that many visitors to Bologna check out is the ‘window’ on to a narrow, Venice-style canal - the Canale Delle Moline - in the central Via Piella. I was taken there on my first day in the city, and haven’t been back since. I never gave it another thought, until May 2023.

Beside the main square - the spectacular Piazza Maggiore - sits the Neptune Fountain, an important symbol of the city (celebrating football fans and New Year revellers used to climb up it, in more carefree times). Its water supply comes from an underground conduit that starts from a well behind my wife’s family home, in the Colli on the southern edge of the city. The well was built in the medieval period and can be visited, although I’ve never quite got around to taking a look. As a cyclist, I was of course aware of the gentle glide downhill to the city centre, and the steep climbs available in the other direction, but never put two and two together.

Until May 2023, when the city suffered the first significant flood in modern times. Bologna was spared the catastrophe faced by the area around Ravenna, but a major artery of the city, Via Saffi, which traces the route of the Roman Via Emilia northwest of the city centre, flooded. The source of the flood was a largely forgotten subterranean stream - il Ravone - that has been progressively culverted and built over since the Middle Ages, so that only the initial and final sections of its roughly 10 kilometers in length are in the open air. With unusually intense rainfall falling on the Emilian Apennines (at one point 300mm in 24 hours) the capacity of this ‘entombed’ watercourse was breached, and the sludge burst out through drains onto the street, causing limited flooding but significant property damage. The Council quickly set about repairing and improving the state of the Ravone’s encasement, work that was finished this summer. Work on a new tram line also involved opening up part of another underground watercourse, the Canale di Reno, which had also been cemented over in the 19th century, forming a street named Riva di Reno (bank of the Reno, a major river that drains in the Po, and passes a couple of miles northwest of the centre of Bologna).

More heavy rain hit in the spring of 2024, and again in September, flooding the Romagna region, that had barely recovered from the 2023 disaster. And then last week, Storm Boris offloaded a spectacular 160mm of water (the amount that ‘typically’ should fall in two whole autumn months) over Bologna in the space of an afternoon. The Ravone burst again, flooding Via Saffi (where one of the city’s hospitals is located). Meanwhile on our street in the South of the city, neighbours shared photos of cars gently floating in around a metre of brown pooling water (thankfully we were in London, as was our car, and our flat is on the top floor).

Where the hell was that coming from? The answer was: yet another underground river, the Aposa, which flows from the hills down into the very centre of the city, just below the iconic Two Towers (the Torre Asinelli and its leaning neighbour, the Garisenda). Having withstood the 2023 storms, not much attention had been paid to the Aposa, but it serves exactly the same function as the Ravone, draining the rainfall from the hills onto the plain of the Po valley, where the city sits. The prosperity of medieval Bologna had rested, I now learn, on the network of natural streams and artificial canals that crisscrossed the city, providing water but also the energy to drive watermills (the Moline) for spinning silk. As the economy evolved, the canals became less important for industry and were progressively quite literally buried, and in large part forgotten. Until the extreme weather brought to us by our modern, more toxic ways of generating energy suddenly reminded us of the reason why rivers and streams are located where they are.

Bologna will survive. We are now witnessing the usual chorus of opportunistic and ignorant voices blaming the Council for, amongst other things, building a tramway and rolling out a 30kmh speed limit, instead of ‘maintaining’ the waterways (people who had never mentioned the problem before the floods, obviously, and don’t quite get the distant but very real connection between the weather and the city being strangled by motor traffic). But it is a prosperous and, all things considered, well governed city. It has access to an abundance of technical expertise (as home to the oldest university in the world), and a population whose basic sense of civic duty was on full display this week with hundreds of volunteers picking up spades to clear up the mud. If it has the breathing space of a couple of years to increase the upstream capacity of its once again familiar rivers, future disasters can be averted, at least for as long as the climate we now have persists.

But what this episode illustrates starkly is that we are going to have to get used to the fact that the ‘hidden plumbing’ of our comfortable, rich world lives is going to need a lot of attention. The infrastructures we built to keep us dry but give us water when we need it are becoming obsolete. Sorting it out is going to be disruptive and expensive. Getting people to understand that this is the priority, not a parking space for their new SUV, is going to cause a lot of friction. Politicians need to start telling people the truth about what we are facing. Pretending it isn’t happening is no longer a viable option, especially for the reality-based politicians who are going to have to find solutions. Politics now is a battle between the fantasists and the problem-solvers, and we can’t leave the fantasists with the best tunes. We need a language to communicate about how we can keep people safe in a dangerous world, but at the moment we don’t really have one.

So why are we still on strike? What have we been doing wrong?

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At the risk of offending dear colleagues, the biggest issue we face is the relatively patchy adhesion to strike action. Academics work from home a lot and can easily reschedule many activities, so imposing real costs on our employers through concerted action faces many challenges. And even with activities that are much harder to work around - notably scheduled in-person teaching - there are large numbers of colleagues crossing picket lines, undermining the impact of the action others are taking. Sure, campuses are quiet on strike days, but a lot of activities are going ahead as planned. Meanwhile, here is a picture I took in Euston station, around 10am, on the first day of the UCU action:

Now *that* is a strike.

Why are academics so reluctant to fight together to improve things? One of the problems, I fear, is that academics are too smart for their own good. Striking is a classic collective action problem: whatever is achieved by the strike is a collective good, from which none of us can be excluded, whether or not we make a contribution to it. Any economist will tell you that the dominant strategy for any individual, in this scenario, is to ‘defect’ - mind your own business, you come out winning whatever happens. No wonder I have yet to see any economists on the picket line.

When it comes to understanding collective action, we need to go back to the classics. The ‘free rider’ problem was outlined by Mancur Olson back in 1965, in his book The Logic of Collective Action. The basic insight, that there was no robust ‘selective’ or individual incentive to take part in the provision of collective goods, has powerful applications across the social sciences, but there is one big problem: it fails to explain how in fact, collective action dilemmas are consistently overcome in social and political life. We vote, we join trade unions, we pay our taxes - well, most of us, Nadhim Zahawi - we abide by a range of informal but important social norms. We do this all the time. All Olson could really tell us is why some of the time we fail to act together, but he did a poor job of explaining why we often do.

Another classic, Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty, brings us closer to an answer. In short, Hirschman distinguishes between two distinct kinds of response to a collective dilemma: exit, in other words, exercising the individual option to seek a better outcome for oneself outside the organization or group, and voice, an expression of protest from within an organization or group to attempt to steer things in a better direction. The first is an individual choice, the second a collective one. What determines why people sometimes choose voice over exit? On this Hirschman is less clear, but loyalty - a commitment to the organization above and beyond whatever individual benefit one might get out of it, is a key condition. Loyalty pushes us to try and change things rather than simply wash our hands and leave. However it is also what makes it less likely that voice, rather than exit, might work. Like a football fan faced with an exploitative club ownership, too much loyalty without a credible threat of exit makes voice less effective.

Hirschman’s framework, like Olson’s, gives few indications of why some groups are better at collective action than others. But it does present a paradox - most academics have few exit options, because academic careers are an investment in very specific skills which are not always easily transferable outside. Worse, the choice to be an academic is in itself an expression of deep commitment to a life of intellectual pursuits almost regardless of the material benefits (not to overstate it, but most of us could earn as much or more doing something else, in some cases a lot more). So in the absence of exit options, voice - the last resort of the forcibly loyal - should be the default response to a problem. Yet many academics ‘exit’ from the ‘voice’ option - they leave the voicing to a small minority who are barely able to carry the burden. This does not make sense - if you are stuck in a profession, to neither exit nor voice is simply to resign oneself to a lifetime of exploitation. So why do so many opt to do nothing?

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure this one out. One answer is that academics are disproportionately drawn from high income, high education backgrounds, and/or are disproportionately beneficiaries of what is inelegantly described as ‘assortative mating’. In other words, for many academics their university salaries and associated benefits are not the sole source of material security: an inheritance here or there, a well-paid spouse, and the travails of academic life look a little more tolerable. In fact, it could even be seen as a kind of almost monastic choice to forego material excess, in the knowledge that a comfortable lifestyle (or at least a nice house) is in any case assured.

But this doesn’t work for many. Another answer points in quite the opposite direction: academia has become such a precarious, cut-throat business that an individualistic devil take the hindmost attitude is a requirement for survival. Solidarity is a luxury the hard-pressed and precarious academic under-class cannot afford. In an academic world where stable employment is increasingly out of reach, the last thing a young scholar needs is to risk a black mark against their name for either their activism, or for simply disrupting the operations of their academic superiors. Best keep your head down.

These explanations focus on the supply-side: who is up for it? Who has the resources? But there is also the question of what the payoff is. This differs quite a bit across the profession. For early career scholars the answer is pretty obvious: what kind of academic life can they aspire to have? If you want to do this job, you want it because of some kind of passion for learning. If you have committed a decade or more of your best years to become an academic, you don’t want to live a life of precarity and poverty, and you certainly don’t want to imagine that you’ll never be able to afford to have the family or the home you want, or to retire at a reasonable age. If that’s not going to happen, you either fight for it or give up and do something else.

For a sadly no longer even mid-career, tenured talking head like me, the payoffs are more limited. I’ve got three decades of pensions contributions behind me and enjoyed permanent contracts the whole time. What do I get out of striking? To me the answer is obvious: I’m sick of the overwork and bureaucratic burdens that have made my dream job, well, hardly a nightmare, but unnecessarily, needlessly, annoying and exhausting. I want to write, mentor, engage. I don’t want to fill in forms and sit in committee meetings. But it’s hardly existential for me. It’s more a matter of principle. That must be the reason why I’m usually the oldest person on the picket line.

Finally, the aesthetics of strike action must have something to do with the way people react. For those with some kind of left-leaning identity, the marches, the drums and whistles, the banners and chanting, is all part of the fun. I suspect that for many academics, it’s silly and undignified. We’re not French, for God’s sake! More seriously, UCU’s leadership is way to the left of the majority of academics, despite what the Daily Telegraph seems to believe. Most academics are instinctively fairly conservative. They don’t vote Conservative because the modern day Tory party is an anti-intellectual ragbag of opportunists, racists and snobs. But we are not radical by any stretch of the imagination. So activism should probably focus on the stuff we can all agree on: good employment conditions and a fair deal on pay and pensions. Forget the other stuff which either polarises or leaves the majority indifferent.

In the end though, it all comes back to loyalty. Loyalty to the profession means accepting the interests of the collective come before the interests of the individual. We can all whine about how UCU did this or that thing that p*ssed us off, or failed to do whatever thing we thought was important. If you’re in a union, you have to go with the majority view, and if you don’t like it, get involved and try to change it. Yes, that’s costly and that’s why most of us don’t do it - it’s hard work, it brings no personal advantage, often the opposite, and if it succeeds you share the rewards with everyone else. But if some people take on the responsibility, the rest of us have to make our contribution. If you’re free-riding on the activist minority, you shouldn’t complain if you don’t get your way on union policy and strategy. Sadly, politics - in the workplace but also more broadly - seems increasingly to revolve around the ethics of individual responses to issues, rather than acting as a collective to shift policy in the right direction. If you can’t exit and don’t use your voice, you’re going to lose.

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