We’ve certainly got our work cut out.
The painful truth is that those of us who work in culture and see ourselves as progressives were comprehensively thrashed in the 2019 General Election. Yes, Jeremy Corbyn’s troubled Labour Party suffered its worst election defeat since the 1930s, but the Liberal Democrats only gained one solitary seat and, crucially, all the Tory and Labour rebels—whether independents, Lib Dems or Change UK—failed to get elected anywhere. There are, inevitably, various reasons for this wipe-out, and some people think—mistakenly, in my view—that victory will allow Boris Johnson to show himself to be a liberal, but no amount of casuistry can seize victory from these gaping and terrible jaws of defeat.
The danger, of course, lies in turning away in despair. It’s all too tempting to say that this is just the squalid world of party politics and refuse to have anything to do with it. If we don’t go that far, we can insist that, since no-one pays any attention to artists, it’s vanity to think that we can make any difference. After all, every time an artist has commented in the past, he or she is mocked and ignored and, in the face of such a disaster, silence might be the best response. But I’m not convinced it’s wise.
We should, perhaps, start by asking what we mean by cultural engagement in politics. And here, while artists making political statements is perfectly valid, their status as artists and cultural workers doesn’t grant them any greater wisdom than any other observer. So we should recognize that political engagement means more than an interest in the doings of politicians and political parties: it’s about shaping the way we live together as human beings and how our society functions.
We should also recognise that it was culture—the very thing we apparently know about—that was the ground on which we were beaten. In the 1980s we were defeated on economics and, in the 1990s, New Labour’s embrace of the seemingly unstoppable force of globalisation left us protesting from the side lines. But in both cases, the cultural sphere was largely untouched or, where it was, for the most part had the confidence to come through refreshed (although I recognise that Mrs Thatcher’s assault on the miners was as bold a cultural revolution as anything attempted by Dominic Cummings).
The peculiar challenge of the present moment is that Johnson’s triumph was, above all, a cultural one. Although the central debate was about ‘delivering Brexit’ (a question Labour signally failed to address), the underlying argument was bigger than that, and a very right wing and populist Conservative party managed to stake out the radical high ground, contrasting ‘ordinary people’ with the ‘metropolitan elite’ and labelling anyone who questioned the wisdom (let alone legitimacy) of Brexit as an enemy of democracy itself. The Conservatives have always weaponised patriotism, but never before has the ‘enemy within’ been more than half the population of the country.
And so those of us who opposed Brexit found ourselves in agreement with people we’ve always regarded as our diametrical opposites. Who could have imagined that old-fashioned one nation Tories could have seemed like the torchbearers for the truth? Or that so many of us voted for parties we’ve never supported in the past, in a desperate attempt to stop Brexit in its tracks? But we were comprehensively outmanoeuvred. What’s more, our attempts to work together failed dismally. The progressive cause tripped up over its own shoelaces and allowed Boris Johnson’s insatiable hunger for power to push us into the ditch.
And so we woke up on December 13th with not just the prospect of being out of power for a decade, but the triumph of a vicious caricature of what we stand for. Because the truth is, we were all too easily presented as anti-democratic elitists, consumed by the vanity of our small differences, talking to each other in our echo chambers, worrying about things that mystify the ‘ordinary people’ who support Brexiteer Conservativism. We may not like this caricature, and we may protest forcefully against it and deny its truth, but we have to start by acknowledging that it has, for the time being, got the upper hand. For people who are supposedly experts in culture, we have spectacularly lost this latest episode in the culture wars.
So what do we do now? Various things strike me. Above all, it seems, we need to reach out beyond the barricades of identity politics. For it was identity politics which defeated us: not just the cultural identity behind the Brexit vote and the cultural identity we mistakenly used to dismiss that Brexit vote; but also the vicious identity politics behind the caricatures used to criticize and dismiss us. So long as we define people by things they cannot change, similar identity politics will be used against us. Having championed identity as lying at the heart of our progressive agenda, we’re going through the uncomfortable experience of being defined by the same limiting factors, and it hurts.
In order to shrug off these shackles, I think, we should remember that in the history of the great liberation struggles it’s never been special treatment that has had traction. It’s the demand for equal rights not special rights that has made the difference. Certainly I’ve noticed in my campaigning for learning disabled people, progress is only made when I make clear that I’m not looking for special treatment for people like my Joey, I just want them to have the same opportunities as everyone else.
I think we have to answer five key questions about our cultural work.
First, where should we operate? And here I’d suggest, as I’ve said so often, that ‘there is a world elsewhere’. Culture is so ludicrously London centric it’s almost obscene. Getting out of London is good for everyone and is the first step in entering into the dialogue that we all know we have to enter into. And here the old imperial model of the regions has to be decisively rejected: touring isn’t about bringing your cultural jewels to the benighted corners of the land; instead, artists should be travelling to learn from their fellow human beings.
Then we should ask, who is our cultural activity for, and who is it we want to work with? I’d venture that most of us have had the experience of going to a cultural event in London—a theatre first night is a classic example—and we know nearly everyone there. There’s nothing criminal about this, but if we’re worried that social media is an echo chamber, this is much worse. And so we should do everything we can to reach new audiences and work with new artists. But diversity must mean more than simply employing one or two more BAME actors. It must means broadening reach in every direction, regardless of ethnicity, class, age, ability, education or background. All too often cultural activity seems to be by and for a very narrow group of fashionable and healthy 20 to 40 year olds. Culture should open its arms wider.
We should then be scrupulously honest in asking ourselves why we’re involved in cultural production, and why we think it matters? Is it because we think it’s a nice way of earning a (very) modest living? Are we more interested in the frankly superficial experience of ‘being an artist’ than in the challenges it raises? Shouldn’t we, instead, be motivated by something deeper, less enjoyable and stable, but more important: namely the exploration of how people live in the world? The artist’s vocation is a serious and challenging one and if, as Shelley said, poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, we need to ensure that our grasp of the world is firm and profound.
Fourth, we should consider what our work consists of? And here, of course, you should never be prescriptive. But I suspect in the current context we should avoid the kind of work which simply furthers the perceived divide between an artistic elite and the millions of people who are naturally interested in culture, but don’t see themselves as practitioners or aficionados. There’s nothing deadlier than the vanity of a self-appointed artistic elite and we need to be brave enough to recognise it for what it is. Which is not to deny the importance of skill and knowledge, but it is to question to what purposes those abilities are being deployed.
And finally, I’d suggest, we should think about how our work should look and feel? As Brecht pointed out, those who criticise artists for being formalists are, in fact, the real formalists, but if form follows content, we should surely beware of producing work which pursues a fascinating but entirely closed discussion about the shape that it takes, with little questioning of the conversation with the people who are still gallantly wanting to engage with it.
One of the many dismal things I’ve discovered in my research into the pre-war Eugenics movement is how many progressive artists and liberals (Virginia Woolf, Bernard Shaw, DH Lawrence, HG Wells and so many others) supported this utterly repulsive pseudo-science. This, I’d say, was only possible because they closed themselves off from the realities of disability and despised the difference that they saw there. But the world is wide, and those of us working in culture need to do everything we can to open our minds to experiences and lifestyles which seem like the very opposite of what we care about. ‘All that is human is my friend,’ said the Romans, and we need to find ways of making new connections, new networks, new colleagues and new friends. And to do that we’re going to need the courage to leave our bunkers and insist again on the universal values that tie us together, whoever we voted for and wherever we stand.
And if we manage to do that, cultural activity just might regain the respect that has been destroyed in these desperate culture wars that have torn us all to pieces.