The way I understand the waste armor and the labor leadership are dealing with the fact that Corin happened just it happened is that this must be relegated to deep history everybody must be clear that this can never happen again uh there was no engagement with why it
Happened with the fact that there were actually two general elections and while labor lost them both actually they gained significant ground in 2017 and particularly well in England in 2017 and then then they went down in flames in 2019 and both of those things are true but um they only want to engage
With 2019 and understand this is an mitigated Defeat the really great thing about doing this job is that sometimes I get to talk to someone who is literally one of the reasons why I’m doing this job at all Gary Young the journalist and academic is one of those people and I hope you’ll get to see all the reasons
Why it’s been such an inspiring and influential figure in my own journalistic work during this interview we talk about life in Soviet Russia what Diane Abbott should have said to Jeremy Corbin and why the idea of skiing bugs him so much I mean did you did you feel
That way when you were when you started writing that you because the standard when you’re not white and you’re not Posh and you’re not rightwing it’s going to be different um for you that it becomes very inhibiting when I started writing uh columns particularly uh I would spend like 300
Words saying I’m not saying this and I’m not saying this and I’m not saying this and trying to uh shadow box with all of the um predictable kind of uh demons and at a certain point and I’m I can’t it wasn’t an epipal point but certain point I just thought you’ve only
Got 1,200 words and you’re going to need to say what you got to say and this is taking up space and it makes it sound equivocal and you’re not equivocal I do think every good column every good piece of writing has to deal with the best argument that confronts it and there has
To be an argument otherwise why do it body writes like in defense of you know against murder because nobody really defends murder unless it’s war in which case they do so um uh so you have to take on the best arguments but I wasn’t taking on the
Best arguments I was taking on the crazy arguments and the you know and and um the reason I jumped on it when you started talking about it is because it I think it’s a really big thing for uh for the sake of for the sake of this conversation I’m going to call
Minoritized writers so they don’t have to be black or or Asian or it could be that you’re working class and they just aren’t that many people like you when there aren’t that many people like you and that feeling and I you know I know it from um uh from a racialized and class
Experience that um I don’t want to be thought of as ex and I don’t want to be thought of as ex I don’t want to be mistaken and there was a realization that well then you’re just giving all of the power to somebody else to Define you
Define yourself and then let them deal with it and more people are capable of dealing with it than you would imagine as it turns out I think for me the find I find the thing I find difficult is finding a place of Health self-doubt because self-doubt is a
Really important thing and it’s the thing which stress tests your arguments and it’s the thing which stops you from making huge clanging errors hopefully because you go I doubt myself so let me double triple check and then becoming Paralyzed by it and I very often end up
In that place of paralysis because I’m so scared of being wrong yeah yeah and being scared of being wrong is a good thing and the the point is the two of them together healthy self outb healthy it’s got to be healthy not kind of um uh cowardly would be the wrong sense
But not cowering self down and or paralyzing St that all of those and there’s no way to police these things but what we see when the people who don’t have this experience right is how bad journalism can be when you don’t have self-doubt when you when
You know you just know what’s going to happen Corin has been elected leader of the labor party we know what’s going to happen now and I’m like well how do you know I don’t know he doesn’t know nobody knows and um so I mean self out is really
Important and struggling with it is I mean it’s a life’s work I still struggle with it like it’s it’s it’s good it’s good for you to be worried and to think is that really what I mean you know it’s why a good editor is is a great thing you because
We shouldn’t be doing these things on our own anyway and so to have someone who says do you mean that or do or maybe you mean something else and even if you don’t mean what they think you might mean it forces you to just engage so um but there’s a
Difference between doubting your son object and doubting the context in which you’re writing right so that the thing where you’re worried that someone will think this about you or someone will think that about you or they will do this to you first of all you don’t control
It uh um secondly that’s not a doubt about what you’re writing that’s a doubt about the the world it goes into which is not insignificant but is not maybe the most important thing in a sense to be worried about but also over time and this is where just being old
Helps they come for you anyway they come for you anyway you can caveat you can mitigate it you can you know you can do you know you can do the whole Ninja thing they’re still going to come for you they still then it’s not like they’re going to
Say oh well you know fair enough enough yeah I can see that he’s engaged with all of these arguments um and so you we’ve only got so much time on the planet and it’s important that we say what we need to say while we’re here and don’t get wrapped up
In trying to counter the nonsense some of it is sense but actually most of it is nonsense what’s the most useful critique that you’ve ever received on your writing the most useful critique is is is probably the the most consistent like do do you mean that or if you’re think if unless you’re
Talking about a specific like I wrote one thing and then somebody said is that what you mean like a specific critique on a specific piece um there’ve been so many I’m going to have to come back to you I’m going to have to come back to you on that but I
Mean a good editor is hard to find and one reason recent one I don’t know that it’s the best one but one recent one was um I was writing this piece about how it’s not Amnesia Colonial Colonial amnes they don’t forget they actually work very hard at not remembering which is a
Different thing uh and Amnesia is a kind of passive much more passive State you don’t forget that you enslaved millions of people and colonized huge numbers like you forget an umbrella or something you don’t and the editor I had Jonathan shaning he said it’s a good point but I need you to
Kind of engage with why it matters why should we care like and he wasn’t saying it doesn’t matter he was saying like you know journalism and books are full of here’s a thing you didn’t know but quite often they don’t exactly tell you why you should care and um we we’re going to
Need that too you know that you know that was like um uh in a sense i’ been so dedicated to the excavation that uh um it’s slightly deluded me what the excavation was for you know is the is the difference between something that’s purposeful and driven and something
That’s noodling and there is there is a place for noodling in writing but actually maybe not when you’re talking about slavery yeah and it’s not like there wasn’t a point or that I didn’t have a point but then I had to kind of what yeah what am I trying to do with
This you know when I think about a good editor I always think of um as R pounds edits of the Wasteland so Ezra pound obviously big big bastard fascist um did some terrible propagandizing for melin Italy and you love him I you want to kiss him cuz I read the piece you wrote
I know it’s the perfect poem it is um it is a in a station of the Metro these apparitions faces in the crowd Petal on a wet black bow perfect poem sorry that’s not my fault he’s a fascist I’d rather he wasn’t but it’s a perfect poem
Um and his edits of the Wasteland you you can get the faximile edition of it and the Wasteland in TS Elliot’s original writing was so much baggier and there’s all this kind of exposition he’s doing all this explaining and Ezra pound just takes a ruler and Crosses it out
And I think for me that has been a constant reminder of the difference between defensive and propositional writing and that so much of it is just going don’t explain that it’s just here and obviously with poetry it’s a different thing and you have to do a bit more explaining with journalism but it
Was the The Bravery to go it’s just here yeah yeah there’s something I I think often this works as well romantically as it does artistically there’s something about confidence that is incredibly attractive and that um about kind of someone approaching a keyboard or a piece of paper whatever it
Is and saying to the best of my knowledge with all the caveats about my imperfections this is what I want to say this is what I want to say this is what I want you to hear uh that is incredibly powerful and that kind of we have to be open to the possibility
Likelihood even at certain points that we might be wrong as well that there’s worse things than being wrong being stupid being uh uh being mean uh being vile um uh making ad hom there are many many worse things than being wrong and actually um you know and I don’t mean morally wrong I
Mean kind of somehow just not quite seeing everything that kind of we are we you know we are in the moment we are where we are so we can only make as much sense of what we what we have so there will you know we will miss things and
That’s kind of that’s okay I mean your background before journalism was that you were translator and you’re working with French and Russian did you ever consider Espionage well I trained to be a translator uh in French and Russian and I did some translation work for a bit
And then actually I came into the guardian in a project finny think of this now because I graduated in 1992 the year of the single European act I was born in 1992 yeah see I hate it when people do that you know even the very very Charming well you said I saw you
Speak when I was 14 yes I’m like yeah that just makes me feel old I mean I should feel um Greatful I just I was born in 1992 so I will reach over this table um so I graduated in 1992 which was the year of the single European act and um
The Guardian had recently launched this thing called Guardian Europe which was it had Partnerships with lots of different papers leemon n Gaz in Russia um sud and they needed people to come in every day and read those papers and find stories that would be relevant and it
Was part of this great new European world that we were entering and Um uh and I could help with French Russian and German and so uh I didn’t study German I studied German a level and then switched to Russian so um that’s how I got got in there so I I I you know I did a bit of translation I never thought of Espionage
Because I was never considered being on the wrong side um or I guess I I guess I could have spied for the Soviets although who’s going to let me near any British secrets so um um so no never got to spy did get to live in what was
Leningrad for six months what was that like and how was the reality of it compared to your expectations of it it was um as a as a kind of lived experience it was hard it was very hard though I still have the there were ration cards and
Um uh and they were kind of a little bit useless cuz you could either buy the stuff or you couldn’t buy the stuff um it was clearly on its last legs um gorbachov was very unpopular this was 1991 um America was very popular which shaped my experience in a way that I’ll
Describe in a little bit it was America just won the first Iraq war so that it was the kind of height of this notion that there was going to be a uni poolar World dominated by America neoliberal globalization and people I remember one conversation that really stayed with me
And uh educated me which was talking to a Russian woman and she was saying how much she would rather live in America and I said well you know in America they they don’t have health care which here you can you know you can go to the
Doctors you can go to the hospital and she said have you been to our hospitals like and I was like okay yeah fair enough yeah if the state provides things they have to be decent they have to be good and like there was no I didn’t spend the time lecturing Russians
On why the Soviet Union was good I wasn’t that stupid but um I I remember that as being like you know would you rather live in a place with no healthare or Healthcare that is Terri that is really bad and where bribery is kind of you know part
Of the M you know just how you do things I lived with a family because I was the only languages are dominated by uh women and so I was the only guy so the women were in uh student hostels and I stayed with a um a Jewish mom and her son so I
Had a quite a different experience to everyone else and so it was hard I remember her crying because she couldn’t find she couldn’t find socks all of his socks had worn out IIA would have been maybe 10 or 11 all of his socks had worn out it was
Cold and uh um and she’d spent like a day and a half looking for socks and there was just no socks um so it was really hard and as a 21 20 twoy old um I had a ball because first of all because I was only there for six months I had Western
Currency my Russian stipend was about five six quid a month so just with 20 30 quid you could do a lot of damage as a kind of young person in terms of kind of alcohol and food and whatever you know whatever else you wanted to do so there
Was that um it was also the only time ever in my life that I’ve been associated with wealth people looked to me and they thought you’re rich this was because um uh at a time that I don’t think has been replicated since America was dominant and uh uh represented aspiration and
Somehow they looked at me I had plats at the time sneakers and they didn’t see an African or Cuban if they had it would have been very very different because they were still catching hell and still Associated actually with Soviet Follies of the past whereas American was considered wealthy and I
Looked I in their mind there are black Russians not that many but in their mind I couldn’t be Russian and I didn’t look African it was all very subtle but it was all quite instant I must be American and I was mostly hang well I was hanging
Around with you know white people who spoke English and so the previous six months I’ve been in Paris which was the most intense racist experience of my life I was beaten up by the cops I couldn’t find a place to stay for ages I was stopped and search probably three four
Times a week it was horrible was it worse than Leningrad well no Leningrad was cars in Paris I couldn’t get a cab even at a stand cabs are go I’m not taking you in l Grand cars would stop and turn into taxis for me because they
Assumed I had dollars just where do you want to go you know be someone with it was like Flintstone Uber someone with their kids in a c just like where do you want to go I’ll take you like you I had to vouch for white people if we were going
Somewhere where it was kind of you know they wanted to know that you had the money they looked at me and they just thought money I know I’ve got a lot more money now than I did then but like nobody looks at me now think you must be rich but in that particular
Moment in uh lenr I was associated with um I was understood to be people looked at me and thought well he’s rich I mean I think this is something which not being black I can’t understand the experience of is that black people are kind of the engine of American pop
Culture and so a lot of what people learn about black people is via American yeah media music Sports yeah so you’re constantly um and I used to bristle at it and then I just kind of leaned into it is that you were constantly being mistaken for being American so
I I worked for a year in Sudan uh in a refugee school and the Assumption if the Assumption wasn’t that I was African it would be that I was American once again again from kind of presentation and it’s not like the presentation was indifferent either because of course it was Britain in then
In the 80s so it’s not like America had no influence on how we dressed or how we looked but that presence that America has which you know or Black America has which obviously I’m not complaining that black Americans have done anything wrong but the power of America economic cultural whatever political
Means that we did in a range of ways it it was like a uh a big weight so you know I was much more familiar with African-American literature than I was with black black British literature until the mid-20s my mid 20s um much more familiar with uh African-American
Politics uh my first book about traveling through the Deep South was about was was prompted by the power of the imagery of the Civil Rights Movement had on me and I knew much more about all of that than I did about colonialism about my knowledge of enuma
Cabal um uh sou Africa came earlier but all of the others um they all came much later because Black America was just so much more accessible than black britishness so you know there’s long been I think this it’s not a tricky relationship but it is something to
Navigate um um when it comes to the kind of power of Black America on our imaginations um I I want to come back to the question of America in a bit but to stick with um the Soviet Union for a second one of the things which I’ve um
I’ve seen you talk about is that this Soviet connection meant that you kind of got in with like Nelson Mandela’s entourage on the eve of the first democratic election in South Africa how did that happen yeah when when you tell people yeah I studied in the Soviet Union it
Was like really and it does open up these kind of interesting thing so uh I was sent to South Africa to cover the election um I couldn’t drive which I couldn’t ski either it wasn’t a kind of it wasn’t a thing until I arri in South Africa and you really
Have to drive to kind of get about and I’m following Mandela on his campaign Trail is one of the things that I’ve been asked to do and so I get lifts with people and I pay them and you know for money and conversation so often they take you one
Place they couldn’t get back you know and then you find a lift bag so I can’t remember where we’d gone but then I needed to get back and someone took me some of the way and said I’m going to drop you at this gas station there’s some people coming later
They will um they’ll pick you up and it was um his bodyguards who had been well they’ve been working and um I amused them you know and I made it my business to amuse them to be fair but um I I’d been involved in the anti partti
Movement from the age of 15 picky this African Embassy with my mom on a uh Friday nights you might have encounted my mom getting nicked really yeah she got nicked twice um you know I think I think CND was my first demonstration but I went on I I’ve
Been involved in the anti-ar movement and I’d set up an anti-ar S to University and so it was that and then I’d studied in the Soviet Union as had they as a journalist they just didn’t think I was going to run off and you know start writing weird stuff about
Them so they were like you just come along so after that one trip where you know I broke the monotony for them a little bit and so then they would just let me kind of you know just go with them and that you know I would know
Where they were staying so I’d book myself in the same hotel and uh so I was kind I stumbled into to this I was 24 25 24 when I arrived 25 when the election happened and I stubbled into this incredibly intimate proximity with uh with the big man himself
And without really knowing what to do with it which is good actually which was helpful because I all I did was Observe and then I wrote the piece that got me my job uh called the Black Knight which is the first piece in the book um but um
Yeah it’s one of those uh unintended consequence things where I’m doing all this stuff not thinking this will benefit me in some way um everybody you know the counselors at school said don’t study Russian glos hadn’t even started yet you know don’t study Russian because what
You going to do with that um uh but I wanted to um anti-apartheid Society you know nobody’s thinking that that is going to be the root to some kind of career breaking um and yeah it all kind of kind of fell into place the moment when when
You first started in the anti-a partide movement did you think that you would see aparti fall that’s a good question I I would have been like 15 and I I think I thought it had to that would have been my that would have been my view at the time
Is that good and right things have to happen you know I remember having an argument with someone and saying uh after the 1987 crash uh economic crash and saying well capitalism cannot continue like this and he said yeah it can uh which at the time I thought can
It surely not you know and anyway here we are so um uh so I think at the age of 15 I thought well this you know obviously this is wrong this can’t continue and there were enough the wind was against it by then and even though like the British
Government wasn’t against it and that there were uh it was becoming part of the common sense um it wasn’t a particularly radical thing to be involved in the anti movement um at by the time I joined it just felt like a very necessary thing I mean my mom talks about the moment of
Mandela being released from prison as a miracle because she talks about how unexpected it felt she felt that it was just like this movement she was a part of it it was morally right but she didn’t think that anything would would happen and then suddenly it just did yeah and my guess is
Uh I’m 54 I’m probably around the same generation as your mom yeah she’s a little older I won’t say how how much old she throttle me but um you also have to remember that we thata came in when I was 10 the minor strike uh miners went down to defeat in
84 I was 15 there had been very few victories we had been kind of um this was the collapse of the kind of you know forist order the crushing of the Trade union movement um it had been a very hard time politically and it had been my formative
Time which is why I think there are so many people of around my age who um are in the opinion game who kind of share my politics because it was it was defeat after defeat defeat after defeat and so Mandela’s release was this stunning um uh Victory allbe it as most
Victories are kind of mitigated through negotiation and so but it was like a rare win a rare win and I have a sense maybe this is because I’m slightly younger than your M of thinking well this this had to happen and feeling really glad that I
Felt not not that I had made it happen but I that I’d been part of something that had actually finally won I mean you you started the guardian in what 94 well 93 I start with a translation but I get a job in ’94 and so this is
Really like end of History era right neoliberal consensus has been secured uh Soviet Union has fallen it’s you know good times and corporate social responsibility forever now baby um what was it like internally at the guardian during that time did it feel like a victory and a March towards progress for
People there or were there people who are like this isn’t stable this can’t last oh they were always you know the guardian was always a coalition of pul FO used to have a column there when I started um Sheamus mil was the labor editor I think or um I think labor editor they
Call it or Trade union editor um you know there were lefties there there are lefties there they were always lefties there Owen Jones Clinging On by his fingernails like on the door frame just like well so there were kind of um um so were some people who well there were some people who
Stood as uh STP people so there were people on on that wing and then you know there were people like um uh Sheamus and um just because Sheamus has become almost like a meme now but there there were a group of people I don’t mean that condescendingly about him I just mean a
Weird way he has been depicted and treated but Richard Norton Taylor Duncan Campbell you know there were a range of uh uh leftwing voices there George Momio was already kind of you know in the mix so um it wasn’t like and and I wasn’t writing opinion right I didn’t write opinion for
Another kind of five years but um uh occasionally I did but dip to toe yes but um uh so it was kind of you know it was it was fine really I mean how did you look at the program of neoliberalism globalization European integration did you at all feel optimistic about it or
Were you looking at that with a degree of Suspicion conation yeah no I didn’t look at it optimistically at all like I I I remember on Election on the day after election day the sun is shining Blair has won um and one of my colleagues says and this isn’t him being
A py it’s just a he said should we get a cab down and see cuz Blair was walking down the mall or something anyway it was a real it was a it was a moment and I just felt completely alienated from it and I remember just saying no you’re
Good you know you know you’re were right um uh which wasn’t me being cherish I just I just didn’t feel it as a moment of Celebration I felt it when they won in ’97 I felt as a moment of relief the Tories are gone and of possibility because these
People will respond to pressure in a different way but I didn’t feel like it was my victory I didn’t feel like it was you know uh it wasn’t the it wasn’t the victory I had wanted uh but I can nevertheless see it as a victory of sworts or at least a defeat
Of Swords a defeat of the worst I mean does the Blair era offer lessons for how leftists can or ought to relate to K starma I don’t think it does actually and the reason it doesn’t is because in between that time there’s been Corbin and Corbin the way I understand the way
Understand the wayte armor and the labor leadership are dealing with the fact that Corbin happened just it happened is that this must be relegated to deep history everybody must be clear that this can never happen again uh there is no engagement with why it happened with
Um uh the fact that there were actually two general two general elections and while labor lost them both actually they gained significant ground in 2017 and did particularly well in England in 2017 and then they went down in flames in 2019 and both of those things are
True but um they only want to engage with 2019 and understand this is unmitigated defeat and uh disaster and that it’s happened the notion that anyone like Corbin could be leader of the labor party during the B era was was F would have been a fantasy and so they all of
That group of people could be tolerated in a way that they are clearly not there something like a Jihad really against the left that defies electoral Common Sense actually like you could leave Jeremy Corin in his constituency where he’s very popular uh and people will know that he
Was a leader of the labor party and they will have moved on or you could try and deselect him and remove him from the labor party and have a whole drama around his seat and the possibility of him standing against the labor candidate and all of that and you could relive
Those now the first one passes by with almost without incident the second one actually revised the notion of Labor as a split party as a uh uh Rel revives memories of Corbin for anyone who was traumatized by that it does so it doesn’t have an electoral logic um any more than a Jihad
Does but that that’s um um to kind of consign the labor party left to not just the Dustbin of the of history but of the future that this this can never happen again so um that Demands a reckoning I think on the left which wouldn’t have been true during Blair’s era which
Is um is this party actually fit for our purpose was the energy that we put into this over those uh four years was it worthwhile what did we gain what did we lose if we look at the trauma I’m not and I don’t have the answer to these questions but I think
They are reasonable questions um um was this the most effective use of our time and energy during that uh period what did we win and what did we lose and I mean a lot was proven a lot was proven was that it was possible and that there
Was there you know with the Fairly boiler plate Social Democratic agenda was you could attract large numbers of people um uh but I think it would be delusional to say that where we are now is really where we want it to be which is different from saying whether it was a
Good idea or not but that’s what we did and this is where we are and one of the things I’ve seen you talk about is that being a black and workingclass writer you were taught from an early age that you had to distinguish between appearences and reality um do you think
That everyone did a good job of doing that with Corbin no I I think very few people did and I think very PE very few people for in different ways and did with different consequences on the left and the right did I was I was just coming back from America when
Corbin was elected in 2015 so I hadn’t seen the kind of the transformation um it seemed highly unlikely you know I was in America packing up my stuff and getting ready to go when Corin was made to stand for his job again which always seemed like a particularly ridiculous
Thing for labor to do to itself really um against a man whose name very few people can even remember now um I I followed him because I was I interviewed him so I went to three meetings and what I was shocked by was how um un ideological his base was his base
Not you know his Bas in a commentariat or his Twitter supporters but you’d go to these meetings I remember one woman saying well if there someone better i’ vote for them and it was as easy as that it was like you remember a guy I can’t
Remember where it was he was like I think we just label needs to get back to a bit more like what it was like you know and Blair did some good things and then there was IRA and that wasn’t so good and I think Jeremy is more like the
Label that we want and it wasn’t I went to three meetings in dunde in Romford and somewhere else it’s not kind of um places where you you could just kind of um dismiss the people as being you know part of some construct or another and um I didn’t hear neoliberal
Globalization mentioned once I didn’t hear intersectionality mentioned once I only heard socialism mentioned a couple of times Jeremy was usually the least good speaker on most stages and got an enthusiastic but um restrained really response and it was um and that’s not a complaint it’s just
A description of a kind of um a desire for reorientation is what I saw and that it came it it came in the form of Jeremy because pretty much every other form had been extinguished and had become indistinguishable from each other um and and that’s what we’ve gone back
To and the one thing I was genuinely intrigued by when I got back was I thought oh I wonder how the blairite crew I wonder how that group of um commentators and actors how they understand this how they understand that this man and his agenda become
Popular and it was really shocking to me and it remained shocking to me that they had no interest in understanding it they actually they were quite determined not to understand it the idea was just that it shouldn’t happen it shouldn’t happen then it happened then it shouldn’t have
Happened we will try and reverse what happened uh and then they couldn’t and then when 2017 happened and labor did much better than expected then they were like well that shouldn’t have happened either and I don’t understand why that happened and then when 2019 happened they’re like see you know and he was
Like a witch so if he floated then he was a witch and they were going to burn him and if he drowned then he wasn’t a witch do you I mean so he had to he had to lose in order for them to be confirmed
And that could have gone on for years it was like a broken clock this is kind of you know these people who had said Labor’s going to go down in flames every byelection every local C election every every single time and they hadn’t and then once they did that I see it was
Like yeah broken clock is right twice a day congratulations I mean there’s an aspect of JY Corbin’s leadership which I think has gone curiously undere examined because obviously the only real voters are swing voters and a handful of constituencies and everyone else electorally may as well be dead but it was
That um for a lot of people of color particularly workingclass people of color there was a kind of affinity and you’d sort of see it when he’s like walking around Holloway and there was a feeling and you saw it when you know a couple of people would be stupid enough
To say this out loud that he was too close to the wrong ethnicities and my theory is that Jeremy Corbin is you know the first White atheist victim of islamophobia yeah now there is a version of which I would which I was never going to do um journalistically but I recall
Um before your time Tony Morrison’s uh description of Clinton during the Lewinsky thing as our first black president and that they’re treating him like he’s black and there was this element to to the way that Jeremy was treated was like dude you don’t have any benefit of the doubt you
There are no benefits for you you are who you are who we say you are and you’ll be wrong in whatever way we choose for you to be wrong and one of the things that uh and this I did right that I I wanted I wanted Diane to give
Him the stern love of a Caribbean mother the love that I had which was my mom’s like don’t come home and complain to me about uh racism at your school about deal with it you were going to have to deal with this stuff so and not brilliant parenting in a range of ways
You know but like um you have to find a way to navigate this because the world is full of people who were quite right this is my mom talking in complaining about how badly they’ve been treated and and they’re still suffering so if you don’t
Want to suffer you have to find a way through it you have to find a way around it you have to deal with it but don’t come home to me complaining about it like you think that there’s something I can do about this thing because there
Really is a limit to what I can do my mom stuck up for me in a range of way it wasn’t completely brutal but there was that element to it and I felt like someone needed to be saying that to to Jeremy constantly you have to be better
It’s not good enough for you to be good you have to be better because they’re coming for you and so the media mean to me you know cry to your pillow get up and find a way to be better because because the cruel reality is this world
Doesn’t or this world that you have injected yourself into this High political culture well it doesn’t want you and so you’re going to have to find a way to kind of um uh deal with that uh and it’s not fair and it shouldn’t as in the same way
That my you know whatever racist teachers I have shouldn’t be let off the hook doesn’t let the media off the hook doesn’t let anybody else off the hook it’s just a kind of urgent reality of this of this moment which is don’t come complain to me about how awful everybody
Is because we kind of knew that going in and um um and it’s so it’s a form it’s a form of uh uh of tough love and I do feel that now coming back to your original question about things we can learn I feel like the LEF is trauma ized for
Well I think kind of everybody in different ways is traumatized but I feel like the left is traumatized has been traumatized by this experience people who joined because they cared about inequality and so on and they suddenly find themselves either expelled or branded n semi and they’re kind of
Wonder you know how did that happen and um uh they have people leading the party who were saying I’m glad that th that those people have left this kind of really kind of stalen his sense of like that never happened and to the extent that it did happen it was just a horrible
Mistake uh so there’s a real I think there’s a a real trauma and as is often the case when trauma is a thir the possibility of kind of self harm a kind of Rage that is understandable and and maybe not particularly healthy I mean I I look
Back on that period of time and there’s all kinds of things I regret like I’ve got a list as long as my arm about all the things that I regret all the things that I did that were crappy or the things that I didn’t do that I should of
Um when I’m particularly hormonal it’s like you know I’ll be talking to my partner and start crying and he’s just like why are you crying about something that happened in 2017 It’s like because I am um how do you deal with political trauma like how do you recover from it
How do you become a useful political actor again or do you just have to go I’m on I’m on the scrap heap of political actors now I’m too damaged to go again oh right well you know you I think quite often people have to take a
Break they have to they do have to take a break and um learn to know themselves more moderately you know um have a cocktail uh hang out with your friends read some fiction just take a bit of a take a bit of a time out and um and
Then and then kind of I think there’s is there is some internal work what was I what did I want to happen What there are no guarantees when you fight there are no guarantees that you’ll win there’s just a guarantee that if you don’t win if you don’t fight you
Can’t win that’s the only guarantee and that these I remember Ronan Bennett talking to me uh he’s a a writer from Northern Ireland uh cathic who was wrongly imprisoned in longes for murder uh uh released became a brilliant novelist and um uh screenwriter and I was talking to him
When Obama won I was talking to him about the impact to Black America on the north of Ireland and elsewhere and he’s and he was talking about solidad brother I think George Jackson’s uh autography an incredible incredible book yes really Incredible Book and he said it was when
I read that that I realized that these things weren’t happening to me personally and I stopped feeling sorry for myself which is hard right you’re you’re in prison for a murder that you didn’t do in Long care in what I’m assuming is the ‘ 80s this
Is not a good time to be there with that that I have to understand this as structurally and that’s I mean I think that is kind of often the challenge is to kind of understand your these things are happening to me personally because I am a person but they are happening
Structurally they are taking place structurally they are kind of and which is why you need some a little bit of distance from the structure to see what the structure is I think um and then start back small I think start back with um a campaign I you know I think that
You something local or something specific um you know and there’s no you know re every don’t rejoin but those are all kind of strategic questions that people um uh have to answer for themselves I I remember being in labor students and being horribly treated uh after I won an election I
Wasn’t supposed to win slightly slightly kind of mini me orish but before you got Jer I got Jer I did I got very jeremi and concluding this was to me I will be involved in this election 92 um because I because I believe what I said you know that a
Labor even a labor government under kinck at that point would be better than what we have and we’ve had this for so long and so so forth of course by the time we got to 97 it was so much it was so much worse but in 92 I will do
This but if we lose then I’m out because I’ve just exhausted fighting my own side and I think that there are more useful things I can do with my time and I don’t I just um so I stayed in the party until then and it was difficult staying in
This party that had treated me so awfully um and um but it there was a kind of there was enough logic in it for me ultimately what I’m saying is that as hard as it is particularly when the attacks are personal the challenge is to not take it
Personally but to understand it as political and to understand it as structal and to see if you can Divorce Yourself your personal year and your structural year which is a big ask I mean I want to move on a bit to America a country that you’ve traveled very
Widely in place that you’ve written about an awful lot um what are the really big differences in terms of racial Dynamics between the states and the UK there are a few I would say um the first is that in Britain black people have been here in large number less
Long uh whereas in Black America um since 1652 there’s been a significant and growing black population actually before then but um uh and time translate into institutions uh but it also translates into an an affinity so and this is in flux in Britain but certainly I have an affinity to Barbados
Which is where my parents are from um that black Britain remains a more Cosmopolitan space with attachments to Africa Caribbean and where people’s parents or Grandparents were from whereas um uh Black Americans African-Americans in particular can’t actually say with any specificity where they were from first of all so they
Don’t have that kind of the flag that you can weave your Carnival kind of thing uh they have an African-American flag but that in itself tells you a story uh but also in many ways and crr Jones poting this out makes them very American uh there are a range of ways of
Being an American and this is one of them so uh there’s that um there is a CL significant class um uh differences within Black America if you go to areas of Atlanta there is a huge African-American middle class um uh same in New York Maryland most cities will have a
Significant uh uh black middle class um that’s moneyed um we don’t really have that we are we there was a time when I was growing up when I would have said we actually don’t really have much classication at all but but now I think we
Do I’m not sure that I would yet say that there is a black British middle class there are black British middle class people I don’t know that that is yet a class it might be there’s no no one’s going to come and give you a stamp
But we we’re on our way there but I don’t know that as a class it exists I guess you’ve got you don’t have the same institutions so you don’t have um historically black colleges ities yes fraternities sororities um the you know the the one that always struck me was the national
Black skiers Association skiers yeah just which has been around for years and years and which you know is uh a a large number of black people who like skiing together with other black people what is it with you and skiing why is the idea of skiing has it’s a symbol it’s a it’s
A symbol of a kind of class difference to me of like oh you know which is very British right if you’re I don’t know Italian or Austrian probably everyone can ski Finland it’s not a big deal but like you need money to ski um
Uh but yes it is a bit of an obsession um so there’s that there’s significant class differentials uh and um finally there is a number you know that we are uh if we just talking of black or African descent about 5 6% of the population African-Americans about 133% of the
Population a significantly higher proportion if you go to some of the Swing States Georgia North Carolina so on um so um it’s a bigger Community that’s been there longer with richer people in it um uh and that also speaks to uh institutions now to just to give a sense of how that works
In um well and I should also say while you can’t because it’s no welfare state in Britain there are a few people who have risen as high there are also fewer people who have fallen as far as um you know the African-American underclass and if you look at mortality rates you know
Black man in DC is the worst life expectancy than a man on the Gaza Strip infant mortality for black kids in Chicago is around the same as West Bank I mean it’s bad unsheltered housing yes exactly all all of all of that so we um two ways to kind of describe that one
Would be in my my uh wife is African-American um wow cross-continental marriage she I think is a fourth generation um part of her family’s lightskin from Louisiana fourth generation University educated fourth off as soon as universities were open her lightskin people were like right in there like right oh you really married
Up you really married up I did um uh and you know I remember being at barbecue at her house and her brother going someone going for an inter and her brother saying oh I know somebody it was barbecue with black folk I know somebody who um works
There um should I give them a call and I thought see that’s what a class is that’s what a class can do uh um the the very obvious thing I’ve forgotten of course is that one of the very big differences is that black America had segregation on its soil and
It had it civil rights movement on its soil and so America in a way black and white is educated or miseducated but nonetheless no American would ever claim however crazy there was no segregation or it wasn’t involved in segregation or it wasn’t involved in slavery they might
Say get over it or it doesn’t matter or so it was all of that whereas most of our kind of key Civil Rights movements took place abroad India Ghana uh um wherever and that distance has allowed a kind of um uh an indifference uh a studied um energetic forgetfulness that America just can’t
Get away with uh and so there’s that too so there is the kind of my wife’s parents were in Jack and Jill which was a ref you could only only get in by reference only black only um parents and toddlers group so it was middle class because you could only get in
Because somebody else said you could go uh and um uh and black only and that kind of so that notion of black only institutions is and and of black nationalism is far stronger there and so one of the other reasons why a black middle class wouldn’t quite work in the
Same way here is because there’s such high levels of uh interracial relationships which is I think is a thing it’s not I don’t see it as a necessarily good or bad thing but it’s a thing like I think virtue can be attached to that in ways that are unhealthy but um it
Does speak to more social integration than they have there and and um uh and a greater kind of fluidity around issues of of race so one reason that we wouldn’t have a black middle class is because quite a lot of the black middle class people would be there with their
White Partners in a way that would be less true in America even though it’s growing I mean something which I’ve noticed in recent years is that there has been an attempt to recreate some of those middle class social spaces for black and brown people here so I’m thinking about particular branches or
Even an organized ski trip um so there is this sort of sense of trying to learn from America and bring it here and as you have that kind of class stratification a bit more you know over the last few decades for black and brown people in this country way of going well
We can have some of those experiences we can create maybe some of those institutions on a very small scale yeah and you know um there’s a lot that’s good about America and a lot that’s not you know and um that wouldn’t be my scene particularly to trying the skiing in
Particular I am against that is my own personal Jihad is the skiing no that that a kind of um uh a class based um kind of hermetically sealed uh comfort zone is not kind of is not really what I’m looking for um And you know some of the things that people want are based on also what other white people here have like well why can’t we do that and some of them are just what they want you know like I’m I I try not to be too apart from skiing obviously
Try not to be too overly judgmental about uh uh uh about these things but it’s a truism and has long been long been that we’re not America that there are elements of black American politics and Culture that uh can be emulated and in my opinion there are some that make sense and some that don’t you know and um when African-Americans used to ask me which was quite often so where would be where would you rather be you like as a black person and I had this
Formulation which as time goes on works less and less well for reasons that become clear the I’m one of three boys raised by a single mom in America that already means one of us would statistically probably be in jail or dead by the early 20s uh my mother was a nocturnal ptic
She got the medicine she needed uh didn’t bankrupt the family I had a hernia when I was eight I went into hospital it was fixed didn’t bankrupt the family I got my grad I went to University didn’t cost me a penny uh see how old I am that must
Have been so nice to you yeah didn’t cost me a penny um my mom died when I was 19 I got more money to stay at univers Unity uh my mom was a public sector worker so she had a fairly decent pension uh I graduated without any debt
At all I didn’t just like like it didn’t cost me money and I got a grant in a range of ways primarily that’s before you get free school dinners and all that kind of stuff so in a range of ways class those are class things got me to a certain
Point um The Guardian had said set up a buery scheme for non-white people and others who would be um dissuaded from going into journalism so there was this clear element of race there and that was set up after in response to the eight the uprisings of the 80s and a sense that
There aren’t enough black journalists it wasn’t a job at the guardian it was just train we got uh they pay for us to do a course um but then there comes a point and you can see this played out in a range of ways uh drama Academia literature where
Britain doesn’t really know what to do with you and at that point lots of people leave Paul giloy left his back uh Carol Phillips uh Hazel Carby they went into Academia yet uh they were at Yale uh Z Smith um Ben Carrington um he’s a USC 8’s NYU I think
Um uh so there is a uh and then when you get to the actors oh yeah uh it’s it’s quite considerable um and of course America is a bigger place you look at Daniel Kia and you go I’m so happy for you like I wish you were here like so happy you’re
Getting the success that you clearly deserve but comeb back yeah well and quite often they do come back they end up coming back but there are um um there there’s significant amount of traffic at a certain stage in people’s careers in in uh in that direction which um makes sense but it’s also
Worth engaging with the fact that quite often as was the case with me and I went to America for 12 years um there were elements of what Britain is and can do that actually got us to the place where America would be even remotely interested in us well a lot of the
Things you described like being able to go to University tuition free um reliable quality healthare these are things which either don’t exist or in Decline and I wonder if that’s manifesting in a different attitude towards a kind of like very individualistic kind of social Mobility particularly amongst you know
Younger black and Asian people there’s the sense of well nothing’s looking after us so I need to get my bag I need to get my properties I need to send money home I need to look after my family I’ll be a landlord like I know that my mom got screwed over by a
Landlord but I’ll be one because that means that I can establish myself on like a Firma Foundation I mean I guess it’s you know how do you as someone with very leftwing politics someone who you know had been part of you know explicitly socialist movements in engage
With that kind of language of I’ve got to look out for myself and take care of my family that’s it you know it’s a good question and what in these conversations I’m very aware of my age and that I was formed in a different time and so the one thing I
Try not to do although my 10-year-old daughters I’m not very good at this is I try not to judge actually but to listen that I grew up during a protracted downturn having uh in any kind of struggle having older people talk about how useless younger people were and I
Just found it irritating and offputting and um and a realization that kind of well this is the world you bequeathed to me so you maybe want to think about that what you know for all of the ways in which you so or we can not have that
Conversation and we can talk about how things are different now and so um it’s not that I don’t have an opinion about some of those things but that um it is very fashionable for people of my age to ridicule um gen headers and the kind of
Their solipsism and so on and I just I try not to um uh and there are elements of the politic it’s not that I won’t have the argument it’s not that I won’t have the conversation but that I’m kind of quite determined to uh talk less and listen more
Because usually they’re trying to tell you something this Oran organiz these young people who are generally criticized for being solipsistic and um um just into therapy and kind of themselves I know they’re always looking at their phones they organized bloody black lives matter demonstrations with those phones they
Were the people that came out they were the kind of um they were the lifeblood of that moment so um uh their understanding of issues around sexual orientation gender equality sex equality um uh racism are way more sophisticated than when I was growing up so it’s not
Some faux humble piece of nonsense you like I’m not trying to be the Dan Lama I just love the zum yeah just love the Z in in the book I I interview stormy and he’s talking about the kind of money that he the donations that he gives in kind of
Oxford and you know elsewhere his Char work and he says I’m not Gandy do you hear me you know and there I’m not trying to be like the Dal and do a fa humility thing if I’m interested in politics then then I have to learn things and that I consider for all of
Those things I see that I’m uncomfortable with it’s not that I shouldn’t be uncomfortable with them it’s not that I can’t a critique of them but um that would be me trying to learn how this is being understood in this moment because it’s not in in all likelihood going to be my generation
That is going to make those radical changes it’s going to be their generation so it’s important for me to understand that to understand them I mean I’m I’m you know being a millennial i’ look at Zoomers and I feel older than methusa sometimes and I go well this is
Actually probably a healthy thing it’s a healthy thing to experience cultural change between my generation and another one um but I I worry that my generation and the younger generation is that you can talk about Collective experiences but only through the lens of the individual so it’s as a
Blah blah blah blah blah and you know Margaret Thatcher in her Lenin phase was very much like economics is the method the object is to change the soul and I worry about what growing up under you know a kind of like zombie neoliberalism has done to my soul and and The Souls of
Of zumers yeah I worry about that too and um and and yet often in different ways I see flashes of solidarity of collective struggle let’s go out there and do X that suggest that it’s that it’s more complicated that not more complicated than what you’re saying but that it is complicated
And that kind of of course these things that we are raised with have an effect we are product in a Range ways of our time and our moment um but we are not only subject to those times and moments there’s also our kind of agency and I
See younger people doing all sorts of cool stuff that makes me think like you know that kind of does give me hope so what kind of cool stuff um the way that well black lives Mana was pretty cool stuff the way that they have kind of um um that the Electoral
Affinity to uh Labor’s left orientation I thought was cool um the attitudes around um uh sexism and uh harassment uh all feel like you know quite quite brilliant and I I I I feel hopeful I I I mean I’m cursed to feel hopeful that is
Partly my want but I don’t I don’t look at every generation particularly of lefties that I’ve known look on a generation that’s coming after them and say ah yeah you know it’s not just it wasn’t like that in our day which is true but like we were better and um um
We weren’t we were different some ways we were worse oh in many ways particularly my generation I mean we were just flailing around we were trying to like and this you know there was the Stuart Hall great moving right show there was this kind of fism reaganism the neol that
Neoliberal moment in collapse of the Soviet Union the defeated it hits like a steam train and it’s amazing that anyone is left standing basically I mean my my last question for you is is reading dispatches from the diaspora is that there are so many different political moments that you talk about so many
Different flashes of culture I mean you’re going from the end of a parthe to you know the rise of Stormy this is a huge period of time so many different contexts um what can white radicals leftists socialists learn from this political black diaspora that you’re talking about I guess that
It it has its own Dynamic and that Dynamic has connections to the white world but isn’t contingent on the right on the white world that you know stormy my angelu there are a range of conversations and there are a range of moments in that book that take place
Without reference to racism or white people and that um uh and so the black diaspora has to be understood both within its complicated fluid autonomy but also as part of a kind of uh of a wider World which is a different way saying it’s not all about you right it’s um and
Um and that’s okay and that’s okay and that kind of um if you look at like there’s a there’s a moment in the my my Andrew interview uh which was my favorite um I was supposed to have 45 minutes for that and I got about 13
Hours and rolled out of her uh limousine absolutely hammered it was a fantastic fantastic day but there’s a moment in the interview which is in the first 45 minutes where she said something about Um finding a partner or something like that and she says you know um I believe I belong wherever human beings are she said I could fall in love with a sumo wrestler if he told me jokes and made me happy of course it’s easier to fall in with someone
Who’s from your church and is down the road because you don’t have to translate but I can translate and I’m willing to translate and I’m you know and I’m happy to if it’s worth it and it was a it was a beautiful exposition to me of a kind
Of um I belong wherever people are uh um and yeah I think that there are a range of diasporas this is this is one of them and uh and in enjoy it for what it is I mean I think our next interview should be about the white diaspora cuz that’s a
It’s a big one it well it is a big one and at times it’s a it’s a deeply conscious one right they’re kind of when you when you look at those pictures of colonial Africa and it says Europeans only well it’s not like British people considered themselves Europeans in any
Other way apart from when they were in Africa I mean the white diaspora is a real thing people uh they don’t white people don’t recognize it as such until they show up in a place where they a minority and then they’re totally looking out for each other or not looking out for each
Other to defend each other but they then they completely notice each other and Associate their existence with a set of assumptions and Rise there something which I always notice when um people come from other parts of the country to London and not everyone who doesn’t live in London says this so please
Northerners don’t bite my head off but often something I’ll hear is and I was the only white person I could see because they come to visit me where I live in North London I’m go no you’re not you’re not the only white person you could see and I know that right because
Tottenham is gentrifying okay like you’re not but it’s that feeling and I’m I’m so fascinated by it and I want to dig into it like like a brain surgeon with them but I can’t because I know that they’ll never explain it to me the way they can explain it to each other
And have that Mutual recognition of suddenly feeling isolated in their whiteness because there’s been like a critical mass of melanin that’s been reached and it doesn’t mean they’re racist but they’re feeling something yeah well it doesn’t mean a racist it just it means that there it illustrates a comfort that comes with being
Surrounded by people who you kind of you know associate with most reflexively I remember being in America and going to uh a friend of mine who was gay invited us to a party his partner was black uh so invited me and my wife to this
Party and uh it was he was the only white person and we were the only straight people it was a black gay party it was a very American black gay party where a priest or Pastor blessed the party before everybody got their groove on and so on but it was I remember
Thinking oh this is interesting like we are uh uh the three of us me my partner and my we we are all Outsiders in um uh in our own way I don’t know my wife was the only woman there she might have been but um yeah yeah and you learn things
That’s the thing that’s that the thing about growing up as a feeling like an outsider is that it’s not inevitable but it offers you a critical eye that I could never grow up assuming that everything I was being told was true because I knew it wasn’t because
They were lying about me I you know so I I grew up sort of watching the news and thinking ah you know I don’t know about that um and um sometimes I think yeah it must be weird to grow up thinking watching the news and thinking
Quite right too you know and um and and and having your narrative constantly reinforced because my experience was almost completely opposite and while that was painful at times and while it took a lot of navigation actually as a journalist and a critical thinker is very useful I mean are there tensions sometimes between
That feeling of going I know this isn’t true and being a journalist where you can only say what you can prove because there are all sorts of things where I think the narrative which has been established as the official one is horseshit but I can’t prove it and
Journalistic standards mean that I can’t say it yeah I think that kind of um um you have to be able to you things have to be evidence-based and um you are still able to offer I think when is still able to offer critique which says at the
Beginning of when Co kicked off um there was this suggestion that vitamin D or lack thereof was the reason why non-white people or why black people in particular but non white were suffering more it’s also like we don’t have rickets anymore like we dealt with the vitamin D problem sometime in the like
1960s but it was like at the beginning nobody knew right so I couldn’t say no but I could say well it’s also true for Latinos it’s also true for uh uh it’s particularly true for bengalis uh uh Latinos in America African these are people with different exposures to vitamin D so chances
Are no you know but I didn’t want to say I couldn’t just say no and it was one of those things that I felt coming right the way back to it I felt that like I had to deal with but so yeah I think that kind of um
The Challenge when you know the dominant Nar of his nonsense is to find a way to expose his nonsense that’s kind of like 90% of what we do I think Gary Young thank you so much for joining us thank You
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