We Need New Stories - Part II
British politics has forgotten Story: the SDP is rediscovering it
In Part I, I wrote about how we tell stories to figure the past, illuminate the present and, most importantly open the way to the future. Humanity has always encountered problems, and always overcome them, so it is natural that for every miserable dystopian story, there was a comforting and inspiring story to balance it. The future could be better than our current troubles suggest.
We need new stories because that is no longer the case. Our current problems are extrapolated endlessly into ever-darker, ever more soulless dystopian futures. Our storytellers have no future to offer us beyond misery, poverty, chaos despair. Having rejected God, Marx, Freud, modernity, American Democracy, the End of History, Globalization and Technology, we are apparently left alone to shiver as we contemplate the threatening future rushing towards us.
That’s why we need new stories.
All of this brings us to the imaginative wasteland that is British politics. Because none of the main parties has a story of the future which is anything but utterly grim, they tell no story. Rather, they compete to warn (or promise?) us just how much poorer, colder, hungrier and less free they intend to make us. For our own good.
If this was just the offering of one party, it would hardly matter. The problem is that not one of them offers anything different. Not one of them is saying: ‘This is the way to a better life, to greater abundance, to freedom and a good society.’ Rather, at best, they flat-out lie about the predictable consequences of their proposed actions (the Greens), or simply hope you won’t notice because of your loathing of the other choices (LibDems, Labour). I am being unfair to the Greens (which serves them right): they do have a story - it’s just that its one in which mankind must be punished for causing complete environmental catastrophe.
Arguably, the Conservatives prosper far beyond their deserts because they are (or were) at least aware of the importance of Story, and will hijack any set of circumstances to see if they can discover another Viable Story to tell the electorate. Boris Johnson is, let us admit, a great story-teller.
But when Story disappears, its place is usurped by its evil little brother Narrative, and also by its deranged cousin Ideology.
Narrative’s purpose in life is simply to distract, one minute at a time. Since it has no structural importance as part of a Story - because there is no Story - Narrative can be changed, set on its head, with almost no consequences. The Story can’t collapse because of a 180 degree turn in the Narrative - because there’s no story in the first place. Ask Kier Starmer.
There is a reason why the Labour Party looks back with longing at the Atlee government: it was the last time they had a proper Story to tell.
The other response to having no Story is to bring in Ideology as a substitute. The Ideology dodge is, I think, for the truly feeble-minded. Relying on ideology is, in the end, believing in a bunch of magic words. Say the magic words, and solutions appear like a rabbit out of a hat; and problems disappear like the conjurors assistant. Who needs Story when you have Magic?
And so to the SDP. The SDP has spent the last few years excavating our Story from the political undergrowth, exploring it and now telling it. It starts with William Clouston’s identification of the curse of indifference which has found root in our politicians and in our politics. It is furthered by the SDP’s critique of the way Britain’s profit-model rests on financial deficits in households and the government, rather than net investment and net exports. And having identified the real roots of the problem, it uniquely is in a position to suggest approaches to actually dealing with them, whether it is housing, transport, immigration, and the environment.
It strikes me that not only is the SDP unique in having a genuine story to tell, but it is also in itself a story.
The story it tells is this: human ingenuity and human initiative can face up to the problems we are encountering, and beat them. There will always be problems, but a vibrant, honest, and curious politics will always be able to deal with them. The future is only bleak if you let it become so: we in the SDP choose not to do so.
We have no narrative that’s about to pirouette 180 degrees, because we don’t need it: rather, what we say simply expresses the Story we are building, the Story people are beginning to hear.
Quite by chance, we discover that something like our Story has already been told - in Singapore’s early years, when the infant republic faced multiple existential threats, so needed both growth and nation-building.
That discovery happened almost simultaneously and without coordination. In the local council elections, we picked up a second seat in the Leeds ward of Middleton. One of the reasons for the SDP beginning to carve our a territorial base in Leeds is what our first councillor Wayne Dixon has been doing. He marks out his SDP territory by, among other things, making sure his ward is a clearer, safer and more civic place to live. That means ensuring the streets are swept of litter, graffiti removed, fly-tippers edged out, and the physical space his constituents call home is looked after. He does it all to generate a proper civic pride.
For this street-level focus and determination, he’s getting called ‘Leeds Kwan Yew,’ because Singapore’s founding father’s first determination was that Singapore would take pride in itself, and he swept the streets himself to make the point.
This activity is anything but trivial. Rather, it is a step towards democratic empowerment, which is why the SDP is not just winning there, but winning ‘Bigly’. When things have been let go, neglected and ignored for too long, people tell themselves their own stories. Really bad ones. In the US Danusha Goska has been almost disturbingly clear about the abjection of her medically-induced poverty: “One of our worst enemies, a dragon we must confront and spear on a daily basis if we don’t want to sink beneath the surface. This dragon is not laziness nor is it racism. It is learned helplessness.” And beyond that, she adds, is learning to value herself as worthless.
Maintaining the physical environment, particularly in ‘tough’ areas like Middleton, is a step towards unlearning helplessness, unlearning worthlessness.
Meanwhile, my investigations into economics has led me to look closely at Singapore’s other founding father, Goh Keng Swee. Would that Britain had a Goh Keng Swee at hand! There are so many aspects of his thought which stir the imagination, but the two most crucial to our story are these: first, the realization that the underlying task is one of nation-building, not merely GDP growth at any price. Of course, get the nation-building right, it turns out, and the economy will prosper anyway.
The second is GKS’s ruthless determination to achieve the steps needed for nation-building, and his ruthless willingness to railroad any bureaucratic impedence he came across. This was not because of any taste for dictatorship, but rather an absolute determination that policies he viewed as central to nation-building would be achieved, and without delay.
This is powerful.
The other story we need to be able to tell, as suggested in last year's AGM, is the story of how we came to be here, as a nation. Knowing what we know, and heading in the direction we intend to head, we will be clear about the wrong turns the nation took in the past that we need to rectify (and avoid repeating). Backstory is integral to story.
There hasn't been a party able to explain our shared recent history in a way that helps everyone make collective sense of the recent past. Doing so, effectively, is a key that will unlock far broader support.