'Alex Beard in Conversation with Richard Burgon'

'Alex Beard in Conversation with Richard Burgon'

[I had the opportunity to speak briefly to the Chair of the Socialist Campaign Group and MP for Leeds East Richard Burgon following a talk he gave to OULC in Week 4. We recorded the conversation, which is transcribed in full here. Afterwards, when I returned Richard to the train station, our conversation turned from the future of socialism to his love for heavy metal. I found Richard to be avuncular and thought-provoking, and I hope you enjoying reading what he had to say]

Alex Beard: One of the things that you mentioned during your talk was the idea of a three-pronged labour movement consisting of trade unions, grassroots protest groups and the institutional Labour party. Between 2015 and 2019, these three prongs were very much galvanised by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Do you think that there needs to be something like the Socialist Campaign Group to lead this? If so, what should give it its direction – does there need to be a figurehead?

Richard Burgon: I think that it is true that the Labour party is a broad church and a collation – it always has been. The Labour party was founded by the trade unions with socialist societies. I look at it these days and I think ‘The Labour party itself is a coalition of socialists, social democrats and trade unionists.’ In wider society, I made the point that there are three ways of fighting back against unjust and unpopular Tory policies. Firstly, it’s through the ballot box where people are hopefully voting Labour. Secondly, it’s through taking industrial action and strike action. And third it’s through protests and what you see is the Conservatives being acutely aware that they are pushing an unpopular policy programme – and one which will include many more policies as this crisis deepens that people will object to and oppose – and they want to remove people’s ability to fight back against that unjust policy programme. That is why they have introduced voter ID to suppress the working-class vote, particularly the black and minority ethnic working-class vote. That’s why they’ve introduced anti-trade union laws, to make it harder and harder for unions to take strike action legally. And that’s why they are bringing in this draconian anti-protest bill, trying to criminalise protest. What you have got is a really concerning, authoritarian drift from this Conservative government and it is one that we must organise against, mobilise against and defeat.

AB: Another of the points you made was about class politics. What I found particularly interesting was the way that you defined, or rather didn’t define, what exactly the working-class was. Do you think that class politics can be fought in terms of ‘we the people’ versus the vested interest and the elites? And further do you think that, for example, what Bernie Sanders did during his two election campaigns was an effective example of populism as class politics?

RB: I think Bernie Sanders is an absolutely fantastic communicator and a very principled politician. He is certainly one of my heroes. I remember reading his biography. And in it he talked about how he got an academic to work in his office who would be drafting articles or speeches and he recalled that he said to this academic ‘remember, our classroom is the classrooms of three hundred million people.’ So, in other words, that reflected that he is very interested in communicating not just to the people that are already interested [in politics], but communicating to the vast majority of the population – and that’s important. I think that in 2017, our manifesto title ‘For the Many, Not the Few’ communicated class politics in the way that the phrase ‘the 99%’ communicates it. I do think that the majority of people in this country are working class in that they have to work for a living, and if they can’t work due to sickness, due to losing their job or due to disability then they need either the support of social security or that of their family or others to get by. I think that the majority of people are by that definition working-class. The people who create the wealth in our society. The people who make our society and our public services run. And so Labour has always meant to be a majoritarian enterprise. We exist to represent the interests of the vast majority in our society including, of course, the discriminated against minorities. Class politics is a fact. The Conservatives wage it very well and very ruthlessly on behalf of the ruling elite that they exist to represent. Of course, they sugar the pill, they don’t tell people that is what they are doing. And, as Aneurin Bevan said in his book In Place of Fear, the art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century is the art of persuading the majority to vote in the interests of the privileged minority. So, in the twentieth century, as in the twenty-first century too. I think that Boris Johnson did that very effectively in 2019 through his slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’. It almost made lots of people forget that really this government and this politician weren’t on their side. But the way that he made it into a Brexit election, a Brexit drama helped to persuade people to vote for a party which sadly isn’t really on their side.

AB: I agree that ‘For the Many, Not the Few’ is an effective way of putting across what people can perceive to be ‘old-fashioned’ class terms.

RB: Although, curiously of course, it was a phrase coined by Percy Shelley in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’.

AB: Who was sent down from Univ, my college! It’s really interesting you mention that Bernie Sanders hired an academic, and that you evoke this idea of the ‘classroom of three hundred million people’. I think that one of the overlooked parts of your deputy leadership campaign was political education. If you had to assign three things as required reading for young socialists, what would they be?

RB: Well, we’ve started actually. Because I didn’t win the deputy leadership election, I don’t have the resources from the party to set up the ambitious education unit for the members that we would have done. But I did do some fundraising and with that I have prepared a package, which is out there now, on the politics of Tony Benn. And the package is available, we have sent it out to tens of thousands of people. They can use it to hold seminars and discussions and workshops in their own CLPs, in their own union branches, in their own community. And so, we put together that and it kind of talks about the different strands of political thought of Tony Benn. The next one that we’re going to do – we’ve been fundraising for this – is an education package on Sylvia Pankhurst. As for what the third one will be, we haven’t decided yet, but it may be an international figure. So we shall see. But I think in the Labour party, obviously the political thought of Tony Benn is very important to me as a left Labour activist and MP. The political thought of Keir Hardie, Aneurin Bevan and also the crucial role that Diane Abbott, for example, played in the anti-racist movement and the way that the Labour movement relates to that and the way that the anti-racist movement relates to the Labour movement as well. But, as I said, Sylvia Pankhurst is the next person that we are preparing political education packs about because her politics were wide-ranging. Yes, a suffragette campaigning for women to have the right to vote, but also her campaigning against poverty, against war, against inequality is so important to reflect upon.

AB: Thank you so much!

[Thanks to Hari Bravery for transcribing the conversation]