Introduction

When I started writing this book, the problem was two-fold. Neoliberalism seemed a particularly destructive force, and yet there appeared no prospect of it being brought to a halt. The question was how's that to be achieved? There is now some suggestion that this question has been superseded. Has anything really changed over that time? I’m certainly not convinced, but there's another issue too. Even if we have seen the last of neoliberalism, does that really mean that something better is waiting in the wings? Looking generally at the rising conflict and uncertainty in the world and looking specifically at the scale of the extreme right vote in the UK and US in 2024, I personally, doubt it – unless we all become actors in making it happen. Let me explain.

An end of neoliberalism?

Since I started on this book, the political, economic and moral bankruptcy and anti-democratic nature of neoliberalism has increasingly been showing itself. In the US, we’ve seen an extremist president reduced to setting the mob on his own seat of government and then standing successfully to lead that government again, pardoning the offenders. Something similar has been happening in Brazil with attacks on its Congress. In the UK, a queue of short-lived prime ministers found the old right-wing game plan and its previously unstoppable rhetoric less and less effective in silencing their detractors.

The paradox of our times

Charles Dickens was writing of a different age but prefigured the enormous contradiction of our own when there are so many reasons for hope, but presiding over it all is a doom-laden global politics. This book is inspired by that huge paradox, summed up by the widening gulf between the personal values we teach our children and the anti-social ideology that increasingly rules our lives. This book's vision is that the one may offer the key to transforming the other.

We are currently experiencing the full flood of this man-made disaster. It is blighting economies, dividing populations, undermining wellbeing and putting us and our planet at unprecedented risk through global warming and environmental damage. Its consequences dwarf pandemics like that of COVID-19 and yet many of us don't even know its name. It's the global catastrophe called neoliberalism – the deregulation of market economies and cutting back of state support for those they most damage. Offering short-term profit for the few orchestrating it, it brings insecurity, threat and disaster for most others. It has helped generate conflict within and between nations, created its own ‘culture wars’, forced mass migrations, reinforced hate and social divisions, divided Global North and South, created new kinds of colonialism and, most of all, it has concentrated power and wealth more narrowly than ever in a new ‘overclass’ without restraint or responsibility.

In the first part of the book, we chart the scale and wide range of destructive effects of neoliberal ideology and formal politics from the individual to the global. We can see its damaging influence behind both the rising and existential problems now facing us and the planet and our apparently reduced ability to be able to deal with them. Yet still, neoliberalism has managed to command wide support in democracies over many years with no end in sight. How has it performed this amazing conjuring trick?

Part III of the book focuses on bringing about change in the politics and ideologies that shape our lives by finding ways for us all to reconnect with each other. What might be needed to make that possible and where might it take us? We can expect to find ourselves needing to rethink almost all the ways we do things if we are to achieve our aims and include everyone. Here the book takes us through a range of key, often neglected issues, where we need to do this if we are to challenge the taken-for-granted exclusions of both mainstream politics and attempts to change them.

Introduction

It's hardly surprising that a book starting with the exhortation ‘only connect’ should pay so much attention to communication. Here we pick up the discussion on the part played by new technology. It's also difficult to see how we can challenge the divisive pressures of neoliberalism without such an emphasis on communication. In this chapter, the focus shifts determinedly to developing more inclusive and equal communication prompted by the sharp realisation of how excluding and unequal communication so often is routinely in our world.

We regularly communicate in ways that leave out large swathes of the population, taking for granted that many mainstream communication approaches, old and new, are riddled with barriers. This can be for historical, social, cultural and political reasons. It's not restricted to particular ‘out-groups’ – although these have often been the most helpful in raising such issues. As a mental health service user/survivor, at work, I have been able to secure ‘reasonable adjustments’ under equality legislation to overcome some of these communication access difficulties. Yet I know that similar problems apply much more widely to people without such recourse.

The disabled people's and Deaf people's movements have challenged this and made progress. However, it remains a problem for many, excluding them in various ways. We must work to remedy this if we’re really committed to a renewed politics which are truly democratic. Struggles for personal politics help us understand the direction that formal politics need to be moving in.

All communication is ultimately personal – if it's to work. That's to say if it's to convey a message accessible to recipients.

Introduction

We live in very uncertain times. While the UK has sought to isolate itself from Europe, the damaging consequences of Brexit have highlighted our interdependency at every level. Gaza is aflame in the Middle East, but much closer to home there's a hot war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine, with no real end in sight and, like the conflict in former Yugoslavia, reflecting unfinished business relating to the Soviet Union's creation and collapse. All this takes place in the broader context of the large-scale global political and socio-economic damage done by neoliberalism's global dominance. The gap between such political values and those demanded of the general public under lockdown was brought into sharp relief by the UK 2022 ‘Partygate’ scandal, with senior politicians laying down one law – while practising another – partying, while nationwide, families had to leave loved ones to die alone (Elgot, 2022).

Introduction

One aim of this book is to help us rethink prevailing assumptions, about what is and isn't possible in politics and policy and what the big issues are. Already, we’ve seen violence against women treated as peripheral. Even such violence meted out illegally by official keepers of the peace has been given little official priority. During my life, I’ve seen prevailing values move from the belief that only by the state controlling the market will we end poverty to the conventional wisdom becoming that only the market can achieve this and state interference makes things worse. The book began with an individual death, which I argue has much bigger ramifications for us and our politics. However, what happens to us as individuals is clearly on a different scale from what may befall us collectively.

Neoliberalism's big consequences

Neoliberalism and its bedmate globalisation are linked with phenomena that can cause individual suffering on a universal scale. It's such big-ticket ramifications of these economic and political developments that we turn to next. While they may seem more distant, we ignore them at our peril. We began with neoliberalism's relations with poverty and inequality. Now we consider a range of other global concerns associated with prevailing politics and economics which also have massive implications for all our futures.

Introduction

This book is about making change. The market has been deluged with such books, not least since times became much tougher for most people. Nevertheless, although the shelves are full of them and bookshops even now have whole sections devoted to the subject, with headings like ‘Self Help’ and ‘Mind, Body and Spirit’, the topic is generally the narrow one of trying to change yourself. Trying to change one person is likely to be a lot easier than trying to change the world! However, since the main reason most people seek change in themselves is to make their stay in this world more comfortable and positive, it's open to question how successful their efforts will ever be in isolation. In addition, most of these books tend to be based on one or another individualistic approach to self-development, so the sub-text is really more one of how you can improve your position in the unequal competition of life, rather than let's make things better for everyone. We may also wonder how helpful such a quest is in the context of the fundamental human desire at the heart of this book to ‘connect’. Even beyond that, as Colin Ward reminds us at the beginning of this chapter, we may even have to subject taken-for-granted concepts like ‘the state’ to radical review (Ward, 2004).

Introduction

This book starts with where we are – with the politics and policies now shaping our lives internationally – the politics of neoliberalism and globalisation. If one very specific domestic event in the UK epitomises both the problems such ideology now faces us with globally and locally, and new ways of understanding and even liberating ourselves from them, it's the terrible murder of Sarah Everard on 3 March 2021. This is a murder that has become one of the global markers of the oppression of women and the collusion of the prevailing politics in it.

A defining femicide

I may surprise some readers by making this connection. Some may feel it is tendentious – elevating one woman's death to undue significance. I’d challenge this strongly – not only because of the Talmud's wise assertion that ‘whoever kills one life kills the world entire’ but because this is an age characterised by disconnection, a general reluctance to examine anything's social relations.

Introduction

Many of us spend much of our lives trying to sort out things that caused us difficulties in our childhood. If we’re lucky, have good support and relationships, we make positive progress. This is the kind of education that can truly be thought of as lifelong learning, embracing our emotional and intellectual development. But sadly, for many of us, it's not the kind of formal education for life we receive. Nor does our state education greatly help in making sense of formal politics, which may be why, so many of us find ourselves increasingly alienated from them.

Education has constantly come up in this discussion of formal politics and personal roles and relationships; the gaps between them and the insights this may offer us for political change. In this chapter, we focus specifically on education because of its centrality to this issue and its both retrograde and liberatory potential. If, as we’ll suggest, formal education has often served as the handmaiden of regressive politics, it's also key to its democratisation and reuniting formal and personal politics in a liberatory direction. However, the kind of education were talking about to help develop more emancipatory politics, tends to be very different from what we’re familiar with from school. It's this paradox and reality we turn to now.

Introduction

This book has highlighted several political, ideological, social, economic and cultural themes. These have included pressure to rising inequality and poverty, to short-term personal profit, environmental damage, disempowerment, colonisation and alienation. We have also heard about powerful counter-themes: valuing diversity and treating it with equality, struggling against discrimination and for sustainability, for equal individual and collective rights and recognition, and for more say in what happens to us in society. If the politics over us has become harsher and more individualising, the personal politics between us seems set in a kinder direction, with more emphasis on egalitarian roles and relationships. Bottom-up movements continue to challenge top-down formal politics. Pressures for participation battle with the most powerful rekindling of populism since the days of pre-war fascism and state communism.

The plea to connect

Current pressures are also reminders of much earlier calls for change and of one particular form they took. Here we may find clues for achieving change for the future. One enduring strand has been framed in terms of connection and reconnection, highlighting separations and inequalities of their own times. During a period, as now, when the gulf between personal and formal political values seemed ever to be widening, that past precedent may offer insights worthy of reconsideration.

Introduction: The massive contradiction

Something we’ve had to get used to under neoliberalism, for example, in the UK, is that institutions we’ve long valued, supported and defended, like the NHS and BBC, have become contradictory and ambiguous. We fight for the licence fee and public broadcasting because we know that without the BBC, UK broadcasting will suffer and it will be a free-for-all of destructive market forces and empire-building media moguls like Rupert Murdoch. However, we also weep over BBC news shifting to the right and becoming the amplifier of the neoliberal press. It failed miserably over issues like the decades-long Jimmy Saville sex abuse scandal, became over-bureaucratised, kow-towing to government. The NHS remains a jewel in the crown for many, but it's been hollowed out by privatisation, its staff overloaded and bullying endemic.

These realities highlight the issue at the heart of this book – the working through of the struggle now taking place between our personal politics and the formal politics they routinely challenge. As we saw during the pandemic, UK health and care workers struggled unto death – in too many cases – to do their jobs to the best of their ability, while for-profit organisations milked anti-COVID-19 budgets for billions.

Introduction

We’ve talked a lot about communication, connection and information. All have a key part to play in gaining wider support against the reactionary formal politics that have been dominating our lives for too long. Now we turn to knowledge and knowledge production; how they’ve been captured by neoliberalism and the pioneering progress being made to reverse that and reconnect them with our lives and experience.

A personal word first

I should perhaps start by saying that Trumpian ideas like ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ don't really feel new to me. My father killed himself when I was four and left my older sister and me with a mother who could be terrifying. She never told us he’d died. I didn't discover he had killed himself until I was an adult! Among the things she did tell us was, ‘If I say something's black and it's white, then it is black’. It was really only when I was grown up and talked about this with my partner that I began to realise the magnitude of what she was doing. While I would resist statements like this at the time, challenging them with her and in my own head, for a small child it was pretty difficult to escape their power! I don't think I really did. The issue was more about being able later to break away from the power exerted over us. I don't think my poor sister ever could. However, I got an early apprenticeship in understanding broader issues of knowledge manipulation!

Disconnecting us from each other – introduction

Under neoliberalism, divisiveness operates at every level and while this may be true of all nationalist and tribalistic ideologies, neoliberalism majors in it at every level. There are many ways it alienates us from each other internationally.

Tourism – a case study of division

This is true of at least three of the dominant ways our paths may cross across nations and continents. These are war and conflict, international working, tourism, and often more closely linked with the latter than acknowledged, the ‘gap years’ of more privileged students. The rise of international working is a further expression of globalisation's neocolonialism – not to confuse with another – the plight of ‘economic’ migrants.

Modern international tourism is a perfect storm of all that's wrong with neoliberal ideology, politics and economics (Jeffries, 2022). Ultimately, its emphasis on the exotic may ultimately be as alienating as the other side of the coin; the neoliberal stress on the migrant threat. The Global North further exploits Global South impoverishment, encourages unsustainable tourism-based economies, and is key to expanding destructive trends like jumbo cruise ships and intense air travel.

Introduction

That 20th-century mantra, ‘only connect’ is about many things but, ultimately, it has to be about communication – at least initially.

The paradox of current communication

Ironically, in a period headlined an ‘age of communication’, in an ‘increasingly interconnected world’ (Edwards et al, 2019), ‘bringing us together’, where innovation has been breathtaking in scale and pace, we’re still talking about the problem of connecting. Why? I’m suggesting that at its heart is the increasing 21st-century aspiration to connect on inclusive and equal terms and that our communication systems are failing to do this and may actually be obstructing it. This is the starting point for our examination of reconnection as key to renewing formal politics. Generally speaking, ‘we’ – the majority – don't own the means of communication and may be unable to change that, but we can rethink how we might challenge this in future.

This draws us back to the issue at this book's heart: the growing gap between our personal and formal politics, specifically between our need to communicate and the prevailing politics of communication.

The technological leap

At one level, the capacity for human communication is unparalleled. In a world of laptops and smartphones, mass intercontinental travel, Zoom and Teams, most of us have an unprecedented capacity to be in touch with each other.

Reading Peter Beresford's new book, especially Parts II and III, reminds me of the hope that so many of us had at the height of the pandemic that those dark days could lead to us ‘building back better’, as the cracks in our society became horribly evident. Debates about what a good or better society might look like helped to keep us going. Even the editorial board of the Financial Times wrote that ‘Radical reforms – reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades – will need to be put on the table. … Policies, until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix’. Referencing the Second World War and the Beveridge Plan, ‘the same kind of foresight is needed today. Beyond the public health war true leaders will mobilise now to win the peace’.1 Alas, it was not to be. Poverty worsened, public services became ever more threadbare, and the carers for whom we had clapped weekly during the pandemic did not receive any tangible recognition.

What this book does is not try to flesh out what a better society might look like but explore how we might do politics differently to get there. It emphasises the importance of means as well as ends, underlining that they are intertwined so that ‘both need to be based on the same inclusive and egalitarian values’. It chimes well with the closing message of a recent pamphlet from Compass, the pressure group for a good society: ‘We can't wait for the perfect government. We need to start making that society now and showing politicians what needs to be done’.