15 June 2017
Why Owen Jones wants a “democratic revolution”
The man behind the surge of youth support for Labour
by R D Shackleton
He’s cuddling a cat in the photo on his twitter handle. This is not the look you’d expect from a political activist trying to be taken seriously. But you can bet that doesn’t worry Owen Jones. It’s just part of the clean-cut, regular boy-next-door schtick that has helped him become such a powerful force in the far left’s electoral turnaround.
To many outside Labour circles, he may still be a fringe agitator, a Guardian columnist, a writer of socially-concerned (and best-selling) polemics. And even within the ranks of Corbynistas, Jones is treated with varying degrees of distrust. He may have made his peace with the party by means of an “unreserved and heartfelt apology”. But the fact remains he denounced Corbyn as a lame-duck candidate as recently as March, calling for him to step down for the good of the Labour movement.
For all that, it was Jones, in association with the Momentum movement, who has played such an important role in converting to the hard-left the young and so many other voters disengaged from conventional politics. And you’re going to hear a lot more from him as a revitalised Labour pins its hopes on the Conservatives’ tenuous hold on power collapsing into another General Election.
That’s certainly what Jones is expecting. “In the not too distant future we will elect the most radical Labour government we have had since 1945 and it will only be done by you building up that mass movement across the country”, he tells his supporters earlier this week in a podcast posted on his YouTube Channel just days after the election.
So who is Owen Jones? Who does he speak for? And what does he mean when he talks of dragging Labour policies more than seven decades back in time to the end of the Second World War?
He’s 32 – but looks a great deal younger. He lives in North London, but with his unreconstructed Manchester accent his Northern supporters take him as one of their own. He’s a fixture on the political talks circuit. As with the rest of Corbyn’s main advisors, he’s Oxbridge educated, with a History degree from University College, Oxford. Yet he can legitimately claim to be working class, brought up in Stockport, attending the no-frills Ridge Danyers Sixth Form College.
One of four children, his father a local authority worker and union shop steward, the Labour movement was a big part of his childhood, with both of his parents belonging to the Militant Tendency. And so the involvement continued with his career to date, working as a Trade Union and parliamentary researcher before branching out into the media.
So far and so predictable. What lifts Jones so far beyond the run-of-the-mill Labour activist, however, is the calibre of his writing and debate and his understanding of what it takes to mobilise the legions of disaffected voters to represent a real challenge to the Conservatives. Just as the economic journalist Will Hutton was seen as laying down the blue-print for New Labour with the publication of “The State we’re in” in 1995, so Jones could be considered to be the intellectual engine behind Corbyn’s politics with his books, “Chavs” and “The Establishment”. Far more important than that, he has built up a formidable platform to champion his views, as a social media star with a current tally of near 600,000 twitter followers – and rising. This, together with his hyperactive YouTube channel and other social media initiatives explains why he has been so successful in mobilising the Millennial generation.
He’s unpredictable. Jones seems to operate at two speeds. There’s his folksy side where he uses his Youtube channel in a jokey series of interviews with staff at the Momentum movement – with which he is closely associated – to demolish, as he says, the myth that they are all Trotskyist extremists. And then there’s the cold anger where he famously storms out of a Sky interview after he felt the news show hosts downplayed the homophobia involved in the Orlando nightclub shooting. He’s a passionate supporter of LGBT rights.
He’s angry, too, in his writing. In the first of his books, “Chavs – The Demonization of The Working Class”, he is looking to: “Refute the myth that Britain is a classless society” given that so much wealth and power is, he argues, concentrated in the hands of so few. He wants to dismantle the “myth” that social problems such as poverty are the result of individual failings and feckless lifestyles. And thirdly, he is looking to propagate the idea that social progress: “Comes about by people with similar economic interests organizing together to change society.” He writes well with a convincing blend of rigorous and well-sourced analysis brought to life with his own subjective observations. His most thought-provoking conclusion perhaps, is that the more the under-class – Chavs – are demonised as being the authors of their own predicament, the harder it is to empathise with them. And once effectively dehumanised: “Why would anyone want to improve the conditions of people that they hate?”
Far less convincing, perhaps, is his attempt to challenge the concept of individual aspiration. As he observes, “Both Thatcherism and New Labour have promoted this rugged individualism with almost religious zeal.” This doesn’t wash in Jones’ world. “If everyone could become middle class, who would man the supermarket checkouts, empty the bins and answer the phones in call centres? But this glorifaction of the middle class – by making it the standard everyone should aspire for, however unrealistically – is a useful prop for the class system.” That’s well and good – but he’s putting forward no credible alternative.
The themes of class struggle are developed further in “The Establishment and how they get away with it” a polemic against what he sees as the grossly unfair distribution of wealth resulting from the prevailing social and political order. The book is all the more effective because of the generous way he treats those who he clearly regards as class enemies. “Little can be understood simply by castigating individuals for being greedy or lacking in compassion.” But for Jones, it is the system – The Establishment – that is the problem, not the individuals who comprise it. Hence, for example, he is at pains to describe the CEO of Ernst & Young as a “generous, charming thoughtful individual” whilst denouncing the accountants’ commitment to philanthropy as a “return to a Victorian ethos where social provision was patchwork and dependent on the generosity of individuals rather than an efficient, publically provided universal system funded by progressive taxation.”
What Jones is looking for in The Establishment – and this echoes the rallying call in his post-election YouTube – is nothing less than a ‘democratic revolution’ to “reverse the achievements of the neo-liberal outriders.” And in their place to usher in a new Britain to be run in the interests of people’s needs and aspirations.
You’re going to hear a lot more from Owen Jones. He’s helped bring passion back to politics and will continue to mobilise the young. Even if his dreams for a socialist utopia still seem unlikely to transform Britain anytime soon.
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