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The Reith Lectures 2023

with Prof. Ben Ansell

Lecture 3: The Future of Solidarity

ANITA ANAND: Welcome to the third of this year’s Reith lectures. We’re
in Sunderland at the beautifully renovated Fire Station, now a highly impressive
live performance music venue site located in the centre of this famous city in the
north-east of England. It’s symbolic of the renewal that is happening here, part of
a work in progress, a clear effort to say the best days for this city can lie ahead,
rather than in the past. And that really chimes with the core themes of this year’s
series, which looks at how we might navigate our democratic future after the
turbulence of recent years. Our lecturer is a politics professor from Nuffield
College, Oxford University, and in this, his third lecture called ‘The Future of
Solidarity’, he’s going to be asking how we can develop a shared sense of
belonging in today’s polarised culture. No doubt, there are going to be lots of
questions about how exactly we do that, so let us hear what he has to say. Will
you please welcome the BBC 2023 Reith lecturer, Professor Ben Ansell.

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 (AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

BEN ANSELL: Sunderland is a city of firsts, first to announce results in

every general election – as I’m sure you’re very bored of hearing – first to
announce the voted leave in the Brexit referendum where, as Sunderland went,
so too did the nation. And most importantly, of course, first in 1936, 1913 and
another four times in the English First Division.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

BEN ANSELL: I did my research. But it doesn’t always feel like

Sunderland comes first, at least as far as the rest of the country goes. Well,
actually not just Sunderland, sometimes it seems only London and the south-
east come first because, compared to the rest of the country, London is in a
different league. Average incomes in London are about £50,000 a year, but the
national average income is closer to £30,000 and, in the north-east, here, average
incomes are just half the level of London, and that’s lower than in any American
state, any French region, any German state, even those in ex-communist East
Germany.

And it’s not just income where we see huge gaps across regions in the UK.
So, as I took the train here from Oxfordshire, the average healthy life expectancy
dropped a year every 25 miles, right, so not just my life expectancy from the train
delays. And now it wasn’t always thus because in 1900 the eighth richest region
in all of Europe was the north of England, and Sunderland, as you know, is
globally famous for its glassmaking and it’s the shipbuilding capital of the world.

Now, in the early 1960s, my own grandfather, Eric, he moved to where

the jobs were, from a declining port on the south coast to work in the bustling
shipyards just north of here on the Tyne, first to Vickers at High Walker and then
to Swan Hunter in Wallsend. Now, lest you think that I’m trying to curry favour
with this audience here in Sunderland, I’m afraid to say that he was closely
involved in the building of the Geordie gunboat herself, the HMS Newcastle. So
I’m sorry I’ll get my coat. Not that long ago the industries, the jobs, the
opportunities in Britain, they were right here and, of course, many of them still
are. Sunderland has the largest car plant in the country, but the last ship was
built at Swan Hunter over 15 years ago. The last deep coal mine in County
Durham closed almost 30 years ago and, over the past few decades, compared to
the rest of the country, the north-east has been left behind.

And I know left behind is an overused phrase, it’s usually said right before
a politician promises to level up, but it’s not inaccurate and it speaks of a national

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tragedy because being part of a country, of a nation should mean common
commitments and collective dreams, a community that celebrates its successes
and protects its less fortunate, but it seems like our nation is pulling apart, rather
than coming together. Our politics has become sharp edged and sharp tongued,
and we have too, especially on the Internet where we go online, yes, to complain
about politicians, but also to complain about our fellow citizens and definitely to
complain about our neighbours and their inability to put the bins out correctly.

Now, I’m not arguing that we should all agree and, in a democracy, we
never will, but beneath our bickering, we all have, and I think want, a stake in our
communities’ success. So to move beyond our disagreements, we’re going to
need some kind of social glue, and that glue is solidarity. And solidarity might not
be a word that you throw around every day. Perhaps you associate it, though,
with trade unions because a few miles away at the old coal pits of County
Durham where the annual Durham Miners’ Gala explicitly calls for community
and international solidarity. That sense of solidarity is, of course, core to the
often embattled union movement, but it can also transcend those struggles
because, as a nation, we also feel solidarity with one another, especially when we
face shared challenges, from wars, to recessions, to pandemics.

And sometimes, in our most wishful, maybe wistful moments, we do feel

solidarity with our fellow humans worldwide. Solidarity is about an ‘us’, about a
shared fate, about a common humanity, about developing and nurturing a
collective identity where what befalls you affects me and vice versa. And the vice
versa is crucial because for solidarity to work, it has to be reciprocal. I treat you
seriously as a real person with real dreams and desires, rights and
responsibilities, just as I would like to be treated myself, as part of an ‘us’.

So solidarity is not the same thing as charity. Now, the act of charity is a
moral impulse of the fortunate to provide for the unfortunate. There are givers
and then there are recipients. There is an ‘us’, but there’s also a ‘them’. Now,
charity is a commendable private virtue, of course, but if we decide to divide our
society into a fortunate ‘us’ and an unfortunate ‘them’, then we’ll be dividing
ourselves in half, and solidarity is about realising there is ultimately no ‘them’,
only an ‘us’. Solidarity is reciprocal charity.

So solidarity, it’s about all of us, but it’s also about each of us because, as
Sunderland fans know only too well, you and I we are not always on top. Now, it
could be worse, I’m a Crystal Palace fan, so we’ve never, in fact, been on top, but
sometimes each of us feels invincible, when we’re young, when we’re well, when
we’re earning a good keep, but, sadly, inevitably, we will age, we will get sick, we
will fall on hard times and then we’re going to have to provide for one another
because we won’t be able to rely on charity alone.

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 Solidarity means pooling our resources to insure ourselves collectively
against hard times and, to do that, we’ll all have to pay in and that means taxes,
I’m afraid. Boo. Some people might think, well, why should I pay for others more
reckless or feckless or just plain unfortunate than myself? But all of us rely on
public services and on social insurance. We all need education, we all need health
care and we all definitely need someone to collect the bins. So you might worry,
though, that all of this spending on solidarity is going to come at a cost – and you
are right.

But high taxes don’t necessarily mean we’ll feel worse off. Most of the
wealthiest countries in Europe: Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, they have
higher social spending than the UK and, on average, people feel happier there.
Now, maybe that’s just because they love paying taxes – possible – but maybe we
can get rich and look after one another. So no matter how frustrated we get with
politicians, we do need the government to step in and provide some, maybe most
of these social services, so we’re going to need a politics of solidarity, and the
good news is that we’ve done this before because everyone in this room will be
intimately familiar with the institution that best embodies solidarity in Britain,
the National Health Service.

And the NHS is a truly universal system. So everyone resident in the UK

can access it, everyone faces the same cost when they see the doctor: nothing.
And, also, everyone has to pay for it through taxes. Now, across our lives, our
relationship with the NHS will change. So when we’re born, when we’re ill, as we
age, we will rely on it. And when we are at our most fortunate, working, spending,
partying, well, then we’ll be paying for it and, depending on how hard we party,
we might be doing a bit of both. But we don’t begrudge others using the NHS
when we’re not doing so, we feel a sense of solidarity across our own lives and
those of our fellow citizens. And we recently celebrated the 75th birthday of the
NHS, and that anniversary is no historical accident. The origins of the NHS, they
lie in a moment of national solidarity, the end of the Second World War, and
when wars end, calls come for recognition of the many sacrifices made by the
public.

So, at the end of the First World War, that meant extending the voting
franchise. At the end of the Second World War, the demand was for those
political rights to be accompanied by new social rights, rights to work, rights to
shelter, rights support and, yes, rights to healthcare. So our NHS is a product of
the Beveridge Report. And that report, written during war in 1942, it sold over
600,000 copies. It had a name recognition of 95%. It truly was the Taylor Swift of
its day.

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 Beveridge’s report covered a whole series of national insurance schemes,
including unemployment and pensions, but they all had one key principle, a
principle that embodies solidarity, and that’s universality. Rather than providing
support only to the destitute or the poor, everyone would receive benefits and
everyone would pay. This state was not a charity, it was solidarity. Now, today,
the NHS is, as you know, incredibly popular: 90% of Brits agree that the NHS
should be free at the point of delivery and available to everyone. Almost as many
believe it should be funded through taxes.

So I did some research to find other popular things before I came here. So
here are some things that are as popular as the NHS. Time with your family – and
I guess that sort of depends on who’s family – David Attenborough, Morgan
Freeman, but not even Queen Elizabeth or Team G gets these kind of numbers.
So, okay, the NHS is the national religion, but there are tensions under that calm
surface because, although the NHS is supposed to be universal, it doesn’t always
play out like that. Depending on where you live, access to cancer care, for
example, might vary dramatically, and we call this a postcode lottery. But it’s not
a lottery, there’s no chance, poorer locations get systematically worse outcomes.
And nor is everybody sold on the universalism of the NHS because,
regardless of your diet, your smoking, your drinking, your drug habits, the NHS
will cover you and some people, understandably, see this as a licence to
misbehave. So they may like the idea of solidarity, but they really hate the idea
that people are cheating the system.

And, finally, the world of William Beveridge is long gone. Life expectancy
in 1942, at the time of the report, was just 64. Now, it’s over 80. And we demand
more from the NHS, we demand hip replacements, MRIs, anti-obesity drugs.
Solidarity is more expensive. So even at the heart of Britain’s most solidaristic
policy, solidarity is contested. And if we can’t all agree on the NHS, then can we
really all agree on other social spending, from the pension’s triple-lock, to school
places, to universal credit? If we are to secure our solidarity, we will have to
conquer three enemies.

And the first enemy is ourselves and our difficulty in making sure that
present ‘us’ looks out for future ‘us’ looks out for future ‘us’ because it’s easy to
put off paying for the future. Think about private insurance, it’s no fun paying
premiums today, but tomorrow when your teenage son has crashed into a lamp
post, well, then you wish you’d bought that insurance after all. Social insurance is
the same. We pay taxes today to cover us for hard times tomorrow. And here’s
the problem for politicians, that’s not really ideal because they raise taxes now,
but the benefits only come after the election. How very unfair on those poor
politicians.

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 And that means, though, that we end up under-investing. People
sometimes say that Britain is a country that wants European-style benefits, but
with American-style taxes, to have our cake tomorrow and eat it today. Now, it
might surprise you, but over their lifetime, most people in the UK end up being
neither net givers, nor net takers from our welfare system. We get out roughly
what we put in. The problem is there’s a mismatch. The time in our lives that we
pay the most in taxes is not when we will most need the benefits. So, in our
forties, we might pay twice as much in taxes as what we get back in benefits and
services, but when we’re in our seventies, that’s going to flip, we’ll get back
almost four times what we pay in. Now then, of course, there’s the real
freeloaders, our kids. Don’t worry, they’ll end up paying taxes eventually, we’ll
get them in the end.

The second enemy of solidarity is dividing our society into an ‘us’ and a
‘them’, and a country that becomes obsessed with binaries cannot easily reclaim
unity. If we see our fellow citizens as ‘others’, as getting in our way, as
undermining our goals, well, then we simply end up stoking the fires of division.
And we see this in the so-called culture wars, over identity, over the environment,
yes, also over Brexit. And riled up by a social media or by each other down the
pub, we end up delighting in divisiveness, but, in my view, these are the empty
calories of politics because national politics has to be about an ‘us’, not an ‘us’
and a ‘them’. Identity politics harms solidarity. People end up thinking that public
spending is something that goes to other less deserving folk or maybe different
looking folk because, in America, studies show that white people with what social
scientists call highly ethnocentric preferences – but you might know them better
as racists – they are much less supportive of programs like aid to the poor which
they think go to black Americans and more supportive of retirement programs
which they think goes to work people like them.

Now, we are not completely immune to this here. Some recent

experiments in the UK found that ethnocentric white Brits, they tend to support
higher housing benefits for white British citizens than they do for Muslim/Asian
British citizens. So the shadow of racism still haunts our national solidarity. Now,
this isn’t inevitable, and I think the UK has come an incredible way as a multiracial
society, but we also must not be naïve. The third enemy of solidarity is our
political division, which makes it hard for us to build a stable coalition for
solidarity. And the nature of that division has changed dramatically in recent
years. So a generation ago, it was money that divided people. Richer people
voted Conservative, poorer people voted Labour. And our political parties might
have disagreed about public spending, but the battle for swing voters meant that
there was a compromise, an agreement to balance solidarity and the taxes you
need to pay for it.

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 But, recently, money stopped mattering for how people vote. So in the
1990s, high income people favoured the Conservatives over Labour by about
20% points. In 2019, there was no difference at all. And so you might think, oh,
our politics isn’t about how much we own, maybe we are all getting along. No
money, no problems, but I think we all know that’s not true, we just have new,
more divisive divides. Education has replaced income in shaping how people vote
and, actually, in the opposite way that it used to. Back in the ‘70s, university
graduates favoured the Conservatives over Labour by 25% points. In the last
election, that had completely flipped.

Now, today’s graduates have been winners in many, many ways. The
national conversation is dominated by graduates, about politics, about social
norms, about whether it’s okay to work from home, and that can leave people
who never attended university feeling ignored and patronised and, you know
what, they are right. We graduates are pretty annoying, but today’s graduates
also feel like losers. They now face tuition fees of £9,000 a year. Even if they do
get high-paid jobs, they might not be able to afford a modest 1930s semi-
detached house and that’s a very different world from their parents and their
grandparents.

Back in the ‘70s, fewer than 10% of Brits went to university, but, today,
it’s around half the population. And people born in the late 1940s, when they
were in their twenties, they spent just around 5% of their income on housing.
Young people today, they spend about a quarter, and I think this affects
perceptions of fairness. So I run a bunch of surveys throughout the country and I
ask people what do you think determines your chances of success in life, is it
individual effort or forces outside your control? Well, half of the over 70s think
that individual effort is the most important thing, but when it comes to 20-
somethings, that’s just 20% of them.

The over-70s grew up in Beveridge’s world with affordable housing, free

education, sustainable pensions, and younger generations now face a housing
crunch, costly university and paying for the triple-locked pensions of their elders.
But, there’s good news, they have iPhones and avocado toast – lucky, lucky
Millennials.

Our political parties now reflect these generational divides. In the last
two general elections, the age gap in voting was over twice as large as it was in
the 1990s. So it’s no surprise that intergenerational solidarity has become so
challenging or why Christmas is so awkward.

So, what can we do? Well, we don’t have to reinvent the future of
solidarity from scratch, and solidarity comes about in two ways. It comes about

7
from feeling like one another and from doing things for one another, and to feel
like one another, well, that doesn’t have to cost money, but it’s hardly simple
because our national moments of coming together have typically been times of
collective suffering, as with the world wars – and that would not be my first
recommendation.

But there are ways to encourage fellow feeling without it costing the
earth. Anyone, like me, who has volunteered at their local school, or for charities
knows the payoff of working with people from different backgrounds, different
jobs, different political persuasions, even different football club supporters. But
volunteering is in decline. David Cameron – I wonder what happened to that guy –
he once talked about a big society of volunteers, but the proportion of people
who volunteer annually has dropped from almost half the population in 2013 to
just a quarter of us today. Now, volunteering is cheap, but so, apparently, was
talk. But we shouldn’t despair. From Saturday park runs, to the London Olympics
in our good times, to Alcoholics Anonymous or Marie Curie hospices in tough
times, volunteering still binds us together. And although the national trauma of
COVID-19 it didn’t dissolve our divides, sometimes it did help communities come
together. For me, it was the creation of something as simple as a WhatsApp
group for our street and going around doorknocking at the beginning of the
pandemic to see if people were okay.

And volunteering is also about places, as much as people. So I think we all

bemoan the shutting of household named stores in our town centres, like
Debenhams and Wilko, right here. But this does provide a new opportunity for
charities, or cafés, farmers markets, self-help groups, it’s not the end. And to give
you an example, there something called the Library of Things. The Library of
Things allows people to go to their local neighbourhood and borrow expensive
household equipment from neighbours.

Solidarity, though, bluntly, is mostly about spending money and one

solution to our polarisation is a return to the spirit of the Beveridge Report, a
return to universalism. So, in the UK, much of our public spending, like child or
unemployment benefits, is means tested. Low earners receive it, high earners
cannot. And that looks – superficially it looks progressive, but it’s unpopular
because it works more like charity than solidarity. Benefits aimed at the poor end
up being poor benefits, they lack political support, they become stigmatised and
then people suspect fraud. And the British public think a third of all welfare
claims are fraudulent, but the actual number, the actual number is a hundred
times lower.

Universal benefits and services, like the NHS, on the other hand, well,
they are much more popular, but how we do universalism really matters. So you

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know that old sore about when countries have the word democratic in their
names, that’s a red flag, well, I think the same is true for policies with the word
universal in their title. And I’ll give you an example, universal credit. First
problem, it’s not actually universal. What universal credit does is it combines a
whole series of existing means tested benefits, housing benefit, unemployment
benefit, incapacity benefit, working tax credits. So, like other means tested
benefits, it’s stigmatising and it lacks strong political protection. It’s also
conditional, with Draconian punishments for failing to meet work tests, and many
recipients end up feeling like potential fraudsters, not real people with individual
needs.

But there is another universal policy idea that does address these
concerns. Give everybody in the country a universal, basic income, no questions
asked, sounds great, where do I sign up? The universal basic income, or UBI, is
simple. It does what it says on the tin: Everyone gets the same cash benefit. Now,
the admin costs of th is kind of scheme are pretty low because you don’t have to
worry about monitoring other people because it’s unconditional. And the UBI is
also not stigmatising. Receiving it doesn’t make you a lazy person or an
undeserving person, it just makes you a person, so it resolves the ‘us’ and ‘them’
problem because all of us get it. How we use it, well, that’s up to us so it creates a
solidarity of freedom, if you will. And it also fends off a threat to the future of
solidarity, that artificial intelligence algorithms could replace the jobs that us
humans get to do today.

And I think our society can only tolerate that kind of mass unemployment
if it doesn’t also have to tolerate mass poverty. So UBI is not perfect, but it’s
better than being made destitute by our robot masters. But there are downsides
to a UBI. So the most popular benefits out there are those that people feel they
earned. People don’t like benefits or even taxes that are unconnected to effort or
earnings, but the UBI is completely unconditional, right, so you could be a
layabout, you could be a billionaire, you could be both and you get it. And I think
that upsets people’s principles about fairness.

And there is also something I find slightly alien or inhuman about the UBI
– especially if it’s keeping us alive in our robot dominated world – it’s a form of
solidarity detached from human obligations. I think a politics of solidarity that
sees us as anonymous agents, as problems to be solved, not real humans with
deep attachment to the people and places around us, that can’t really bring us
together. So, a successful universal policy agenda has defined this Goldilocks
path between an unfeeling computer says no conditionality and an obligation-
free handout. And that, I think, starts with taking who we are and where we live
seriously, as seriously as we do.

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 And that might mean the central government letting go because
Westminster doesn’t always see people or places, it sees national insurance
numbers and tax returns, it treats Sunderland as interchangeable with Sandwell
or Southend. It ends up seeing like a state, categorising and sorting people, but
not always listening to them. So rather than a one size fits all universal benefit,
we should think, instead, of universal guarantees, guarantees of everything from
access to schools and doctor’s surgeries, to affordable housing, to accessible
public transport and to be implemented in ways that make sense locally.

So take building houses, we have an affordability crisis for young people,

of course we do, but it’s not only because of selfish NIMBYs. So when I run my
surveys asking people about why they oppose housebuilding, the same concerns
come up again and again: Schools, surgeries, doctors, dentists. Some people
really like talking about sewers. But people, correctly, suspect that the local
infrastructure needed won’t be provided along with those houses. Now, our main
political parties still disagree about how much to spend on solidarity, but they
have always agreed on one thing, that the centre should decide. If people felt
trusted to govern the places they lived and provide for local needs, I suspect we
would discover that our communities around the country are a bedrock of
solidarity, a solidarity of this century would pass power downwards.

So if we want to heal our national divides, to give places the chance to

thrive, to build a north-east that attracts ambitious people, like my grandad, from
across the country, then we need to treat people and places seriously, not as
problems to be managed. Solidarity is a test for our nation about what kind of
society we want to be and whether we are willing to pay for that when the chips
are down. But, the good news is that the future of solidarity is in our hands. It’s
about us and is up to us, so let’s get cracking. Thank you.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

ANITA ANAND: Ben, thank you very much. We’re going to take questions
from this absolutely packed auditorium in a moment. But, if I can kick us off, I
mean, it seemed to me from your talk the examples that you gave fitted into two
silos. So there’s kind of sort of local solidarity with people who are like you who
either are of your tribe, if you like, they live in the same area, they have the same
concerns, and then national solidarity. And, a bit worryingly, the examples you
gave of really good national solidarity were world war and pandemic and I just
wondered whether it really does take a crisis to create a national solidarity?

BEN ANSELL: There are some real contradictions in the ups and downs of
human life. So, for example, inequality, economic inequality is often lowest
during really tough times. During the Black Death inequality went down. We

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don’t want the Black Death to have lower inequality, that’s a bad way of getting
that. World wars have the same effect. Recessions often have the same effects.
So that’s an unfortunate reality. War was also about sacrifice, so, yes, it did have
the effect of destabilising existing relations, it basically made a bunch of rich
people poorer and, in some ways, that probably helped equality in the early post-
war, but it also had the effect of bringing people together in a common goal.

ANITA ANAND: Let me question that, though, because, I mean, the

pandemic… we were all scared together, you know, we lost people together, but
nothing showed the difference and inequality more. There were people who had
gardens, there were people who didn’t have gardens, there were people who
could work from home, there were people who had no choice about working from
home. That terrible crisis did not forge solidarity, I would suggest, but actually
showed the divisions between us very much more clearly than before the
pandemic.

BEN ANSELL: I think it did a bit of both because we did have the furlough
scheme and whatever one thinks about it, people stepped up and paid for other
people to be able to work at home, right. We could have just abandoned
everybody to their fate and that would have been a horrible outcome. We did end
up, not just clapping for the NHS, but also supporting the NHS building the
Nightingale hospitals, the vaccine program and so on. So, to some extent, our
society succeeded there. The problem is that we all still feel divided. So I think
the real failure, if you like, of the pandemic, because it didn’t politically bring us
together, it didn’t make us feel more of a team together and, as you noted,
people had very different experiences of that pandemic. Those pre-date the
pandemic, right, so all of the inequalities that we had as a country became
manifest, became visible during the pandemic in much higher death rates and so
on. We have not, it seems to me, got to a period yet where we are really serious
about doing something about those health inequalities so that in the next
pandemic the suffering is at least more equally shared.

ANITA ANAND: Okay. We’re going to ask you to put your hands up and
ask questions. The gentleman over there shot up immediately, so should be
rewarded for his courage and enthusiasm.

TITUS ALEXANDER: Thanks. Thanks for that great talk. Titus Alexander,
Democracy Matters. My question is around global solidarity. Some of our biggest
crises are international and we need to share them. How do we strengthen global
solidarity, both financially and politically?

BEN ANSELL: Yes, that’s a great question and I only touched on it briefly
in the talk. As a country, for a long period of time we did something that was not

11
very popular with our own citizens, but might have been beneficial in that way,
and that was the .7% foreign aid target. Now that’s pretty controversial because,
understandably, charity begins at home is a common feeling that people have
and, because so many parts of the country have been struggling, you can see why
that was politically controversial. For a long period of time, the government
stuck to it. We, of course, no longer have it, it’s now back to being an ambition
again. The tricky thing is turning that kind of commitment to fund development
around the world into outcomes that are beneficial for the rest of the world
because it is easy for that money to be used badly or to end up supporting
charities or research groups that conduct wonderful research, but don’t
necessarily get directly to the heart of the matter. But I do think that so many of
our global challenges stem from poverty and stem from people lacking the
security that we feel here. It seems unlikely that we’ll have effective international
solidarity with the level of global inequality that we currently have.

ANITA ANAND: The lady behind.

CHARLIE CHARLTON: Charlie Charlton. You talked about social glue.

The further that’s stretched, the less sticky it becomes, and one of the greatest
challenges for the north-east are the preconceptions people have about us down
south and elsewhere. How do we change that narrative?

BEN ANSELL: It would be really useful if politicians from the south didn’t
use you as props and stereotypes and I think there’s just been a massive tendency
of that in Westminster, I think, in part, because Westminster didn’t know what to
do in 2016. So it invented a group of northern voters or red wall voters or Brexit
voters in their own heads, but sometimes resembles actual real people, but
mostly resembles a bunch of kind of glued together stereotypes that they’ve
gleaned from old Andy Capp comics, so I don’t think that’s very helpful. And I
think for Westminster to take the north-east seriously would require maybe a
different political system than the one that we have because we had a system
where every north-east constituency voted the same way for 70 years, and I can
understand that there was a reaction against that – you feel taken for granted –
but it doesn’t seem that things have really changed for the north-east
enormously over the last few years, right. Levelling up is an idea, I’m not sure it’s
an experienced reality. So I think a de-centring of politics is probably the only
way that you get taken seriously and I don’t know whether that’s the new metro
mayor system because that then puts Sunderland in with lots of other places that
Sunderland fans don’t always agree with, but I do think some form of
decentralisation would at least force politicians to listen to local needs.

ANITA ANAND: Coming back to you, I mean, it’s hilarious that you turned
Newcastle into the Voldemort of geography and wouldn’t say its name. Is that a

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worry, if we can get back to the lady who asked the question that if you are
pulled into the orbit of the metro mayor system that you will be completely
eclipsed by Newcastle that is larger and louder?

CHARLIE CHARLTON: Well, it’s a very tricky issue at the moment. There
is a lot of excitement about devolution, a lot of excitement about the potential,
but, arguably, if you look at the north-west, a decision would have to be made
about a leading city and, inevitably, people believe that will be Newcastle. That
poses very interesting challenges for an area that has been very tribal, getting
Sunderland to have Newcastle as the leader, getting Gateshead to have
Newcastle as the leader, right down to Teesside, right up to Berwick. It is a
challenge and you’ve got seven local authorities to keep in agreement as well.

ANITA ANAND: The woman in the middle…yes.

EILEEN: My name is Eileen and I’m a PhD researcher at the University

here at Sunderland. If we have a bunch of – I’m assuming bunch is the collective
word for mayors – if we have a bunch of metro mayors or are they trying to
expand it into the rest of the country, mayors for regions throughout the country,
will this not be anti-solidarity as each mayor will obviously be for their region?

BEN ANSELL: Yes, there’s a real tricky trade-off that you’ve outlined so
clearly there between wanting our local areas to be treated seriously with the
people that we know and care about around us, and which is where most of, I
think, our solidaristic feelings are coming from and wanting to empower that and
then how it plays out at the national level and I think there’s always going to be a
bit of a bounce back and forth between those things. And that’s okay because the
country is more than just the kind of aggregation of all the localities. I think it’s
important to be aware of that. We do have things that are national in nature that
bind us. I just think that we’ve focused on those for the last few years and not on
the former. One way of thinking about a national government that took localities
more seriously would be – and I hate to say it – if we are going to reform the
House of Lords, which may happen, then thinking about is a second chamber of
regions that’s more locally defined a way of getting there.

ANITA ANAND: Thank you.

CHRIS MULLIN: Chris Mullin, I was the Member of Parliament for

Sunderland South for 23 years. Isn’t the political problem that any politician or
any political party that went into an election promising higher taxes, especially
those that will be required to fund a universal basic income risk triggering mass
hysteria?

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 BEN ANSELL: And spoken like a man who’s experienced a tax bombshell
poster. Yes, it’s really difficult. So, actually, I alluded to the challenges earlier
that politicians normally have to raise taxes today for benefits in the future and
that’s challenging around elections. FDR had that problem with the introduction
of Social Security back in the ‘30s. Initially, they’d wanted the benefits to come
out many years after the initial taxes were paid, but after they lost a
congressional election at the end of the ‘30s, they just smooshed them together.
It’s really difficult to do. Part of it, I think, relates to our volatile form of first past
the post electoral politics, which means that, firstly, politics is quite knife edge in
this country. You either win or you lose control of Parliament and, because our
political system is so centralised and creates such a kind of overbearing power in
the executive of the day, is quite hard to make policy stick over time.

And I worked on a skills policy back in the mid-2000s that, when I worked
for the Treasury, did become part of law and then the government changed, the
policy went out the window. Very easy for that to happen. So, all of this is a real
challenge for each of us. When we go to the ballot box, right, to in our own heads
think, well, wait a second, am I just voting for what’s convenient for me today,
but, of course, as a voter you’re not making the key decisions. What this really is
then is a call for grown-up politics from our politicians. I’m sure you’re all
extremely confident that that’s going to happen, but I think it’s possible. It might
require some kind of cross-party agreement about securing the future of the
NHS, but I’m not sure how you create that easily because in our currently
extremely polarised environment, it’s very challenging to do that, and I
acknowledge that the UK is a particularly hard place to get these kind of long run
policies that we might need.

ANITA ANAND: Do you mind if I throw that back to you, Chris Mullin,
because, I mean, this is radio, so people can’t see your eyebrows were doing the
dance of disbelief, but could you ever imagine a time when there is cross-party
support to turn to the voters and say what do we want, more taxes to pay for..
whether it’s UBI, universal basic income, or a better NHS or anything like that.
You’ve been in politics, is that ever going to happen?

CHRIS MULLIN: Well, at the beginning of 2000, that was possible. Blair
did raise a national insurance to put money into the National Health Service. That
wasn’t as a result of a two-party agreement, it was as a result of having a majority
of 160 in Parliament. So I think it’s very impractical. The Professor said we would
need to re-kindle the spirit of Beveridge, yes, but it took a world war to do that.

BEN ANSELL: It did, yes. Beveridge may be the only successful cross-
party agreement in our history. Having a huge majority is obviously one key way
of essentially being able to get past the electoral problem. But another is just

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having economic growth and there was great growth in the ‘90s and early 2000s
and we’ve had a growth rate that, believe it or not, is worse that any growth rate
since the Napoleonic wars in this country and that just makes every decision so
much harder.

GRAHAM THROWER: Hello. Graham Thrower, the Institute of Economic

and Social Inclusion at the University of Sunderland. I worry that maybe the
biggest barrier for the future of solidarity is a lack of any shared acceptance of
the objective truth about the challenges facing society and the inequalities in our
society in a world of alternative facts and fake news. So how do we combat that?

BEN ANSELL: There is an onus on us not to simply call out the so-called
mainstream media and to say, oh, they’re all lying to us, the main guys in the
establishment. I think that’s been a really unfortunate outcome. Of course,
venerable institutions like the BBC or ITV or Sky News or the major broadsheet
newspapers, they don’t always get all the facts right, but I do think we tend to
jump on them very quickly when they make a mistake and we give a lot of leeway
to crazy research that’s being done on social media where the evidence base is
very low, there are no fact checkers. So I think it’s on all of us to take seriously
the big institutions a bit more. Nobody likes trusting a big institution, but I think
they are a lot more trustworthy than stuff you find on Twitter or on TikTok or on
Instagram and so on.

ANITA ANAND: I think what you’re saying is what everybody would wish
is that we all think about things more, think about each other more, but does that
make you just a hopeless optimist.. that genie is out of the bottle now.

BEN ANSELL: Yes.

ANITA ANAND: We all do, we go whichever way we want to go, we listen

to whoever we want to listen to.

BEN ANSELL: Isn’t it empowering, though, in some way to think that it’s
actually up to us, right. The government can’t step in and ban fake news. It’s not
a viable thing to do because information travels from the States or from Europe
or from Russia at the speed of light into our social media feeds. So actually
preventing that from happening would require an enormously strong and
authoritarian government that then we would all shiver about. So I think the
empowering part is to say, look, actually, it’s up to all of you, it’s up to me, it’s up
to everybody to be a bit more serious about this and not just denounce the big
guys and not get tricked.

ANITA ANAND: Okay. The lady behind..

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 MAEVE COHEN: I am Maeve Cohen. I’m from an organisation called the
Social Guarantee that advocate for universal basic services, so I don’t know if
your thumb would still – I’m sure it would. So it is a question about-----

BEN ANSELL: Always give a thumbs up.

MAEVE COHEN: It is a question about UBI, universal basic income. It

does seem to me that it is the ultimate throwing money at a problem. These
inequalities and the social inequalities we face and a lot of the environmental
breakdown that we face is due to an overdependence on private markets and
private production and private consumption and just giving everybody cash
doesn’t address any of those underlying forces that are creating these problems.
So I think a far better use of that money would be investing in collectively
provided services, which is something that you have spoken about, and I wasn’t
quite sure if you were advocating for a universal basic income because you did
speak a lot about services and I’m not convinced you can have both and I would
like to ask you about the potential between those two.

BEN ANSELL: So, I’m cunning like that because there’s a lot of real UBI
advocates out there and I think there are some benefits to this as an idea. At the
risk of advertising my own book, I wrote a book why politics fails where I talk
about the merits of UBI and I ultimately come down against it, which is an
unpopular position for academics to take, and the reason is because the money
to pay for a UBI that was actually meaningful, which may be like would be, kind of
the level of a basic pension, right, nine or 10 grand a year, has to come from
somewhere, as the point was being made earlier, that money has to come from
somewhere. That means increased taxes or probably it means cutting other
things that we already like. So it strikes me that you might win the battle with
UBI and lose the war, that you’ll end up without people having access to services
because you’ve stripped back many of the collective public goods that we depend
on from public transport, which we don’t fund enormously generously in this
country, but education and healthcare. You could end up in a situation where
people are sort of buying healthcare vouchers or education vouchers because
that’s how you save the money from the UBI. So, yes, I guess my idea of universal
guarantees is along the lines of universal basic services.

GRAEME MILLER: Thank you very much. I’m Councillor Graeme Miller
and I’m leader of the Sunderland’s City Council. So I was interested in your
comments about the mayoral combined authority, but that’s not my question.
The future of solidarity, I think, is under deep threat from AI, the use of deep fake
technology, peoples’ increasing belief that social media just tells them the truth

16
or the truth they want to see. All of that risks splintering the future of
solidarity…

BEN ANSELL: We have gone down the wrong path in thinking about how
to govern artificial intelligence by focusing so much on what is called the
existential threat from artificial intelligence, which is the sort of Terminator 2
threat. But it seems to me that the AI risks that are much more important are
those to the essence of our polity and of our economy. Artificial intelligence
could replace all of our jobs I suppose, but I think the bigger risk is it makes a
small group of people extremely wealthy and makes a lot of other peoples’ jobs
much more insecure and then to our polity, it’s very unclear to me that there’s
any serious move in our major social media companies to take seriously the
threat of AI deep fakes. It is very hard, I think, for our government to do very
much about that, but we have been effective at regulating political advertising on
the normal media, around TV and radio, for years and we just wave our arms in
the air and say, oh, well, what can you do about social media, and I think we
probably could do a little more than we’re doing.

ANITA ANAND: A question at the back.

ROLLIE: Hi, I’m Rollie, I’m a master student at the University of

Sunderland. Can you have an English solidarity when some cities don’t identify as
English?

BEN ANSELL: Yes, lots of parts of the country, in Merseyside and in the
north-east, they feel less in common with the country than they might do. Now,
that might be long-standing, as I think it is in Liverpool, but Liverpool was a Tory
town in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Newcastle used to vote Conservative. Places also
change and adapt, so I don’t think I would want to think of different city regions
in the United Kingdom or even in England as being fundamentally distinct from
England as a whole. But many places have felt completely ignored and I think
feeling neglected, feeling ignored, leads to backlashes that we’ve only started
taking seriously in this country as a political outcome in the last decade and I’m
not sure we’ve really taken seriously, administratively or economically, at all yet.

ANITA ANAND: Okay, can I throw it back to our student questioner

Rollie. I mean, I get the impression that you’re saying that England is not the
banner underneath which you think there is going to be this sort of solidarity.
What would it be?

ROLLIE: Solidarity has to come through class because people at the top
of the tree, they don’t need solidarity because there’s no struggle. So people who
find it hard, like students, people who work, people on benefits. I mean, even the

17
middle classes are feeling the pinch now and it’s the people at the top who,
frankly, talk about having solidarity, but don’t know what it means to deliver it.

ANITA ANAND: Thank you.

KEVIN YUILL: Hi. My name is Kevin Yuill and I am an emeritus professor

of history and my question is about national solidarity because, in the past, this
country has been bound together by its common past, by its history, and I think
you have some background in history as well.

BEN ANSELL: I do, yes. Good research.

KEVIN YUILL: I notice that my children’s generation is ashamed of the

past and they have a disdain for the flag and they have a rejection of Britain’s
history and I just wonder whether a national solidarity is possible without what
has bound together this nation in the past, which is its history.

BEN ANSELL: I’m not going to sit here and say that I think the students
should be taught an airbrushed version of history. I also don’t think it makes
sense for students to be taught horrible histories where the only horrible part is
the UK, I get that. I think we have to trust that our children are a bit smarter than
we sometimes think they are about knowing that there’s good and bad in all
things and being able to teach history in a way that doesn’t veer towards one of
those two extremes is extremely challenging for anybody who teaches history.
Anyone who has taught it as a professor or as a teacher knows that’s a balance
you have to strike, but you do spend all of your time talking to students about
bias and sources and so, in a way, I think we need to have a more grown-up
conversation in this country about how to talk about the goods and bads of
British history and not worry too much about emphasising one or the other as
taking away our solidarity. I think our solidarity comes from collectively shared
experiences more than it does from collectively shared narratives, though I’m
open to being wrong.

ANITA ANAND: In the past, we’ve had national service. It’s been at a time
of war, but would that not be a thing that would bind us together in solidarity,
maybe not a militaristic one, but for social service or putting something back in
our community. Would a national service do that job?

BEN ANSELL: So I initially thought about talking about this in this lecture
and I left it out, but I think the point I want to make about national service is very
few people, even in this room, would have had to do it and a lot of politicians and
advocates of national service never had to do it, so it does raise the question of
how would they feel had they had to do it and whether it’s just make-work

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because I don’t think you want people around the country having to do make-
work for a year without being able to get on with the rest of their lives. And the
other thing I would say about national service is I don’t think you can force
feelings of common feeling with other people. I think that’s something that you
want to develop organically, rather than saying, well, everybody has to do this
same process and that will create them. Maybe it will or maybe it will just lead to
a great deal of resentment, or my bigger concern, actually, is it leads to a great
deal of inequality, as people from more privileged backgrounds, just as with the
Vietnam war draft, find ways of getting out of it or getting the cushy jobs.

ANITA ANAND: Okay. Thank you. Now, the woman in green in the
middle..

JEN CLARK: Hi. I’m Jen Clark, and I’m interested in our history of
solidarity movements, of mobilising, of people holding governments to account
or trying to influence change, what do you think is the future, given clampdown
on rights of protest and other things, of the future of solidarity of activism, of
mobilisation, of movements, of citizens?

BEN ANSELL: Well, in this country, we’ve very recently been having a
great debate about protests. We have had a government that’s twitchy about
protests. Amazingly, we have a police force that’s less twitchy about protests,
which is impressive. Other countries – the French have blocked some forms of
protest entirely over the last few months, so whether we’re striking the balance
correctly, I don’t know, but what I think we can say is that during times of war,
say, for example, the Iraq war, we saw massive protests. We see, and some people
hate them and some people love them, huge, effective protests by Extinction
Rebellion.

So it’s not obvious to me that activism is a sleeping giant, right, I think it’s
happening in the country. The area of civic organisation that I think needs a jolt,
maybe compared to other countries, is with trade unionism because if you look at
what’s happened in the United States over the last few years, you’ve seen a
massive resurgence of labour organising with Amazon and Starbucks and entities
that people thought could never be unionised, and done so quite successfully -
obviously with the backing of President Biden. But we haven’t seen that same
turn here and I think figuring out how Labour.. we’re here in the north-east, right,
with the grand tradition of labour organisation, but around fixed jobs where it
was easier to organise because everybody worked in the same place, could
organise together, much harder in the gig economy, in the precarious economy,
and I don’t think we’ve had that conversation in the United Kingdom yet, and that
seems to me to be an interesting one to have.

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 ANITA ANAND: We have some representatives from Durham Miners
here…and just tell me what you think about that observation, about protest and
solidarity?

ROSS FORBES: I’m Ross Forbes from the Durham Miners Association.
Yes, there was a year-long protest 40 years ago with people trying to protect
their communities. I’d be very interested how Ben would react to that period in
particular and how that changed the British state.

BEN ANSELL: I think the British state realised that they could crush a
union and, once they realised that, it became much harder for unions to have
credible negotiating power against the central state. Now, that was always going
to be more of a showdown when you had an industry that was fighting directly
against the state, rather than, say, an employer, but to give you a similar
example, the University Colleges Union hit the red button, had a marking
boycott, students didn’t get their degrees, everybody thought this is the last
thing you would do, this has to work, and it didn’t work. Well, that makes it very
hard to negotiate after you’ve done that, so unions have to be credible. So I think
it’s been a real challenge for the movement since that point because that
empowered the government so much in the years afterwards to create a series of
laws that make it harder to strike and I don’t think that the swing back has
recovered much of the territory since then.

NEIL HERRON: Thank you. Hi, Ben, Neil Hearn, former market trader. We
have another Sunderland first and that was the first person to be prosecuted
under the metrication regulations. A guy called Steve Thoburn became the
metric martyr and the solidarity that we saw was the entire British public got
behind the unfairness and injustice of prosecuting someone for selling bananas
by the pound to someone who asked for bananas by the pound. Steve went
through the courts, the European Court of Human Rights, the House of Lords,
the Royal Courts of Justice, and we had a massive public resistance.

ANITA ANAND: What’s the question there?

NEIL HERRON: The question is do you think it helped sow the seeds of
Brexit?

BEN ANSELL: I mean, it’s funny the way you say it went through the
European Court of Human Rights, there’s a sort of dance there, right, because, on
the one hand the regulations made it harder and on the other hand it provided
the apparatus to go through it. Look, I don’t think it can be as simple as one event
for Brexit as a whole in the country, but also local events matter locally and
Sunderland, of course, was a defining point of the Brexit referendum, of people

20
feeling they weren’t being listened to. I do think any higher level of government
needs to take seriously that there are always going to be local consequences to
its decisions that it can ride roughshod over, but might ultimately end up
accumulating into a reaction it doesn’t like at all.

ANITA ANAND: Time for one last question..

.
EMILY: I’m Emily and I’m here with my sixth form college St Robert of
Newminster. As the younger generation is painted out to be so obsessed with
social media concerning the fact of like fake news are we, therefore, a threat to
solidarity and like how we’re going to get around that?

BEN ANSELL: Oh no, you guys are way better than your grandparents on
Facebook. So, I mentioned earlier that I run surveys around the country with
several thousand people and what I always try and do in my surveys is I don’t only
just asked people to kind of give me a number, like how much do you approve of
something, I try and ask people to put in open-ended answers about how they
feel about things and so then I get their explanation, so why do you feel that
way? And then I can look at how older people and younger people respond to
things. So younger people are much more concerned, in the language that they
use, about the system, about the structure, about inequality, about them that has
and them that hasn’t, about fortunes, about fairness than older people are. Older
people tend to focus on individual tenets. They’ll talk about effort, they’ll talk
about savings, and that’s great too, I believe you should all engage in lots of
effort and save money, but it’s a very distinct way of thinking about it and it’s not
clear to me that the youth are less solidaristic, it feels like they’re more
solidaristic, they think about things in terms of the structure of society more. So
if you care about solidarity, that’s good news.

ANITA ANAND: This has been a really fascinating Q&A session. Thank
you so much. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to leave it there, we’re out of
time. Next week we’re going to be in Atlanta in the swing state of Georgia just 11
months from the next US presidential election and, there, Ben is going to be
asking how we can continue to grow our economies without despoiling the
planet. So that’s for next time. For now, though, thank you to our audience here
at The Fire Station in Sunderland, a huge thank you to our BBC Reith lecturer for
2023, Professor Ben Ansell.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

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