Alex Smith

21 July 2009

What is it about your political beliefs that put you on the Left rather than the Right?:

It’s about believing that the people are the ends of our national wealth, and not just the means to it.

It’s about understanding that in the modern economy, everyone contributes in their own way to our collective national health; that the plumber and the musician and the cleaner and the dustman are as fundamental to how we live and our everyday happiness as the wealth creators in the City who rely so entirely on those services provided by jobs in other sectors. So it’s about a fair distribution of opportunity, aspiration and wealth.

What that means in practise is a smoothing out of opportunity through improving state schools, developing a system of progressive taxation, harnessing the market rather than letting it run wild – but it also means ensuring that people are free to make decisions based on need and through offering comprehensive and fully available choice for all.

What do you consider made you Left wing?:

I always say it was when I went to university, and on my very first day I was asked which school I went to before I was asked my name. To me, that showed that you are judged on where you came from, not on who you are or what you can do. Then again, it could have been when my Dad told me that his headmaster said to him: “people called Smith don’t go to Cambridge”, so his was forbidden from applying.

That stark realisation had been developed over years of growing up around both poverty and privilege in North London, and came from going to a school where on your one side was a comfortable, middle class kid from Highgate, and on the other was an orphan from the Congo who lived on a tough estate in Queens Crescent.

It also came from a simple, simple interpretation of common sense: that the market, for all its worth in creating wealth, is not in itself a driver of social justice – on the contrary. It needs to be checked and harnessed for social needs and social good, or else it is as destructive as it can be powerful.

I think being on the left also came from a diligent study of History in the UK and the US. From the industrial revolution to Chartism to the creation of the NHS and the welfare state in the UK and Roosevelt and Kennedy and Johnson in the US, the key democratic and social advances of recent history have largely come from the left.

How would you describe the sort of society you want Britain to be?

Actually it’s pretty simple. All people in Britain, no matter what their race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, educational background, means, class, geographic region, etc, should have identical opportunity, aspiration and be afforded the ability, skills and power to achieve whatever they wish to.

Healthcare and education should be free for all and of equal quality for all; housing should be affordable and readily available to all; and there should be a robust safety net for those who fall behind.

That same ideal applies worldwide, and I do believe that international movement socialism has a role to play in helping the developing world to gain some of the rights and advantages that we in this country take for granted.

What one or two changes would make the biggest difference to bringing that about?

All schools, no matter where it is or whether you pay to attend through means other than national contributions, should provide equal opportunity and equal aspiration. That doesn’t mean abolishing schools that currently isolate privilege to those who can pay for it; it means getting the right environment, the right teachers, the right investment and the right accomodations to ensure that state schools are as good as private schools in terms of the basic education they provide, the extra-curricular activities they encourage, and the networks and job-links they foster.

Education won’t solve everything, but if we can get employers to a position where they will take people on on their own merits and instinct as to whether they can do the job, rather than a cursory glance at your educational background, we’ll be in a better place.

What most makes you angry about the way Britain is now?

Educational inequality and ghettoised aspiration. Often, that is because of what is taught in state schools and the hard culture around those schools. But why should my mates’ dreams be blocked before they’ve ever been presented with the opportunity to realise them?

Which person, event, era or movement from the past should we look to for inspiration now?

We should be looking to the US Democratic government of the 1930s and the British Labour government of the 1940s, which both tackled huge, existential challenges with vigour and innovative solutions toward advancing the common good through investment in social security, national health and a re-functioning economy.

We on the left should also be looking to the movement culture created by the Obama campaign to tackle today’s most pressing problems: that means collective, collegiate and immediate responses to climate change and economic recession, and it means promoting equality and social justice at home and around the world.

Position: Editor, LabourList

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