If We Don’t Hang Together…

This week: Nye Bevan, Labour and the case for solidarity; some extremely large places; and the European train time simulator you always wanted.

A few weeks ago now, I went to renew my metropolitan elite card for another year by spending a night at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank. Tim Price’s Nye tells the life story of Aneurin Bevan, the Welsh Labour MP who served as Clement Attlee’s health minister, through dreams and flashbacks while he lies dying in a hospital bed in the NHS he created.

As is often the way with these things, the play manipulates the truth slightly – in reality, Bevan had months, not hours, between diagnosis and death, and actually died at home in Buckinghamshire – and I came out of it thinking that it was less a great play than a great piece of theatre. Even were it not for the truly haunting staging of the scene in which Nye negotiates with the doctors’ union, the BMA – represented by a collection of giant, faceless animations with chilly disembodied voices, not unlike the real BMA today – how could you not get a kick out of two hours of Michael Sheen poncing about in his pyjamas?

Several weeks later, though, I find I still can’t stop thinking about it, and what it says about the Labour party now. In a variety of different contexts we see Nye and those around him realising that the group is stronger than the individual. Bevan’s career as a trade unionist and politician is foreshadowed in the scene where his primary school class realise they can beat their abusive bully of a teacher by standing together. (The scene, enjoyably, features a single child who’s a scab.) If I could sum up the theme of the play in a single word, like I’m trying to teach it at Key Stage 3, it would be solidiarity – an ideal of which the NHS is the ultimate expression.

Solidarity, crucially, does not mean working exclusively with people you like. In the Westminster sequences of the play’s second act, Bevan first votes in support of the hated Winston Churchill to bring the Americans into the war, then joins a government dominated by careerists he despises; the medical profession, meanwhile, are portrayed as both selfish and self-regarding, yet the NHS clearly will not work without them. The play is, among other things, a critique of the politics of purity: it makes a strong case that you sometimes need to work with people you see as opponents for the greater good.

The reason I keep thinking about this is, of course, because the people running the British government absolutely have not thought about any of this at all.

There are all sorts of subtle signs that the current iteration of the Labour party is rather less keen on solidarity, as either message or policy. There’s been no attempt to push back on the transactional attitude that’s crept into debates around tax and public services; no attempt to argue that, if we’re going to fix this mess, we all need to pitch in. In his Atlantic policy, Starmer’s goal has apparently been to get the best possible combination of free trade deal and tariffs from the Trump White House for Britain, with no reference to our other allies: the idea that Britain could or should stand shoulder to shoulder with the EU or Canada just doesn’t seem to have occurred.

Worst of all, the government has all too often seemed ready and eager to talk about vulnerable groups – welfare recipients, the trans community, migrants – as though they’re a problem to be addressed, rather than our friends or neighbours or family members, or simply human beings deserving of human dignity. It does this in large part because it thinks the most important voters want it to. It has not stopped to consider what the long term effects of such an approach might be.

Some of this may stem from economics: it’s simply easier to be generous or redistributive when the pie is growing than it is when we are fighting over scarce resources. But partly, too, I think it’s the fragmentation of politics in general and a change in the culture of Labour in particular. The party has always been a coalition of groups that more or less hate each other, but who for most of the last century understood that, under First Past the Post, they needed to cooperate to win power. But in a multiparty age, the benefits of tolerating people you despise are less obvious; and the uncivil wars of the Corbyn years have left both grudges and a taste for purges. Throw in the fact Starmer’s most senior role in private life was running the Crown Prosecution Service, where he had employees not colleagues, and the result is a Prime Minister intensely relaxed about simply kicking out people he finds difficult.

All this is, of course, extremely stupid. At the next election, the party would ideally want more people to vote for it: telling those who criticise to piss off at every opportunity is an odd way of going about that. The lack of a language of solidarity, meanwhile, has left the government unable to explain why rich pensioners should give up their Winter Fuel Allowance. Now it looks likely it’ll be forced to break its promises and raise taxes again: that would never have been easy, but it’s a damn sight more difficult because at no point has a minister even tried to explain how we all need to do our bit.

Nye isn’t always handled with the greatest subtlety – but it makes the case that sometimes you have to risk short term discomfort or unpopularity to achieve your actual political goals. If there’s an argument that a truly powerful work of art is the one you find yourself thinking of long after you walk away from it, then perhaps Nye is a great play after all. If you, too, are a member of the metropolitan liberal elite, it runs in London until Saturday 16 August, then moves to Cardiff for a week. Tickets here.¹

Some quick promo

A big shout out to Philip Lowden who has taken two books about borders to a town where he can stand with one in the Netherlands and the other in Belgium. Cool.

A reminder that you can hear the authors of both books – that is, if it isn’t obvious, Lewis Baston and myself – chatting away at Waterstones Romford on 2 September. Because my stepfather wants to meet Lewis, my mother will be there, too.

Hey, let’s talk about the most populous political units that aren’t actually countries, shall we?

This is what it is like in my head all the time.

I’m researching the history of parks – for a thing you will all be hearing about at great length soon enough whether you actually want to or not, so I’m not going to dwell on it now – when I come across an assertion that, from some points of view, the Taj Mahal can be considered the cornerstones of one of the earliest municipal parks. So I disappear down the rabbit hole of reading about the origins and history of the Taj Mahal, during the course of which I note that it’s in the state of Uttar Pradesh…

…and I find myself wondering whether, as I have long suspected, uttar means “upper”. So I go in search of the etymology of the province’s name, and – before I have time to learn that it actually means “northern”, that the five provinces named Pradesh² are spread right across India, that Pradesh isn’t a region but a word for “province”, but that the Hindi word uttar comes via the Sanskrit work uttara which can mean both “north” AND “above” so yes, is distantly related to the concept of “upper”...

...I spot, on the Wikipedia page for Uttar Pradesh, this sentence:

With over 241 million inhabitants, it is the most populated state in India as well as the most populous country subdivision in the world – more populous than all but four other countries outside of India (China, United States, Indonesia, and Pakistan)

There are state-level national subdivisions with more people than 190 countries? Well.

Now I’m obviously writing about that, aren’t I?