This crisis has been coming for years, if not decades. The problems in higher education span multiple lines of criticism across financing, geography, and standards. Every possible solution to one criticism promises to exacerbate another. Is it time to cut the Gordian knot? Or is higher education too big to fail?

Trust in the quality of the product itself has corroded. A third of Britons now believe a degree is not worth the time and money. One recent IFS report suggested one-in-four graduates will lose out financially from going to university: unsurprising, given the so-called “graduate premium” turned out not to be as generous when 50% of young people held degrees, as when this was true of only 10%.

Who could have predicted that? Not New Labour, or any subsequent government, none of whom seemed to have heard of supply and demand. But there are few alternatives for any young person who aspires to more than gig-economy work, so off they go to “Uni”. And, having graduated, the burden of student debt they find themselves carrying swiftly becomes a core grievance for pretty much any young graduate you care to ask. And can you blame them? Even a Treasury select committee recently called the Government’s own information on the student loan offer tantamount to “mis-selling”. The glossy presentations and videos didn’t, for example, mention anywhere that the repayment terms could be altered unilaterally at a later date.

Many young graduates who accepted these loans now watch with justifiable anger as the terms are changed underneath them, and their debt compounds beyond their ability to remedy. None of this is helped by a stagnant employment market, and rising living costs — not to mention, since Rachel Reeves froze the repayment threshold last year, more graduates than ever dragged into the repayment bracket. Nor does it look any better for future cohorts: fees are now indexed to inflation, even as the cost of living creeps ever higher. This generation faces what has been described as a “ticking time bomb” of debt and taxes.

As British school-leavers prepare to find out on Thursday whether they got the A-level grades required for their chosen degrees, critics argue that they’re signing up for a life earning scarcely above minimum wage, enslaved to what amounts to a graduate tax, for a credential so degraded by AI cheating and grade inflation, it’s scarcely worth the paper it’s printed on.

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In this context, Andy Burnham’s proposal to increase access to technical education can perhaps be read as an indirect effort to tackle this predicament, by encouraging more young people to find other routes to qualification — and, perhaps, also tackle the more scammy end of “Uni”. His recent pledge is light on detail, but if more British youngsters were diverted to credible technical pathways at 14, surely fewer would then end up plumping for low-value degrees and a mountain of debt.

Will it work? It’s certainly a very Labour approach to the problem. Rather than seeking to impose “standards” from the top down, and risking an attack from the sentimental Left for being a big old meanie, the aim seems to be to create academic excellence as it were from the opposite direction: by improving other qualification routes. But the prospects of success are, at best, uncertain, and not just because others have tried the same measure and none yet succeeded. There are also many more factors in higher ed’s current predicament than just the range of choices available to school-leavers.

For one thing, both swingeing fees and grade inflation are facets of something more fundamental: the transformation of education into a product and the widening of “access” to that product. This is laudable, where it comes with great teaching, rewards aspiration and hard work, and enables social mobility. But in practice, it also means an absolute increase in the number of young people in full-time education. This group has more than doubled since expansion began in the Nineties. And this, in turn, means more students now hew closer to the national mean, in academic ability, than when fewer attended and selection was sharper. Inevitably, teaching and expectations have adjusted.

Meanwhile, the related change from grant-based to fee-based funding has encouraged students to see themselves as paying customers. This has shifted the relationship between students and professors. It’s much harder to hand out “Fail” grades to a paying customer, especially when you need them to give you good student-satisfaction ratings to attract the next cohort. Thus universities both have a financial incentive to preserve standards, and hence their reputation, but also to keep students happy by not asking too much of them.

The result is an unhappy compromise in which institutions trade on academic excellence, while quietly finding ways (such as a panoply of special accommodations for exams) to soften its demands. Meanwhile, the cost of attending continues to climb — even as people begin to notice that not all the newer graduates seem quite as, well, educated as they used to. (Nor indeed, as an astonished world discovered recently, all the professors, including those at Cambridge.)

What to do? The most direct solution would seem to be to accept that not everyone is suited to higher education, and somehow force a return to greater selectivity. But there are several problems here. Firstly, you’d be placing your selection criteria in the hands of a professoriate of whom an unknown number thought Jason Arday was just fine. How would that go? And even if numbers did fall, this would inflict a sharp economic shock on the university sector. No Labour prime minister in his right mind would be blasé about job losses in so overwhelmingly Labour-voting a demographic.

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And still more fundamentally, shrinking at all presupposes that our universities exist to educate British young people. And the reality is that this is now secondary, at least in financial terms, to their work as exporters of credentialism with a British accent. The incentives at work here are tangled, but boil down to the fact that domestic fees are capped while foreign student charges are not. A Times investigation recently revealed just how large foreign students’ contribution to university funding was: for 10 universities, this income stream makes up 40% of their total. A bit like the schoolmasters’ kids at a posh public school, British students are increasingly cross-subsidized by foreign ones paying full whack.

This academic globalization is at the heart of the sector’s current predicament. For one thing, the competition for foreign students has set off an arms race to provide impressive facilities, encouraging universities to take on enormous debt. Between 2008 and 2019, university borrowing increased by 180%; 38 higher-education institutions now have borrowing that exceeds half their income. And this has, in turn, necessitated even more high-paying foreign students to service the debt.

Some institutions have even resorted to dodgy “franchising” arrangements, where they subcontract their brand-name to third parties and skim off the fees. Needless to say, this has done nothing for these institutions’ academic reputations. It has also created a conflict of interest between universities seeking overseas student income, and ordinary Britons concerned about migration.

In response, Labour under Starmer made changes calculated to disincentivize “students” whose primary motive was really migration, including tighter visa requirements and changing the rules on student asylum applications. This resulted in a sharp drop in non-EU student applications — which has left some British universities in a financially perilous state.

The Times reports that 51 universities declared a deficit in the year the changes came into effect. These institutions are now scrambling for the far more limited pool of home students, and courses that previously required three A* grades at A level from British students are now accepting BBB.

So we can be sure that any measure designed to improve academic standards by further restricting domestic student recruitment would leave these over-leveraged universities in a still-more-woeful state. Should we care about this? I submit that we should.

In our clickbaity age, the temptation is always toward polemic. Gunboats in the Channel; hang the paedos; raze these scam institutions to the ground. But not all academics are Ardays. Some are dedicated and brilliant. Some are even (quietly) not woke. And a general insolvency across British higher education would in any case affect a great deal more than just the approximate 440,000 people who work in the sector. In some parts of the country, universities are one of the few remaining engines of even relative middle-class security.

They’re also still — even with the objectionable wokeists, sometimes foolish financial decisions, and at times flagrant visa-laundering — an engine of prosperity for many. This remains so despite — or more uncomfortably yet, perhaps because of — the now markedly globalist orientation of many universities. The top six higher-education cities in Britain are London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Brighton, and Cardiff, with a total of 157 higher education institutions between them. There is a strong overlap with parts of the country that suffered most acutely when Britain de-industrialized. And the knowledge economies that have grown up in, say, Liverpool and Manchester in the last decade or so, to the immense benefit of those cities’ inhabitants, most likely wouldn’t be there without the universities.

Simply allowing higher education to fail would replicate the catastrophic impact of the Thatcher years, in parts of Britain that still vividly remember what that was like last time, just without any compensatory City boom. Any Right-winger who thrills at the thought of this is either a sociopath or hasn’t thought it through.

This isn’t to say, though, that correction is not warranted. But higher education is a complex system, deeply embedded in Britain’s social fabric, and economically load-bearing in some regions. Unless we want widespread economic misery, and a lot of very radicalized, very unemployed, very Left-wing former academics at large, correction needs to happen via careful adjustment: gradually suffocating the visa mills, swiftly spinning up technical training, and perhaps buying out over-leveraged and/or academically vacuous corners of the sector.

So as a first step to averting the sudden death of British academia, we probably need to find some smart, prudent, reality-oriented sociologists to survey the field, and help devise this careful plan. Wherever they are. Perhaps Cambridge?

Among the many myths woven around the miners’ strike is the claim that it represented the end of industrial working-class militancy — indeed, of the industrial working class as such. From then on, so the story goes, coal mines gave way to call centres and manufacture to finance and the service sector. Greasy overalls were replaced by the dressed-down mateyness of the modern office. The class which Karl Marx had dreamt might take over material production was depleted and scattered to the winds.

This isn’t quite what happened, not least if one takes a rather more global view of the matter. For one thing, work in the service sector can be just as heavy, dirty and disagreeable as traditional industrial labour. It includes not only Harley Street receptionists and celebrity chefs but refuse, postal, hospital, cleaning and catering workers. For another thing, while today’s chief executive smoothes his jeans over his sneakers, over a billion people on the planet go hungry every day. Slum dwellers, the fastest growing social group on earth, represent one third of the world’s city dwellers, while the urban poor more generally constitute at least half of the world’s population. Most of the mega-cities of the Global South are rife with poverty, disease and overcrowding. Capital is concentrated in fewer hands than ever, while the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed swell by the hour. The transition from industrial to post-industrial capitalism has expanded and consolidated the system, not modified it.

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Like Mark Twain’s death notice, the obituaries issued for the working class have been much exaggerated. If you take the category to include both manual labourers and the lower levels of white-collar workers, it constitutes a massive proportion of the world’s population, perhaps around two to three billion. If you add to that the vast army of unskilled casual labour, along with the retired, unemployed and chronically sick, the number soars even higher. In Latin America, this informal economy now employs over half the workforce. There has also been an increasing proletarianisation of the professionals (teachers, social workers, technicians, journalists, middling clerical and administrative workers) as the modern middle classes are hit by the kind of economic insecurity that afflicted the 19th-century working class. Labels like “service” and “white collar” obscure the immense differences between airline pilots and hospital porters, or senior civil servants and hotel chambermaids. It’s true that there has been a huge expansion in technical, administrative and managerial jobs, yet this increase was also taking place in Marx’s day, who noted what he called the “constantly growing number of the middle classes” and rebuked orthodox political economists for overlooking it.

If by “the working class” you mean blue-collar factory workers, then this group has indeed diminished sharply in advanced capitalist nations — though this is partly because a large slice of it has been exported to poorer regions of the planet. It is true, even so, that industrial employment on a global scale has declined. Yet the working class is by no means confined to factory workers. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world, manufacturing workers were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. Marx is generally considered to be a champion of blue-collar industrial workers, yet he was well aware that they didn’t form the majority of working people of his own time. For that, one must look to the vast army of Victorian domestic servants, most of whom were women. In fact, the original proletariat wasn’t the male working class but lower-class women in ancient society. The word “proletariat” comes from the Latin word for “offspring”, meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs. They had nothing to yield up but the fruit of their bodies, producing labour-power in the form of children. And the labour they endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. Today, in the farms and sweatshops of the Global South, the typical proletarian is still a woman.

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Marx didn’t champion the proletariat because he thought there was some resplendent virtue in labour. On the contrary, he wanted to abolish it as far as possible. In any case, some stockbrokers no doubt work as hard as some garbage collectors. Marx didn’t even consider the proletariat to be necessarily the most downtrodden of social groups. There are many more likely candidates for this role: vagrants, students, refugees, the elderly, the chronically unemployed and so on. What interested him was its place in the system of production. These men and women were familiar with its workings, organised by it into a collective force, indispensable to its successful running, yet with the capacity to take it over. It was in this sense that industrial capitalism created its own gravedigger. It couldn’t achieve its ends without massing people together, and by massing them together it created the conditions in which they could seize the means of production and run them for their own benefit rather than for the profit of their masters.

It’s in this sense that for Marx history moves under the sign of irony. Marx’s championing of the proletariat, in other words, is inseparable from his belief in democracy. People needed to throw off their chains by their own collective efforts on the spot where they found themselves, not handed their emancipation from elsewhere. What’s changed since the miners’ strike, then, isn’t that the working class has vanished, but that its material conditions have changed. A more flexible, smaller-scale form of capitalist manufacture, with its average unit employing  only a few hundred people, means that the workplace is no longer the main or sole focus of political militancy, as pits and power stations were for the miners. In our own time, the theatre of political conflict is increasingly the street. The mass protests which matter, from Americans marching for George Floyd to Israelis against Netanyahu, take place in public squares rather than factory yards, and the participants are a far more socially mixed bunch than a phalanx of Yorkshire coal miners.

A coal miners’ strike isn’t like a strike by, say, firefighters. There are no communities which consist almost entirely of firefighters and their families, but there used to be towns and villages which drew almost the whole of their identity from the local pit. It is this intimate interweaving of life and labour which Margaret Thatcher and her gang failed to grasp. For them, you would drive to the office and then return to your suburban home, with little connection between the two. In a mining town, the domestic and public realms are closely related, and one of the vital links between them is women. One function of the domestic arena is to breed a new generation of colliers, as well as to care for the current one. The solidarity among miners underground that may be essential for their survival can be translated into collective action in the political sphere.

Not much of this was understood by those bureaucrats and politicians for whom a mining community is just a convenient means of grabbing energy out of the ground, and can be allowed to collapse when the last chunk of the stuff has been excavated. What matters for them are the two grand abstractions of state and economy. The state was unleashed against the miners with such alarming force that any fiction of its impartiality was discredited. For their part, the police seemed to disown any semblance of disinterestedness and treated the strikers as deadly antagonists. My injured leg healed pretty quickly, but there are a number of wounds and traumas from that time which continue to fester.

These episodes of our history have been evoked repeatedly in recent days — even since we heard that, come January, if a Whitehall-devised “reasonable worst case scenario” plays out, the UK will face four days of planned power cuts. If they come, the blackouts will strike industry, rail services, government buildings, even homes — just at the moment when two-thirds of UK households face being driven into fuel poverty by rocketing energy prices. This raises the grim possibility of people struggling to pay bills for a service which, for several days, they won’t even receive.

But if, as a government source insists, this is just contingency planning and is “never going to happen”, why did this story grab so much attention? Because the mere prospect of blackouts conjures images of past national crises — crises which traumatised society, but have also been romanticised.

The possibility of nationally coordinated power cuts only really began with the establishment of the National Grid in 1938, as it stitched the country together with cables and pylons. The Grid had been conceived by the Stanley Baldwin government as a state-backed coordinator of commercial firms — a typically Baldwin-esque compromise between public and private sector, symbolic of his dreams of a moderate, modernising democracy. Baldwin might well have baulked at the state-enforced blackouts of the Second World War, policed by overbearing ARP wardens. But in the face of Nazi attack, this too was a rough-and-ready form of national unity — even if that unity was mainly audible in the universal grumbling at having to put boards over the windows every evening, and then having to stay in. Sticking to and putting up with the blackout became the epitome of the much-mythologised Blitz spirit, not least for those who were never actually bombed.

So in February 1972, when blackouts became a dire necessity for a very different reason, sentimental images of wartime stoicism were readily to hand, waiting to be fired up along with the emergency oil lamps. But this time, the “war” causing the blackouts was between Edward Heath’s government and the National Union of Mineworkers. In pursuit of a pay rise, the NUM turned the electricity supply into the site of an all-out struggle for power. Ministers simply did not anticipate that the miners would mount a highly-organised, startlingly creative campaign. But they found themselves up against “flying” pickets fanning out across the country to close docks, coal depots and especially power stations — including a picket of Battersea Power Station conducted with boats on the Thames, with the aid of a loudhailer. The strike won widespread backing from railway workers and dockers. The ordinary, tedious wiring of everyday life, and the work needed to keep it running, suddenly became political.

And so, with the availability of electricity falling fast, the government was forced to declare a state of emergency, imposing power cuts to push consumption down. Medium-sized firms were shocked to find themselves on a three-day electricity week. A million people were laid off. As though to symbolise the chaos, streetlights started coming on in daylight. Why, moaned the Times, had ministers not seen all this coming? The Central Electricity Generating Board warned that if demand were not reduced, they would have to do “block” cuts, “blacking out large areas indiscriminately”. Hospitals included. Already, a doctor was telling the Mirror that two hospitals had been hit by blackouts with no warning, which could easily have killed patients. Finally, the cabinet, forced to meet by candlelight, gave in.

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Unlike in the Forties, this time the lights going out signified not shared national fortitude, but the overweening power of the unions, and the government’s failure to plan. Heath set up a Civil Contingencies Unit to prepare for future emergencies, and when the miners struck again two years later, he declared a three-day week pre-emptively. But after another round of blackouts, the electorate decided to try Labour instead. Margaret Thatcher vowed that, if and when she faced the miners, the lights would stay on.

The miner’s strikes may be a tale unique to this country, but it wasn’t only Britain struggling to keep the lights on. No blackout captured the political failures of the Seventies more dramatically than the one that struck a near-bankrupt New York City on the sweltering night of 13 July 1977. It’s one of those tales of the American berserk that unfolds almost as neatly as a movie. Unlike Heath’s power cuts, the proximate cause was random — a series of lightning strikes — but the blackout was soon helped along by the failings of the power company, Consolidated Edison. The “night of terror” that followed snapped Gotham’s advancing decay into sharp focus. This was the city of Taxi Driver; there was even a serial killer, “Son of Sam”, roaming the five boroughs. Not an ideal set-up for finding yourself suddenly stuck in a stalled, pitch-black subway train, let alone a lift. The city was already drowning in a crime wave; now looting raged. The main source of light in some areas was provided by the many zealous arsonists. Like its mobs, New York’s politicians were held to have completely lost control. The Mayor, Abe Beame, blamed Consolidated Edison, but, like Heath’s, his career was flickering out.

Today, the blackout remains a shorthand for political calamity, for Left and Right alike. In 2015, when a writer for the Mail on Sunday sketched out the horrors of a future Corbyn-run Britain, along with rationing and riots, the doomsday scenario duly included the lights going out. In 2019, in his BBC TV series Years and Years, Russell T. Davies imagined the authoritarian populist Britain of 2028 — complete with a power cut-inducing cyberattack. Whether the attack is internal or external, the blackout captures like nothing else the knowledge that millions of total strangers and the government are all wired up together, and that it may not end well.

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But what’s really striking is that the lights going out isn’t just a harbinger of the apocalypse: the idea is creative. Once theatres could be lit electrically, it did not take all that long for writers and directors to spot the imaginative possibilities. Plunging a scene suddenly into darkness could hammer home a punchline, underline an irony, or send up characters’ helplessness. Mid-century stage thrillers loved to snap the stage to black, with gunshots and screams to follow. The playwright Peter Shaffer forged an entire comedy — called, inevitably, Black Comedy — out of the conceit of showing actors stumbling around in a blackout, but with the theatre lights on full. RF Delderfield’s play Worm’s Eye View made light of the difficulties of trying to meet wartime blackout rules by taking out a bulb. One actor who appeared in it, David Baron, turned a similar scene into something much more sinister once he started writing under his real name, Harold Pinter. In his pioneering early plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker, blackouts dramatise how instantly a hostile world can turn on you.

Yet equally, they open up radical possibilities. In her 2006 novel, The Night Watch, Sarah Waters re-imagines the blackouts of the Second World War not only as a frightening nuisance, but as a liberation from prying eyes. A lesbian couple can do things in a pitch-black London doorway that become impossible again in peacetime. The darkness also opened up freedoms for women who preferred male callers. Amid all the accounts of fear and trauma from the 1977 New York blackout, and the enthusiasm of the looters and arsonists, there is also the voice of a young woman rhapsodising that the experience was “far out!” For good or ill, this curious phenomenon defamiliarises the everyday, casting it in a strange new (lack of) light. Like plays, movies and fiction, blackouts signal that the hard limits framing how we live may not be quite so solid after all.

So perhaps that’s one reason why the shadow of blackouts this winter catches our imagination. As in 1972, the boring, taken-for-granted wiring of everyday life is becoming political. Our current blackout scenario centres on a new cable under the North Sea, which sends hydroelectric power to the UK from a Norwegian power station — but may send rather less if Norway’s low water levels force it to prioritise domestic energy production. This is suddenly something that might affect whether we can work or cook — like the standards of maintenance of French nuclear reactors, which may also leave the UK short of power.

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For critics of current energy policy, all this draws attention to a series of long unremarked political choices, which are now registering in the unnerving mix of rocketing prices and possible blackouts. Professor Richard Jones, formerly of the Industrial Strategy Commission, points to the UK’s increased reliance on gas imports to meet our overall energy needs, as North Sea production has declined. At the same time, more countries have started competing to buy gas. Cross-continental pipelines have opened up a global gas market — to which, Professor Jones suggests, we have chosen to leave ourselves highly exposed, in the belief that the market is the best means to access cheap energy. In the Seventies, the UK was deeply dependent on domestic coal and its workforce; now we are dependent on the vagaries of foreign gas supply. So even though the UK is not supplied directly by Russia, President Putin’s withholding of gas still threatens us.

Others blame the Cameron government’s 2013 decision to roll back investment in energy efficiency and renewable domestic energy sources, or, conversely, the green levy. The Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy insists that UK supplies are diverse and secure. But former Downing Street chief adviser Dominic Cummings argued recently that “Westminster’s disastrous handling of energy” goes back well beyond the current government, and that “a blackout would belatedly lay bare the consequences of our under-investing ways”.

If the worst-case scenario does happen, it may be that we choose to cast this as another Blitz, and stoically put up with it. But its impact could yet turn out to be more like what happened in the wake of the power cuts of the Seventies. For politicians, and eventually much of the public, in the years after the 1972 miners’ strike, the blackouts highlighted the folly of giving an increasingly radical union the power to shut off the country’s supplies, and the government’s failure to plan far enough ahead to avoid them. Perhaps, in time, a new series of power cuts will come to seem like a rare moment of romance in our wired-up, screen-saturated lives. But in the meantime, blackouts may once again cast a shadow over some long-accepted political choices.

***

Phil Tinline’s most recent series, Pay Freezes, is available on BBC Sounds. His book The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares has just been published by Hurst.

Between 1971 and 1981 Stirlingshire suffered a massive reduction in manufacturing jobs, but it was the eradication of coal-mining in the mid-Eighties that sealed the fate of many communities. The boredom and hopelessness which had taken hold in the previous decade had, by the Nineties, curdled into a detachment among adolescents, which was manifesting itself in violent disorder, substance abuse and criminality. In this period, before the false dawn of Britpop and Cool Britannia, rave culture was dominant. Radio-friendly tunes such as Let Me Be Your Fantasy by Baby D and Set You Free by N-Trance rang out in back bedrooms and chip shops, and blared from hatchbacks that raced the quiet lanes and waste grounds that once served local industry.

The village of Fallin lies three miles beyond the tourist trails of the city of Stirling. As a pit village, the miners’ strikes and subsequent closures had a profound effect on the community. Sunk in 1904, the pits at Fallin — Polmaise Colliery 3&4 — were in operation until 1987. Coalfields were not profitable and did not reflect the ruling Conservative Party’s vision for Britain, and so they went. The closure of the Fallin pits stripped the village of its purpose and ended four centuries of coal-mining in Stirlingshire. The mine there had once been record breaking in both its militancy and productivity; it was the first to go on strike in 1984, and it stayed out the longest — 56 weeks. It topped productivity ratings, excavating 1,400 tons of coal a day in 1976, and once removed 20,000 tons in a week. The bonuses earned at Fallin caused such embarrassment for the rest of the industry that Union leaders had to request that the men slow down.

The community was thriving within a few years of the coal seam’s discovery, and it produced successive generations of instinctual, red-blooded workers who were inured to danger and fanatical about coal: young men who were conditioned physically, mentally and socially by the work. Far from today’s view of mining as a kind of occupation of last resort, the men and boys of the village chose the toil and discipline of the pit over anything else. John McCormack ran a hotel and won the Scottish Cup with Falkirk F.C. as a footballer; he was offered four times his mining wage to go professional, but nothing could stop him working underground. “Many a person in my position would have gone to work in the hotel full time”, he wrote in his memoir. “But I was a miner all my days, and I couldn’t get away from the pit.”

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The colliery became not just the anchor point of village identity, but a special, albeit unmystical, space, inaccessible to outsiders, where husbands and uncles and brothers lived out the prime of their lives. Its underground shafts were a stage, where death was taunted with poetry and jokes, and where songs were sung under a low black ceiling that constantly creaked. It must have seemed inconceivable that the site to which the village owed its existence might disappear, but the shafts were sealed and the winding gear dismantled and, before 1987 was out, a dismal new era for Fallin began. Industrial estates sprang up offering minimum wage roles, and welfare-to-work schemes tried to capture the imaginations of men who had already had their heads turned by drink and drugs. Families stripped of their livelihoods, their optimism and the bonds of shared experience were soon being pulverised by heroin.

My high school classmates came from those families. The intergenerational trauma caused by addiction and poverty had had, in the decade since the closures, a profound effect on my school; there were at least four suicides in my year, including a hanging and a self-immolation, and a kind of adolescent ultra-violence was rife. Classes were dominated and disrupted by pupils, many from mining families, who were in complete rebellion against a society that had ceased to encourage ambition in their lives, and a curriculum which reflected nothing of the dysfunctional intensity of life outside the classroom. It has to be assumed that, given the opportunity, the young men may have become as fearsome and focused as their fathers and grandfathers once were, but they certainly weren’t mourning the loss of an imagined future. The collective imagination had already been seized by rave culture. Every bedroom I remember had its own devotional, Blu-tacked patchwork of spacey-looking rave flyers, covered in names of locally-famous role-model DJs who offered up simple, euphoric tunes that seemed to go straight to whatever it was that ailed you.

Is it possible to make a 16-year-old, fresh off a weekend of cheap stimulants and breakbeat hardcore, sit down on Monday morning and feel engaged or fulfilled by playing the theme from Steptoe & Son on a gut-string acoustic guitar? By piping meringues? By reading morality plays about people with moustaches? The kids of Fallin were travelling to enormous raves like Rezerection in Edinburgh, telling people they’d only just met that they loved them, forging their bonds above ground, in tents and fields. They were making money off drugs and burglary, racing banged-up Renaults under the moon, having casual sex in the woods that had begun to reclaim the rusting ruins of the pit machinery. Fallin was soon a warzone, scarred by graffiti, litter, fly tipping and dilapidation, and terrorised by youths whose energy couldn’t be harnessed by half-baked school and community initiatives which multiplied as uselessly as weeds.

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This generation, whose parents had been told by Margaret Thatcher that there was “no such thing as society”, had the misfortune to hit their teens between the era of unionism and strong community their fathers had known, and the spread of the internet, which a decade later brought learning, friendship and lots of free entertainment to hollowed-out places like Fallin. In between they had to build their own networks; dance music on cassettes, phoned-in requests to radio stations, pool hall doorways and car meets in the dark. They responded to their abandonment with a single-mindedness that was no-doubt inherited, and an exuberance born of having nothing. It was a reclamation of sorts, full of undoubtedly violent and criminal behaviour, but perpetrated by characters for whom nothing existed but the immediate present, who had matured quickly and lived on their wits, who were smart, roguish, likeable and full of inimitable schemes and stories.

During the hardest times of the miners’ strikes, such was the solidarity that it felt as if Fallin — the housing stock, the community services, even the land itself — were under collective ownership of families who belonged to the village. But as successive generations grew up in a place without a purpose this solidarity fragmented quickly. For the new generation, which had become accustomed to unemployed role models, there were no positive shared values; they didn’t feel they had a stake in anything local. John McCormack, the miner footballer who observed the breakdown of the community, said: “The number one problem is work. The fortunes of the village were always tied up with the fortunes of the pit.”

McCormack was one of many miners still resident in Fallin who could remember a much less chaotic time. Mining stories too often leave out the cultural and social richness cultivated by miners; in Fallin, this richness revolved around the Gothenburg pub, so named because it ran on the Scandinavian system whereby the committee-run pub reinvested 95% of its profits in the local community. “The Goth” opened in 1910, and its profits helped build the village bowling club, fund a local pipe band, and hire a community nurse. Stars of the day, including Kathy Kirby, played at the miners’ social club. Supported by the mine, Fallin became a regional centre of achievement in dancing, football, athletics and dog racing. The Millhall Colliery Pipe Band became three-time World Champions, and no less than 34 world champions of one kind of another lived in Fallin in the inter-war years. One of these was Bob Starkey, a champion wrestler and Highland Games athlete, a coach at the Paris Olympics in 1924, a Policeman, a soldier and a miner at Polmaise Colliery. Starkey later modelled for the kilted and vested strongman on the Scott’s Porridge Oats box, an image that became emblematic of Scottish health and masculinity in the twentieth century.

Today mining has a different set of associations. Films, documentaries and works of literature have sought to portray the struggle of the miners’ strike, and that world — busses, soup kitchens, whipsmart wives, soggy-collared men waving placards in the rain — is ingrained on the British consciousness. But the impact of the mine closures went far beyond Thatcher and the miners and the families themselves, and the scale of the stories left untold is vast. Too often inhabitants of mining communities have been reduced to statistics by studies seeking to explore the negative consequences of pit closures: the health inequalities, social dislocation and unemployment, which were (and in some cases still are) rife in Stirlingshire and other areas where mining was once dominant. Far less has been written about how these communities prospered, how they kept going through a poverty that was enforced on them, the strength they found in music and culture, their humour, their warmth, their wisdom. In the case of Fallin, how a young village, sunk in one short decade, began to right itself.

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In July 1988 the Stirling Central Regional Council opted for full clearance of the Polmaise Colliery site, to, “eradicate all traces of this failed industry”. The Goth still stands, having recently funded a defibrillator for the village, but of the pit itself only the bing — the huge mound of spoil accumulated during the mining process – is visible today. While there have been a number of suicides here, it has been successfully rebranded as “Fallin and Polmaise wood”, a nature reserve managed by the Woodland Trust. A small stone cairn was unveiled to mark where the shafts once were, and a memorial dedicated to miners who had lost their lives was installed in 1994. A memorial garden with some old pieces of machinery was opened in 2006. Numerous organisations have helped Fallin recover from the disorder of the Nineties, including Fallin Community Enterprises, a charity established in 2005 which aims to drive forward the social, economic and environmental regeneration of the village. It was unthinkable 30 years ago that anyone would want to move to Fallin, but the village continues to grow. In 2021, 400 new houses were approved for land to the East, but despite a 25% affordable housing requirement, it’s unlikely any of them will be within the budget of former mining families in the area.

Driving through on a recent Saturday evening the energy and turbulence is gone. A recent study described Fallin as a “non-place”, and at a glance it is hard to argue. Beyond the grey and brown houses, there’s nothing here: a row of half-shut shops, a flat-roofed library, a Tesco Express. It remains an austere village with no real centre. Some progress is evident — 72% of residents own at least one car, 33% have a degree — but below the surface are the same old community concerns. In May of last year residents of Fallin were asked what they felt the priority should be in any further regeneration of the village. Older respondents focussed on activities for young people (74%). The priority for younger respondents was school (67%) and they also mentioned things to do (64%). One respondent noted, “the people are our greatest asset”.

The new housing developments are bringing young families to the village, and the youth of Fallin today, raised on the same distractions as everyone else, are indoors — rightly unhaunted by the legacies of coal. Out on the streets, compared to the Fallin of 30 years ago the place looks nearly welcoming; some waste ground remains, but the graffiti and syringes are gone. Derelict sites have been converted to green spaces and sports facilities. On residential streets the hedges are square, the creosote fresh, SUVs are parked up at regular intervals. Looking up at the windows it’s hard not to wonder if any of the voices that could be heard requesting tunes on the radio all those years ago might be living here now, prospering somehow, with their own young ones. The odd hatchback whizzes past but the windows are up, the speed limit is observed. Rave seems about as relevant here as Kathy Kirby. There’s no music blaring anywhere.

“Who is society?” asked Thatcher in 1987, in an interview for Woman’s Own magazine. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The unravelling of both state provision and large-scale political organisations was fertile ground for new forms of politics. Thatcher cannot have been pleased when one of these sprouted at Greenham Common RAF Base in Berkshire. The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp was an embodiment of women taking their lives into their own hands, taking responsibility for themselves and their actions, and not being held back by the fact of being women. Like a muddy, plural, mirror image of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, it reflected the new individualism in an emerging form of political dissent.

There has always a danger in reading history backwards from where we are now, of finding in it the seeds of how we understand the world today precisely because we’re looking for them. Out of the Darkness — a new book of stories about Greenham — is told by women who were there 40 years ago. It explicitly eschews any claim to be an official history, but the claim that the Women’s Peace Camp had a lasting influence on politics still deserves to be taken seriously.

Begun by a handful of peace campaigners who walked from Cardiff to the gates of an air base chosen to house American nuclear Cruise Missiles, the camp grew organically after a few people decided to stay on. It wasn’t initially women-only, but after several discussions, a vote was taken and the few men were asked to leave the camp.

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The initial decision seems to have been pragmatic. “They didn’t do the washing up, help with the food, look after the kids,” said Jill ‘Ray’ Raymond, “they get drunk, they are violent and they won’t do the washing up.”

Bear in mind that 1981 was only six years after the Sex Discrimination Act was passed, seven years after contraception became available on the NHS, and eleven years after the first Women’s Liberation Movement conference in Oxford. Social expectations that women would do the housework and childcare, and defer to men, were still strong.

Some of the women also felt that non-violent direct action would be easier without men around, as situations were less likely to escalate. “Some of the squaddies wouldn’t want to hit a woman so they were more careful about violence,” said Fenja Hill. “It was probably less violent because there were no men.”

As the camp grew, though, its existence as a women’s peace camp became more important. Josetta Malcolm, who has since identified as non-binary, described their experience of a women-only camp as being “like therapy, it was like a political awakening…. to just see how things linked up about patriarchy, and nuclear arms, and war. Actually to be in a women-only space and then have your voice heard as a woman is so empowering.”

We can see in this a shift of emphasis from a shared external aim — getting nuclear weapons off the site — to more nebulous goals based on what we would today call identity. Certainly, it was an early example of who you are being as important as what you want to change. But in fact, the focus of the camp was never solely on a shared political aim. There was no plan, no organisation, no strategy and no leaders. These were seen as virtues, not failings.

The method of Non-Violent Direct Action, NVDA, rests heavily on each person taking personal responsibility for what they decide to do. There is no top-down discipline, just “affinity groups” that decide together what action to take. That makes it hard to predict, control or counter. Actions like blockading gates when the mobile cruise missile launchers were trying to leave the base, or cutting through the fence to dance on top of missile silos, disrupted military operations and in some cases embarrassed the government.

Without elected leaders, nobody is accountable to anybody else, except directly and informally. This was seen as in itself revolutionary, modelling an alternative form of society, one without hierarchies. Even the different camps at different gates were not identified by military names or numbers, but by non-hierarchical colours. Each camp developed its own character. Green Gate was spiritual, healing, close to nature. Turquoise Gate was vegan and Violet a refuge for carnivores. Orange Gate was home to families and had the best cake. “Main Gate” became Yellow Gate.

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This diversity of the different camps was also seen as symbolic of a wider cause. Feminism was supposed to have room for all sorts of women, who might disagree politically or tactically, but nevertheless be united by the fact of being women. Shared life experiences bound them together, but it was assumed that simply being a woman was enough to outweigh differences.

Even deciding who was, or was not, a Greenham Woman was seen as needlessly divisive. “A Greenham woman is any damn woman who wishes to call herself a Greenham woman,” said Lorna Richardson. “I think it’s antithetical to both the spirit and the practicality of Greenham to divide women into camp women who lived there, and visitors who did not.”

The absence of structure and organisation came with limitations, however. Penny Gulliver recalled occasions when Blue Gate was asked to create a diversion for a big action planned by Yellow Gate. After she and her Blue Gate companions broke into the base and got arrested, “then you’d find out they’d had a row at Yellow Gate about who was going to take the pictures and then they called it off, but nobody came and told Blue Gate!”

Visual and symbolic protests were important. The Greenham veterans talk about reclaiming myths and symbols, witches and spiders’ webs, Moon Goddesses and the hand symbol, forefingers and thumb tips touching, that portrays the vulva. This idea of protest as performance or work of art today typifies a new kind of politics, less concerned with taking power and more with provoking an emotional response, both in those witnessing and in those taking part.

“I think Greenham gave me the confidence to be a woman — to be who I was.” said Sue Say, “and recognise that’s not always going to be the same as someone else.”

It’s not new for individuals to gain a sense of their own capabilities, their independence and agency, through taking part in political action. What is relatively new, though, is seeing such internal change as an end in itself. Asked about the lasting impact of Greenham Women’s Peace Camp, many of those involved talk about changes in themselves. Some of them became therapists, including Sue Bolton, for whom “it was about going right back into yourself and realising the whole thing starts from you… And then you change the whole world, just by being yourself and finding out who you are.”

Slogans like “Greenham Women Everywhere” and “Carry Greenham Home” evoke a sense of the camp, not as a tactical campaign to change UK defence policy, but as a state of mind. The mantra “The Personal Is Political” comes up again and again.

That phrase was first used by 1970s feminists, drawing attention to the fact that their home lives, who raised their children and even their intimate relationships were connected with the public world of politics. Laws governing access to abortion and contraception, or the legality of sexual relationships, had a direct effect on private lives. Many women went on from Greenham to work in women’s refuges, in social work or feminist campaigns.

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But while women at Greenham were discussing what they should eat, how to share out the domestic work and what it meant to sleep with women instead of men, the meaning of the phrase evolved. Instead of somebody’s personal life reflecting political changes that needed to be made in the public realm, that personal life could itself embody change. Egalitarian cooking arrangements, lesbian sex or cutting off your long hair could be political acts in themselves.

Some aspects of life as a Greenham Woman are familiar from more recent political campaigns. A loose, non-hierarchical structure with no clear goals or strategies was adopted by the Occupy movements. Self-organisation on the basis of an identity, or shared lived experience, rather than around an external political goal, is now a permanent state of affairs. The Extinction Rebellion protests use aspects of Non-Violent Direct Action, though the movement does have leaders and centralised planning.

What has become a central feature of extra-Parliamentary politics, though, is the focus on self-expression. “I want my name on the list of people that says, ‘I do not think nuclear weapons is the right way to go,’” said Margaret McNeill. “It’s putting my name to this invisible charter that says ‘I was there, I witnessed this’.’” Today, the motto “Not In My Name’ has become a familiar sight on demonstrations; it is usually less of a threat to remove from power an elected government, more a disavowal of some policy or action that will go ahead anyway.

The struggle between the National Union of Mineworkers and Thatcher’s Conservative government was not about coal. It was about who had power in the country. The Greenham Women wanted to erode, if not the physical power of guns and missiles, the legitimacy of holding that power. They wanted to change the policies of those in government, but not to take that power for themselves. They explicitly rejected systems that centralised power, but they wanted to be visible, and to render visible aspects of themselves and their lives that they felt had been ignored or devalued.

Thousands of women spent time at Greenham, from a few hours to several years, and later said it changed their sense of themselves and what they could achieve. But did the camp succeed?

The last cruise missiles were removed from Greenham Common in 1991 — but most would say that the end of the Cold War did more to bring that about than the constant presence of women at the camp. Some of the women stayed on until the land was finally returned to being a Common in 2000, after almost 60 years of military use. It is now home to arts and business projects, nature reserves and open space.

You could interpret these two changes as victories for decentralised, women-led, non-violent campaigning. Or you could say that change happened when those inside the fence, those with the political, legal and military power, laid down their arms, took down the fence and crept away. But whichever you think is true, Greenham still became a prototype for the shape of political protest today.

No? OK. I guess you must be one of those George Eliot types who stays up until 2am devouring German critical theory, and has never dreamt of liking a squirrel video or eating a whole packet of custard creams. But here are the headlines, just in case you’re drifting.

The smartphone is rewiring our brains.

It is shrinking our attention spans.

It has reduced our cognitive competence to goldfish level.

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If you’ve been staying alert, you’ll have heard all this before. And if you haven’t, then you can see it insisted upon in an acclaimed documentary streaming now on a device near you. Screened Out is the work of the Canadian director, Jon Hyatt, and it is full of troubling statistics. The most troubling arrives in its fourth minute. “A study done by Microsoft revealed that the average attention span dropped from twelve seconds to eight since the mobile revolution began,” says the anxious voiceover, “which makes our attention span a second below a goldfish, which is only nine.”

Helpfully, at this point, Screened Out shows us all the relevant numbers and the image of a gormless-looking fish. Not that we need them. As the Guardian’s reviewer pointed out, “Jon Hyatt runs the risk of stating the bleeding obvious by elaborating on facts everyone is already aware of.”

Here’s something that I suppose must be less obvious. Some of these facts are not facts. Many of those that are don’t amount to much. One of Hyatt’s interviewees, Nicholas Kardaras — a doctor who thinks that video games are as addictive as heroin and claims to have treated a boy reduced to a catatonic state by playing too much Minecraft — says this of digital technology: “It’s changing your kid’s brain. It’s rewiring your children, developmentally, neurologically.” This is true. All human experiences rewire the brain. That’s how brains work. If they didn’t, they would be some other order of object. One that would, say, not think to question that scary stat about digital technology and goldfish.

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The Microsoft study quoted so vividly in Screened Out is not a scientific paper. It’s a 2015 consumer report carried out by the marketing team of the firm’s Canadian division. True, it contains an infographic that expresses identical claims about the decline of the average human attention span. But the only footnotes refer to texts that are either irrelevant or untraceable.

But that doesn’t seem to bother the makers of Screened Out. When contacted, they replied: “we say that Microsoft released a study, which is true.”

The exemplary BBC Radio 4 programme, More or Less — currently doing such sharp analysis of the government’s questionable use of Covid-19 statistics — followed this trail in 2017, demonstrating on the way that goldfish have excellent memories. But that hasn’t stopped this phantom study being deployed by a cohort of authors with one thing in common — the desire to sell us books about how we ought to be more attentive and less easily distracted.

Among them are You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters (2020) by the New York Times journalist Kate Murphy, and Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (2017), by Adam Alter, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Stern School of Business. (Alter is one of Hyatt’s most portentous talking heads.)

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Is there any convincing research in this area? Not much. Mainly because the average attention span is a concept that most psychologists regard as meaningless. The closest I can find in the literature is a recent paper published by the journal Nature Communication, in which the authors attempt to measure the history of our “collective attention span” by comparing the longevity of twitter hashtags with the past four decades of box office receipts and the frequency of certain words and phrases in a century of texts digitised by Google books. “The phenomenon,” they concede, “lacks a strong empirical foundation.”

Like most declinist arguments about human powers of concentration, this work also lacks much of a sense of cultural history. In the last century, variety theatre managements packed their bills with magicians, comics and dancing dog acts. If they bored the audience, they were booed off. (There are eye-witness reports of patrons bringing along their knitting to the show, or shelling peas as they watched.)

If you went to the movies in the first decade of the last century, you would experience a similar vibe — punters got up and down as they liked as a cascade of short subjects flowed on the screen — one-shot trick films, newsreels, a Victorian novel boiled down to five minutes of action. (The film historian Tom Gunning described this as “the cinema of attractions” — movies that you watched for the images and the gags, not for the narrative.)

Were the attention spans of the Edwardians shorter than ours? I suppose we would have to bring a few of them through time to watch Scorsese’s The Irishman (209 minutes), Avengers: Endgame (181 minutes), play through Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (80 hours) or listen to some podcast series in which one hour of efficient radio has been fluffed into a 10 part epic. We might also ask them if they considered the hours we spend absorbed in social media to be evidence of an inability to concentrate, or evidence of an excess of that capacity.

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Technologies of pleasure always acquire enemies. The medico-moral language they use to express their objections has remained remarkably consistent over time. In the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines ran think-pieces about the deleterious effects of so-called Sensation Novels, works accused of “preaching to the nerves” and “drugging thought and reason.” These days, they’re published by Penguin Classics. In the 1930s, the wireless was accused of destroying the art of conversation. Now it is regarded as the purest form of public service broadcasting. A sconce in the museum of moral anxiety may await today’s assertions about the narcotic and disabling effects of the smartphone.

I wonder if there’ll also be a place for my theory — it’s not backed up with any empirical research, but I don’t see why that should stop me airing it — that there’s always a space in the culture where social hygienists can turn their worries and their confirmation bias into discourse? I’m not going to claim that this discourse is as addictive as heroin, but it clearly exerts a strong attraction. Strong enough to drive earnest and well-meaning writers and film-makers to make arguments based on numbers that are less substantial than the thoughts of … oh, you know, those little orange animals you used to win at fairgrounds.

That was how, at the age of 13, I became aware that the placid politics of the 1960s would be replaced by class warfare. And that behind the facade of Seventies respectability, the establishment lived secret lives according to different rules.

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Soon, my dad’s prediction came true. The miners’ strike forced power cuts and the three-day week. I remember my schoolfriends, sent home early, pilfering from market stalls in the pitch dark.

But I don’t think the outbreak of class struggle would have had the same radicalising effect on me had it not coincided with my discovery that Catholicism was a sham.

At my school, the priests who taught us railed every day against the twin evils of masturbation and homosexuality. But on arrival we were told by older boys to avoid entering a room alone with some of them, in case we got “touched up”. And in the name of gentle Jesus meek and mild, some were in the habit of inflicting random, psychopathic violence.

This atmosphere of political crisis, combined with the daily experience of hypocrisy and menace at school made me search for answers. And by coincidence, answers were already lodged into my brain — because at the age of 10 I’d played one of the newsboys in Noël Coward’s play This Happy Breed.

Coward’s portrait of a working class family during the General Strike, the Depression and the Munich crisis includes a character called Sam Leadbitter, a caricature communist from central casting. Sitting in the wings at night after night, I found his lines the most vivid. My 10-year-old brain did not see Leadbitter as a caricature at all, but rather the only honest character among a bunch of “apathetic, unthinking, docile supporters of a capitalistic system which is a disgrace to civilisation”, as Sam himself puts it.

These lines stuck with me. Unwittingly, and from beyond the grave, it was Noël Coward who steered me from hormonal teenage revolt to a real and lifelong engagement with the world’s most coherent liberation theology: Marxism.

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I read The Communist Manifesto in the school library, together with an introduction by A. J. P. Taylor designed to convince us that it was bullshit. One priest noticed what I was doing and tried to engage me in a discussion about Catholic social teaching. I curtailed the discussion by telling him that Catholic social teaching was bullshit, and that belief in God was irrational. But my Marxism remained, at this stage, book-learned and pretty basic.

Then, aged 15, I went to a youth club disco. At the edge of the dancefloor were some very tough looking kids — Irish, black, Italian — who I’d lost touch with after primary school. A record came on that cleared all the Slade fans off the dancefloor: crackly silence; a black man’s voice wailing. Then a crunchy R&B tune kicked in, and all the rough lads threw themselves into a dance that was a mixture of kung fu, shuffling and acrobatics. They did the splits; they spun like ballerinas. This was the Northern Soul culture in its heyday and within a couple of minutes, I was part of it.

I now discovered that it was not just the establishment and the Catholic clergy that could live a double life, but everybody. There was a mass criminal underworld selling drugs all over the North of England, organising thefts from pharmacists or shipping “backstreet” drugs from Amsterdam. To get to the Northern Soul all-nighters you had to catch the last bus and stay out all night, and hunch in doorways at first light until the bus and train services restarted.

Suddenly I was part of a vast working-class Bohemia, operating with absolute solidarity in the face of police raids and searches. We idolised the black kids on our scene, and we venerated black performers like Major Lance and Jackie Wilson. We were white working-class kids curating the R&B music of Detroit and Memphis, and the rest of the world could go to hell.

So when the National Front started holding their racist “anti-mugging marches”, we knew what we had to do. I remember waking hand in hand with my girlfriend as a military-scale convoy of police riot vans sped past us, on the way to confront an Anti-Nazi League protest. I told her: “Next time, I’m joining in”.

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That was how I ended up on my first political demonstration: a 25,000 strong Anti-Nazi League demo in Manchester, in July 1978. My mum told me not to get into trouble. I went alone, spoke to no-one apart from to say “no thanks” to a Left-wing newspaper seller. I marched, I chanted, and then I got hit in the face with a heavy banner pole after the wind snapped it. It took a lot to convince Mum that I had not become some kind of anti-fascist rioter.

That is how — via atheism, soul music and strife — I became politicised.

Looking back, across 40 years of political engagement with the Left, some of the ideas that crystallised in my head at the age of 15 have remained pretty constant: a total lack of deference to authority figures; the default assumption that politicians and religious leaders are corrupt liars; a general preference for spontaneous action; a lifelong revulsion against racism.

Another legacy is that I always understood the importance of counterculture in working class life. Northern Soul, punk and later hip-hop and garage for me had a political meaning, embodied in the taking and holding of physical space at night, for the breaking of rules and the mixing of ethnicities and sexualities.

There are people on the Left who fetishise the old working class culture I come from, and who construct a nostalgia project around it. But for me, alongside the official signifiers of beer drinking, football and respectability, real working class culture has always included a counterculture — of drugs, music, iconoclasm and evading arrest.

I think that’s what inoculated me from the nostalgiafest, and allowed my political commitment to adapt in an age where political opposition movements are full of diverse, networked, educated people.

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With hindsight, it also looks like the work of that progressive priest was not in vain. To defeat the Catholic humanism of Rerum Novarum, I had to build, out of the texts available to me at sixteen, a Marxist humanism, with ethical and moral implications. This has strengthened throughout my life.

Today we are faced with anti-humanism on all sides: from the far-Right, with its race science and violent misogyny, to Silicon Valley, where humans are seen as “already algorithms”, lacking agency and free will. At its most extreme, the post-humanism movement seeks to replace homo sapiens with hybrids of machines and flesh.

My opposition to this is based largely on the conclusions I reached in the school library in the Seventies: human beings have evolved as imagineers, teamworkers and linguists. On that basis it is possible to propose they will free themselves through technological change and self-liberation. If you strip out all the specifics about class, economic crisis and poltical tactics, that’s the basic proposition of Marxism.