Dear Tristram…

“You are the top 1%. The Labour party is in the shit. It is your job and your responsibility to take leadership going forward.”

These are the words of Tristram Hunt, the former public school pupil, son of a Lord, Labour Shadow Education Secretary, former hopeful leadership candidate, former historian (well, more a 'man who writes about the past' as Simon Heffer snidely phrases it) and professional picket-line crosser – the man who crossed a legal picket line of his academic colleagues to teach a class about Marxism. 

Tristram is the Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central, one of the most deprived constituencies in the country with unemployment running at double the national average, one with a history of far-right politics, and one with officially the lowest voter turn-out in the country. 

And yet Tristram feels no need to address these words to his constituents, or even the hard-working Labour Party members in Stoke-on-Trent Central. They have nothing to say which would interest him. How could they? They are not 'the 1%'. Their lives – unfashionable, provincial, unprivileged, hard-working or unemployed – do not fit them to have an opinion. Instead, Tristram turns to the privileged pups of the rich, those who have won the lottery of life and haven't even begun to spend their winnings. From there, he wants them to go on to lead lives of service to the Labour Party - by becoming Special Advisors, or getting parachuted in to safe seats (like him) without ever having to get their hands dirty. They will, of course, have a lot of theory to guide them…just like David Cameron, George Osborne and the Milibands, all of whom attended Oxford. Just like, lest we forget, all those other politicians, civil servants, bankers, hedge fund traders, pension fund executives (etc etc) who plunged us into the deepest and widest recession since the Victorian era and decided that the solution was to beggar the working poor while resuscitating the financial systems which got us into this in the first place. 

You'd expect this sort of undemocratic, elitist rubbish from a Conservative, because they believe that the rich have earned a voice by making it so far up the greasy pole (and that their children must be similarly blessed) but it's sickening to hear it from a Labour politician. However, it's not exactly unprecedented. There's a movement called the Fabians which still exists as an organisation, and which has many descendants outside the actual Fabian Society. It was largely socialist for most of its existence (with some rather dubious interests in eugenics along the way) but parted company from the mass of the socialist movement in its view of the Great Unwashed. While thereat of us socialists believe that the people are perfectly capable of expressing their needs, wants and solutions and should be listened to, the Fabians took the view that a small cadre of experts with the mental resources to understand the world should take the reins on behalf of the people. Part of this was fuelled by a quasi-Gramscian feeling that the People had been brainwashed by capitalism to the point that they were incapable of enunciating a critique of their condition and doing anything about it. Most of it was simply a Victorian disgust and horror at the Scum, feeding a fear of what they'd do if they weren't placated (they might even have a revolution!). Leave it to the Clever Chaps, said Sydney and Beatrice Webb, entranced by the new Soviet system they saw on a carefully-chaperoned trip to Russia and not particularly interested in the stories about mass murders and gulags. Efficiency is all! What could the bovine Kulaks possibly have to say. (There's also an ultra-left version of Proletarianism called Workerism which assumed that left to their own devices, the People would automatically create a paradise, but when control of public housing was devolved to street level in certain towns in the 1970s, the Workers spent rather too much time ensuring that non-white people weren't allowed to move in). 

So Fabianism became a rather conservative structural model which occasionally produced interesting ideas and people but fails because it's always in a hurry. It's a technocratic vision which sees discussion, persuasion and argument as inefficient, and it prefers to deal with elites rather than masses, even when those elites are the products of inherited privilege rather than, say, ability, as Tristram's unpleasant little outburst demonstrates. 

The glaring problem with Hunt's speech is that it's just very weird to ask 'the 1%' to stop a mass party being 'a sect'? What can a cadre of the 1% be other than a sect? It's a fundamental assault on the optimistic principle underpinning socialism: that we believe in the wisdom of crowds. It's even more galling that it comes from a man whose books are derivative and policies even worse: as shadow Education secretary his job seemed to be to perform for the Daily Mail and say yes to Michael Gove. He loved academies and free schools, for instance, seemingly entranced by the idea that removing schools from democratic and parent-led control and giving them to very rich men's companies would somehow improve education: a belief informing this nasty little speech too. 

I would love Tristram to explain to his own local Party, or to my students (mostly poor, ethnically diverse, mostly female) why they must not lead the Labour Party or contribute to its debates, whereas a mostly rich, mostly white, mostly male group should. But it's unlikely he'd even deign to reply to an invitation from a 99% institution or a person without an MA (Cantab). What would be the point?

We need to talk about Tristram

I'm a member of the Labour Party. Being a member of any political party makes me a little bit weird - formal participation has been declining for many years. I'm even weird amongst my friends. Most of us are socialists, and we're not especially welcome in the Party. But I carry on because I'd like to have even a tiny say in the policy determinations of a party that has a strong chance of winning a general election. I admire my friends who spend their time arguing over the minutiae of leftwing ideology before standing in the rain selling three sectarian newspapers a week, but let's face it: that's more of a hobby than a plan for government. 

So I'm in the Labour party. I joined to vote for John McDonnell in the leadership election that led to Gordon Brown's elevation. What can I say? I unerringly support the losing side. I wanted Denis Kucinich to win the US Presidency. I've met both Milibands, and far preferred Ed. David struck me as an unreflective and cynical machine politician. Ed, for all the scrapes he gets into, seemed to be principled and genuinely interested in the people he met.

But my party doesn't make it easy for me to remain a member. There's the whole embrace of neoliberalism, for a start. Then the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the torture, the kidnapping, the deregulation etc. etc. ad infinitum. There's the latest wheeze, which is to punish young unemployed people for the bankruptcy of Britain (caused by the financial sector) by reducing their social security support. It's marketed as 'help to train' so I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the 'help' is significantly lower than the current rate of unemployment benefit.

But most of all, there's the Honourable Tristram Hunt MP.

Tristram is the privately-educated son of a Lord (not that I'm particularly bothered about that: Benn and Dalyell were both quite posh) who was unaccountably parachuted into the poor and socialist constituency for Stoke-on-Trent Central, apparently thanks to the machinations of his friend Peter Mandelson. Tristram is an historian, or as the newspapers put it, a 'distinguished' historian, i.e. one who can produce a decent narrative from interesting though not essential material without troubling the reader with tricky metaphysical questions.

Tristram is the Shadow Secretary of State for Education. That means his job is to oppose the work of Michael Gove, the man who thinks that education should be given to private corporations who'll reproduce the atmosphere of Mr Gradgrind's drone factory and make a profit along the way. Mr Gove wants you all to become junior Empire Loyalists who know that Muslims are Bad and the British have been, are and always will be White, Christian and Nice.

Tristram isn't up to the job. Worse than that: he agrees with everything Mr Gove does. He simply feels that Michael could be a little more efficient. For a very clever man, he seems incapable of thinking anything through beyond the question that obsesses all rightwing Labour politicians: 'what will the Mail say about this?'.

Not only is Tristram incompetent, deeply conservative and entirely lacking discernible Labour values, he actively works against his party's history, beliefs and members. A few months ago, this former academic went back to Queen Mary College to deliver a lecture (apparently he doesn't consider being an MP and shadow cabinet member constitutes full-time employment). To do so, he crossed a legal picket line of his own colleagues. The subject of that lecture? Socialism. The biographer of Friedrich Engels stirred the workers with his principled defence of the right of exploited workers to withdraw their labour:

"I support the right to strike for those who have balloted to picket. I have chosen not to join the strike." Mr Hunt, who is also the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, said his "personal commitment remained to the students" he was lecturing.

Funnily enough, that's the exact same claim deployed by my scab colleagues here at The Hegemon. It is, of course, transparent bullshit. I took strike action because I'm committed to my students: I want them to be taught by rested, decently-paid academics who have the opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research, not by exhausted hourly-paid ones exploited by a management that cares for nothing beyond bums on seats, while the financial sector or whatever creams off potentially great thinkers.

I won't be going to my constituency party's summer party to be lectured on Labour values by a man who betrays his colleagues and his comrades. The continued presence of Tristram Hunt, while marginal compared with all the other failures of the political class, has become symbolic to me of a party leadership which can't throw off the mental shackles of the New Labour period, a clique which is more concerned with appeasing the right than developing the self-respect required to make a case for socialism and persuading the voters of our cause.

I know that my party's local and national representatives will write off my whinging as typical of a privileged élitist, but they're wrong. You don't have to be a raving Trotskyist to understand that you don't cross picket lines, especially when you're a massively rich person earning a second or third income by taking work done by former colleagues protesting about eight years of declining pay.

Tristram is the touchstone of the debate, a symptom of the cowardice and isolation of the upper reaches of the Labour Party. If you can't find anything to argue about with Michael Gove, you're in the wrong party and the wrong job.

Dear Tristram

I'm sorry to harp on about this. I'd rather post something about the books I'm reading or the music to which I'm listening - but Tristram Hunt's betrayal of his colleagues and political friends is really bugging me. Here's the letter I sent him and Ed Miliband. I encourage you to do the same. Their email addresses are ed.miliband.mp@parliament.uk and tristramhunt@parliament.uk

Dear Ed and Tristram,

I am a Labour Party member and a university lecturer, after four degrees (BA, MA, PhD and PGCE), ten years of extra debt and many years of hourly-paid casual work. At 38, I have only been employed full-time and with pension rights for 6 years. In that time, my pension has been cut, my pension contributions increased and my retirement date extended far into the future. My salary has not increased in real terms since I secured this job, though my workload, class sizes and management expectations all have.   

I look at my students and see bright, eager people, many of whom would like to become the next generation of intellectual leaders and educators like you once were Tristram. But every year, weighed down by £50,000 of debt, they’re forced to take ‘socially useless’ jobs in for example banking rather than follow their hearts and give back to society. While the senior management of many universities demand corporate levels of pay ‘to attract talent’, academic pay is declining and it’s hard to attract a new generation when conditions are declining.  

This is why I was so utterly disappointed to see a Shadow Minister for Education crossing a picket line to deliver a course - ironically - on Marx. I am not naive enough to expect a Labour politician to support an industrial dispute any more, but I would have thought that Tristram would have had the good manners to simply reschedule the session or use another entrance. Given the caution and sophistication of your political activity, I can only conclude that publicly crossing a picket line of one’s colleagues is a deliberate political act designed to deliver some kind of message to the political right.  

Despite being an expert on Marxist theory, Mr Hunt has clearly failed to learn the Labour virtues of solidarity and empathy. I would like to stress to you how disappointed I am by yesterday’s action. Even though I’m on the Board of Governors of my university, I was on the UCU picket line and worked hard to explain to my students that withdrawing our labour is both deeply unpleasant and our only remaining option in the pay dispute. How can I talk to them about the joys of social democratic unity in an individualistic neoliberal society when my own party’s leaders are so willing to betray their former colleagues and political allies? 

I’m not asking either of you to support our strike (though I wish you could), but I would like you to contemplate whether crossing a picket line is what you got into Labour politics for.
Yours,
Plashing Vole

PS: Here's the automated email reply from Tristram:

However, as I am sure you will understand, my immediate priorities will be my parliamentary duties as Shadow Secretary of State for Education and to my constituents in Stoke-on-Trent Central.

Yes, it really looked like it as he strolled across a picket line to deliver a class in London.

The name's Hunt. Total Hunt.

People have got many LOLs from Jeremy Hunt's name, particularly when it was (accidentally) transformed on live radio into an insulting and crude term for the female genitalia. It's not a term I use, and anyway, being likened to Jeremy is the most wounding weapon in my arsenal.

But what is it about politicians called Hunt? Jeremy is the Minister for Health who a) wants to sell the whole thing off to his friends in business and b) things homeopathy is a thing. The other prominent Hunt is Tristram, MP for part of Stoke-on-Trent thanks to being Peter Mandelson's friend back in the days when that wasn't code for 'corrupt Machievellian war-monger': parachuted in against the wishes of the constituency members. Tristram is of course the very exemplar of meritocracy: anyone who claims his political rise is in any way connected to the fact that his father is a Labour member of the House of Lords is just a cynical purveyor of the politics of envy. Tristram. No, like all Labour's leaders, Tristram spent a formative period underground as a miner, before embarking on the long hard slog through community activism before the acclaim of his fellow proletarians led him to set out on the long march to London to change the world.

Only joking. Tristram went to the very expensive and elitist University College School, then Cambridge. After a brief period as an academic and TV historian (very much not the same thing as being a non-TV historian), he went – surprise surprise – to a New Labour think tank and then into Parliament.

Unsurprisingly then, our Tristram is indistinguishable from the Old Right. Despite being an academic expert on Marx, Tristram shares Michael Gove's passion for private-school stylings and neo-Victorianist attitudes. He has never said anything that could remotely be described as socialist or left-wing, and is seemingly entirely uninterested in anything other than pragmatic triangulation. This of course is a shame as Michael Gove and David Willetts have turned school and higher education into a quagmire of privatisation, free-market principle, corruption, bullying and prejudice. You'd have thought that anyone with more brain cells than a nematode could manage to carve out a political space allowing him to critique this neoliberal project, but apparently not.

Tristram Hunt's descent into shame was complete today. As I and thousands of other academics and support staff picketed in response to our fifth consecutive real-terms pay cut, Tristram crossed a picket line to deliver a class on – of all things – Marxism. Which at least indicates a vicious sense of humour.

That's right. A Labour Minister for Education ignored his former colleagues and his party's history to become a scab.

Update: thinking about it like a politician, I realised I initially missed the point. Tristram is a former academic and a Shadow Minister for Education. There is no way that he did not know that a) his former colleagues were taking industrial action and that b) there would be a picket line. Knowing that, he then chose to cross that line. He could have stayed at home or done one of the many things he has to do (perhaps take a trip to Stoke-on-Trent, which he supposedly represents). He could even have arrived early and sneaked into the building before the pickets started, like some of my scab colleagues. He didn't do any of these things: he deliberately crossed a picket line to make some kind of point, presumably to curry favour with the Daily Mail. And for that reason, I'm going to write to him and Ed Miliband.

I'm a Labour Party member. That means that I've endured the endless erosion of principle and passion in the party for as long as I've been alive. I've watched my party leadership running scared from the Daily Mail in every industrial dispute going. I've seen them hand over essential public services to their scaly new friends in the City. I've seen them torture and bomb and kidnap, bug and burgle and hack and I've stayed in, hoping that one day a shred of principle might re-emerge in the only non-Tory party that has a chance at government.

My reward? To watch Tristram Hunt stab us in the back without a twinge of guilt. We're so far beneath his concerns that he won't bother explaining himself and the Party will support him. What is the point of him? What is the point of voting Labour if it's led by people entirely bereft of principle? What will Tristram Hunt do that Michael Gove won't? From here, it's pretty hard to tell.

'…gossip, envy, malice and "constructive criticism".

Well, that's what semi-pro historian and centrist MP Tristram Hunt thinks blogs are for - an opinion expressed in a newspaper column (that famously objective and calm medium) on the subject of Why The Internet Is Letting In All The Oiks And Disturbing Proper History.

Now, my field (1930s Welsh proletarian literature, amongst other things) has yet to make a huge impact on the web. The novels I study aren't on Gutenberg. The archives haven't been scanned, the letters not uploaded. Which is a shame: I've spent a massive amount of money on rare books, travel, nasty bed and breakfast establishments and railway station pasties (never, ever, be tempted by the 'beef and onion', an insult to both substances). If I had more money, I'd make more visits. However, not being professionally interested in the actual paper used or the postmarks, I'd quite like the Gwyn Thomas Correspondence to be on the web. I'd work from the scans, and lots of people might accidentally stumble upon one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

I don't see why a supposedly leftwing historian wants to reserve any academic subjects for academics. We need experts (at least, I need you to need me!), but we also need to widely disseminate everything. The existence of the Daily Mail, Paul Uppal and Simon Cowell to pick three random examples, can be directly attributed to the denial of detailed context to the masses and thus an inability to refute their hysterical assertions. Their distortions and exaggerations only thrive when a public is encouraged to remain uninformed.

So making historical texts available online isn't an attack on Tristram's unhealthy fetishistic love of actually touching the very paper a scholar used (though every touch is damaging): it's an accessory, a democratic gesture in an increasingly undemocratic world.

History, literature and every other field, shouldn't be the preserve of a smug little club telling everyone what to think. We need experts who can spend all their lives thinking deeply about a special corner: but without easy access to texts and ideas, the expert will have nobody to talk to. That may be fine for some of the more insular academics, but it leaves me cold. I'm an evangelist for ideas, and I need to believe that there's a pool of people thirsty for conversation.

Hunt has this to say:

There is nothing more thrilling than untying the frayed string, opening the envelope and leafing through a first edition in the expectation of unexpected discoveries. None of that is possible on an iPad.

He's completely wrong. Unless you have some sort of collector's obsession with being first all the time (which isn't academia, it's trainspotting), then there is something far more exciting than touching a piece of paper nobody's touched for a while.

It's having a new idea, or developing existing ones in interesting ways. Michel Foucault (re)discovered the Memoirs of Herculine Barbin - but the thrill wasn't novelty: it was the opportunity to explore the tense relationship between individual identity and the social institutions.

But I suppose Tristram hasn't yet experienced that.

Yet another birthday

I'm off now. To sunny Stafford for Dan's partner's 40th. Then my Germanic chum (like that, Deer Friend) Felix is coming for the weekend to drink while I mark essays. What are you lot doing for the bank holiday? Wish I was going walking…

Oh yes - to drown out the New Labour screaming, I just received Tristram Hunt's new biography of Engels, and a new edition of Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England (short answer - less than idyllic). Plus ça change…