Why I stopped going on TV

TV debates don’t change minds; organising does.

Whenever I do media, I get asked why I don’t appear on big TV shows as frequently as I used to. I’ve had a few more of these questions since my viral appearance LBC, in which I call out the warmongering politicians trying to drag us into WWIII. I’m quite happy to do media appearances when I feel like I have a clear message I’d like to communicate to a mass audience. But the honest answer is, most of the time, doing media is a waste of time.

Me on LBC last week. You can watch the full show here.

DEBATE ME

I recently wrote a short review of Sarah Stein Lubrano’s brilliant book Don’t Talk about Politics, in which she shows, using compelling evidence, that political debate does not change minds. People know what they think when they start watching a debate and the vast, vast majority won’t have changed their minds by the end. Lubrano argues that the fixity of our political views stems from the fact that people don’t see political ideas in the same way as scientific ones: political ideologies aren’t made up of statements that can be proven true or false. Instead, the way people see politics is intimately tied to the way they see themselves.

Trying to debate someone on an issue like whether or not socialism ‘works’ is futile. That person will already have made their mind up on the issue, because they’ve already made their mind up about who they are. Someone who is obsessed with order, control, and hierarchy will hate the very idea of socialism simply because of the way they’ve constructed their identity. And someone’s sense of self isn’t something you’re going to shift during a 30 minute panel debate.

When I read Lubrano’s book a few months ago, it crystallised a perspective I’d been forming for a few years. By the time I left London and moved to Cornwall, I was utterly sick of Westminster and the media class that buzzes around it. The decision to move was based on instinct, not reason. I had become bored of shouting into the void, knowing that I was simply providing fodder for a media class that had zero interest in presenting ‘both sides of the story’. The only thing most political journalists in this country care about is their proximity to power; an attitude that I find pretty grotesque.

But, looking back two years later, I can see that those instincts had pretty solid foundations. I didn’t realise it at the time, but by the time I left London I had developed a completely different understanding of the nature of political power than that I held when I arrived in the capital 8 years earlier.

How does political power really work?

I first moved to London to work at a think tank, where I helped to develop policies that – I hoped – would influence parties’ policy decisions. I moved through think tank world for several years, researching reports, writing op-eds, and appearing in the media. Eventually, I went on to write for the New Statesman and continued to make frequent appearances on shows like Question Time and Newsnight. My entire career was structured around the assumption that it was possible to change peoples’ minds through disinterested debate.

But while researching and writing my latest book, Vulture Capitalism, I realised that things were a little more complicated. In the book, I outline the Marxist view of the state as a social relation – in other words, what happens within the state reflects the balance of power within society as a whole. Even if the unlikely scenario that you do succeed in changing the mind of someone in a position of power, that doesn’t mean they’re going to act on their new beliefs. They’re much more likely to bow to the whims of powerful vested interests – as Rachel Reeves has with her U-turn on taxing wealthy non-doms.

Politicians will only move when they’re pushed. If you want them to act in the interests of the majority, then the majority has to be better organised than the wealthy minority. So, how do we convince people to organise?

This is the million-dollar question that I’ve been considering for the last several years. Through events, interviews and conversations with people around the world, I’ve realised something pretty surprising: most people don’t need to be convinced that the system is broken. They know our economy, and our political system, works in the interests of those at the top. They’re in favour of a profound transformation of our economy – from higher taxes on the wealthy, to the nationalisation of utilities, to decarbonization.

The issue is that they feel utterly powerless to bring these changes about. My next book is all about where this sense of powerlessness comes from, and how we fight it. I’m currently in the process of interviewing hundreds of people from around the world to find answers to these questions, and I’ve already learned more through these conversations than I have debating the country’s brightest minds.

Less Talk, More Action

To return to the original question, the reason I don’t do media anymore is that people don’t need to be convinced the system isn’t working; they need to be inspired to change it. Panel discussions set up to discuss Westminster gossip or debate new policy proposals aren’t going to inspire anyone to do anything. No matter how these ‘debates’ go, people aren’t going to change their minds on the issues – and they’re certainly not going to march out of their living room and join a protest or a social movement. In fact, the arcane language and fawning over powerful politicians tend to make people feel disempowered, convincing them that politics isn’t for ‘people like them’.

The only way to challenge these views is to meet people where they are. If you’re going to get politically organised, it’s more likely to be because your neighbour asked you to come along to a local protest than because you saw a bunch of allegedly intelligent people debating policy on TV. You’ve got to be able to see, in real life, that there is a different way of doing things. That’s why I started writing my column, ‘What Can We Do?’: to show people exactly what they can do right now to turn their political convictions into action. It’s also why I stopped doing so much media: because I’m convinced that we need less talk, and more action.

To be clear, I’m not saying that powerful politicians or inspiring leaders can’t move people to act. The astonishing success of Zohran Mamdani proves beyond doubt that they can. But Zohran didn’t win by debating policies on panel shows designed to make him look stupid. He won by walking the streets of New York, talking to people who were being screwed over by the out of touch political class, and showing them, in very real terms exactly what he was going to do to change things.

Today, I spend most of my time investigating why people disempowered and talking to the organisers that have succeeded in making them feel powerful again. Still, every now and again, it does feel pretty good to go on TV to give a verbal kicking to a political class united in favour or inequality, climate chaos, and genocide.