Illustration by Ellie Foreman Peck

One of the first writers I met early in my editorship of the New Statesman was the campaigner and cultural entrepreneur Anthony Barnett. I admired his radical campaigning spirit and restless interest in the English national question. England, we both agreed, was a nation without a state submerged within the carapace of the multinational post-imperial United Kingdom, now increasingly destabilised by nationalist movements in Scotland and Wales. I’d read the work of the Scottish historian Tom Nairn, notably his 1977 book The Break-Up of Britain, and I knew Barnett was close to Nairn. We agreed to meet for a drink – he chose a non-alcoholic fruit cocktail – in a bar on Fleet Street, London, and I’ve never forgotten his opening remark: “Every magazine needs a project.”

As the co-founder of the online platform OpenDemocracy and director of Charter 88 – which campaigned for electoral and constitutional reform – Barnett knows all about the power of well-orchestrated projects. Charter 88 was launched in a special edition of the New Statesman by then-editor Stuart Weir, who died last year. As Barnett wrote in his appreciation of Weir, it had enduring influence and “inflected” New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. “It also helped ensure the delivery of a Human Rights Act, Freedom of Information, the defenestration of most of the aristocracy from the second chamber, a Scottish Parliament, a Welsh Assembly, a London mayor and a Supreme Court.”

Charter 88 began a constitutional revolution that remains unfinished. Today the Human Rights Act, which incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) into UK law, is under direct attack from the dissident new right, which blames it for many of Britain’s present ills, from uncontrolled illegal migration to the role of activist judges. Both the Conservative Party and Reform UK support withdrawal from the ECHR.

Barnett is 83 and suffering from metastatic prostate cancer but he remains resilient and is being well cared for at Guy’s Hospital in London. “I was advised not to ask about a prognosis,” he told me when we met one recent afternoon for lunch at his house in Oxford. “The best thing to do is proceed. Do acupuncture, a diet, take the treatments that you need and don’t ask about the prognosis.”

Barnett remains as politically engaged as ever. He writes a column for Byline Times, “Notes on Now”, and is working on a book about what it means to be European in this age of upheaval. He believes in a Europe of nations, but different from the old Gaullist ideal, and is convinced that the European Union has not weakened but saved the nation state in Europe. “Why does Ukraine want to join the European Union? Not in order to liquidate being Ukrainian, but because Ukraine can breathe as an equal around the table. And there’s a real Europe, a human Europe, which is one where regulation is possible. You can have the same medicines, and they’re safe, the same beaches, and they’re safe, the same water, and it’s safe, and you can live in this environment.”

For Barnett, Brexit, as he wrote in his fast-paced 2017 book The Lure of Greatness, signified the “end of an era, a truly historic moment”. He thinks the nations of the United Kingdom can one day rejoin the EU, but this will be possible only after the break-up of Britain – which he thinks is inevitable. I don’t. “The problem with the English is that they do not know how to be English,” Barnett said. “We were the first, God’s first country. And everyone was trying to be like us. So the essence of being English is that we don’t have to be English.”

Barnett is no nostalgist and even now looks to the future. He uses the word “future” a lot during our conversation. “I think what it means to be human lies in the future,” he said at one point. “You couldn’t have the equality of women without contraception. So there’s a profound and positive change of what it means to be human, which was incomprehensible to people 300 years ago.”

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Later, as we discussed Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know, which is set in 2119 in a world remade by a series of nuclear explosions and climate disaster, he said: “We still don’t know whether in 100 years’ time, what it means to be human is that we really screwed up and our weakness in front of greed and competition has led to ecological catastrophe. We know what we are doing to this glorious planet. We know we don’t need to. And we proceed nevertheless to do it.”

In What We Can Know, America is a wasteland controlled by warlords and roaming gangs and Britain has become an archipelago of small islands after being drowned by tsunamis. The period through which we are now living is referred to as the Great Derangement: we knew what was happening to the world and allowed it to happen all the same.

When I contacted Barnett for this interview, his reply intrigued me. “A new epoch is on the way, marking the end of the Sixties one, which I participated in the birth of,” he wrote in an email. “A catastrophic failure, apart from feminism. Ironically, while the key figure of the new order is surely Xi Jinping, Trump himself is a personification of the Sixties – its dark side, but then Nixon won the election.”

I was born in the Sixties but came to political awareness in the early Thatcher years of the Eighties. Even then, I had a sense that the legacy of the revolutionary excesses of the Sixties generation – the student rebellions, the radical individualism, the licentiousness, the revolt against family and tradition – was greater atomisation and the fragmentation of society. In many ways, the triumphalism of the left in the Sixties created the conditions for the new right’s counter-revolution. It was, therefore, fascinating and surprising to hear Barnett describe the Sixties as a catastrophic failure. What exactly contributed to the failure?

Before answering, Barnett wanted to qualify what he’d written in the earlier email by saying that, as well as feminism, the Sixties left had “won the argument” on racial justice and ecological sustainability. But, as he put it in a later email, “while many, including me, talked about the need for a ‘hegemonic project’ etc we utterly failed to develop one that had any tangible grasp on society. At the beginning of the Eighties Raymond Williams wrote about how, in contrast to the postwar era, the left was suffering from ‘an absolute loss of the future’ in the sense of believing it was taking society somewhere different and better. Whereas the right, which had been conservative and backward looking – a lost cause if you will – now expressed a self-confident, forward-looking project of marketisation and high-tech global future.”

The right’s response to the social and political victories of the Sixties left was neoliberalism, Barnett said. This is a much abused and misunderstood concept, but for Barnett it means “a political project that said the market knows best and that government is the problem, not the solution. The project at the heart of neoliberalism is to give primacy to the market and to destroy all social and political impediments to its rule, breaking the trade unions, and removing the market from democratic government.”

Born in 1942, Barnett grew up in a “left-wing family” in the north London suburb of Edgware. He failed the eleven-plus and was sent to a “minor public school”, which he did not name. From there he went up to Cambridge and later studied for a MA at Leicester University. From 1965-83, he was on the editorial committee of the New Left Review. When I asked him about his parents, he became silent and for a long while looked down at the table. He did not want to speak about them or at least needed more time do so. A few days later, in an email, he explained that his parents “both had turn-of-the-century Polish immigrant parents but contrasting class backgrounds”. Their marriage was “difficult”. He met his future partner, Judith Herrin, now an archaeologist and historian of late antiquity, at Cambridge – her mother was a “pioneering NHS GP” – and “migrated into her family”. His long association with the intellectual left had begun.

Barnett describes himself as a historical materialist as well as a liberal, but he dislikes paternalism. “Of course, I’m liberal in my views and life, I’m a live and let-live pluralist. But Liberalism, with a capital ‘L’ sees itself as knowing what is best, it regards the population as illiberal and dangerous, it is a ruling point of view. Paternalism is its middle name. In contrast I believe in popular agency, in the 99 per cent, in this sense I’m a republican.”

He has never joined a political party, although in a recent *Byline Times *column he revealed that he had signed up to “explore the possibilities of ‘Your Party’”. In his book The Lure of Greatness, he denounced Jeremy Corbyn’s “regressive radicalism” and yet he relished Corbynism and the forces it unlocked. But Corbyn, he says, is “the least skilful politician who has ever made an impact on politics”. He contrasted his struggles with Nigel Farage, whom he calls “an unbelievably skilful politician”.

I asked Barnett, as a long-time campaigner, if he admired Farage’s ability to create mass movements and launch start-up parties. After all, he speaks of mobilising a people’s army. For the second time in our conversation, he became silent and looked down at the table. Eventually, he said: “It’s a very fair question you’ve got me on. I do want to think about this. I’ve said for a long time someone has to speak for England. And by default, Farage is doing so, though his language is Anglo-British. And we have vacated the field.”

“We” presumably meaning the left?

Barnett nodded but then digressed to mention Caroline Lucas, the former leader of the Greens, and her book Another England while also praising the great radical tradition represented by Milton, Blake, Shelley and Tom Paine.

But on Farage?

“Yeah, on Farage. If you leave the door open… He’s speaking for the frustrated.”

No nationalism is entirely benign. The door has been left open and Farage has walked through it. “At the centre of Tom Nairn’s originality,” Barnett has written, “is his insistence on nationalism as an inescapable necessity that has a dual-nature – captured in his image of it as a two-faced Janus, the Roman god of doorways, that looks towards both past and future.”

“Nationalism is intrinsically two-edged,” Barnett says now. “It looks to the past to mobilise the past for moving forward. It always has that element of regression, because without the regression, you cannot mobilise the forces to move forward. We’re dancing with our dark side, you know. Who hasn’t had a bad thought or a wicked idea? Or a jealous or envious impulse? There’s no such thing as just anti-colonial nationalism and bad fascist nationalism.”

To defeat Farage and his anti-system Reform UK – as well as what he calls “other far-right leaders like Trump and Marine Le Pen” – Barnett believes what is required is “an alliance of what we have come to call the left and the liberal centre”. In other words, a multi-party popular front. But if there is hope for the left it does not lie with Corbyn and his putative party.

“The left is not a singularity. Talking about Gaza, which is fine, but never mentioning Ukraine? A party of the left has to look at the fact that Europe has been invaded. It’s got to be able to talk about Putin and Ukraine. And if the Labour Party is getting it right, then it has to be able to say: ‘Well, we agree with what Labour is saying on Ukraine, but we think Gaza is more telling because it is a genocide and, therefore, this is a more important issue for us. If you can’t say that, and Zarah Sultana just says the Labour Party is dead or morally dead, or whatever. That is baby talk. There’s got to be a real discussion of pluralism. And there’s got to be a discussion of the fact that people are complicated. As somebody who is younger and came from a more complex background, Sultana, I thought, would add that. And they have nothing to say about working with the Liberal Democrats.”

Barnett will, therefore, not be joining Your Party, but he will look to the future and will not stop writing and campaigning. He has a theory of history and knows what he is against but also what he is for – pluralism, republican citizenship, Europe, a popular sovereignty unencumbered by the delusions of the elites who control the fractured Anglo-British state.

What I like about Barnett is his intellectual restlessness. As one of the leaders of the Sixties academic left, he feels compelled to question what his generation got right and wrong. If he is not exactly mourning a lost future, he wants to understand why it turned out differently from what he expected. He once wrote of Nairn that his “motivation is always to work out how to move forward in a profoundly changing world”. Barnett is similarly still working out how to move forward. While I was at his house, he took a call from Neal Lawson, co-founder of the new Andy Burnham-aligned, soft-left Mainstream campaign group. It believes the status quo cannot hold. What’s next – that’s what interests him. Forward, forward, forward.

[Further reading: The Reform revolution will be Americanised]

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