Badgeland. By Steve Rayson. Bavant Press. 2023.
This is an engaging and well-written account of a life spent in left-wing politics during the 1980s, mainly in the Labour Party and also in Militant for a time, referencing a variety of Trotskyist and leftist groups from the era, together with their preoccupations and campaigns. Hence the Badgeland title – from ‘Rock Against Racism’ to ‘Coal Not Dole’.
Rayson starts as a schoolkid with an interest in politics in his home town of Swindon before moving on to be a student radical at Bath University and then after graduation to various management positions, initially at the former Greater London Council (GLC) before its abolition by Thatcher.
He charts an emerging disjunction in his life between the metropolitan sophistication of London and its progressive social liberalism and the visits he makes back to his working class roots in Swindon to visit family. There, the working men’s club frequented by his father and his friends has little time or interest in the radical left. Much to Rayson’s dismay they instead developed much more of an interest in buying their council houses and making a quick buck by joining in the various share-offerings of the privatized utilities. It is a tale that reflects a fundamental and wider shift at the time, when former working class trade unionists became seduced by the alleged benefits of the ‘property-owning democracy’ promoted by Thatcher’s Tories.
The book is funny by turn and sad at others, and in essence charts his frustrations at the failure of most of the campaigns he got involved in, from CND and the Miners’ Strike to the fight to save the GLC. He also traces the parallel tendencies within the left that were to emerge as New Labour, making an accommodation with Thatcherism that Rayson was uncomfortable with.
Eventually, after his time as a manager in local government, Rayson became an entrepreneur himself and in the ultimate irony claims that his life in and around Trotskyist groups prepared him well for the task, incongruous though that may sound. Part of a recalled conversation with a left-wing friend at the time is worth repeating:
‘I think all start-up founders should join a Trotskyist group as a teenager. It is far more valuable than studying for an MBA. They run weekly education sessions, they give you homework and individual mentors. They make you do presentations and coach you in the art of public speaking.Okay, you have to moderate the hand movements and stop referring to everyone as comrade… But seriously it was Trotskyists who helped me achieve my ‘A’ Level grades to get to university…Trotskyists teach you sales skills the hard way. They put you outside M & S with newspapers saying ‘Smash the Capitalist System’ and challenge you to sell as many copies as you can. It is the sink or swim school of sales training and better than any selling course…They demonstrate how to build organisational capacity and communicate a consistent vision to their members. They generate revenues that are out of all proportion to their small size and are incredibly resilient. They create and publish national newspapers. They are also experts at guerrilla marketing which is a required skill for entrepreneurs.’ (pp.352-3).
In this he’s not entirely wrong of course, and others have made successful careers in public sector management for themselves based on some of these skills. Rayson has also worked in that sector and as a consultant too, and clearly still has an interest in radical politics.
These days, despite his various campaigning disappointments, he says he tends to vote for the most radical candidate on offer. Perhaps he’s even voted for the SPGB. Strangely enough, there is an argument that our commitment to a society of abundance and free access to wealth without a coercive state means that socialism as we see it could be the most creative and ‘entrepreneurial’ society of all. But then again, he would never have learnt any of that from Militant or the RCP.
DAP
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