How I’ve Tried To Change The World. By Alexei Sayle. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2026. £16.99
This is the third of Sayle’s entertaining autobiographical meanders and is subtitled ‘… By Walking Down The Middle of the Street Shouting’. Instead of a straight autobiographical approach to the more recent decades of his career, stand-up comedy’s greatest ever shouter has instead chosen to focus on his political activity and this is the thread everything else revolves around. To an extent it works, though it is also a catalogue of failure and frustration, as he largely admits.
His parents were stalwarts of the old Communist Party of Great Britain but the young Alexei moved on to the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a Maoist outfit he tired of over time and whose internal atmosphere and membership behaviours he has bemoaned, arguing they could learn a lot from some of the practices of Alcoholics Anonymous. Since then, he has been a supporter of most leftist causes from the late 60s, often prominently so. In recent times he has been especially animated by the atrocity in Gaza and appears to have fallen out with a number of friends over it, including others – like him – of Jewish heritage.
As he recognises, ultimately much of this political activity has been futile, though he clearly had his hopes of something bigger and more successful rekindled by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour leader. This soon went the same way of course, though he seems to downplay the inherent contradictions in the Corbynite position (which was always focused on delivering rhetoric on behalf of the oppressed – while never really challenging the capitalist system of markets, profits and competing nation states that creates the oppressed in the first place). As a great supporter of the Palestinian cause, Sayle also underplays the tendency of Corbyn and his allies to focus on single-issues and rely on the belief that an enemy of an enemy must somehow be a friend, often in a way that has demonstrated a huge degree of political naiveté.
Sayle, however, does show some real lucidity at times which is memorable (as he always does in his stand-up and radio shows). Here he is writing about the Arab Spring when mass movements threatened to topple – and often did topple – a series of Middle East dictatorships:
‘There is no greater argument than the failure of the Arab Spring for leaders of protests needing to understand that they absolutely have to possess a political ideology. For them to have adopted socialism or Marxism or anarchism, this providing a way to bring structure to the act of rebelling. For them, in fact, to have a code. Otherwise, you risk your protest ending up like the Black Lives Matter rallies which went from a visceral outcry against state brutality to players occasionally kneeling before a football match for fuck knows what reason’ (p.147).
Elsewhere Sayle also says that he regards Marxism as the best way available of understanding the world around us … even if it won’t necessarily make you happy! Cheers, Alexei.
DAP
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