The Civic Radical

What happens when the political labels that once made sense stop explaining what people actually believe?

Modern politics increasingly demands more than a broad set of values. Choose a side and an entire package of opinions seems to arrive with it: on immigration, identity, free speech, the nation, the state and even which facts are considered safe to acknowledge.

The Civic Radical begins with a refusal to accept the package.

Britain is already a country of radically different people who disagree about fundamental things. History is not going to produce a simpler population. Political opponents will not disappear after the next election, and no movement is going to educate the entire country into permanent agreement.

We have to live together anyway.

From immigration and national belonging to workplace power, free speech, identity politics, public institutions and democracy itself, The Civic Radical asks two persistent questions: who has power over whom, and what kind of common life remains after that power is used?

The answer is Civic Radicalism: a politics built around secure belonging, challengeable power and a common civic life strong enough to survive serious disagreement.

This is a left-wing manifesto that refuses to surrender difficult realities to the right. It argues that immigration can be badly governed without migrants becoming enemies, that human dignity does not settle every policy question, that solidarity must be larger than identity, and that freedom means more than being left alone while somebody else holds the practical conditions of your life in their hands.

It is also an argument against purification: the seductive belief that society would finally work if the wrong people could simply be removed, excluded or defeated.

Accessible, provocative and written without the language of a think-tank report, The Civic Radical is for anyone who feels politically homeless, ideologically suspicious, or increasingly unconvinced that choosing a side should mean allowing that side to do all of the thinking.

Winning is an event.

Living together is what happens afterwards.