Tesco, Stokes Croft and the Return of the Public

on May 26 in Bristol, Culture, Projects tagged Book review, Bristol, Festival of Ideas, Stokes Croft, Tesco by Peter Blackman

I was recently asked to read and review ‘The Return of the Public’ by Dan Hind for the Bristol Festival of Ideas Book Prize. Here’s the review below. It went on to win the Prize. The book, not my review obviously. I wrote it at the height of the riots over the new Tesco store on Stokes Croft in Bristol, so it was perhaps inevitable that those events, and the way in which they mirrored issues featured in Hind’s own writing for Al-Jazeera, would feature in my review.

“From peaceful protestors to riot police, local councillors to the masked men who threw missiles off the roof of ‘Telepathic Heights’; everyone who was involved in the riots surrounding the opening of the Tesco store in Stokes Croft should read ‘The Return of the Public’ by Dan Hind.

For unlike many books on social and public policy, it is not written from an obvious position of political bias. Books such as those find favour from a similarly biased readership - known in the US as ‘media cocooning’ – but they rarely have something for audiences as different as those who recently found themselves on either side of the riot shield. For however different the personal views on each side might have been, the individuals involved are all public citizens. In his book, Hind argues that at present, that public is not being given the opportunity to debate and to have influence.

In clear, consistently well phrased prose, Hind spares neither the ‘public service ethos’ of (mainly) Labour post war governments – mother knows best. Nor the Tory ‘neoliberalism’ which placed its faith in self interested economics - the market knows best. Both, in his view ‘seek to do without a population operating as an autonomous public’, and he writes convincingly that our anger at the activities of shareholder driven corporations, supported by government and an insecure mass media is rooted in all of these bodies ever decreasing legitimacy. Put simply – who are they to tell us what to do or think?

Using well chosen examples from the past – Rome, the English Civil War, and the establishment of the US republic – Hind shows that though the structure of the state may change, the private interests of what history textbooks once described as ‘the traditional ruling classes’ always trumped the needs of the public: ‘the bulk of the population were offered a fantasy of unbroken tradition and time honoured obedience to the ancestral order.’

Hind suggest that we move from being ‘an audience and an object of manipulation for the powerful’ through a programme of public commissioning, a new public system of knowledge, and a reform of the private sector. The first is the creation of funds with which the public can approve independent journalists to investigate important issues. The second the opening up of science so that it is not the secretive partner of the military-industrial complex, and the third a revolution in business liability and properly constituted systems of employee ownership.

Every reader will have a different opinion on these proposals. Reading Hind’s book however, it is impossible not to be gripped by the fear that under our current political and social system we are impotent, when as the public, we should be important and pre-eminent. Hind believes that “The long, drowsy years of apathy and inaction, debt and celebrity-worship are over. In Britain, as elsewhere, the public is back.” The recent events on the streets of our city would seem to prove his point.