Brand or bland? Are these really my choices?

Russell Brand has a book out and a great publicist. His diagnosis of our current malaise is pretty spot on. His solutions however are woolly headed at best and inconsistent at worst.

But Russell Brand is being taken seriously. He’s never off Newsnight nor out of the pages of the Guardian. People are flocking to follow him in their thousands. He is Che Guevara for the scripted reality generation.

The established left simply don’t know what to make of this. Take all the cynicism of the last two paragraphs for example. It’s an ugly response to a man who is inspiring people. A response that speaks not just of our understanding of the depth that is missing from Brand’s analysis, but also from our awareness of our own lack of ability to achieve the same kind of response.

Some of you may have noticed (many of you will not) that I’ve had a couple of weeks off from this column. I’ve been away while much of the Brand mania has been reaching it’s peak. I’ve seen it through the filter of occasionally checking in on Facebook and Twitter rather than the usual all-consuming obsession that is the fate of the modern political blogger.

So maybe I am a bit more forgiving of Brand not having been over-saturated with his cod-revolutionary philosophies. But I have also come back with some distance between myself at my best and most rested and the angst I felt last time I sat at this keyboard and contemplated the state of the modern Labour Party.

The problem is that time and perspective have not changed my analysis. They have confirmed it.

The emergence of Brand is nothing new. It is simply the latest in a series of ways in which vast swathes of our country are saying to the established political parties “you have nothing to say that I want to hear”. From the rise of UKIP on the right and the Greens on the left to the fact that 45% of Scots can no longer bear to be a part of the UK we are hearing an endless chime tolling the end of politics as usual.

Unfortunately our response has been to simply debate more of the same. To deal in technocracy and play numbers games. We have chosen to see inspiration and reassurance as antithetical and are so terrified of failing to do the latter that we shun any attempt at the former stance that ultimately neither resonates nor reassures.

For a while, Labour looked to be doing politics a bit differently. The emergence of Arnie Graf and the emphasis put on the community organising model showed us – for an all too brief moment – a different way of doing politics. A different way of interacting with the people and communities we purport to serve.

But Arnie is now long gone and Labour has returned to our diminishing returns model of transactional politics. But while our number one goal is to seek to reassure over our approach to the finances, we are not even offering a tempting transaction. Transactional politics has to be bigger to inspire. That was the appeal of a more relational approach – it inspired at community and neighbourhood level. It was about people not money. Change not continuity.

We can sneer at Russell Brand if we like. It’s easy to do and kinda fun. He is a bit of a wally after all. But he’s the wally who has got people interested in having political conversations. He’s the wally who is giving people a sense of hope.

Maybe we should remember when that was our job and wipe the bloody smirk off our faces.

Emma Burnell is Contributing Editor of LabourList