Stella Tsantekidou column: ‘You can just do things!’

On Sunday, the NEC rejected Andy Burnham’s request to leave his mayoral seat and run for Parliament, denying restless members the sacrosanct right of every socialist: the right to hope.

In response, my Xitter timeline was filled with messages spouting the kind of obfuscations you’d expect from a narcissistic boyfriend. The narcissist continues to do the thing that hurts you, while blaming you for protesting his hurtful behaviour. The word ‘psychodrama’ (the kind of word only spinners use) was used in many briefings, tweets and statements. You are selfish for continuing the psychodrama by complaining about the narcissist’s unwillingness to change their offending behaviour.

I am not ideologically opposed to imposing on members –Imposing, otherwise known as ‘deciding’. I do not believe the hoi poloi always know best, because politics has losers and winners. We vote for our leaders to pick wisely and fairly. But the NEC’s decisions have left members feeling powerless. It’s time for some self-help.

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Cate Hall is not widely known in the UK, but she embodies the ‘you can just do things’ way better than any MAGA technofascist who uses it as an excuse to gut the US state. While still in her 30s, Cate became the world’s top female poker player and a Supreme Court advocate, later launching her own art and perfume companies and co-founding a pandemic medicine company that set the record for the fastest startup to bring a drug to clinical trials. She’s done more since, but you get the gist. Stay with me, I promise this is both relevant and useful for us in the Labour Party.

Cate’s philosophy helped me a lot in my career, especially the theory of the ‘moat of low status’ popularised by her husband, Sasha Chapin, on Substack. The ‘moat of low status’ is the uncomfortable period when you first start doing something and are very bad at it. To become good at it, you have to persevere through the embarrassing stage and take advantage of the goodwill others will show you because of your endearing newness.

This mindset helped me get my first job in Parliament after a gazillion rejections, and then become the political commentator and writer I am today. The first six months were a nightmare of cringe Substack blogs and barely legible parroting of Labour party cliches on shouty TalkTV panels. After the first year, everything became more bearable. I went viral on Substack, editors from magazines that had previously ignored my pitches subscribed to me, and respectable media outlets started booking me. I was glad I persevered.

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This is where Labour is at the moment. In the moat of low status. After 15 years of low agency at the mercy of events, we have suddenly found ourselves in government, and we are still figuring things out.

The Tories and Reform, bloated with cash from their oligarch donors and propped up by the algo-terrorists of Xitter, pat themselves on the back for getting to us. The Conservatives look pitiful now, but for 15 years, they enjoyed unparalleled institutional dominance. Talent and resources flowed to their coffers and headquarters. All the ambitious, though admittedly unprincipled, people flocked to them, as did buckets of funding for their think tanks, PR agencies and other civil society and media infrastructure that make the weather in Westminster. Reform now is so flush with cash, I am hearing they just bought 200 MacBooks for their HQs (or maybe it’s 150, but who’s counting?). Their researchers are paid McKinsey consultant-level salaries.

I wish I were exaggerating, I wish my sources were not trustworthy, but comrades, ahead of us is the battle of our lives. Across the pond, the alt-right terror in the White House is punishing the liberal institutions social democrats built through blood, sweat and tears by letting his ICE squads shoot his own citizens. There are people in the UK who look up to him.

But here we are, Labour activists, politicians, SpAds, officials, in the moat of low status, trying to govern after 15 years on the bench.  Our government has not committed any of the far bigger long-term errors of new governments like those of Thatcher (monetarism)  or Cameron (austerity). If we had a financially literate and less gossip-obsessed media class, those once new Tory Prime Ministers should have been held accountable for de-industrialising the country and entrenching an unbalanced, unsustainable economy. Yet, in the public realm, you are not given goodwill. That’s fair; the fate of a whole country rests in your hands. You are not a teenager learning to ride a bike, or a Greek commentator performing linguistic gymnastics to avoid saying ‘fascist’ in case you offend tiny men.

Cate, queen of agency, has two relevant pieces of advice that depressed Labour activists can learn from now. They are not collective solutions, but the time will pass anyway, so we may as well improve.

The first is to seek real feedback. Real feedback comes from people who know you and have a stake in your performance. I am afraid we need to work on this one. Compass’s Neal Lawson put it well in his Guardian column over the weekend: “What therefore matters most are systems and cultures that allow constant feedback, and different views and voices to be heard. Governing is always a mix of professional expertise, top-down control and open debate and negotiation. It is the latter trait that needs to become predominant for any organisation to survive, let alone thrive, given the complexity, even chaos, of governing today.” So, start that Substack newsletter, with my blessings. If you are young, you can’t go wrong in becoming one of those anon zoomer accounts that post Labour memes/TikToks. Digital skills are extremely prized in political campaigning, and you will get feedback on your skills development in real time.

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The second one is to court rejection. Be ambitious, try to achieve things that feel unreasonable. If you are coming out of a period of failure, your intuition about what is possible is inaccurate. The only way to recalibrate it is to aim higher. If you are a Labour activist, raise your aspirations for what a Labour society should look like. Look at American grassroots organisations, they are real pros, and think about what models have worked for them. If there is any figure you think is doing good work, reach out to them and ask how you can emulate what they are doing. Ask people who know about fundraising to introduce you to donors or help you with grant applications. The highest likelihood is they will be flattered, but if they ignore you, you lose nothing. 

Most of all, keep going till you cross the moat of low status into competence – and take the party with you while you’re at it! 

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