An Edinburgh Festival For Revolutionaries (in Bournemouth)

There are many surprising things you discover when you start a new project. For me, Adam Curtis was the last remaining programme maker worth watching on the BBC. He has made lots of documentaries that are just quintessentially English: witty, artistic, serious and controversial. 

At a time when most people seem to repulsed by the idea of participating in politics, could Curtis be a talismanic figure transcending traditional divides?

Here in Bournemouth, we host political conferences, but we had no bookings from mainstream parties this year. So we decided to create one.

Until the last election, Bournemouth had been Tory forever. The loss of the two seats in the last election has not reinvigorated local Tory activists. It has extinguished them. There are no events presenting visionary young Tory MPs with electrifying new visions for the town that ‘diversity destroyed’. The best we’ve had is Reform hosting David Starkey calling for “a return to 1997”.

Aware that Adam Curtis’s schtick is that nobody has any alternative visions for the future, we came up with the idea of setting up an Adam Curtis Party Conference to do just that. Another hook was the 10th anniversary of his HyperNormalisation documentary that raised questions about 9/11, Brexit and Donald Trump.

Of course, who better to top the bill for such a conference than the man himself? We invited him. His response was a polite and an extremely BBC-style rejection. The proposal made him laugh. Bournemouth was a very good choice of venue. But he said he couldn’t think of anything worse than people sitting on panels talking about the future.

But Adam Curtis’s oeuvre does offer scope to invite interesting people on the margins of politics, so we pressed ahead regardless. After all, we know that the energy is not with the main parties any more, it’s at fringe events like the Battle of Ideas. We’d like to emulate that kind of event in the provinces.

Curtis raises problems that you won’t hear about at the mainstream party conferences, like language. Political language is ever more technocratic, with liberals claiming that their expertise and good governance has to prevail over tribal politics. 

For example, DEI has become absorbed by HR departments and repackaged as professionalism, safeguarding, evidence-based practice and basic decency, when it actually comes from murky policies like affirmative action and American management theory.

Curtis says that to create a new vision you have to change the language. This is something that edgy and creative types are better at doing than careworn politicians or sleazy think tanks. ‘Demonetisation’ was a new phenomenon that has become familiar to those of us with a taste for free-thinking. If they can do it to us, why can’t we do it to them? Thames Water is ripe for ‘demonetisation’, as is Comic Relief and our higher education system.

Another major problem with our political class is that they are finding ever more ingenious ways to cut themselves off from the public. Our new Labour MP has opened a garish shop on the high street. How accessible you may say! But it’s got high-security double doors. You have to use an intercom. I tried to deliver a letter to the MP and staff refused to accept it. They told me it had to be addressed to Westminster, so it could be security checked. As I said to a friend, “I didn’t want to kill Tom Hayes before, but I do now!” (That’s a joke, by the way, Mr Hayes. Don’t call the police.)

It’s far more practical and fun to do politics without politicians, or think tankers or academics. When the Tories or Labour came to Bournemouth 20 years ago, it was like going to a real party. Last year I went to the LibDem conference: it cost a fortune, the security was oppressive, the debates were not debates, there was no glamour or colourful personalities. Issues like transgender were indulged in ways that normal voters would find baffling. Who wants to be involved with that? 

It’s not easy to build a programme with a tiny budget, but it’s important to try because it’s almost impossible for new political talent to emerge under the present circumstances. 

What we need is an Edinburgh Festival for revolutionaries. At the moment public discourse has two schools. A roster of smug Boomers who pop up on Radio 4 and at literary festivals on the one side, and on the other a number of young podcasters who are saying important things but they’re impossible to contact and never seem to leave the studio. Adam Curtis is disdainful about these people, too. He said: “We’re waiting for someone to draw a new map, and until then, we’re just going to witter away to each other on podcasts.”

As organisers of political events will know, it becomes a sadomasochistic pleasure to be turned down by local venues. We wanted to host our 9/11 installation at an arts centre. We received a carefully-worded email: “To ensure our hireable spaces remain a safe, objective and unbiased space for all, we cannot accept any bookings for political or religious uses/with political/religious themes or agendas.”

It’s been a weird summer. The heat or other phenomena must account for why nobody answers emails or responds to press releases. The BBC usually loves to promote its own, but it seems not in this case. The pressure has stretched our creativity. Last weekend we set up a table and went into competition with the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the high street. The results were very satisfying. It turns out people love a political bust-up while on the way to the shops. We’ll be back next weekend.

I’ve always been inspired by a quotation from another great BBC documentary maker, Jacob Bronowski. He said, “The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. … The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.”

People out there say that there is free speech and democracy in the UK, but that’s almost certainly because they are non-practising. When you actually show up or take action, you find out that reality is very different to how you imagine. Despite appearances, change is happening. The liberals have their comfortable jobs, but they are not creating anything new or paying a high price for failure yet. Which is why Adam Curtis is a talismanic figure for those of us who want to take up our swords and build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.

The Adam Curtis Party Conference runs in Bournemouth from September 11th-13th.