The Orwell judges credit you with being a master of combining the personal with the political in your writing – do you feel this is the most effective way of creating impact?
I look for this in my reporting and writing. It’s very intentional. I remember spending a day in Stockport where some people were doing a citizen’s economic course – they weren’t economists, but they were interested. When you see the world through someone else’s eyes, it’s a genuinely enriching experience. I often think of the people I met years ago – I’m still in touch with a lot of them – and imagine what their take on something might be.
I have an economics background so I have been trained to know that it is not a daunting subject, and people can understand more than they think. It is not an area that is closed off to them and it is so much more than the numerical. But putting a face to the story is important. When people think about austerity it’s hard to imagine just one or two people struggling – they think about society as a huge, overwhelming mass. Or with the production of iPhones, people don’t think about the Chinese workers putting them together. I consciously try to show that these are people like you or me – and they could well be you or me if there had been a couple of different rolls of the dice.
In 2014 I was lucky enough to be shortlisted for the Orwell social evils award. I looked at Jeremy Corbyn and why he wouldn’t get elected, Apple and coerced labour, gentrification in London – a fairly wide expanse of subjects. In 2017 I was shortlisted but didn’t win. Every time I’ve looked at the Orwell shortlist, I’ve always thought the list of names is particularly formidable. It remains incredibly touching to be recognised in this way. In my teens I read all of George Orwell’s work and that has always loomed large for me, so to have that name waft over your name, like incense, is quite magical.
Who are your biggest influences?
At 16 or 17, I chanced across EP Thompson and the British Marxist historians and that decided me: I was going to study history. Decades later, they still influence how I approach economics. That’s often the subject of aggregates and means and all-else-being-equal, and what used to be called History From Below reinforces how those living in the same society can be affected entirely differently by the same events and harbour opposed belief systems and move at a completely differently chronological pace. When I was reporting on the Brexit referendum, those lessons kept coming home.
And history and economics together – the study of slow processes and structures – form a very useful corrective to the breathlessness of news, its focus on personalities and its amnesiac insistence that what just happened is always of earth-shattering importance.
Your Alternatives series was born out of a sense that people were looking for alternatives to austerity, corrupt business, public services collapsing under the strain of cuts, children going hungry in their own communities. What did you learn from this?
Around 2013, I went to a housing estate in Barnet in north London. I wrote about it, as did Holly Watt when she was at the Guardian. There was old Ministry of Defence housing bought up by a guy who ran a private equity firm. It had great economic potential – it’s a lovely suburban area. One of the houses had been occupied by a group of anarchists, but with people from the estate coming back and spending time in the house. There were about 30 people there in total. They could talk about housing for hours and knew so much about how London was changing. These were not the sort of people who you’d see on the news, but I was pinned to the floor by the force of their opinions. They had been given short shrift by the housing association and moved into temporary accommodation where there was damp and insects crawling around on the floor. But you simply couldn’t pay for the knowledge and insight they offered. It’s a whole different register for talking about politics and we should be listening. After an Alternatives event we held in Preston, Lancashire, I went to a Sainsbury’s afterwards and I saw some people from the event having the debates all over again. It was remarkable and just highlighted how vital it is that we as journalists keep talking to our readers.
What makes the Guardian unique?
I joined the Guardian in 2007 as economics leader writer. I had been at the BBC – a fantastic news-gathering operation, but one that has to be fairly rigid about what is being broadcast each evening, because of the level of forward-planning required. The decisions that are made in a room in Shepherd’s Bush are the stories being discussed from Edinburgh to St Ives. What I love about the Guardian is that editors will send you off to investigate a story and they will trust you enough to tell them what you think is interesting and worth writing about.
I remember our now-editor-in-chief Katharine Viner telling me to go to Athens, when Greece was in dire straits, head to Syntagma Square, and just see what was happening. At that time, Greece was considered a lazy, corrupt country that had been living high on the hog for a long time, whose moment of reckoning was upon them, and this was being reinforced by the media. Because I had been allowed to go off and do my own thing, I wrote a piece that was completely different to anything else in the press at that moment. I met teachers who had top degrees but were working part-time in a phone shop because that was the best job they could get. I ended up going to a housing estate in Piraeus – a major shipbuilding town – and I met a former dockworker who told me about how his life had been since the crash. I asked him what kind of tensions it had caused in his life. He paused for a long time, and then he said that his mother-in-law lived in the flat below his family and she left her door open at night so they could go in and steal food from her fridge. Neither party ever mentioned it, but it was understood. “And for a long time, I haven’t been able to be intimate with my wife.” It was staggering to hear this candid story from a proud family man like him, and I wrote it into the piece. That night when I went back to the square, I saw students who had printed the story from the Guardian website soon after publication, translated it into Greek and shared it on their own makeshift websites. These people fought so hard, but lost the battle anyway.
What are the highlights of your time at the Guardian?
Leader writers are often imagined to be comprised of what Larry Elliott calls “sherry corner”, and when I joined the Guardian was pushing for some younger voices among its ranks. The banking crisis was unravelling in my first few months at the newspaper. There were so many changes happening around us. Later that year I went from Wall Street to Pittsburgh to LA to talk to people about Barack Obama and the state of the US economy, and getting the feeling even then that the craziness was not going to stop with the first black president. I went to a town called Stockton in California that had gone bankrupt and the mayor was working in a shop that sold balloons – I thought it was ironic for a place that been in a now-burst bubble.
Then later, in 2015 and 2017, watching people who had never engaged with politics before getting excited about Corbyn and Labour. And then seeing so much of the spark that had powered the 2017 campaign and helped Labour hold Theresa May to a minority government – and how so much of the air had gone out of it by 2019. They had so many great ideas but these couldn’t stack up for people who were part of the so-called “red wall”.
In 2019 I went to a former mining community in Derbyshire and found that the jobs were no longer in industry or mining, but rather in poorly paid social care or distribution, and they now had a Conservative MP. I knocked on one woman’s door and she initially thought we were canvassing for Labour. We got told to sling our hook, but we could hear shouting from inside the house and she invited us in to talk to her husband. They wanted to be listened to, and revealed how lonely they had become. I thought: “Here is a couple that has disappeared from the view of society, and the party that has always represented them for generations is no longer even talking about them.” I realised that in London, just a few hours away, there are young activists who are so removed from these communities outside the capital. It taught me that parties can change their leaders and their manifestos, but if you break trust and lose voters, you won’t get them back easily.
What’s the biggest challenge for you as a journalist?
I think it is marrying up the political with the personal. It has been really difficult to report during the pandemic. My natural instinct is to go out, meet people, talk to them, and hopefully arrive at a familiarity with them. When this knowledge is reported and fed back to the politicians, really powerful things can happen. By bringing in new types of information, you can change the discourse and break the feedback loops between Whitehall and Fleet Street. Over the course of the past decade, the Guardian has done this again and again.
What do you think can be learned from the pandemic and perhaps carried into life beyond lockdown?
I read some histories of the Spanish flu, which was the last great global pandemic. I realised that is seen, really, as a coda to the first world war, rather than being a hugely significant event in itself. When it got to Paris, it hit the wealthiest boulevards but it disproportionately affected lives below stairs rather than above – we have seen a similar thing with Covid-19 exposing “class” strata in society. We’ve also seen so many inspiring actions being taken by communities to protect lives and provide support for the most vulnerable. I guess the question we all have to ask ourselves is whether we want to go back to how life was before, or can we do better? I think the Guardian has a big role to play in that conversation. It is our responsibility to illuminate alternative solutions to what the government is offering.
I think we will soon be at a point where we need to reflect on the way the government said it was protecting key workers and the most vulnerable – the manifest failures, on the one hand. And also the opportunities that might arise from this crisis. We will emerge from this fog at some point and we need to consider how we should live differently, and what we owe those who have given so much – including their own lives.
What advice would you give to young journalists who are starting out?
Don’t do what everyone else is doing. I’ve been a mentor to would-be journalists on the Guardian’s Positive Access Scheme pretty much ever since I joined the newspaper and Joseph Harker press-ganged me into it, and the biggest trend I have noticed is 21-year-olds wanting to write comment pieces about Venezuela or Corbyn. Don’t do that. There’s already a giant slagheap of surplus comment, especially first-person comment. Where our media – and our democracy – suffers a deficit is reporting. I try and use my column to find stuff out and expose it, on housing scandals or corporate abuses. I would far rather read your fact finding on the asylum system in this pandemic or how temp agencies work than your collected tweets on Donald Trump.
We are lucky to have a newsroom that is so much more diverse than the ones I trained in – and still so much more so than a lot of our competitors. We’ve got a long way to go, but it feels so wonderfully different to write alongside people who might not have had a chance at another paper.