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Summary
Summary
The first full investigation, based on exceptional access to underground and alternative political movements, of the revolution that will reshape our world in the coming decades.
In the wake of conventional politics' dramatic implosion, a vast new range of ideas and political groups are emerging from the wreckage. The landscape has changed so dramatically that, so far, none of the deluge of opinion and commentary has been able to make any real sense of it.
In 2011, at the age of 25, Jack Shenker was appointed the Guardian 's Egypt correspondent and broke the news, on the ground, day by day, of its Arab Spring. Now this ferociously talented young journalist will do the same for Britain, reporting on the revolution in our midst. From inside the activist communities, campaign groups and protest movements that are now emerging throughout the country - including exclusive access to Momentum - he will introduce the reader to a relatively young, entirely fearless new generation who have nothing to lose and for whom none of the old assumptions apply.
Now We Have Your Attention is the first full and proper inside guide to this completely new paradigm of political behaviour. It is the book you need to understand politics now - and its trajectory in the coming decades.
Author Notes
Jack Shenker is an award-winning reporter on radical politics and protest whose work has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. In his mid-twenties he was appointed Egypt correspondent for the Guardian , covering the 2011 revolution and Arab uprisings, which led to his critically acclaimed first book, The Egyptians: A Radical Story . He writes regularly for a wide range of publications, including Granta , the New York Times and the London Review of Books ; his journalism has covered Gaza, Africa, Central Asia and the United States, as well as Britain and Europe, and has been translated into several languages. He is based in London.
Reviews (1)
Guardian Review
From climate crisis protesters to rent strikers, from conflict to hope: a deft exploration of a nation in distress and a politics that often goes unnoticed. In October of last year, the Financial Times published an unwittingly comical op-ed by Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary. Summers, who is not known for cultural or political nuance, reported that he had been on holiday across the US. Not only that, but he'd gone by car. This pioneering spirit yielded such insights as that the centre of the country is sparsely populated and surprisingly oblivious to events on the east and west coasts. Summers was a changed man. Why had this latter-day Jack Kerouac not understood his own country before? Summers explained that "economists like me see the world through the prism of models". And yet the literature seeking to uncover the hidden middle America has been growing for some years now, even before Donald Trump's election provoked panic on the part of elites. From Thomas Frank's prescient What's the Matter With Kansas? (2004) through George Packer's The Unwinding (2013), to Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land and the meritocratic sneer of JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (both 2016), plus the heartbreaking photo journalism of Chris Arnade, the fragmentation and private tragedies of middle America have received plenty of reportage and reflection. The question is whether figures such as Summers have been paying any attention. This genre is not so developed in the UK, perhaps because a nation smaller than California doesn't require it as urgently. Nevertheless, the shocks of the past three years have provoked overdue curiosity about precarious employment, the housing crisis and the cultural margins, which are rarely dramatic enough to attract media or political attention. It's not just Brexit: between spring 2017 and spring 2018, Britain also witnessed Theresa May being confronted by the hard truth of austerity, Corbyn's electoral surge, the horror of the Grenfell tragedy, and the appalling details of the Windrush scandal. If complacency with the fairness and contentment of the country was still possible in May 2016, within two years it surely was not. Jack Shenker's Now We Have Your Attention is an exploration of a nation in distress, touching on many of the key fractures that have opened in British society since the financial crisis of 2008. Each of the book's seven chapters considers a particular theme, via a particular place: the devastation wrought by austerity on vulnerable young people in Manchester, the disruption to traditional communities in Tilbury, the spectre of automation in Newcastle, and so on. Grenfell, Yarl's Wood detention centre and other grimly familiar names are encountered along the way. But so are the energy and vision of activists seeking to build something different. Shenker introduces us to the Unity Centre in Glasgow, which offers support to those targeted by Home Office border enforcement, and the London Renters Union, which campaigns against the dominance of landlords. The one constant theme through the book is conflict. "The defining feature of our age is that politics is being reanimated, drawing an era of mass, passive spectatorship to a close." People are suffering, but they're also struggling, and therein lies hope. Shenker is a journalist, and each of these portraits is skilfully compiled through the first-hand stories of the protagonists. These are told with great sensitivity and empathy, resulting in tales of injustice and loss that can be deeply moving. We meet Theo, a victim of the "hostile environment" policy that was responsible for the Windrush nightmare, and Kyle, a young man from Oldham who ended up on the streets via a series of family tragedies. Shenker is eager to avoid justifying any drift towards nationalism, but is nevertheless attentive to the conditions that might prompt it. "Without thinking about who has more reason to be nostalgic," he argues "and what it is those people are nostalgic for, accusations of nostalgia risk becoming little more than a 'mute' button on those who have lost the most." Capitalism, neoliberalism and discredited ideology haunt this portrait of Britain, and Shenker is quick to draw on sociological and statistical analysis, to provide context for the personal stories he recounts. The American sociologist C Wright Mills famously defined the "sociological imagination" as that which helps to connect "personal troubles" to "public issues". Now We Have Your Attention has such imagination in abundance. A difficulty I had with the book derived from its curiously brief prologue; it never entirely left me as I was reading. Shenker is reticent about the premise of his study, noting that our "weird, disorientating age" is "marked by political earthquakes and volcanoes - shock election results, constitutional chaos, new parties, new leaders, new governments" but this handwaving fails to explain what really concerns him. In any case, the book is not about Brexit (no bad thing right now), and nor does it cast much light on the divisions behind that crisis. He then contrasts his book with the "sped-up", "free-floating" and "ahistorical" takes of "most news coverage". No doubt he is right that there's too much sensationalist and drive-by reportage in the British media, from which he correctly and deservedly distinguishes himself. But not being part of the "mainstream media" is something that virtually anyone can aspire to, and on social media they frequently do. It doesn't indicate what we should be talking about instead, or why. The number of stories not reported by the mainstream media is effectively infinite. Without a sense of what's driving him, the writing sometimes takes on the feel of psychogeography, moving through time and space, identifying connections and giving voice to the marginalised and forgotten. Of the American titles listed, The Unwinding is the closest comparison. Shenker is an excellent guide and an elegant writer. But I wanted to ask: why did you go there? How did you select that? Over the course of Now We Have Your Attention, one detects answers. While Shenker never says as much, the book is plainly written from the left, which isn't to say that it is aimed at the left. A chapter on Corbynism, Momentum and The World Transformed conference - taking us from a three-day hackathon in Brighton to Jeremy Corbyn's Westminster office - is palpably excited by these movements. In his choice of informants, we get a sense of what drives him. All are victims of or campaigning against social and economic injustice. Most could be described as on the left, in some sense or other. Gathering these voices together is an entirely valid project, indeed an urgent one now that the 2017-18 window (when Britain's gravest injustices seemed to dominate the news cycle) seems to be closing, to be replaced by culture war and constitutional crisis. The problem for many of the activists and movements presented by Shenker is that they did to some degree have the nation's attention, but are losing it all over again, as Brexit devours everything. The worry in 2019 is that bogus conflicts, rooted in lies and scapegoats, are stealing our attention from the real ones that Shenker traces. If our political elites had shown some of his curiosity towards everyday struggles across Britain, and some of his compassion towards the strugglers, we wouldn't have reached this pass in the first place.