 I want to talk not so much about the direct threat undoubtedly posed to our beleaguered democracies by what Yanis rightly calls the nationalist new fascist international, as about its challenge to a cultural politics of self and other that I believe is all around us. As Inna Shevchenko, the exiled Ukrainian leader of Femines says, democracy is not only about counting silent hands, it is about allowing the confrontation of different opinions, many many voices, about public debates, discussions and disagreements too. Discussions and disagreements where people listen to each other and may change their minds about what is the right or the winning position because, as Shevchenko says, we all have multiple identities and we also have multiple answers. The truth is that the Bannonite leaders of Europe cannot thrive in societies that are confident about crossing borders. If we are to reinvent our democratic cultures, we need the skills to be able to reach out across these boundaries and change people's minds. And for that, my premise is that we need a culture of openness and generosity that acknowledges vulnerability as a strength. And this is why I'm very concerned at the shift in meaning of the safe space that has taken place in my lifetime. During the euphemistically called Irish Troubles, a safe space was the place where brave, Catholic and Protestant individuals and the very brave people who brought them together would meet to work out a better way forward than violent conflict. In these conflict resolution spaces, whatever the power imbalances between the parties and regardless of the conflict raging outside, for the duration those present were equal, they were mutually vulnerable, face to face and crossing boundaries to overcome the enemy images and change each other's minds. How different is the safe space of today? An identity politics that demands recognition and state protection for socioeconomic groups unjustly marginalized by securing them from the other in a borderless space free from threatening conflict, criticism or too unsettling debate. This is why I urge you tonight in your call to action, please don't move too swiftly to what binds us together in the creative union. Let us instead freeze frame the previous precious moment, which is the crossing of geographical borders, social borders, borders of all kinds, that openness to what is different when the outcome hangs from the balance for all when, as I believe creatives know, whole new worlds can appear. That is a pluralist democratic culture, one sorely needed back here in Brexit Britain, where two aggrieved, majoritarian national us is have been so busy tearing our political fabric apart. Why can't we say yes? Let us cross the boundaries between us and them, geographical class, age barriers and so many other borders. Let's bring the metropolitan remainers to Bose Court, St. Wilfrid's Catholic Church, Coop and Ward, so that we can all get to know each other better. Let's ask ourselves why neither side in the Brexit debate and none of the main political parties have ever thought to propose and enable this, why they incite us, scare us or maybe just manage us, but never invite us onto the stage of history to meet each other and change each other's minds, confident that our differences can be mutually revealing and that we leave us and remainers can build a better future together. It is my belief that we will never renew our democracies until we the people in all our diversity come onto that stage of history in our own right, once and for all. I'm hoping you will agree at least that this is a job worthy of the very best creative minds. The UK must play a key role in the open-sourced, democratic, transparent and radical transformation that Europe needs. One of the extraordinary things about this period is people discovering that actually caring about other people is an enhancement of life and that is wonderful and one can call it a humanisation. At the same time it's obviously absolutely key that we begin to talk about what kind of political programme we can evolve in order to make sure that at the very least we build back better as the phrase is that the Labour Party is being invoking and what interests me is why you're contesting this rather than trying to work out what the relationship between the symptoms that have emerged under corona of real human solidarity, what they mean for the way to actually build on this now in order to try and build a defence of democracy. What interests me is that we are whatever we you know have we come out of this crisis we're still going to have to fight against the forms of nationalism that are so dominant in all our countries and for me that is a fight about the core of democracy which is deliberative democracy pluralist democracy how you bring people with different ideas together so they don't kill each other but they listen to each other and some of them persuade each other unless we can restore that kind of culture and civility and the media to go with it exactly what we're doing here talking, disagreeing, coming up with new ideas unless we can enrich our democracies again with that I think that we are going to be in a worse state after this terrible tragedy of the virus than we were before so that is my hope and it's a passionate commitment. The important thing is the relationship with people what you can do for them what they can help you do what you can skill them in doing that that will be decisive both in our movement politics and in our electoral success if we try and oppose electoral politics to other forms of politics we're going to get ourselves in a dead end we need electoral politics plus as we go into the summer a lot of us in the northern hemisphere are thinking well the pandemic is pretty well over and now we can at the long last get back to normal but of course with only 1% of the population in Africa vaccinated the pandemic is not over it's not over in Asia it's you know it's resurging throughout the world it's going to take billions and billions and billions of pounds and the world knows how to deal with saving people's lives to pull us away from a vast civilisation threat really worldwide the economy and to the populace and this couldn't be a better time in my opinion for us to be rewriting our manifesto because this is the beginning of a of a new era of challenge there's a sort of danger on two sides here one is the cause for a clear and a radical posture and a revolutionary vision and to be able to say it all and get it out there seems to me to be part of a problem the left and i'm talking about the left now does have with its obsession with truth this is an interest in the scientific nature of Marxism for example but more generally with rationality as the thing that is going to win our battles for us and the fact is that if you tell people exactly what they ought to think they very rarely fall over backwards and if their arms and legs in the air and say oh thank you i never thought of that i'm now going to change my life entirely on the other hand uh you will have the shantile moves of this world on the left who respond to this by saying oh godly look how good the far right are at capturing hearts and minds among working people um we must look at a left nationalism we must look at a left strong man we must understand the irrationality of these things and uh so you move into a kind of irrationality area which i think is very dangerous indeed and for me what's completely missing here and this touches on this question of communication is our understanding of ideology of how ideology works of the fact that class struggle never takes place except through and in ideology and if you want to persuade other people and that's what our job is and by the way i would say we want to persuade the people who back the xenophones as well as the people who are frightened stiff of that of that route um we want to persuade an awful lot of people but then you have to think about how ideology works and it works very well in the arts because they are ideological pieces they're about successful ideological interventions that is when art works one thing that's working is just making an intervention on the way that people are interpolated into society through their sense of the meaning of life makes an impact on that and yes i think we have to work much harder at what it means to be to make successful ideological interventions in different ways to all sorts of different constituency what on earth is the scenery of the european parliament doing choosing which votes it's going to honor and which votes it's not going to honor in the european polity this is disgraceful and it's quite clear that it is on the back of spanish waging of lawfare against political dissent in spain and so i think this is an appalling situation for me it smacks very much of a general degradation of democracy there used to be a time when democracies were assessed by the litmus paper of how majorities treated the minorities and here we're even talking about people who've succeeded in capturing a majority of votes not being allowed to take elective office in spain and now not being allowed to have parliamentary immunity from the the the imprisonment and all the rest that's going on in their country so um for me this is a reminder of what happened to us under brexit when a large minority was just carved out of the polity and we were left with the lever hard lever politics as the will of the people everyone else was ignored this is happening in country after country after country to defend democracy today we really are going to have to get a lot more nimble and articulate about all these events we really have to take seriously that it is the empowerment of people experiencing democracy for what it can do and what it can achieve that really builds a movement for change all progressives are confronted by this dilemma that they have to do a two step as opposed to the right the first step is to make people really angry about what's going on around them and the second step is to give hope and very often one doesn't get anywhere near the second step simply because the forces against us say terribly clever at breezing in and saying COVID oh not a problem let's have a moon shot let's just solve that day after tomorrow um they're very very good at getting people to think that getting Brexit done will actually get Brexit done and we have a much more uphill struggle to convince people that there is something that can be done to be really transformative which is what our vision is after so I think we have to build the movement very strongly to go out into communities and out into our society and it's that discussion that I want to be party to there are people to persuade but there are fellow democratic citizens as we try and defend democracy I think that's a huge job for all of us and it's the one that really keeps me hopeful about the future