I’m going to the LibDem conference this weekend. I was thinking about who I might meet there and I remembered the writer and prominent LibDem thinker, David Boyle, would be there. I hadn’t seen him since I last went to a LibDem conference in Bournemouth in 2008.
However when I Googled him, I was shocked to find an obituary for him in The Guardian.
I met David, when I was working on the community website for Paddington W2, Newspad. When the internet came along it seemed possible to use new technology to reinvigorate local news and recreate community on atomised London streets. It didn’t really work out like that, but there were some successful experiments along the way.
David was interested in all kinds of ideas that subverted modernity. His book the Tyranny of Numbers exposed the target and statistics culture. Authenticity rejected ‘corporate fake in favour of the local real’. He was a great believer in multiple currencies and he told me the anecdote, which I’ve never forgotten, about what happened when Israeli doctors went on strike. The mortality rate fell. On two separate occasions!
His book Eminent Corporations attempted to do to big business what Lytton Strachey did to the reputation of Victorian public figures. Many big companies airbrush their histories, prefering to hide behind shiny logos and virtue-signalling platitudes.
His obituary writer wrote: David believed that whenever something is wrong, it is probably too big. David embodied that idea. He set up organisations, he was a prolific author and he was a humorous and gentle man. He was a prophet who saw through the corporate and political illusions of the first quarter of the 21st century, reminding us of John Ruskin’s observation that ‘There is no wealth but life.’
Postscript
I remembered a passage of David’s writing which I copied out and I cherish for its wisdom:
There was William Morris in 1888, putting the finishing touches to his first medieval fantasy novella, A Dream of John Ball.
Morris, the great socialist and wallpaper designer, was by then thoroughly disillusioned with Liberalism, and he dreamed that he had hurtled briefly back to the Peasants Revolt. There he had encountered the preacher who inspired it, John Ball, and spent the night with him in a darkened church, surrounded by the bodies from the first brief encounter with the enemy, talking about the future.
Afterwards, the encounter gives Morris an extraordinary perspective on history:
“I pondered all these things,” he wrote, “and how men in fight and lose the battle and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat. And when it comes, turns out not to be what they meant and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”
Morris was right, and he seems to have hit on a profound truth about politics. Change is deeply paradoxical, and – although the grammar of progress eludes most politicians – we achieve what we achieve sideways, like crabs.
When we win we are also at the moment of disappointment; when we lose then paradoxically things happen as a result. It’s confusing, but that is how it works.
David Boyle
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