My conversation with... Michael Hastings

Re-Enchanting… Public Life. Belle Tindall reflects on what is (perhaps surprisingly) her favourite conversation so far.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A man in conversation laughs and throws his head back

Michael Hastings being interviewed at Lambeth Palace Library.

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This opening paragraph may well break every rule in the Podcast Hosting Handbook, but I’d like to offer some context for my conversation with Lord Michael Hastings by putting my cards on the table for a moment. If there’s one place where I, the co-host of the Re-Enchanting Podcast, have become disenchanted; it’s politics. It’s capitalism. It’s leadership. It’s public life.

It is for this reason that I am still surprised that our episode with Michael has become my personal favourite (and if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ll know that it has notably stiff competition). The conversation really has done what it set out to do, it has begun to re-enchant me.

Michael Hastings, for those who are not yet acquainted, is a force of nature.

He is an Independent Peer in the House of Lords, and that’s only the beginning. Allow me to mention just a few of his other current roles: he is the Chairman of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the London Chamber of Commerce, and the Industry Black Business Association. He’s the Vice President of UNICEF, a Professor at the Utah State University, an ambassador for Tearfund, and a personal mentor to hundreds of people.

He was the BBC’s Head of Public Affairs before becoming its first Head of Corporate Social Responsibility. He was also GMTV’s Chief Political Correspondent.

So, to sum up: Lord Hastings’ work resides in the realm of politics, capitalism, leadership, and public life.

This was always going to be interesting. I just wasn’t sure it was going to be that enchanting. How deeply wrong I was.

When Michael was just sixteen years old, he was asked what he wanted to do with his life, and the words he spoke that day are the exact words he still lives by now. He said,

"I want to speak up for the poor. I want to bend the power of the prosperous to the potential of the poor."

And that, it seems to me, is exactly what he does. That is precisely why he sees such value in serving in the business sector, the commerce sector, the political sector. In those places, he is able to ‘leverage opportunity for others’. He does all that he can, in those public spaces, to bend the power of the privileged few in the direction of the poor.

What I found even more interesting is that, the way he speaks of such things, it’s as if he sees no other way of operating in those societal spheres; he accepts no other (valid) reason why one would enter politics; no other (ethical) motivation behind economic prosperity. You could call such optimism naivety. Or, as I’ve learnt, you could call it enchantment.

It strikes me that this conversation may just be the balm that the 65 per cent of people who have lost trust in the government need. Whether one agrees with the details of what Lord Hastings says or not, it’s certainly striking how foreign it feels to hear someone speak of service as the beginning and the end of their political and commercial aspirations.

From the moment I met Lord Hastings on a drizzly Wednesday morning, I was utterly captivated by his warmth and immediately at ease in his presence. And, as a result, a truly inspiring encounter ensued.

Review

Books

Culture

4 April 2024

4 min read

Remembering red on red

The cultural revolution's factions have a disconcertingly contemporary feel.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A Chinese stamp depicts a map of the country from which people march holding a little red book

Long Live the Overall Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, stamp, 1968.

Public domain, via Wikimedia.

Modern era China has suffered human loss on an unimaginable scale. The Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century cost over 20 million lives, more or less the global total from the Great War of 1914-18. The vicious Japanese occupation in the 1930s led to 15 million Chinese deaths. The famine begun in 1958, precipitated by the Great Leap Forward, caused around 40 million deaths.

For one nation, however large, these are appalling losses. By contrast, the fatalities in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) amounted to one million or more. But the impact of this communist insurgency within a communist state is profoundly felt today, for its generation is still alive. The trauma of those years has wounded the bodies and minds of millions; people who are unsure how to come to terms with it because of the uncertainty of what can be safely talked about.

Mao’s incitement to younger people to turn on their teachers and elders in vitriolic criticism and violent attack, including torture and murder, was an attempt to re-boot the revolution by exterminating elements of western capitalism and traditional Chinese authority – the so-called Four Olds of ideas, culture, customs and habits. The humiliation of teachers and parents was profoundly at odds with the Confucian culture of respect for elders, and it was embedded in young minds whose frontal lobes had not fully developed and where empathy was unformed. The ensuing violence, pain and hardship was sickening, encompassing millions.

Many of the bereaved and injured, the perpetrators and the victims, are still alive. Some bury their memories as a way of coping; others search for meaning, but run up against an authoritarian government with new digital tools that make totalitarianism possible. In her book Red Memory (Faber and Faber, 2024), Tania Branigan has produced a masterpiece of literature. Interviewing survivors, bystanders and instigators of the violence, she has produced a history of their guilt and trauma, while reflecting on the uses of memory.

The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

The word remember is coded with meaning. When we piece together our memories of the past, we re-member them and the members are frequently not put back together again in the way an event happened. This becomes more pronounced with the passage of time and the known tendency for people to make themselves more central to a story than they were at the time. We also narrate the past in ways that burnish our reputation and preserve our conscience. The Cultural Revolution has been reassembled in fragments; there is, and there will be, no initiative like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. People can make of it what they want; but without justice, the losses fester.

The lack of a shared public memory also means the Cultural Revolution can be made to service any goal. Detached from the moorings of truth, it becomes a malleable symbol. Xi Jinping suffered himself. His father was purged, denounced as a counter-revolutionary, and sent to hard work in rural Shaanxi Province. This is his creation myth, and how it made a man out of him. But there are other lessons to be taken from that time which he has strategically and wilfully ignored. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who followed Mao were determined that never again would one man develop a cult of personality like his, by ensuring limited presidential terms. Xi Jinping has abolished this limit and introduced Xi Jinping Thought in an echo of Mao’s Little Red Book. If there is one thing Xi has taken from his experience, it is the terror that chaos unleashes and the need to avoid it at all costs. The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work

The cult of Mao was idolatrous, usurping Christ. Jesus said he would divide families: ‘father against son…mother against daughter…mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law’. This divisiveness was located in his claim to be the way, the truth and the life. He did not seek to divide families, but knew his claims would do so. Mao intentionally turned families against themselves - the foundation of a civil society - to ensure loyalty to him would not be compromised.

It is easy to identify this several decades on and at the safe distance of several thousand miles. Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work. It is also sloppy to make links between the ideological fervour and purity of Maoism and today’s social media culture. There is no direct link, despite some claims. But the story of how groups coalesce righteously and are manipulated into ever more extreme forms of factional purity has a disconcertingly contemporary feel.