There has always been more than one David Lammy, but until I read this book I didn’t realise quite how many there were. To younger readers, he might be the man who went viral after the Grenfell tragedy with an emotional denunciation of the ways in which residents had been failed, or the Twitter warrior against Brexit. Older readers may, however, remember the smooth Blair protege of the 00s, whom it sometimes seems hard to reconcile with the later version. But trying to reconcile them is arguably missing the point of this thoughtful, nuanced book, which is about learning to live with complexity rather than tearing ourselves apart over it. If the conundrum Lammy raises in the book – that we all have a human need to belong to a group, but that these tribal instincts are being channelled in increasingly polarising ways that turn people against one another – isn’t wholly solved, the journey towards a solution is unfailingly interesting.
Lammy’s childhood was split between Tottenham in north London, where he grew up as the child of working-class immigrant parents, and a state-funded boarding school in Peterborough, to which he won a chorister’s scholarship from age 11. He went on to become a lawyer, an MP, a minister, a personal friend of Barack Obama’s. He has been tipped to be Britain’s first black prime minister. Yet throughout, he has been targeted with racist hate mail, much of it trying to make him feel as if he does not belong, and despite moving in elite circles he has rarely felt part of the crowd.
Politically, Lammy is hard to pigeonhole, an advocate of national service (although for civic, not military, purposes) and of John McDonnell’s pet project, a universal basic income paid to everyone regardless of salary. He was threatened with deselection by pro-Corbyn activists for challenging antisemitism within Labour, but lionised for staunchly opposing Brexit. “My identities are fluid and cross-cutting and a couple of them even contradict,” he writes, adding that while all these identities are part of him, “none of them on their own define me”. He insists, in short, on the right to contain multitudes, but fears Britain is struggling to do the same.
The book divides broadly into three parts: a trip through the places that made him, an analysis of how tribalism divides society, and finally some ideas to bring it back together. The argument for a “politics of belonging” overlaps throughout with the live debate about how Labour can win again, in ways that suggest the leadership contest might have been enlivened if Lammy had stood (he became vice-chair of Keir Starmer’s campaign instead). The book gives generous space to Lisa Nandy’s analysis of how Labour became estranged from its northern heartlands, while defending the best of the Blair years more strongly than anyone in this race bar Angela Rayner.
Sadly, for a contest short on new ideas, the final chapters are arguably the least satisfying part of an otherwise absorbing book; not because there’s anything bad about the policies themselves but because most are either very familiar or – like the idea of countries coming together to formulate a global wealth tax – seem doomed to fail in the current climate. Yet perhaps there can be no silver bullet for something this complex, beyond encouraging what Lammy calls an “encounter culture” – bringing people of opposing views and backgrounds together to foster understanding.
He certainly does his bit on that score. The arch-Remainer returns to Peterborough to interview Brexit voters (including Clive and Kathy, the parents of a school friend who became something of a substitute family for him) and takes an empathic view of their objections to eastern Europeans moving into town. It is, he writes, “wholly understandable that the transformation of Clive and Kathy’s street from a friendly family environment to one full of young, mostly male workers living chaotic lives, regardless of their background” would cause alarm.
He writes equally generously about a man charged with sending him racist abuse online, who cuts an unexpectedly sad figure in the dock. Yet he doesn’t try to paper over every crack: a chapter on identity politics, that wellspring of furious rows over everything from trans rights to the legacy of colonialism, argues that righting historical injustices means accepting that divisions do exist and that people’s experiences of the world are inevitably shaped by race, gender, sexuality or other aspects of personal identity. Some division, it seems, is inevitable.
So are tribes good or bad things in themselves? The answer, seemingly, is both. Lammy argues that the atomisation of society and collapse of old social structures are driving people towards toxic new ways of satisfying a natural desire to belong – criminal gangs, white supremacist subcultures, Isis – which would be better satisfied by creating broader communities based on positive values.
He may not have all the answers on how to do that yet. But for a Labour party seeking to rebuild a broad electoral coalition, this book asks the right questions.
• Tribes: How Our Need to Belong Can Make or Break the Good Society by David Lammy is published by Constable (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
