As a young man, fighting what he saw as the broken institutions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Danny Sriskandarajah had a T-shirt bearing the slogan “International Mother Fuckers”. These days, from a distance, he can come off as an establishment figure, but don’t be fooled by his equanimous nature and cheerful sartorial style. He is a political radical, forged in the fire of childhood exile from Sri Lanka and his family’s fight from their new home in Australia for the persecuted Tamils left behind.
Sriskandarajah, 48, is the head of the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a thinktank founded 40 years ago to fight neoliberalism. Before starting that role in January, he was the chief executive of Oxfam, which he took over in 2019, after the heinous scandal about staff paying for sex with earthquake survivors in Haiti, some of whom may have been children. Sriskandarajah didn’t go for that job because he was a safe pair of hands who could make trouble go away, but rather because he saw that “the sexual misconduct, the safeguarding failures and the abuse of power were symptomatic of a wider challenge in the development sector … it has ended up feeling neocolonial”.
Now, he has written a book, Power to the People, which sounds like yet another political self-help book, but is in fact upbeat, empowering, alive with the possibilities of civic action and vibrant with examples from the past, including Save the Children’s founder, Eglantyne Jebb, and Rosa Parks.
His telling is subtle. He carefully enunciates the fungal theory of change – that when “mushrooms” (consequential movements or individuals) spring up overnight, it’s because of a vast, invisible, underground network. “Those manifestations of the angry mob or the system-change activist will only happen if we nurture civic life in all of its forms,” he says. “Start with whatever you’re passionate about. It could be as simple as the kids’ football club. Get involved, volunteer, connect with your community – do stuff.”
My reservation about “Do something! Don’t do nothing!” treatises is that they make it sound as though we simply have to identify a problem and pull together to fix it, then everything will be fine. But we can see problems all around, and agree what they are, yet the status quo keeps getting worse. He agrees: “Wherever I look, everything is not fine. My argument is everything could be fine – or could be much better.”
We meet in the cafe of the supreme court in London, which he loves because of the metaphorical richness of Parliament Square, where it sits: creaking institution of justice on one side, broken democracy on another (the Houses of Parliament), the spent authority of the church (Westminster Abbey) on the third. It is less than a week after Keir Starmer’s first speech as prime minister. “It’s weird that we have to have a senior politician remind us that service is at the heart of politics,” says Sriskandarajah. He doesn’t mean that casually; the long-term global trend, that voters no longer trust politicians to act in the interests of anyone but themselves, worries the hell out of him: “Their fundamental credibility is at stake.”
In the book, he refers to a 2020 study of the UK, Poland, France, Germany and the US that found that between 24% and 51% of people felt “a personal distance [from] democracy”. The numbers of our general election worry him, too: “Nineteen million of us stayed home. That’s double the number of people who actually voted Labour. Add those who voted Reform, add those who reluctantly voted for a party in the ridiculous first-past-the-post system. That’s a disillusioned supermajority who are losing faith in mainstream politics. How does this end? It ends in autocracy.”
Or it could end in what he calls “algocracy”, “where representative democracy gets usurped by the algorithm. Because why do we need elected representatives to channel our collective will when the algorithm can already predict what we think, collectively, far more accurately and systematically?”
What worries him the most, though, is “the crisis of imagination … It’s almost like we’re assuming that the current institutions, whether they’re political or democratic, or in the digital world, or in the global infrastructure, they’re all the best we can do.” The cornerstone of our civic engagement is imagining differently, he believes, but can we imagine fast enough?
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‘Twenty years ago, I thought this would be the century of the citizen,” Sriskandarajah says. In 2003, he had just married Suzanne Julia Lambert, a barrister from Trinidad and Tobago, whom he had met when they came to the UK as Rhodes scholars in 1998. “We joke that our kids are Cecil Rhodes’s grandkids. He’d be rolling in his grave: a brown man and a black woman met using his money.”
He worked for the thinktank the Institute for Public Policy Research from 2004 until 2009, when he became the youngest ever director general of the Royal Commonwealth Society. He was appointed secretary general of Civicus, the celebrated civil-society NGO, four years later. One of the things that makes his book stand out is the depth of his global expertise. For every idea he has about participatory budgeting or deliberative democracy, he can name five places in the world where it has worked.
Sriskandarajah moved from research to campaigning certain that it was possible to democratise almost everything. “We could organise, mobilise, socialise; the costs were lowering; the barriers to participation were lowering,” he says. “We could challenge economic orthodoxy. We could finish the job on globalisation, fill in the gaps on social protection and human rights and mobility.” That’s not how it has worked out, though, with advanced democracies sliding towards autocracy and conflict everywhere. “Yeah, it’s been really awful. The last 15 years in particular.”
He is a convincing globalist, in the sense that he does not split the world hierarchically into countries that teach or learn, give or take. Put simply, we are all screwed – and we need to learn from each other as quickly as we can. “I feel very rooted in my Sri Lankan and Tamil identity,” he says. “At the same time, I’m a global citizen. I know it’s a tacky phrase, but it does worry me that we’re not encouraged to think about, or even sometimes prevented from thinking about, ourselves as global citizens.”
In the book, he tells a fascinating story about organising a Commonwealth mission to the UK – including delegates from Guyana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka – to observe the British general election in 2010. One Tory MP, Patrick Mercer, was dumbfounded at “having our election monitored by the very people we taught how to have democratic elections in the first place … I hesitate to say the lunatics have taken over the asylum, but surely this is putting the cart before the horse.”
It turned out that election was problematic. Hundreds of voters were turned away from polling stations before they were able to vote, while there were allegations of fraud and malpractice. The results were a disaster, one way or another pauperising a generation. I still struggle to process how getting involved with kids’ football could have arrested the country’s slide into British exceptionalism and casual discursive racism, but Sriskandarajah’s point is that you have to be able to imagine yourself as part of a world in which things improve. You can’t do that on your own: you need models of change, either looking outside to the world or backwards to the past, but you also need an “associational life” – to be part of a collective that does some positive, tangible thing.
In climate crisis discourse, there is the idea of the “tech optimist” or “tech fantasist”, which I consider a variation on the climate denier: someone who sees the problem, but thinks human ingenuity will magically solve it. These people get a lot of airtime, but do not represent the broad swathe of global opinion. Here, says Sriskandarajah, we can see the intersection of broken climate, democracy and media.
“Around the time of the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, there was a beautiful example of focus groups done with representative groups of people in 70-odd countries on the same day, so it started in the Pacific and ended in the Americas. People were asked very similar questions to what the diplomats and politicians were negotiating in Paris,” he says. “Amazingly, they came out, on the whole, with far more ambitious policies. In rich countries, they were far more prepared to take actions that might end up diminishing their economic quality of life, because they felt a responsibility to do so. It’s an example where I think that creating more global mechanisms for democratic participation will help create more ambition.”
How to make a focus group’s ambitions real will differ from place to place. In the UK, it may mean getting rid of the House of Lords and replacing it with a permanent citizens’ assembly; in Belgium, they established the world’s first permanent citizens’ council, and docked it successfully into their representative democracy, five years ago. The alternative, in which people can think and dream whatever they like and political reality is handed to them by remote, unresponsive governments, while nonsense is peddled by media old and new – well, presumably we can imagine something better than that.
Allied to the tech optimist is the youthquake fantasy: the assumption that all young people support Greta Thunberg and will simply time-out their forebears and take over. But their faith in institutions is waning, Sriskandarajah warns: “A significant proportion of young people in 30-odd countries polled would prefer a strong leader to democracy.”
There are democratic answers, up to a point, he says. “The way the modern economy is evolving is that the precariat are not just in insecure jobs, but they’re also having to spend more and more time on work. You cannot have a functioning democracy unless people have the time and the space to engage in citizenship, well beyond voting every five years.”
There is also a problem of wealth capture and states failing to discipline capital, he says. Governments are “not just woefully inadequate, they’re also wilfully neglectful”. Corporate foundations “give away a few tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, maybe, but are refusing to pay a living wage to workers in their supply chain”.
In his time at Oxfam, Sriskandarajah made the case trenchantly that the existence of billionaires posed an active hazard to the global functioning of civic life. Now, he asks: “Where does this end? There are only eight men who own as much as half the world’s population. When Oxfam started publishing, it was 62 men. Do we think the system really is broken when only one man owns half the world? Is that when we think: ‘OK, now we have to stop?’”
The NEF is working on an “extreme wealth line”: “There’s the extreme poverty line, the line below which it’s socially unacceptable for someone to have to live. Why can’t we have a similar one for the upper limit? A level of net assets that society thinks is problematic? It’s likely to buy you too much influence. It’s likely to mean you’re rent-seeking somewhere. It’s a result of policy or market failure.”
This is not about looking for messiahs, however, nor becoming a disciple of the right cause, Sriskandarajah says. You just need to get on what he calls the “participation ladder. Some people will benefit in terms of connecting with community, getting involved, learning skills, the habits and rituals of civic life.” And some people, he hopes, will say: “I’ve got a greater responsibility here to protest or speak truth to power or challenge norms.”
Power to the People by Danny Sriskandarajah is out now (Headline, £20). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• This article was amended on 18 July 2024. Danny Sriskandarajah came to the UK in 1998, not 1999, as an earlier version said.
