Life as a leftist has been a complete failure

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0:33The New Statesman

0:38Hey Alexey, it's Oli Dugmore from The New Statesman here. I am super excited to have you in the studio, catch up, hopefully have a little bit of a laugh as well. There's a lot for us to talk about. But yeah, I'll see you soon.

0:52Alexei Sayle: Hi Oli, yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. Your studio's near my house, so it's easy for me to get to. And, you know, out in the garden, I'll probably buy some chunky gold jewellery afterwards. Alexei Sale has never much cared for a conventional view of the world. Born in 1950s Liverpool to committed communist parents, he was named after Maxim Gorky, real name Alexei Maximovich Peshkov. Died-in-the-wool Marxism, in other words, was baked in from birth, and he's Jewish on his mother's side. His first two memoirs, Stalin Ate My Homework and Thatcher Stole My Trousers, told the story of that red upbringing.

1:33Now, Sale is back with volume three, how I've tried to change the world, exploring a lifetime of protests, marches, and what decades on the picket line have taught him about being a Marxist today. I'm Olly Dougmore. You're listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. A warning, there is some very strong language from the outset of and throughout. the interview.

1:59Before we get into our interview, you might be wondering why I'm wearing a sling and why we didn't publish an episode last week. The reason for that is because I had an altercation with a bin. I was cycling, had a crash, and I've broken my collarbone and a rib. So that's where we've been. That's why I look like this. On with the show. Hello, Alexi. How are you? Hi, Ollie.

2:21Alexei Sayle: I'm better shaped than you. Doesn't take much these days. Pretty beaten up. you wanted to write a book called Blair's a Cunt. That's not this book. What happened? No. Well, I mean, I wrote my last volume, a memoir, which was called That's Just All My Childs, this is 10 years ago. And I sort of, the first one was called Standing Out My Homework, the second one was called That's Just All My Childs, and the third was going to be called Blair's a Cunt. and I was prepared to weather the flag from the booksellers. I mean, it was never really going to be called that. But the reason I'd not written Blazer Compt partly was because my professional life, relatively speaking, was after 84 when the second one finished was a story of relative success.

3:18Alexei Sayle: And there's no tension there. There's nothing to write about really. But then I realised, talking about, you know, this desire for left-wing ideas and stuff, that my life as a leftist had been, you know, a story of almost complete failure and disillusion and disappointment and rejection. And, you know, that was very fertile grounds for a memoir, really. So let's talk about your life a little bit then. When and where were you born? I was born in Liverpool. My childhood home was in Anfield, Liverpool 4, just a couple of hundred yards away from Liverpool's football grounds. My parents were both members of the British Communist Party.

4:13Alexei Sayle: My mother had come from an unorthodox Jewish family where they spoke Yiddish. She met my father in 1947. My father worked on the railways, he was a railway guard. My father was an active trade unionist. He was Merseyside and North Wales District Secretary of the National Union Railwayman. And because my dad worked on the railway, she got free rail travel up to the borders of the Soviet Union. That's what was going on inside your house. But outside your house, you know, the years of your birth, This is kind of peak Cold War. Yeah. Can I quote some of your writing to you and ask you to tell me a bit more about it?

5:01Alongside the other contrarian ideas that were part of my family's mythology, there was also an overwhelming, rather smug perception that the world is not at all as it is presented to the public by the media and by academia. There is another secret reality hidden from the view of the masses, a reality that us and only a few other people have the ability to see. the first time I remember experiencing this is the Cuban Missile Crisis yeah tell me more about that well yeah I mean we were just you know I talk in one of the earlier Vultonson memoir about just like shouting at the Queen's speech on the television on Christmas Day and stuff lies lies and that was every every you know when we watched the news bulletin on the TV it would be just accompanied by this kind of Greek chorus of yeah lies But the Cuban Missile Crisis itself was that it was the one time, I think, in the history of post-war when people were genuinely terrified of nuclear war.

6:03Do you want me to tell your viewers why we didn't think that in our hours? Yeah, please. Well, we were convinced. My parents took me aside, I think, and told me that this was a – that I didn't need to worry because the whole thing was a ploy by Nikita Khrushchev, the Premier of the Soviet Union, in order to... The United States had been planning or had installed missiles along the Turkish border facing the Soviet Union. So this was a ploy in exchange for not building missile bases in Cuba. Khrushchev wanted to get several concessions out of Kennedy. One was to never attack Cuba because there'd been the Bay of Pigs invasion, failed invasion a few months before.

6:46And also to remove the missile bases in Turkey.

6:51Alexei Sayle: And so I didn't need to worry because Mr. Khrushchev had it all in hand. Now, I did think for years that my mother was a lunatic when she would tell people about this. But actually, I think there is some historical basis for that being the truth, really. The strategic merit or otherwise of that decision, when you hear about the narrowly avoided instances of nuclear war, like radar stations picking up flocks of geese and potentially misinterpreting them as incoming missile attacks, it's all well and good to provoke an international standoff for those strategic concessions. But what we know about nuclear war is that there but for the grace of God go I.

7:44It's a close run thing, right? It feels like an extraordinary gamble, if that's what it was. Yeah, I guess so, yeah. I mean, but it was just, I mean, it was something that really was, I can remember very clearly, I think, a sense of tension even in the classroom. and so all the kids were kind of in primary school were crying and stuff and i'm just sitting there all the teachers are like worried about me because they thought you know i don't you know i'd kind of uh the tension had got to me to such an extent that i'd snapped really i'm like he's lost it yeah don't worry it's fine mr khrushchev's got it all i couldn't i couldn't reveal i couldn't reveal the secret of what I knew but I just it's fine don't worry guys did you ever think about not being a Marxist was there ever a moment of kind of you know parental rebellion not being a Marxist yeah I mean my my childhood rebellion from my parents was to go even further left and so for for a few years I was a Maoist you know you know and I you know the the the arguments at the breakfast to be

8:53Alexei Sayle: You know, don't call your mother a running dog reactionary, Lexi. But she is. Chairman Mao says she's waving the red flag to defeat the red flag. She's a revisionist, capitalist roader. So that was my rebellion was to go even further. This question may sound simplistic. I don't mean it to, but what is Marxism? I'm not looking for a definition. I mean, do you think of it as a way or a toolkit of understanding the world, of understanding history? Is it a belief system? Like, tell me what you think it is. I mean, I'm not a great scholar of Marxism, but it seems to me that it's a materialist philosophy.

9:40Alexei Sayle: So first of all, it says that all that exists is the material world. You know, there is no metaphysical. world. And then it just, you know, I think it says in the comments, all history is the history of class struggle, really. That what is prime in human history is economic, is economic organisation, really, that that's what governs everything.

10:14Alexei Sayle: and that seems to be just that. I mean, you don't have to be left-wing to be a Marxist. You just have to have that analysis that history is the history of economic classes bumping up against each other and economic development from early kind of nomadic hunter-gatherer. And then to agricultural societies where there was surplus and surplus enabled the rise of an aristocracy and a priest class and, you know, a warrior class kind of thing. And then from feudalism, we go to capitalism, you know, the manufacture. It seems self-evident really to me. You moved to London and I mean you touched on it a little bit there but I mean how did the the Marxist scenes of Liverpool and London compare to each other?

11:12Because the people I knew in Liverpool really were familiar to me and I think were also I wouldn't say they were normal actually but they didn't quite it was sort of all right really whereas the people in London the part the communist party of britain brackets marxist lenders which i was a member of they they fitted much more into that kind of stereotype of the of cult members really you know and there was a lot more cult behavior that went on and they could see an essential lack of seriousness in me really that put i could never use the word comrade for instance i could never call anybody a comrade and so So they could sense in me that I wasn't really like them.

12:08And so therefore they, because it, I mean, that's, I mean, to go back, I mean, I don't, I never really know where it came from. But from a very early age, I both believed completely in communism and socialism and at the same time found it ridiculous. and absurd you know i mean and that's so i i don't know i don't know how that happened really or why but it was those two things always existed in parallel with me really that i always found it ludicrous i found the modes of behavior ludicrous really and it's something that i mined for my comedy for to this day really um so and they could they could sense the people in london could sense

12:56Alexei Sayle: that in me that I wasn't serious really, you know. I was laughing at them. So much. I don't think it's just politics, right? But that tension between the absurd and the serious, I mean, that touches everything, right? That's school. That's the workplace. That's all of our, like you said, our modes of behaviour, the codes of social behaviour that we kind of impose on our society. You could, I was thinking about it, train carriages recently, you know, this bizarre, you commute into work, 200 people on a train carriage, all together, dead silent, not looking at each other. Like, and no one really seems to think that that's a strange state of affairs, but it is.

13:43It's peculiar and it's bizarre, but everyone else just thinks, oh, it's just my commute into work. It's entirely normal. And that tension between those two things, if you're unable to acknowledge or see and perhaps be a bit self-deprecating or at least be self-aware enough that it exists, you're kind of... Certainly politically, if you take yourself too seriously or try to put yourself across too seriously, I think you're on a hiding to nothing, I think. You think? Well, I think, I mean, in the CPBML, you could only... Serious was the default position. It's interesting you mentioned the commute in a way that because i was just re-watching the series on um uh netflix i think called mind hunter oh i watched that when it first came out yeah yeah really interesting you know about the foundation of the um behavioral science you know the quantico at the fbi and the younger guy talks about i think he'd done philosophy of psychology at university and he talked about how what they would do sometimes.

14:45In a lift, if you stand facing the door, if you stand the other way, he said it drives people crazy. If you don't face the door of the lift, it makes people really, really uncomfortable. And that's kind of what I was doing. I was standing in the Communist Party of Britain, Marxist, Leninist. I was standing facing the back wall and they could sense it, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It drove them nuts. You can do that now. If you're the first person in a lift, you stand facing a certain direction. and everyone else that gets in, they face the same thing. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They do. Your book, it runs Vietnam to Gaza.

15:19I mean, seven decades, street protests, street activism. I mean, what's actually changed about being on a march? What's the same? Tell me about that comparison. I mean, in many ways, it's the same because it's just walking. As the subtitle of the book, it's just walking up the middle of the street shouting. you know it's a it's a timeless kind of uh a timeless enterprise i think in many ways you know um the ghazam marches which i think i've more or less been on every one should give me some kind of certificate but um i guess jeremy being on everyone as well um they are you know i see them as they're kind of a v i I mean, there's a kind of the way that they're still typified in the media.

16:13You know, what's he called? Rowley, the chief constable of the Met or whatever. I never thought he was, like, good at his job or anything. But when he said that the PSC tries to, you know, he's had to stop them rooting marches via, you know, they try and go via synagogues to upset Jewish people. I just thought that's a fucking lie. I didn't realise that you actually lied, you know. I mean, the police. Yeah. Never. I know, I know. It's kind of naive. I mean, weird. Yeah, I know. It's stupid, isn't it? Of course they lie all the time. I suppose I didn't expect the chief constable to lie about something so provably wrong, really, as that.

16:56It's just like, why would you say that? Because it's bullshit. It's clearly bullshit, you know. But, you know, the way that the marches were typified as hate marches and, you know, for them river to the sea, globalised the Intifada and all this kind of, you know, being banned. And the reality, which is just that to me it's a vision of, like, the best of Britain, really. And I get quite emotional about that. You know, it's gays and trans and Muslim kids and Jews and, you know, just all animated by a rage, a genocide, you know, and it's...

17:45It's very heartwarming, you know, and at the same time it's utterly depressing because, you know,

17:56Alexei Sayle: it's when, you know, we're not listened to.

18:02So, I mean, I oscillate really. I mean, I did genuinely spend the first three or four marches in tears most of the time.

18:22And, you know, it's, you know. now I mean the fact that I've got used to the fact that we

18:31Alexei Sayle: we can you know you can I never thought I'd go to another restaurant or watch another football match because there's a genocide going on and you do you end up you know and I think I think that if you you know I said if you when you watched a movie set in the 1930s in Germany like Mephisto or Cabaret you had to make a kind of leap a cognitive a leap to try and of imagination to understand how people could you know and now you don't have to because we're living that reality you know it's extraordinary But you do, I mean, it's sort of depressing that your life carries on because, you know, in the early days I didn't believe, I thought, how can you think about anything apart from this?

19:38But you do, you know, and I mean, that in itself is depressing really, I think, you know. There's obviously palpable sadness in what you're describing to me there, but there was a hint of, would I say, pride in a part of your answer as well? There was something about the beauty of that coalition of people that were there. Can I ask you to talk to me a bit more about that, Alexi? Yeah. What it is that makes you happy about that? the extraordinary decency of those people is remarkable I think

20:25and the desire to go against the norm all the propaganda from all the legacy media is at the very least you know horribly biased you know so it's

20:50I just think these people are the best people in the world because it would be easy to be cynical if you had that like you said to be depressed by that state of affairs but actually there's a degree of optimism and hopefulness yeah in people like that Yeah, I think so. I mean, you're seeing in the United States the way that, I mean, sometimes people say, you know, why do you go on about this one subject? Why is Palestine? Why are you obsessed with Palestine? Palestine, but Palestine is such a useful, no consolations of people of Palestine, but it's such a useful bellwether, I think. And it's, for instance, one will be able to judge Andy Burnham by what he does about Palestine in the coming autumn, really, whether he sticks with the prescription of Palestine action as a terrorist organization, whether he continues to supply arms to Israel, which has increased under Starmer, whether you will be able to tell from that who Burnham is, really.

22:15Because if he'll bend to the Israel lobby and the arms industry lobby, on that he will bend on everything else, really. And I expect that he will buckle. We're going to take a break now. We'll be back after this.

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23:50You made a historical comparison earlier, and I'll read another bit of your book to you and we'll have a bit of a conversation about it. This is a quote now. Keir Starmer is often referred to as, quote, former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer, end quote, as if that's somehow relevant to the right-wing authoritarian he's now become. Hitler used to work in a pub, but you never hear him referred to as, quote, former barman Adolf Hitler. It's what they did in later life that's considered significant. I mean, do you think it's fair to directly compare the two of them to each other? Yeah.

24:24Alexei Sayle: Yeah, I think, I mean, I hate Starmer so much, really. And he still remains my MP. So I'll be getting on to him about my bin and see what he does. Why do you hate him so much? I just think, well, why do I hate him so much? I think he's, I mean, I think, you know, I mean, historically unpopular because I think people could see that he was just a horrible human being, I suspect. And people could see that, I think, regardless of his policies. But I think that his career arc of, you know, I did, I mean, you know, he did pro bono work on the McLevel case and all the cases. I know people, you know, from the left who, you know, years ago, you know, he was useful.

25:22I just think that that was just in preparation for his move into kind of authoritarianism, really, that he's profoundly... I mean, the one thing he obviously believes in, as he said, I'm a Zionist without qualification, that he enthusiastically really supported the genocide. And Britain was probably still conducting spy flights over Gaza and arms exports to Israel went up under his reign. Let's talk about the 1930s comparison because it's a point of conversation you hear quite a lot these days, is the extent to which there's a similarity between our modern times and the times that spawned fascism and how similar they are.

26:20You know, I think the point about the specifically that Nazi Germany point of comparison with anything people will say to you, you know, that's a kind of a unique event that doesn't bear comparison to anything. But on this point about the 1930s, the conditions in which fascism started, how similar do you think it is to the time that we're in now? Do you think it's possible to draw a comparison between the two? The silence of, you know, I mean, most of it.

26:50Alexei Sayle: I mean, there are obviously particular actors and actresses that speak out, but really I think comedians have been pretty silent, shamefully silent. In terms of the forces that form, I mean, the economic forces that form, fascism in the 1930s in Germany. I don't know. I mean, I've seen commentators in the United States say that if the November midterm elections go ahead more or less as they're meant to go ahead, then the United States lives to fight another day. If the November midterms are suborned, then, you know, pretty much on the way to fascism in the United States, really. And that's a terrifying prospect, I think.

27:46So, I mean, the comparisons aren't direct, but... Yeah, the United States recently lost its classification as a liberal democracy. Yeah, in VDEM's 2026 report. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned... Actually, let's just turn to Andy Burnham for a second because you mentioned him a little bit there. I mean, how do you think about him as the incoming Prime Minister? Well, he is now our Prime Minister. Do you have any historical comparisons for him up your sleeve? Not particularly.

28:19Alexei Sayle: I'm cautiously pessimistic about Andy Burnham, really. He's obviously not. I mean, I think probably as a person he's less of a screaming shitbag than Starmer, you know. but uh i i think that again you know i mean having having having said that lenin is a cunt uh lenin did you know his he had a very clear-eyed view of the labor party which was that the labor party its existence was to deflect the socialist inclinations of the british working class away from socialism really and to tie them down into if they became members to tie them down into i mean I didn't saw my own feelings here, but tie them down into the kind of extraordinarily tedious meetings and procedure and to continually dangle the prospect of socialism before working class while never delivering it.

29:20Alexei Sayle: And that's kind of, I suspect that that is baked into the DNA of the Labour Party, really. So, sorry, new statesman. It's no offence to me, Alexi, don't you worry about that. Sorry to tell you this. How many communist countries have you visited? Not that many, really. Which ones have you been to? Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, briefly Poland. What did you think of them when you were there? At the time, I was obviously a kid, really. I stopped going with my parents. the last country we visited was uh bulgaria um i kind of thought they were like fairyland in a way that they were because there were places that were utterly different to the west and there was no advertising there was you know there weren't many cars i mean we were treated like royalty though i mean we were like fated uh you know as reputentatives as the british working class uh so well there was a i i think i was aware very early on that we were we were constantly followed that that our interpreter would always be security would always be kgb or whatever the local variant of that was um A couple more questions, Alexei, and then we'll be out of time.

30:52You recently took part in a conversation with Miriam Margolis and Michael Rosen called They Call Us the Wrong Kind of Jew. What is the wrong kind of Jew?

31:01Alexei Sayle: Well, in that context, obviously, if you're Jewish and opposed, anti-Zionist, You are betraying your, you know, you're betraying your whatever race or religion or whatever the fuck it is. I mean, you know, you're a traitor to the Jewish people, really. So during the purges, during the Morgan McSweeney-Keyer-Starmah era, You were something like 30 times more likely to be expelled from the Labour Party for anti-Semitism if you were Jewish. Because, you know, it's a simplistic thing, but to be Jewish and oppose the apartheid colonial state of Israel is, you know, seems contradictory, really. So, you know, we theoretically Jews who oppose Israel give the lie to that, that Israel represents all Jews because it doesn't.

32:18As you've gotten older, how has your sense of self, your identity, how has it changed? Do you have a clearer idea of who you are now that you're older? Yeah, I think I have a clearer idea of, I mean, certainly professionally, I think I have.

32:33Alexei Sayle: I've found I've found exactly what I want to do really and don't do anything else really don't do any extraneous kind of crap I'm very confident I'm very proud of the the work that I've done over the last 10 years that you know I mean my Radio 4 series Sandwich Bar I think is I'm very very proud of it I think it is just I remember the recordings of the first series and I was just thinking they should stop comedy now this is comedy has somehow carried on you've completed it and you're amazed that people are still laughing after you've figured it all out after the first couple of series of Imagine You Sandwich Bar people would go yeah that's that's enough now And on top of that, you're pitched as TikTok's favorite Marxist explainer as well.

33:38So how does that feel?

33:41Alexei Sayle: I've immensely smoked about that. I'm just so pleased with myself that I could do a video and I don't know. you know that they got 15 million views uh my tiktok that marks i was uh brian eno has these uh these rather serious gatherings hard art where he encourages around his studio to encourage people to you know come up with ideas revoluting ideas that both are artistic but also aid the you know the human struggles of humanity and some woman said a young woman said to me she said oh i recognize you you're an economist and i'm like what i said will you talk about economics on tick how do you see those videos and think that i'm i mean well they can't they can't call you a comedian anymore because you completed it Oh, yeah.

34:44That's why.

34:45Alexei Sayle: They have to think of something new. I do like that I function in this space, you know, the kind of podcast TikTok video space. I'm very pleased with myself for having found a way at the age of 74 to do that, yes. Alexi Sale, thank you so much for making the time. I really appreciate it. Thank you. It's great. That was Alexi Sale. You've been listening to The Exchange from The New Statesman, and I've been Oli Dougmore. See you next week.

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