Peter Hain – an outsider on the inside
“I’M NOT an all or nothing person... I’m an all or something person”.
This is what the writer and activist Alan Paton said to a very young Peter Hain when the two of them first met. Hain found Paton somewhat gruff, but the phrase lodged itself in the South Africanborn teenager’s mind and pretty swiftly began to energise his own anti-apartheid activism.
The subsequent story is narrated with an excellent balance of passion and objectivity in Outside In, Hain’s recently published autobiography.
It is a book of considerable originality that offers a welcome opportunity to reappraise one of the most interesting of political lives in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Helpfully avoiding the tedium of mere chronology, Hain focuses episodically on the outworking of his upbringing in 1960s South Africa, where his parents, Adelaine and Walter were “banned” for their anti-apartheid activism as members of the Liberal Party, and needed a special extension of apartheid legislation merely to be able to talk to one another.
The personally painful consequences of this – Hain’s mother enjoying her daughter’s birthday party through a kitchen window, Hain’s father watching his son play cricket at Pretoria Boys High through a metal fence – burnt themselves onto the hard-drive of the fledgling activist and clearly still fuel his passion and compassion.
Exile to the class-ridden stuffiness of England gave Hain the first of many experiences of what it means to be an outsider in a context where who you know on the inside, and the insider badges you wear – public school, Oxbridge and the like – still counts for far too much in terms of the influence the Establishment will allow you to wield.
Hain has fought and brilliantly overcome such stuffiness all his life. As a cabinet minster under premiers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the outsider came in but on his terms, not those of the Establishment “Club” which has often closed ranks in an attempt to shut him out.
Hain certainly experienced the worst of the Establishment as a result of his direct activism, not least its sinister hand in two Old Bailey trials. In one, a private prosecution for conspiracy to stop the Springbok tour of the UK and Ireland in 1969-1970, only the natural justice of the jury saved him from a judge seemingly intent on incarcerating him.
A criminal prosecution on jumped-up charges that he’d robbed a Barclays Bank joined the British Establishment hatred of Hain to that of many white South Africans (Gordon Winter, who worked for South Africa’s then Bureau of State Security found a Hain “double” to carry out the robbery.)
The only conspiracies Hain has been caught up in have been organised by those who saw him at the time as “public enemy number one” in South Africa and in Britain.
Such was the desperation of the apartheid machine. Such was the success of the non-violent guns Hain and his amazingly enterprising movement of young people aimed at apartheid sport.
But Hain has never been an all or nothing protester and activist. His all or something approach has seen him prepared to work from the inside of politics as much as to agitate from the touchline.
A path to power beckoned him away from Britain’s Liberal Party – of which he was youth leader for two years – and into the much more electable fold of Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.
Eventually securing a parliamentary seat in Wales, he found himself once again on the inside of a context often perceived to be resistant to outsiders. Hain’s political skill is always to put in the hours it takes to win people over – but more than this, at a human level, to embed himself, to get to know people and to energise their concerns.
This has made him not only a hugely successful constituency figure – well-liked across the political spectrum for his commitment to those he serves – but also led him to be a versatile minister in government when Blair’s landslide victory at the polls in 1997 returned the strongest Labour Party administration in the UK since Clement Atlee’s 1945 post-war government.
To his critics Hain’s all or some- thing approach has been dismissed, shunted unceremoniously into the siding where outsider activists are turned into insider pragmatists who sell out principle for power. But Hain was never one of those.
He’s always seen direct action as a means not an end, his eyes trained on achievable goals and tangible transformation not short-term publicity. Not for him the idealist’s couch from which to pontificate, but rather the realist’s seat at the table from which to seek to make real change.
Like Nelson Mandela – about whom Hain has written a popular and acclaimed biography – Hain’s sense of putting his feet in the shoes of anyone in a complex situation has always led him to adopt a “can do” approach.
Many politicians use their personality to great effect – South African President Jacob Zuma being one of them, for example. But where a Zuma can break the ice and get opponents to talk, a Hain can deploy the charm but also put in the strategic hours listening to often mindnumbing detail that he senses is the very material from which negotiation will lead to resolution.
His ready acceptance of the doyen of South African rugby, Danie Craven, for instance – his instinctive responsiveness to Craven’s politeness since Hain is the most polite and respectful of men himself – enabled a dialogue between them in the 1970s that at the end of the 1980s bore considerable fruit in respect of changes to South African sport.
Like a Mandela, knowing the battles central to the Afrikaner zeitgeist, and able to reference them in conversation when they’re needed politically, Hain always moves beyond mere knowledge to a deep acknowledgment of the emotional significance of the narratives that shape people’s lives and energise their passions.
In this sense it’s Hain, more than anyone else, who deserves the credit for the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, because he brought a lifetime’s experience to bear on the intransigence of loyalist and republican extremists in a way that understood and respected where each was coming from.
As Minister for Europe and for Africa he’d already demonstrated immense skill and perseverance.
He understands well a deep truth about conflict resolution, which is that you almost always achieve reconciliation when you bring together extremes, not when you try to focus on the softer players close enough to collide in the middle ground, because ultimately such a space is too mushy to sustain progress.
A liberal radical who, from his days in Britain’s Liberal Party, always saw himself firmly on the left and never as part of the sandalwearing centrist brigade, his constant living as an outsider on the inside has enabled him to offer a prophetic voice and perspective that has edge and integrity.
In this sense, and more personally, he was able instantly to see that the Christian-muslim work I was trying to pioneer in the former milltowns of Lancashire and the dialogue work that’s continued to be focused on younger citizens in north London, was about the meeting of world views where differences were probed, dissected, celebrated and respected – in other words, it was about the dignity of difference, never about boiling beliefs down to some illusory lowest common denominator.
When I recently invited him to participate in a conversation with the Cape Town priest and former prison chaplain to Nelson Mandela, Harry Wiggett, Hain, a self-confessed agnostic, readily welcomed the chance to engage with a faith perspective on Mandela that is not the prism through which he had previously as friend and biographer seen the man.
He engaged in the conversation with the same inquisitive respect with which he’s approached his calling as politician (he would not quibble with that description; he sees it as calling not career) and which has characterised his whole approach to life.
He was completely open to see aspects of Mandela’s responsiveness to faith he hadn’t previously considered because he’s above all else a lifelong learner.
Of whatever faith or world view each of us has much to learn from his all or something passion for truth.
Chivers is Vicar of John Keble Church, Mill Hill, London and the author of Fully Alive (Pretext, Cape Town, 2010). Peter Hain’ s Outside In is published by Biteback Publishing (London, 2012).