Weaponising peace: the Greater London Council, cultural policy and ‘GLC peace year 1983’

Bridging bureaucracy and activism: Challenges of activist state-work in the 1980s Greater London Council

“…Thus Cooper (2020: 181) suggests British municipal radicalism of the 1980s was characterised by the adoption of an activist register, marked by 'a readiness to campaign, and not simply govern, on behalf of marginal and subjugated interests', alongside an affirmation of, and activist-state interest in, the entrenchment of social justice issues in the everyday urban fabric -seeing, for instance, the political importance of pavement curbs, pedestrian crossings, sewage disposal, or herbaceous lawn borders (Hall, 1988;Hatherley, 2020). For example, the GLC voiced countercultural claims on spheres of social life previously considered beyond the scope of local government interest, such as sexuality (Cooper, 1994), and directly campaigned (or funded community campaigns) against nuclear weapons (Atashroo, 2019), racism (although see the critique by Gilroy, 1987) and corporate urban development in the Docklands (Leeson, 2019). Such efforts, as Hall (1988) argued, could contribute to countering the emergent atomised subject-formation of Thatcherite politics, laced with competitive individualism and hostility to public administration.…”

“…Critical assessments too often conflate the institution and its occupants, allowing them to read the difficult negotiation of constraints as the naı¨ve adoption of timid social-democratic reformism. Atashroo (2017) for instance, notes the disappearance of contextual evidence about intention, action, and the limits to agency within the GLC bureaucracy from critical accounts like Gilroy's (1987), suggesting that a structural critique that restricts scope for individual agency will likely conflate intentions and outcomes. Atashroo (2017) criticises Gilroy's approach for framing contingent outcomes as part of a cohesive institutional logic, misreading unintentional failures as wholly disingenuous exercises in co-opting social movement discourses and energies -a discursive position that has strongly influenced subsequent perceptions.…”

“…Thus, whereas the GLC has tended to be narrated within the discursive constraints of British ‘local socialism’– of local governments dabbling in progressive politics – this paper adopts an alternative perspective, focused instead on the constituent activists of the new urban left and their novel practices of institutional experimentation. Recent work has begun to reappraise the GLC and excavate its internal dynamics (Atashroo, 2019), including the important work of the ‘GLC Story’ project. My aim here is to bring those experiences into conversation with theoretical perspectives about the state, to highlight points of tension that remain relevant to contemporary forms of what I term ‘activist state-work’ within municipal governance.…”