Alexei Sayle has already written two autobiographies: Stalin Ate My Homework, which covered his early life, and Thatcher Stole My Trousers, which took him from art school to becoming a stand-up at the vanguard of the alternative comedy scene, ending in 1984 with the second series of The Young Ones.
How I’ve Tried To Change The World (By Walking Down The Middle Of The Street Shouting) is not a direct sequel to these, but rather a collection of thoughts inspired by his lifetime's commitment to protests, especially marches. Do not go expecting too many vignettes from his comedy career, which has seen him go from pugnacious angry Marxist – who the Special Branch called an ‘intellectual thug’ when they had him under surveillance – to beloved Radio 4 figure. Occasional anecdotes of ill-fated sojourns to Hollywood or getting pissed at a BBC party attended by Princess Diana do pop up to enliven these pages, but they can seem like adjuncts to the job in hand.
Protest was a habit instilled in Sayle at a young age, thanks to his parents, Joe and Molly, devoted members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The first incident here, which he barely, if at all, remembers, dates from 1959, when he was seven, waving off a youth march from his native Liverpool across to Hull, as the nascent Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was protesting the H-bomb. He then moves through campaigns around the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War in 1969 and the miners’ strike of 1974 – the one the unions ultimately won, before their later defeat at Margaret Thatcher’s hands.
Much of his anecdotes recall a distant past where there was a ramshackle left-wing bookshop on every high street – a more hopeful time when protest seemed more part of the social fabric of the left as people felt united by a hopeful belief that their actions could change things. The 1.5million-strong 2003 march against the Iraq War, which turned out to have no effect on the Blair government, put paid to that ideal.
Sayle also admits a certain futility to the Palestinian solidarity marches he still religiously attends when it comes to achieving change - but maintains that protest is ‘urgently relevant’ given the awfulness of the situation and the need to feel he’s doing something. Especially as governments – including Keir Starmer’s – have repeatedly curtailed protests in draconian freedom of speech clampdowns usually overlooked by the right-wing press.
Between the occasional absurd fantastical anecdote, Sayle joins the the dots between various left-wing activists and philosophers over the years and across the planet, enlightening for laymen not so deeply ingrained in the cause as he is (and very few are). His writing is also consistently entertaining, which is not an adjective often pinned to Marxists.
Sayle is not dewy-eyed in his appraisal of many comrades on the left, saying that infighting, intransigency and a failure to present an optimistic community-led vision for the future have all stymied the progress of socialism. But he is a vehement fan of the politics of Jeremy Corbyn that were thwarted by Labour’s centrists.
Towards the end, the nostalgia and whimsy are shelved as Sayle’s genuine anger at the situation in Gaza froths over. A long-time supporter of the cause - who nonetheless is highly critical of how the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Islamist terror groups such as Hamas have exploited the dire situation - he tells of his bitter regret over the friends he has lost over the issue; his frustration that any criticism of the Israeli state is condemned as anti-Semitic; and the ineffectiveness but necessity of coming out to protest after protest.
At 74, the revolutionary spirit still burns inside him – refuelled after a quieter middle age – putting paid to the notion that everyone gets a bit more right-wing as they age. And for all the left’s faults, anyone who reads this will surely come away a little more Marxist than before.
• How I've Tried To Change The World By Walking Down The Middle Of The Street Shouting by Alexei Sayle is published by W&N. It is available from Amazon priced £13.52 in hardback or £9.99 on Kindle.
