Peter Beresford OBE: Reflections on the role of culture as 'social glue'
The Cross Party Group on Culture and Communities, for which Culture Counts acts as Secretariat, met in June 2025 for a discussion of the role of cultural institutions as ‘social glue’. This is part of a year-long exploration of big ambitions for culture and communities, which you can read more about here.
To complement the discussions online and in person at this meeting, we asked Peter Beresford to join us as an active listener, and to write a reflective blog on the evening’s conversation. Peter Beresford OBE is Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia, co-chair of the disabled people’s organisation Shaping Our Lives and a long term user of mental health services. His latest book (May 2025) is The Antidote: How people-powered movements can renew politics, policy and practice (Policy Press).
Connecting with Culture Counts
It was good to be part of the Scottish Cross Party Group Culture and Communities June event responding to the grim national and international shift to extremist formal politics. No hint of a focus on mimicking current far-right populism as any way of dealing with it or regaining electoral credibility. Instead, we were treated to an action-programme for social glue and the part that cultural and arts policies and organisations can play in regenerating it and renewing solidarity in society.
Ah glue – now you’re talking. From childhood days onwards, from Seccotine and flour paste, through Aerolite, Araldite and then on to superglue, it’s always been part of my life as someone constantly making things, from models and toys to furniture, fittings and motorbikes.
Of course, some uncoupling is also needed – for example, to separate us from prejudices that are being used maliciously to set us against each other rather than against our political manipulators. For instance, that refugees are the biggest economic threat ‘we’ face, rather than reinvigorating us and our society, or that disabled people are benefit cheats, rather than a growing minority in an ageing but disablist society. That’s where wonderful Gluebusters come in metaphorically, helping us do the job – challenging our prejudices and the lies that feed them – separating us from both.
Mostly though, we were talking about social glue’s importance in maintaining and rebuilding our solidarity. We heard about renewing the cities that more and more of us will live in globally; the role of museums in telling us truths about our lives and histories and the reimagined libraries that routinely challenge conspiracy theories and lies about ‘fake news’ by guiding us to the evidence and actuality.
We began with a poem from Katharine Macfarlane celebrating libraries – a joyous paean to all they do and offer. But sadly later, we heard more about their closure as part of the shift to cutting public services and deregulating the market imposed by prevailing neoliberal politics and ideology. Surprise, surprise, such closures are taking place most in areas of greatest deprivation and then there’s wonder why disadvantaged groups feel marginalized and seem so readily set against each other.
Predictably, there was talk about the damaging effects of funding cuts on policies and communities, but also much more attention was paid to a new normal for public policy and services. We need to be doing things differently in more equal and inclusive ways if we want to challenge rising feelings of alienation and neglect – and people clearly are. We heard from the horse’s mouth, from Éadaoín Lynch of the Scottish Book Trust and Giulia Gregnanin of Timespan in the Highlands ‘a meeting place between our past and our future’. Their emphasis was on efforts to inform, involve, engage, include, empower, coproduce and co-create with local people and groups, treating diversity with equality, guided by principles of social justice, addressing the local while seeking to connect with the global.
Here was a preparedness to take on the unresolved issues of our age, dismissed by populists as ‘woke’ but increasingly key to who we now are in times of massive change. So, there was reference to the legacies of colonisation – from the Highland clearances to Gaza – and to organized struggle, remembering the Scottish Herring Girls organizing a women-led strike in Great Yarmouth (near where I live!) in the 1930s. As the Q and A session highlighted these new approaches to cultural work, building on a new more equal personal politics, are pointing the way to transforming policy and formal politics in humanistic and sustainable directions.
This invigorating occasion brought me back to my own work on participation in politics, policy and professional practice, particularly in these times of rising uncertainty, division and distrust. My new book The Antidote* which addresses this and how we may combat it, highlights the importance of connection, just as this session did. It takes as its starting point the modernist call to ‘only connect’ articulated by writer EM Forster, poet TS Eliot, sociologist Richard Hoggart and many others through to the present. Significantly such arts and cultural figures took the initiative then, as the Scottish Parliament event suggests arts and cultural activity and initiatives are doing now.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned though, it is that such connection needs to be updated for the twenty first century. The emphasis of this gathering confirms that. We need to be talking about inclusive connection and involvement, which address the wonderful new diversity of our society – and building equal and inclusive alliances between our different organisations and movements to achieve it. Hopefully the glue will stick, not just as a starting point for further events from Culture Counts, but also for more new imaginative thinking for formal politics and public policy.
* The Antidote: How people-powered movements can rebuild politics, policy and practice https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-antidote