You’re very much in the vanguard of promoting post-capitalism. Have you given any thought to the role that political education can play in that transformative process?

I’ve given a lot of thought to our absence of economic education. Because as the former economics editor on the Channel 4 News and the BBC, I became aware of a strange thing. As a journalist, I initially valued the ability to tell people new things. Journalist training teaches you to run into a room and go “Hey everybody, guess what just happened?” But then people started to stop me and say they couldn’t make heads or tails of what was being said. That made me think, I should come off my egotistical high horse where you always want to tell people new things. It can be very useful to explain old things. That’s true in economics, and I think it’s probably also true in politics.

However, my fear in political education in an organised setting is that it inevitably becomes a means of social control. The form of conservatism we have now goes beyond trying to create a better society and says that the purpose of politics is the market. For them, the market is everything. For them, it’s the definition of human nature.

How do you think we should redress political education in schools?

If you gave me free reign to design a political education syllabus for A Level, I would take everybody down to Zad the airfield in Southern France that has been occupied by anarchists for more than 10 years, then I’d teleport them to Istanbul where you can’t have a Gay Pride march without getting your head beaten in, then I’d go to a village or a slum in Kenya, where it’s not immediately clear who is in charge. What you’re seeing is a very wide range of political institutions across the world. My fear is that political education would just highlight the House of Lords, the House of Commons and the Magna Carta. But I’d like to expose people to the extremely wide range of human practices that count as politics. I feel that the political education we currently have simply studies what is, but I also think we should be studying what ought to be and what our minds are capable of.

With this question of who runs the village, I feel that even in this village, most people don’t know who runs it. In my experience, most politicians don’t even know who is really in charge.

If democracy is what you’re worried about, a big democratic deficit is that today 70% of people don’t even vote in local elections. Local government has a certain limited amount of power. From that arena comes practice. If you can work local government, you can work national government. The less power this multi-layered state has, the more power corporations have. Napoleon once said “I found the crown lying in the gutter.”

It’s not obvious where it is, but look at the water regulators recently. In my eyes, one of the consequences of Thatcherism is this huge establishment of regulatory bodies that most people don’t understand and therefore don’t use.

I look at that like the state is becoming the economy. Neoliberalism claims that the state is shrinking and stands away from the economy. In fact, it becomes the economy. All the water companies in this country only exist as private entities and make a delimited and pre-arranged profit by arrangement with the state. They only have the ability to run a private corporation on top of the public infrastructure because the state regulates it in that way, and therefore we have a state created market.

Given that you want to empower people, to what extent do you think that understanding the existing systems and political engagement and campaigning should be a civic right?

I certainly think that it should be built into primary and secondary education. The formalities of politics should be taught, but then political education should go deeper and explore the subtexts, the secrets and what’s really going on.

I think we’re facing the most educated generation humanity has ever produced. I don’t bemoan the fact that many people don’t seem to know much about politics, because if they wanted to know then they could find out. The information is very accessible these days. But many people don’t want to learn about what happened before they turned eighteen or about the intellectual background of the West. I’m talking about educated people studying for degrees, it often doesn’t matter to them.

But if you set people challenges that were more relevant to their everyday lives; for example you look at Grenfell Tower, the building’s cladding was probably responsible for the spread of the fire. Now in Liverpool we currently have buildings with the same type of cladding within the private sector. People who bought their flats for 200 grand are now being asked by the leaseholders to pay a great deal more to replace the cladding. I’ve had people ring me up and say, “The press aren’t interested in this, my MP isn’t interested. Why is that?” The answer is power. This could be you, the person who built your house doesn’t care. How would you deal with that? Go to your MP, but what if the MP is sponsored by the builders union? “Oh you mean, corruption exists?” Yes, welcome to England. That’s the way I’d teach it. I’d look at real problems that are applicable to people’s daily lives, and how you can navigate the political landscape to try and solve them.

You can find out more about Titus Alexander's book, Practical Politics: Lessons in Power and Democracy here