Roger Hallam spent his final 11 days at HMP Wayland – a category C men’s prison in Norfolk – writing an 86-page treatise about the future of British politics. He handed me a copy when we met on a warm Tuesday afternoon at a flat in south London.
In Grasping the Enormity of the Moment Hallam lays out a grassroots blueprint for Your Party – the new left-wing movement currently being co-founded by Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn. The Extinction Rebellion founder’s pitch to the two Independent MPs is that if they follow his method, their new party will secure 20 per cent of the vote and the “Labour party will implode.”
In July 2024, Hallam was jailed, alongside four other activists from Just Stop Oil (JSO), for conspiring to disrupt traffic by having protesters climb over gantries on the M25. He was caught formulating this plan on a Zoom call by a journalist from the Sun, arrested and subsequently handed five years in prison. His sentence was later reduced to four years and he was released early on 14 August, and will now finish his sentence on tag. (A post on X by JSO declared on the day “Breaking news: ROGER IS FREE!”) This interview with the New Statesman is his first since leaving HMP Wayland – we spoke five days after his release.
“I’ve been to prison quite a few times since I was 19,” he told me, “I went three times when I was in the peace movement as a teenager. It was quite different then. But I have been three or four times since.” The year Hallam has just spent inside was his longest period of incarceration. “I’m sort of used to it,” he said.
Hallam, 59, is tall and slim, with a short, grey, low ponytail. He seemed tired when I met him, dressed casually in a green checked shirt, shorts and trainers. An electronic ankle tag was wrapped around his left foot. On the way to meet Hallam, I listened to his 2023 appearance on Nick Robinson’s podcast Political Thinking. It is a fiery back-and-forth in which Hallam attempts, several times, to turn the line of questioning onto Robinson.
Two years on – one of which was spent in prison – Hallam seemed quieter, more reflective, even nervous. But the conviction of his beliefs and objectives remains. “I’m a bit rusty, actually,” he said, “I got out of prison and slightly lost my confidence.” He described the year he spent at HMP Wayland as one of the best of his life – “I had the chance to read and write, which is my passion.” (Though he is keen to point out that this is not a universal experience for prisoners). As well as running regularly, Hallam read 100 books while imprisoned.
Of those he read, The Matter with Things by Iain McGilchrist and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis had the biggest impact. “I’m a New Statesman-esque intellectual. I like to read my books… now I’m full of slightly heady intellectualism,” Hallam said, chuckling (he is currently reading Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: a theory of political organisation by Rodrigo Nunes).
Naturally studious, Hallam devoted his time inside to develop intellectual, practical proposals for how Your Party should be run. And that is the crux of his latest book (“well, it’s more of an essay”), which – as he says in the first chapter – he began writing from his cell at “8.48am on Thursday 7 August”. Hallam writes as he speaks: with exclamations, giggling asides and long anecdotes. But the intention of this self-published pamphlet is clear – he is preparing the ground for a new left party.
When I asked Hallam what he plans to do now he is out of prison, he was unequivocal. “I am in service to the Corbyn-Sultana project,” he told me, “I have been part of an informal network of people who have been on the edge of that for a year or so.” To Hallam, who has provided the organisational brains of some of the largest acts of civil disobedience in the UK in the past decade, the creation of Your Party is enormously significant. He writes in his book: “Let me make a claim. I think that the Corbyn and Sultana announcement on creating a new movement/party is the biggest moment of our lifetimes. I need to be more clear. I think it can lead to a global political revolution.” This is bigger than XR, bigger than the poll tax riots, Hallam writes. Bigger than the international student uprisings of 1968. “It’s a massive rupture of momentum in the political space,” Hallam told me, excitedly leaning forward from his perch on the sofa. “Just because it hasn’t flowered yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t going to. There’s an 80 per cent chance it’s going to be the biggest political story of the year.”
In the four weeks since Corbyn and Sultana officially announced the founding of Your Party, 800,000 people have signed up to its website. Though these are not membership figures Hallam believes the speed and scale of interest is significant, and something to work with. “You put those things together, and I’ll go and do the maths, and I’ll turn you into the largest political party.” If Sultana and Corbyn follow his plan of action – Hallam argues they could win 20 per cent at the 2029 election – or more specifically, 12 million votes. (This ambition was first made public by Sultana, who told a Zoom call of trade unionists last month that Your Party should be aiming for between 20-25 per cent of the vote). “If you want a left party to get 10 per cent of the vote, you’ve already got it. It’s going to get you 30 seats. Who gives a fuck? All you’re going to do is let in Reform,” he said.
Hallam continues to think deeply about mass public organising. He is something of an expert in the field: XR’s last protest ‘The Big One’ saw 100,000 people descend on central London. His ideas are practical and strategic – diverging slightly from some of the other thinking currently being made public around how Your Party might function and operate. Grasping the Enormity of the Moment was in part a response to James Schneider’s interview in the New Left Review. “As soon as the left starts talking conventionally, they’re talking about something which is not precise,” he said, “so you know we can say ‘oh, we need community involvement’, but you’re not actually dealing with it socially, scientifically.”
In practical terms, this means a form of community organising bordering on events management. XR made heavy use of citizens assemblies – a form of deliberative democracy in which a random yet representative group of people are brought together to discuss an issue. Hallam points out that it is good that figures in and around Your Party have said that citizens assemblies will be used. But without a clear structure for how they will work, they risk becoming performative gestures. These events must be meticulously stage managed in order to achieve true and widespread reach.
“When Mrs Jones from the Wirral comes to that assembly, she needs to be met in 15 seconds with someone shaking her hand and letting her know she is valued,” Hallam told me. “She needs a cup of coffee and then she needs to talk to other people. If you do a really good assembly, 50 per cent of those people will go door knocking for you,” he said. “And if you put that through a spreadsheet, you’ve got like 20,000 door knockers in 15 weeks. They’ve shown in New York [with Zohran Mamdani] that that basically wins the election.” He adds: “the stuff about policy and leadership… you want to tend to it, but that’s not the real show. For the new left project, the real show is making organisational design sexy.”
This is his biggest critique of Keir Starmer, his inability – as Hallam characterises it – to understand human and social interactions. “Neoliberalism offers nothing,” he said. “That is why Starmer is such a disaster. Because he just treats everyone as a machine.” Hallam added: “We’re not functions of ideology. We’re emotional beings. And if you want to get the best out of people, you need to attend to their emotionality.” This, he points out, is how to tackle the persistent issue of small boat crossings. “You might have a problem with the boats, but it doesn’t go deep. You put them into an assembly, and they’ll go, ‘Oh yeah. Well, obviously it’s a problem with the rich and we should tax the rich,’” he said.
Hallam’s time in prison has not deprived him of his characteristic doomsday urgency (“Climate is basically Hitler”). He believes that the world will hit 2˚C of warming – smashing past the UN’s 1.5˚C target – in the next ten years. He blames the fact that tackling emissions has fallen to the bottom of the global priority list as the consequence of “extreme social repression”. Surprisingly, while he is clearly worried by recent developments in the government’s approach to protest, he accuses “the Labour party of putting people in prison”. He is clearly more concerned by what he perceives as a capitalistic power relationship within society that prevents collective action (“You’ve got to get a job etc”). The turning point, he says, will come when there is a climate disaster closer to home. “As an example, when 2,000 people die in a flood in Spain – you will likely get 2 million people protesting in London,” he said.
There is a streak of evangelical Christianity in Hallam’s ideas, and his approach to community organising. Mark 10:45 says Jesus came to “serve not to be served”. And Hallam repeats the notion that those involved in grassroots movements – whether that be XR, JSO or even the new left party – are in service. Their participation must not be driven for selfish gain, but rather to advance the resilience and prospects of others. Hallam was brought up in a Methodist household, and he points to the success of the Methodist movement in giving structure to the working class during the late 1700s when “25 per cent of London was pissed at any one point” as a good example of successful community organising. When I ask him how much an influence faith has had on him, he pauses. “That’s what socialism is. It’s secularised Christianity… We need a new language, which is participatory but ethical”.
The person whom Hallam thinks embodies this most readily in the current political moment is Corbyn. “That’s basically what Corbyn represents, right? Everybody knows he’s not an intellectual genius. He’s not a strategic Napoleon. He is a fundamentally decent bloke,” Hallam said, “and that’s what it’s got to be based on… That means we need to be humble, and we need to be in service.” For now, Hallam is keeping his head down, quietly organising a network of community groups and activists ready to mobilise as soon as Your Party gets off the ground. Corbyn and Sultana need only say the word, and Roger Hallam will be at their service.
[See also: My advice to Jeremy Corbyn]
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