A Rebel with a Cause

Ben Phillips, author of How to Fight Inequality and builder of social justice coalitions across the world is, by his own cheerful admission, a “posh white bloke”: London private school, Oxford University, a family background in advertising.  

He has spent his life turning that elite training against the world that gave it to him – driving campaigns to hold the rich and powerful to account, through his work as a leader in national and international NGOs, social movements, and the UN. 

Ben Phillips combines the work of organizing with the work of narrative building and sees them as inseparably interconnected. In Berlin, his research is on how stories can perpetuate social stagnation or open up social progress. He believes in the power of active hope: At a time of fraying multilateralism and rising intolerance, he contends that progressive internationalism can still win. 

Ben Phillips was born in London in 1976. His father ran marketing for the company that became GlaxoSmithKline; his mother was a nurse. His father was Anglican, his mother Catholic. “What I was processing as a child was the contradiction between the values of love that we learned on Sunday and the society of greed and privilege that I saw at school Monday to Friday.”  

At St Paul’s, the nearly 500-year-old, all-boys private school in London he attended, most of his teachers and classmates held a view of Britain that he could not share. It was the height of the Thatcher era, which scaled back the welfare state, dismantled the unions, and privatized public goods. “Thatcher was a pin-up girl for almost all the other boys. I was one of a small minority who said that what she was doing was breaking society apart.”  

What he was learning to see, even then, was how wealth secures itself. “Money sloshing downwards through a political system shapes that system,” he would later write. The concentration of wealth, and the confidence in privilege that goes with it, cement a story about who belongs and who does not, and that story takes on a force of its own. His conclusion as an activist: change the story a society tells about itself, and you change what its power is allowed to do.

Ben Phillips's schoolboy rebellion met its biggest test in his final year at school in 1992/1993: people in the UK were following the negotiations in South Africa to end apartheid, and most of the boys, parents and teachers at St Paul's still sided with the white regime. "Look, Phillips," one classmate said – surnames only, even among the boys –, “it's all right for you because you won't have to suffer the consequences. I've got family there." 

Ben Phillips, among the few who supported Mandela, answered on the spot: He would go to South Africa and teach in a Black township. “I was making this up. And then, like determined teenagers do, I went and organized it and did it. He backed me into a corner in which I made an absurd commitment that I then fulfilled.” 

Aged 18, Ben Phillips became the only white resident in Mamelodi, a large township on the edge of Pretoria. He lived with an African family, taught, joined the ANC, heard Mandela speak, met Desmond Tutu. He learned how democracy had been won; how organized people had overcome the apartheid state. He also watched the new democracy’s limits – rubbish uncollected in the township while it was cleared three times a week in the white suburbs – and witnessed the start of the HIV crisis.  

“I was literally rewired by the experience”, he says. “After people opened their homes, took the time to teach me and share with me their life stories, there was just nothing I could do with the rest of my life other than social justice.”  

Back in the world he had come from, he went up to Oxford to study history: “History is about how change happens. That’s the work that I do.” What followed was a career in activism, fighting inequality across the world by working on the dynamics of privilege and power he now knew from both sides. He held senior roles at Save the Children, headed campaigns and policy at Oxfam and ActionAid, co-founded the Fight Inequality Alliance and was director of communications at UNAIDS.  

“We’re in a vicious spiral in which wealth amasses power and power amasses wealth, to the detriment of all of us and to the detriment of democracy and decency and dignity,” he says. “But we don’t need to stay stuck in that doom loop. Together, we can build societies that work for everyone.” His critique of power spares not even his own NGO world: “Charity is a form of sharing without renouncing power,” he says. “Saviorism saves no one. Progress comes from people working together as independent equals.” 

Today, Ben Phillips heads the Public Good Narrative Project of the Global Cooperation Institute, which fosters new stories of shared purpose among societies. Narratives shape what a society believes is possible and they determine what policies are put in place, he says. After World War II, politics was shaped by the story that peace and prosperity depended on cooperation: Welfare states, the United Nations, multilateralism, international law – had been the result of the realization that “competition between people and nations got us destruction.”

Then in the late 1970s, “a new story came: the state is the problem,” he continues, “privatization, monetarism, deregulation, getting rid of workers' rights all followed from that.” Following the 2008 financial crash, the “privatization story” should have been exposed as a “massive lie,” he argues. Yet instead, the right replaced it with a narrative of fear: “Outsiders threaten us, we need to put our own people first.”

“What we need is a new story called Public Good – remaking the idea of cooperation for the 21st century,” Ben Phillips says. “Cooperation is in our interest, between and within countries.” And then he reiterates: “The policies follow the story, not the other way around.” 

These dominant frames are what he comes to Germany to investigate. Germany, he says, once told itself it would thrive in a thriving world, yet that confidence and openness have given way to fear since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, two Trump presidencies and resentment about migration. He sketches a shrinking circle of belonging: first, you are afraid of Russia or America or countries to your South, and then inclusion shrinks. “And then it's people who live or worship or dress differently, speak up about rights, or don’t seem deferential enough. Everyone starts to be a threat."  

At its crudest, this story is held by the AfD, he says, “but add water to the AfD story, and you hear similar things from some Christian Democrats and even some Social Democrat politicians.” The consequence of this fear-driven story is Germany and Europe shrinking from international cooperation, respect for international law, acceptance of migration and the social contract. Ben Phillips is not downbeat, however. His focus is on how to help shape a new story.