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2 months ago
6
Twenty-four years ago, when I was 24, I did my first reading in an American bookshop. At the end, in the question-and-answer bit, a middle-aged lady with a disgruntled look on her face put her hand up: “Yeah, I don’t get it.”
I asked her what she didn’t get.
“It just doesn’t add up. I mean, if you didn’t have any money – then how’d you go to that fancy university?”
Now it was my turn to be confused: “Um … well, it was free.”
“Whaddya mean? Like a scholarship?”
“No. It was just free for everybody. Our taxes pay for it.”
I will never forget the gasp that went around that Barnes & Noble. So I kept going: “And I didn’t pay for accommodation, either – we couldn’t afford it, so Brent council gave me a full grant. Oh, and then my little brother got run over by a truck during my first year and the NHS rebuilt his entire right hand – for free!” More gasping. I genuinely thought some of the older members of the crowd were about to have a heart attack, which would of course have been a pretty expensive affair – for them.
Oh, I used to have a lot of fun with my American audiences back in the day. Telling my quirky tales of functional healthcare and education systems free at the point of use … But then came the moment when those stories came to feel not just outdated, but like ancient history. Or, more specifically, like a fairytale about a lost world, the postwar world, in which even a Tory like Churchill saw the need for a government that supports its citizens “from the cradle to the grave”. A world that – though very far from ever being perfected – remains the closest my country has ever come to anything resembling social equity.
As the years passed, I began to feel that the whole matter of the past was becoming unmentionable, particularly in front of the young. It sounded like the kind of generational taunting I remember despising when I had to take it from the 60s crowd: hitchhiking in the Himalayas on a £20 budget, practising “free love” minus the shadow of Aids, etc.
Who wants to hear this stuff? Who wants to hear about decent social housing, free education and world-class medical care when you can’t pay the rent, the neighbourhood school is failing and you haven’t seen a dentist for four years? I kept my fond memories of a functioning country to myself.
But these days I think that historical nostalgia should not be the sole preserve of the right. The left can also make use of it. We can remind ourselves that a more just society is possible, if only because a few of the necessary conditions have at various moments actually existed upon this Earth, and in the not-so-distant past. With this in mind, I have begun thinking of the circumstances of my youth not as a fairytale or as an impossible fantasy, but as a real-life thing that did happen and might happen again, under the direction of a Labour party committed to the radical principles upon which it was founded.
You should think of yourself (I said to myself) as something like the Ancient Mariner, just repeating over and over your tale of woe, in the hope that the next time the big bright bird of potential equity flies past the ship of state, we might remember what it looks like, and what it can do, and not let any Tories or neoliberals rush up on to the deck to shoot it down.
This Ancient Mariner metaphor stood me in pretty good stead until I settled in the US, around 2010, returning 10 years later to a Britain I barely recognised. At this point, I became Rip Van Winkle. The list of things that have boggled my mind in the past four years is too long to recount here, but the final straw came just a few weeks ago, while I was washing up. The radio was on. A government spokesperson was extolling the virtues of conscription. Where else (asked the spokesperson) can people of different classes and races and genders meet each other on a more or less equal footing and pursue a common goal? Where else in modern-day Britain can community be fostered and encouraged, and people allowed a space in which their human capacities, whatever they may be, can flourish? Where else, I ask you, where else?
I couldn’t work out if this spokesperson was so dense that he truly couldn’t think of an alternative answer to his own query, or if this was one of those very unfunny comedy skits you sometimes find yourself listening to when your hands are otherwise occupied with soap suds. But no: he was 100% serious. The thought that a well-funded state school would provide all of the above had truly never occurred to him. And then I realised: oh Jesus, if things carry on as they are, one day he’ll be right.
Given what his party has been doing to the schools, the hospitals, the public services, the libraries and public housing, one day the army will be the only place where Britons of different classes will ever experience each other and the possibility of human flourishing. This guy wasn’t describing a policy he wanted enacted, not really. No, he was describing a dystopian reality that may yet come to pass.
Going about the place giving readings, I meet a lot of young people and a lot of old people. A lot of black people and a lot of white people and a lot of brown people. A lot of straight people and a lot of queer people. Just a lot of everybody, in fact. It makes me happy that my books attract such a cross-section of people, and I love talking to them. Of course, conversation is by its nature anecdotal – and a novelist is not a pollster – but it is my very strong sense that, nationally speaking, the end of a tether has been collectively and definitively reached. And at the end of that frayed tether, I don’t hear culture war debates or fears that billionaires are going to leave the country if business taxes go up.
Housing. Education. Healthcare. That’s what people talk about. Young people who have to pack up all their stuff every few months to move from one overpriced fleapit to another. Desperate, frazzled, working-class parents stunned to realise their rich counterparts now think it reasonable to “game the state system for a year or two” so it looks better on their kids’ university applications. People who know people who have died waiting for ambulances. People whose relatives died of Covid while Boris Johnson was partying. People queueing for my own local food bank, whom I recognise, whom I went to school with. Adults moving back into their childhood bedrooms, or out of town, or on to the streets.
As far as I can tell, the people I meet when I’m out and about span the political spectrum from radical leftists to small-C conservatives. But whether they want to burn it all down or try to preserve and improve Britain’s rich cultural and institutional history, not one of them cares to live another month being “governed” (in this context, scare quotes are essential) by this particular group of high-rolling chancers, who do not seem to have a thought in their heads besides their own and their donors’ enrichment.
Everybody is so, so tired. They’ve seen Conservative parties come and go, but these Conservatives are something else, as the centrist Tory Rory Stewart discovered when he tried to bring his conserving ideals to a party that barely understands the meaning of the word. These are not your 18th-century Tories. They’re not even your 20th-century Tories. These people are sheer ruination. They have bankrupted whole cities with their austerity measures, most notoriously Birmingham, slashing its budget by hundreds of millions since 2010. Low wages have plunged 900,000 British children into poverty.
This is the party that first plotted the piecemeal privatisation and hollowing out of the NHS and this is also the party that has accelerated its dismantling to such a frightening degree that it appears to have spooked itself. After all, people dying on waiting lists is very bad optics indeed and, pragmatically speaking, will probably lead to a trouncing at the general election. And just when they were so close to the finish line! When the long-awaited, unimaginably lucrative windfall of a privatised service was about to fall into the laps of all their good friends in the private healthcare companies, turning millionaires into billionaires!
Making Millionaires Billionaires. That’s really the slogan these guys should be running on. In a very real sense, it’s their only legacy. First, they succeeded in normalising the idea of a multimillionaire prime minister. Then they tried to make the argument that calling any attention to those multimillions amounted only to “the politics of envy”. Though perhaps they’re right. Certainly, anyone who has to deal with exploding energy bills, crumbling schools, food insecurity, poisoned water, hospital waiting lists and rapacious landlords is pretty envious at this point of the class of people for whom these problems will always remain mere newspaper headlines: a permanent oligarchical class, presently represented at the highest level of government, who live in an entirely different world.
During my tenure in this self-appointed role of Ancient Mariner, sometimes I’d ask myself if I was irrationally attached to a nostalgic politics more suited to the past than the present. It’s true enough that I believe there are many things in Sidney Webb’s Labour party that are worth revisiting and reviving, but I feel I am, in my nostalgia, at least relatively clear-eyed about what it is I miss.
Over the past 14 years, by contrast, we have been afflicted with a Tory party that claims to be nostalgic about the Thatcherite 80s, but in reality seems to want to return us all to a medieval feudal state. And the problem with a radically unequal country is not that it sparks a politics of envy, but that it doesn’t even work on its own terms. Inequality on this scale is not especially good for business – or rather it is good for so few businesses that its effects are practically invisible to 99% of the population.
Inequality has also proved ruinous for culture, universities, the cities, the country, farmers, teachers, doctors, the police, the working classes, the lower middle classes and, at this point, even a fair whack of the rich middle class, who find themselves obsessing over their video doorbells, imploring their neighbours to chip in for private security on nextdoor.com and sounding deranged as they complain about being potentially priced out of a private school system that more than 90% of people will never attend.
That’s the dark secret about this version of Conservatism: it doesn’t even work. That’s the joke of it all. What we have at this point is an unstable and dangerous mix of Thatcherite ideologues – determined to finish the job of dismantling a postwar social compact they despised from its inception – and shysters whose short-term thinking is so profound that they haven’t even the political will or energy to turn Britain into that fabled, deregulated paradise-for-some: “Singapore-on-Thames”. No, they’re too busy having lockdown parties or making secret millions off PPE contracts or betting on the date of the general election. They’re a whole new breed – and the good thing about that is their old defence tactics no longer work.
I’m afraid the papers aren’t going to swing it for you this time, guys. People have eyes. People have children. People pay rent. People go to the shops. People get sick. People go to work. The damage you have done is everywhere and in plain sight. All you have succeeded in achieving this time round is keeping the environment off the agenda entirely, a truly shameful elision in which both of the main parties have colluded.
But look outside: here comes the sun. The very intense sun. And come October (after the fires but just before the floods), perhaps it will be time for the party of the people to revisit its £28bn green deal. “But who will fund it?” cry the papers. And for my next sentence I will now type the startling fact that an estimated £570bn is being held by British residents in overseas tax havens.
Why am I writing all this? Even the dogs in the street know all this. I am writing it because in my imprecise novelist way I sense a strange, nervy mating ritual going on between the country and the Labour party, strongly reminiscent of the circle-jerk of contemporary dating, and in the spirit of radical openness I want to bring it out of the shadows and into the open air.
We keep anxiously checking our phones. Is this Labour party playing it cool? Or are we coming on too strong? Will it perhaps express its true feelings later? When it says “business”, does it really mean “renationalise the trains”? Or does it truly believe we’ll only vote for it if it keeps whispering sweet nothings to us about national security? Doesn’t it get how openly desperate we are? Oh, you can drive yourself crazy trying to project yourself into the minds of Labour MPs. One actually said to me recently: “But Zadie, we don’t want to get people’s hopes up …” Sorry, mate: my hopes are up. Because, unlike the many millions of despairing young people who have lived their whole adult lives in this state of ruination, I am the Ancient Mariner, and I know this is not the way things have to be or have always been.
Of course, like everyone, I am trepidatious. Maybe the Labour party threw that flirty word “change” into its manifesto in a casual, teasing way, like when someone texts: “U up?” Well, Labour party, I’m not even playing it cool. My answer is: “YEP V MUCH AWAKE LET’S DO THIS.” (If I’d had a phone and been alive in 1945, this is what I would have texted Clement Attlee.)
Now, some on the right will tell you that the big differences between 2024 and 1945 are thorny matters like “the economic realities of a globalised world” or “mass migration” or the 2008 financial crash or even (when they’re feeling honest) the own-goal of Brexit. Meanwhile, some on the left will sigh and explain that what happened post-1945 represents the kind of radical change that is only really possible after a ruinous world war. Well, 14 years of this government have created a situation impressively close to the aftermath of war: the immiseration of millions. Of course, nobody has all the answers to our thorny problems, but before we can deal properly with any of them, we will first need a government that at least identifies the purpose of government as being in the service of the people.
“But nothing will change after 5 July!” You hear that one a lot. I can’t agree. The crucial difference will be the presence, however faint, of something that has been largely absent these past 14 years: governance itself. Because that really is the weirdest tale of them all: the one about the little sea-faring country that found itself being run by a bizarre subset of people who do not actually believe that government should serve the people – yet still insisted on forming one. Who felt virtually no responsibility towards the people they “governed”. Who treated their government posts as mere stepping stones to more remunerative work in the private sector.
I know it all sounds like experimental fiction, but all of this actually happened! Here! They really did take over the ship of state, shoot down the albatross and then sail out upon wild and unregulated seas, during which harrowing journey we all got a horrifying glimpse of the prospect of “Singapore-on-Thames”. But nobody on this island wants to go any further in that direction. No sir. Not one of us. At least, nobody who doesn’t have a green card, many other passports and an offshore account. Roll on 4 July!
English (US) ·