Recipe for reforming Britain that’s mainly preaching to the converted

Rosamund Urwin reviews Zoe Williams's latest polemic, in which the Guardian columnist takes on most of the big political issues of the day
Rallying cry: Zoe Williams (Picture: Nick Cunard/Writer Pictures)
Rosamund Urwin2 April 2015

Get It Together: why we deserve better politics by Zoe Williams (Hutchinson, £14.99)

Zoe Williams’s new polemic doesn’t lack ambition. The Guardian columnist takes on most of the big political issues of the day — poverty, immigration, housing, impending environmental Armageddon — and proposes solutions. “It’s not good enough to say ‘I’m merely naming the problem’,” she writes. “Nobody would bother doing that if they didn’t think there was an answer.”

The picture she paints of the UK today is bleak. Wages are stagnating as house prices climb. One million people used food banks last year. Yet in the wake of the financial crisis, Williams believes politics “veered radically to the Right”. Decisions are now boiled down to “What’s cheapest?” The poor are blamed for their plight. The national obsession is growth at any cost. “What,” she asks, “is the point of growth, if the fruits of it are only delivered to the top?”

So if our politics is shifting Attila the Hun-wards, this is a Left-wing alternative. And there are lots of good ideas in this well-researched book.

To combat low pay, she proposes online unions to bargain collectively: “Look at what 38 Degrees and Change.org can achieve: imagine that transplanted to the world of work.” The best idea is to nick the approach of the Right: pass radical ideas off as par for the course: “The genius of the Right is that when they have a radical idea, they never say it — they just do it.” In Williams’s world, that would mean a massive programme of state house-building and a basic citizen’s income.

But this isn’t some dull political treatise — it’s well-written, with strong anecdotes. The most galling conveys the disconnect of the rich. On a play-date at the house of financiers, Williams searched for a food bin for her children’s scraps. The City types didn’t know what she meant; she explained the council used them to take away food waste. “Then what happens to it?” asked a currency trader. “Do they give it to the poor?” We have moved on from “let them eat cake” to “let them eat chicken bones”.

Williams also has some blisteringly damning lines. She succinctly sums up the Tory’s top-down reorganisation of the NHS: “They [the Conservatives] create chaos with new legislation then turn round and say, ‘It’s impossible to run this organisation. It’s in chaos!’” And the cherry-on-top of an excellent chapter on the environment is a none-too-subtle dig at James Delingpole: “Some articulate but fundamentally irrational man, educated beyond his intelligence (he always went to Christchurch)... disputing scientific evidence of which he has no understanding.”

So here’s my problem with Get It Together: it preaches too much to the converted. NHS-loving, Ukip-loathing Lefties. People like me. An editor at the publisher Hutchinson claims Williams “shows us that... it’s lunacy to be anything other than Left-wing unless you’re actually already an oligarch”. But lots of these people do exist, and they’re not mad. I rather wish Williams wanted to get some of them, if not on board, then at least thinking.

There’s the odd semi-error too. Williams describes 1996 and 2003 as when it was “no longer a given” that everybody could afford their rent and to eat. Surely, 1991 (recession) and 2001 (dotcom bubble bursting and 9/11) would be better choices? Then there’s a line on private equity that seems confused. “I know why private-equity firms buy companies that deliver care services: the stock price goes up, in the expectation that the service will be run more cheaply.” But if Blackstone and their ilk buy care home businesses outright, they wouldn’t be listed on the stock market to have a price.

Perhaps I’m nit-picking now. Certainly, if you are already sympathetic, it’s hard not to be stirred by Williams’s rallying cry. “You don’t lack power and nor do I. Irresistible power is when we all start going in the same direction. What do we want the future to look like?”

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £12.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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