Moranifesto

  Look again at what “hardworking” means—what politicians mean when they say it. It means “working two jobs if you have to.” It means “taking night shifts.” It means “working zero-hours contracts.” It means “relocating your entire family across the country if that’s where the work is.” It means “accepting whatever job you are offered at the job center, or having your benefits withdrawn.” It means prioritizing being a wage earner above your own well-being. It means saying, “That job would make me miserable, and ill—it means I will not see my family, and I will be anxious and withdrawn” is unacceptable.

  But given the above cost of people living miserable lives—and that’s before we calculate time off work, and the knock-on effects on loved ones’ health and ability to work, if they must stay at home and care for someone ill—there’s a fairly sizeable argument to say that people would be of more benefit to their country—or, at least, be a considerably smaller burden—if the onus was put on being a content and healthy citizen rather than a hardworking one. Plus, it allows someone in a low-paying job who is healthy feel they are “contributing” as much to society as someone in a high-paying job. It allows pride, and value, to be attached to things that are not just financial.

  So much of the NHS’s budget goes on what is, essentially, the medicalizing of social problems. Elderly “bed blockers,” repeat emergency admissions for the mentally ill, obesity, diabetes, the Friday night carnage of the pissed—all problems that could have been addressed, earlier down the line, with the spending of hundreds of pounds, now costing tens of thousands of pounds when they present to the emergency room and result in long-term admissions and expensive treatments. At the moment we are currently spending billions on fixing loneliness, depression, anxiety, and self-loathing, because there is no real value put on being a healthy and happy person—merely a “hardworking” one.

  The fact that we don’t have, at the forefront of our planning departments’ priorities, building estates, towns, and cities that work as brilliant machines to keep us healthy, and inspired, and happy is another depressing waste of time, and energy, and resources.

  Currently, we tend to dismiss the bland, monoculture architecture and planning of most twenty-first-century urban spaces as nothing more harmful than boring. But research conducted by cognitive neuroscientist James Danckert discovered that when people are bored, they don’t merely become dispirited. Instead, they register higher levels of cortisol—the stress-related hormone, which is linked to anxiety, strokes, heart disease, and diabetes.

  Boredom is also linked to increased involvement in risky behavior—gambling, drinking, and taking drugs. Suddenly, the high street of a depressed area, full of cheap liquor stores and betting shops, and the emergency room on a Friday night—a carnage of drunken, high people rolling in from eleven p.m. onwards—all seem part of the same story.

  But yet we still build cities that make the citizens ill, and cost the NHS billions.

  I would have the health and care services—both physical and mental—work as part of the consultation process on any sizeable building development—malls, town centers, housing. Have them help, from day one, to build cities that actively keep people healthy, stimulated, connected, and never too far from a public toilet.

  Recognizing that the BBC is just as important a part of Britain as our economy, our health, and our weather, and entirely removing it from political purview. No curtailment of the license fee—instead, the opposite: its expansion as an opt-in to everyone in the world, thus making it a truly global broadcaster.

  Acknowledging the past. I once spent a very interesting afternoon with the BBC historian Dan Cruickshank. At the time, I had a massive intellectual and genital crush on him, and was wearing a very low-cut top—in order to suitably convey this to him. Over the course of our conversation, he became gradually more and more discombobulated and sweaty—all, I believed, due to my repeatedly leaning forward, tittily, and saying, “So—tell me more about seventeenth-century bricks, Mr. Cruickshank.” Finally, he turned bright red and stood up.

  “Wow,” I thought. “I really am very powerful, sexually, right now. He’s going to take this to the bedroom. Yowsa.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Cruickshank said, leaning on a chair. “But I must go. I’m going to Iran tomorrow to look for the Tower of Babel, and I think my antimalaria shots are making me feverish. I feel most peculiar. Good-bye.”

  And he staggered away from me, my love, and my bosoms, in order to lie down with an ice pack on his head.

  However, before I destroyed him with my allure, he’d given me a brilliant, potted history of our country—one that has made me, subsequently, see everything through new, Cruickshank History Spectacles.

  In essence, Cruickshank said, pointing out of the window of the hotel we were standing in, whenever you see a beautiful, white Georgian building—the golden crescents in Bath, the stucco confections of London—these were buildings almost certainly built on slave money. In all those beautiful English novels, whenever a character has made his money in “the Indies,” that would almost certainly have been slave money, too.

  Ever since, when I am walking down a British street, this is what I see: the real cost of these beautiful buildings. It’s like having the receipts nailed to the door. Really, they might as well be built of bone—the white, white render made of crushed bone—because that’s the currency they were paid for in. Ravishing, but deadly—like white piles of sugar, or cocaine. We effected an astonishing piece of bad alchemy—turning incalculable suffering into things that make us swoon, and, in our rapture, never asking after their history.

  It’s rightly humbling to become aware of this—after all, when we see the Pyramids, we know that their awesome beauty was only possible because of immense cruelty. We know this about the buildings of the Aztecs—and, indeed, the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, currently being built in Qatar (current death toll: 1,200). And yet, in our Western cities, there are no lessons where we are given Cruickshank History Spectacles, and can see what we are made of.

  And to know what we are made of—how we came to be the privileged country we are today—is important. It is the perfect inoculation against insularity, jingoism, and that dumb, feverish brand of fuck-them-all patriotism we fear when we look at the rise of proto-fascist parties and the hard right. A little bit of history is the vaccine against misplaced superiority, and that unpleasant, festering, ill-informed sense that to be a Briton is to be innately superior.

  In terms of both race relations in our own country, and our foreign policy abroad, it would be healthy for everyone in this country to have a deep understanding of why we are, now, such a rich and advanced nation. We don’t need to become uselessly self-flagellating about it—the world will always be, to a certain extent, Game of Thrones, and when we started founding our Empire, we had different standards of morality, and different concepts of the value of humanity. We have been on a long road out of colonialism, slavery, witchcraft, child labor, feudalism, droit du seigneur, capital punishment, beheadings, and believing the sun revolved around the earth.

  But if we look at the deep anger and fear in both our own citizens of color—at risk of radicalization, feeling “other”—and the powerful distrust our foreign policy inspires in other countries, we could open up a new space for conversation by acknowledging that their sense of our history is very different from our own—and with good reason. Very, very early on in the game, we stole a huge advantage at the expense of other nations, and it would only be suitable, as a courteous nation, to admit this.

  And the sense of urgency in this matter—the need to talk honestly about the reality of history, and the origins of current economic social and economic power—is so much more noticeable in America.

  The first time I went there, when I was seventeen, I went to Seattle, at the height of grunge, to interview Courtney Love. It was a dazzling September day, and I stood on an intersection at nine a.m., looking down to the bay—surrounded by skyscrapers,
and the then-newfangled coffee shops.

  I expected to be blown away by being in America—home of rock ’n’ roll, Patti Smith, Studio 54, Truman Capote, Niagara Falls, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young singing in Laurel Canyon. I expected to feel the giddying thrill of a new continent bursting with invention, hope, and space.

  At the very, very least, I thought I’d be vibing off being in the city of Frasier. Frasier! With Niles! (“A latte—with just a whisper of cinnamon.”)

  Instead, all I could think about was what had been there 150 years ago. The forced relocations, and the death marches; the buffalo skulls piled twenty meters high.

  And another 150 years before that, to the east, boats were arriving with millions of stolen people—all being poured into founding this massive, roaring continental powerhouse that now, for better or for worse, sets the economic, military, cultural, and moral climate of the earth.

  I stood on that street corner and felt an unbearable sadness, a profound sense I shouldn’t be there, and the itchy embarrassment of being another liberal white girl basically going all Dances with Wolves when confronted with America. I went out, searched fruitlessly for a proper cup of tea, and then went back to my hotel room and read P. G. Wodehouse, and pretended I was back in Britain.

  Whenever I told the story afterwards, I always felt unbearably pious—“And that was when I realized America was built on genocide and slavery! I dunno if you guys ever knew that???”—and would have to couch it in terms of me being a massive dick.

  But then, twenty years later, when social media and Twitter blossomed into life, that feeling I’d had on the intersection of Second Avenue and Pike Street gave me an understanding of the sudden, superheated firestorms that would suddenly rage over race issues.

  America’s history lies, like a subterranean methane lake, under the thin crust of its present. The gas perpetually rises and, sparked by the slightest thing, ignites—burning everything around for days.

  No one is calling for the dismantling of America—or, indeed, Europe. But we do need to be aware. And awareness doesn’t need to be brutal, or abject, or alienating. Awareness can be like revelation—it can inform you, and uplift you, and motivate you. It can be the start of new and brilliant things.

  In this respect, culture is trying. In the last fifteen years, Hollywood—still the global teller of stories—has increasingly focused on telling the same story, over and over again, like some feverish monomyth begging to be unpicked; like a dream we desperately need to analyze. The classic Hollywood blockbuster repeatedly nags at the same tropes: The earth—precious, and familiar—is being attacked by alien forces with unfathomably superior weaponry and technology. The aliens seem not to have human emotions—they have simply come for our resources: be it oxygen, land, or flesh. They cannot be reasoned with—there is never a diplomatic solution to an action movie. It’s just simple, all-out war—with one side having to be annihilated.

  And this monostory does seem to be a desperate attempt at telling the story of the invasion of America and/or founding of European empires abroad. The aliens—with their weaponry and technology; no diplomacy, only annihilation—are playing the role of European invaders. And white male heroes play the role of the defending native populations. With the tiniest flick of the switch—just a small inversion of the tropes—our huge, entertaining, but increasingly repetitive and boring blockbusters could be retooled to tell our real history—as with the making of the long-mooted telling of the slave rebellion in Haiti (see “12 Years a Slave”).

  Not knowing our history is one of those problems that could be largely solved by culture—a couple of dozen TV shows/films/albums would tell the stories far better than any government initiative. But politics would have to do the groundwork in making sure there were enough people of color in positions of power, and with big enough budgets, to commission these projects in the first place. With Hollywood so incredibly white right now—94 percent of the Academy voting on the Oscars is white—culture cannot cure this problem without a very firm correcting redistribution of power.

  Again, we find that the answer to our problems is a fundamentally right-wing mind-set—letting people come up with their own solutions to problems—but one that needs a left-wing, statist push: making sure the playing field is level, and those in need are given the power, resources, and infrastructure they require to effect change.

  It’s almost like this theory I have about right-wing vs. left-wing being obsolete is a coherent theory.

  Complete protection of abortion rights (see “This Is a World Formed by Abortion”).

  Restoration of the Victorian drinking fountain network, in order to save the thirteen billion plastic water bottles thrown away every year. It’s not just an environmental concern—bottled water is five hundred times more expensive than tap water. Neither the planet nor ordinary people can afford for most water to be available only in nonreusable plastic bottles, when the Victorians had this problem licked in 1898.

  Business. Currently, too many of our big multinationals gain massive profits at the expense of the state: by paying the minimum wage, or placing employees on zero-hours contracts, they force their employees to claim top-up benefits/housing benefits simply in order to survive. This hugely inflates our welfare bills, while the multinationals continue to enjoy vast profits—which they then often don’t pay tax on, should they choose to register their businesses in tax havens abroad. At the moment, the only pressure against this kind of corporate behavior are ad hoc Internet campaigns, aimed at shaming the companies in question. And while I enjoy re-Tweeting a petition about Amazon or Tescoaid for six cancer wards, pensions for four thousand widows, and the new municipal swimming pool in Croydon! Yay, John Lewis! I would make paying your tax competitive. I would make it sexy. Yeah. John Lewis wanted to be taxed hard, all night long. I would do you, John Lewis.

  So . . . yeah. That’s what I think.

  I mean, that’s what I think right now. Who knows what I’ll think in six months, or a year. I hope I’ll think differently about some things—because I’ll have learned more about them. It would be mad if I didn’t. All political beliefs should be based on the understanding they will change, and improve. Planting your feet firmly in the ground at seventeen, or twenty-six, or forty-one, and saying, “This is what I will believe—FOREVER!” is the first sign of someone indicating that, at some point, they intend to stop thinking. I wouldn’t trust those people as far as I could throw them. And I have very poor upper-body strength. I call monkey bars “failure bars.”

  Let me be clear—even though I’ve written a manifesto here, if I were elected on a landslide victory, I wouldn’t walk into Parliament tomorrow and rigidly enact all of these policies. Unless someone Double Donkey Dared me, of course—which is, as we all know, the dare you cannot decline.

  No. What I’ve tried to do here is . . . start a conversation, instead. Open up a clearing in the woods, with very firm notices pinned on trees—“THIS IS A PLACE FOR POLITE CONVERSATION ONLY, THANK YOU” and “LET US HAVE A MORAL IMAGINATION ONCE MORE”—and then welcome everyone in who has that . . . restless feeling, too.

  If I began this by standing onstage, in a cape, intoning, “A change is going to come”—simply because it felt quite exciting—I’d like to end by making a speech a bit like the one Michael Sheen made in 2015—where he stood in the rain, passionately defending the future of the NHS.

  If you want to imagine I actually am Michael Sheen, absolutely feel free to. I do most of the time. It makes me fancy me.

  Many times in human history we have achieved extraordinary things, on impossible deadlines, while facing utter horror.

  During the Second World War—the defining historical event of the last century—the cross-discipline of state management and rapid technological advances allowed astonishing leaps: first on the battlefield—allowing us to end the rolling, mechanized charnel houses of the Nazis—and then in our homes, streets, and cities, as the planned implementation of social and
technological progress resulted in the most dizzying rises in living conditions ever recorded.

  We know that, with our backs to the wall—when we are under pressure—we, as a species, are capable of incredible cooperation across all spheres. Back then, no effort was too great, no plan too ambitious, no investment too much—as to put a limit on our expectations was, simply, to die: to see civilization crushed by fascism.

  Well, we are at war now. We are at war with our own unhappiness, and obsolescence.

  We’re at war with anxiety, and depression, and hopelessness, and apathy, and despair; we’re at war against the idea of millions of people waking up every day and being too scared to say who they are, or who they love, or what they think. We’re at war with the idea that the children in some countries must be sacrificed for the comfort of children in others.

  We’re at war with the terrible possibility we might get to a point in the not too distant future—maybe just ten years, almost certainly fifty—where we look at a problem we finally cannot solve, and go, “Oh Christ. We really fucked it. We really, really fucked it.”

  No one wants to be Charlton Heston crying over the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand. That is always a bad day in the “So—how did that all pan out?” factory.

  When someone says they cannot change these things, as their hands are tied—because of cataclysmic events in the economy, banking system, or commerce—then I would point out that these are things that were invented, by humans. They can be uninvented and reinvented a million times over—before breakfast, if necessary. They are merely systems born of ideas—not acts of God, or forces of nature, or physics. Once, they did not exist. If necessary, at some point in the future, they can not exist again. If they are not fit for purpose. If they are not to the ultimate, fast betterment of humanity.

  Because the job of politics is to defend and uplift and represent and improve the people—not lie helplessly between other competing forces saying, “If things were different, we would change things.”