Zoe Williams - Get It Together: Why We Deserve Better Politics

Contents

Why cant you buy a house?
Does poverty still exist?
Has the NHS had its day?
Will your kids be able to afford a degree?
Is it too late to avert the apocalypse?
Who got us into this mess anyway?

We all want the future to be fairer and happier. Lets Get It Together.

We dont have to wait until we have permission for change. Its easy to feel powerless, but you dont lack power, and nor do I. Irresistible power is when we all start going in the same direction.

If you have a full-time job and still worry about shelter, food and warmth, then there is something wrong with your employer, your housing market, your food supply, your utilities ownership structure, or most likely, all four. A state in which people cannot afford necessities is not a lean, competitive one, it is a primitive, failing one. Its not enough to sit back and watch as our NHS slides away from us; as the young and low earners are forced out of London; as the richest 100 people in Britain have as much wealth as the poorest 30%.

We are the same people that created the NHS, that abolished slavery and child labour, that brought in National Insurance and fought for our civic spaces and civilised laws. We are as generous and fair as we have ever been. In mercenary, mean-spirited times, collectivist and ambitious ideas have to be expressed as often as possible. We can have a fairer and happier future. We just have to Get It Together.

I am forty-one, I have two children and a husband and I live in London. Ive been a journalist at the Guardian for fourteen years, writing columns and features, and being constantly surprised as everything global finance, climate change, social fragmentation, inequality always turned out to be exactly as dicey as one or other of my colleagues had invariably warned. I have also written for womens magazines including Marie Claire, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Good Housekeeping, Red, In Style and Grazia. Before that, I was a journalist at the Evening Standard, smashing the patriarchy, one bar review at a time.

What Not to Expect When Youre Expecting

The Madness of Modern Parenting

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Hutchinson
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA

Hutchinson is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright Zoe Williams 2015

Zoe Williams has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published by Hutchinson in Great Britain 2015

www.randomhouse.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781473518520

ISBN 9780091959012

This book is dedicated to my mother, Gwen

If you can do a full-time job and not be sure at the end of it that you can afford shelter, food and warmth, then there is something wrong with your employer, your housing market, your food supply, your utilities ownership structure or, most likely, all four. This is a fact that is at least as old as the Industrial Revolution. A state in which people cannot afford necessities is not a lean, competitive one; it is a state that is primitive and failing.

(Deep breath.) My names Zoe and Im middle-class; through and through, not even upwardly mobile, with a working-class hinterland. I dont worry about heating, because my wages are high and my housing stock is sound, and I dont worry about housing, because Im 41. Yet the 15-years-younger me cannot afford what I could at the turn of the century. And in 2030 she will not, if we continue in this direction, live as I do. An unequal society that keeps afloat on the hardship of a solid bed of poverty is bad in its own particular way, but thats not what were looking at here.

There was a way of living that we used to consider normal: we all went to school, some of us went on to university; we tried hard, though we didnt make a big thing of it. We didnt have to justify every second of education, or even every term, by the employable skill it delivered. Then we came out with a degree, got an entry-level job a job that we got paid money for, by the way, even though we were inexperienced and hoped to be earning about 30 grand by the time we were around 30. Some people would then peel off, others would stall. The understanding of what it was to be middle-class was that youd open a pension pot, start saving for a house and buy one, then have kids when you were relatively secure. In fact this was the understanding of what it was to be normal: whether you went to university or not, even the young deserved to be paid; just because youre under 25 doesnt mean you bring no value to the workplace, or that you can live on air. Even non-graduate jobs should have some progression up the ranks, given that you get better at them. The aristocracy is the only place Ive ever witnessed unemployment as a lifestyle choice, yet the aristocracy remains fixated on the idea that its how we would all live, if we could. I must say, it doesnt make them very happy, but they get by.

What else did we all think? That you should be able to retire at 65. You should be able to afford your own house or, if you couldnt, you should be able to rely on the stability of your rented house, be able to afford it, as well as be able to feed your children on the income that you make from working full-time. Even though there have been times in recent history 1996, 2003 when these things were no longer a given for everybody, you wouldnt have found any of this promised in a political manifesto. It would have been like promising freedom of religious belief, or clean air. These things were as natural, observable, inevitable and proper as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

These expectations, to a graduate, a student or a NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) today, must read like the claw-game in an amusement arcade: they know how its meant to work; they know that, if you put the coin in, concentrate, have a bit of luck and perseverance, you should get the prize; but they also know that its rigged. Nobody believes in any of these truths any more, for the simple reason that they are no longer true. Wages have stagnated at every point on the pay spine, except for the very top. Jobs are now very insecure; only one in 40 new jobs is full-time. Average house prices have risen to ten times average salaries. Exactly how much you could save for a pension, if it took until your forties to pay off your student loan, is a moot point.