Frankie Boyle - The Future of British Politics

It seems redundant to state that Frankie Boyle is a writer at the start of a book that he has written. His Wikipedia page no longer refers to him as pessimistic and he hopes that you, in your own life, one day experience this searing level of vindication. The mundane details of Frankie Boyle are available elsewhere. Let us instead note that he is currently doing a lot of yoga; has a laissez-faire parenting style; is very happy with his recent purchase of a massage gun; and his next holiday will be in Greece.

ALSO IN THE FUTURES SERIES

The Future of Serious Art by Bidisha

The Future of Men by Grace Campbell

The Future of Stuff by Vinay Gupta

The Future of Seduction by Mia Levitin

Where and who do we want to be?

How might we get there?

What might happen if we stay on our current course?

This is one of the five books that, together, comprise the first set of FUTURES essays. Each short book in the set presents a beautifully written, original future vision by an accomplished writer and subject expert. Read individually, we hope these essays will inform, entertain and challenge. Together, we hope they will inspire readers to imagine what might lie ahead, to figure out how they might like the future to look, and think about how, collectively, we might make the transition from here to there, from now to then.

Over the life of the series we aim to publish a diverse range of voices, covering as broad a view of the future as possible. We ask our authors to write in a spirit of pragmatic hope, and with a commitment to map out potential future landscapes, highlighting both beauties and dangers. We are hugely proud of each of the essays individually, and of the set overall. We hope you get as much out of reading and arguing with them as we have from the process of getting them out into the world.

This first set of FUTURES would have been impossible to publish without the enthusiastic support of Tortoise Media, Unbound and the subscribers whose names youll find listed at the back of each essay. Michael Kowalski, Tortoises Head of Product, introduced co-founder Katie Vanneck-Smith to the idea, and she made it happen. Annabel Shepherd-Barrons unparalleled strategic capabilities kept the project steady and on course. Matthew dAncona offered superb editorial guidance with extraordinary kindness and generosity of spirit, and Jon Hills designs for the book jackets are elegant perfection. Fiona Lensvelt, DeAndra Lupu and their colleagues at Unbound have proved wonderfully creative and flexible throughout.

This first set of FUTURES essays was commissioned in autumn 2019, in the midst of the Brexit saga, and edited in spring 2020, in lockdown, as Covid-19 changed everything. As we write, it looks unlikely that, by the time you read this, our lives will have settled into any kind of normal old or new. Still, argument, wit and enlightened thought remain amongst our greatest strengths as a species, and even during an era as stressful and disorienting as the one we are experiencing, imagination, hope and compassion can help us mine greater reserves of resilience than we might expect. We hope these essays can, in a small way, help us find some light at the end of the tunnel.

Professor Max Saunders, Series Editor

Dr Lisa Gee, Programme Director and Editor
May 2020

I finished this essay just before coronavirus came along and rendered it all as relevant to the zeitgeist as The Diary of Samuel Pepys . Ive left the text as it was submitted in late February 2020, as I think its instructive to see my breezy attempts to wish away the looming disaster; probably one of the few times Ive been in tune with the national mood. The year 2020 began with Australia on fire and a billion animals dead its sobering to think that will now be the feel-good story of the year. Remember at the beginning of the year when Rod Stewart lamped a security guard and Justin Bieber announced that he had Lyme disease? Dizzying times; it genuinely felt like the world was a wonderful place to be. For many of you, it will have been surprising to learn what was expected of you during an Apocalypse. You always wondered whether you would be fleeing; fortifying a bunker; or camping on a motorway roundabout. Turns out youre working from home. Trying to get a spreadsheet about body bags finished before the provisional deadline of your own death.

Mistakes have been made in the handling of the crisis. Like flying the Buckingham Palace flag at half-mast when the Queens not in, which is just an advert for burglars. In my local park, someone has tried to cheer people up by chalking You Got This! on the ground. Literally the last thing you want to hear in a pandemic. There have also been a variety of embarrassing attempts by famous people to boost morale. If celebrities want to keep our spirits up, they should accept that what would raise those spirits the most is to see a couple of them really lose it big time. Weve all developed our little coping strategies. One easy way to completely remove the urge to visit your family is simply to put up Christmas decorations.

Glaswegian men have found it trickier to stay two metres apart than most, what with so many unable to keep even a hundred away from an ex. Here, news of a pandemic seemed to energise the elderly: the streets were full of people who normally only leave their homes to vote for fascism. Before the lockdown, old people in Glasgow, apparently determined to flood the housing market with cheap bungalows, looked like they had formed a search party to go and find the coronavirus. It was sinister just to catch sight of an old person in the distance, much like the feeling you get when you see an antelope in a nature documentary and know its not going to end well. Im sure we all know fatalists from the older generation who are saying things like, If I get it, I get it. Theres no point trying to avoid it. Some of these people lived through the Blitz, and were presumably mental back then as well. While everyone was hunkered down in Anderson shelters in the dead of night listening to the Luftwaffe passing overhead, your grandad was probably up on the roof testing his Christmas lights.

What have we learned so far? Well, maybe best not to vote for people who think of you as a herd. The governments response to the crisis reminds me, more than anything, of that bit in Apocalypse Now when Kurtz asks, Are my methods unsound? and Willard replies, I dont see any method at all, sir. In early briefings Boris Johnson would pull a concerned face, to show that he is a serious person. Unfortunately, the face he pulls when he tries to look like a serious person is the sort of face that an actual serious person pulls to show that they are confused. In many ways, if the whole cabinet are killed by a virus just after their election victory, it will pretty much be the ending of The War of the Worlds . The designated survivor, Dominic Raab, who seems to instantaneously develop every symptom of the disease whenever hes asked to read out a press release, looks like the very man to lead us right over the lip of the volcano.

We will soon get back to full employment. As the governments lack of planning means anyone tested negative can spend ten-hour shifts blowing into the mouths of the infected as a human respirator. We re seeing exhibition centres in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow converted into temporary hospitals and morgues. Which has a certain logic: if youve ever been to watch a band at one, youll know theyre among the most sterile places in the UK. For many who dont get a call back from Tesco, there awaits a summer job bagging cadavers, and at the end of the shift being charged six quid for a short-measured pint of flat Carlsberg served in a plastic tumbler. We should be affording the NHS staff and patients a level of dignity in these worrying times. Its distressing enough to be told that youre being put on a ventilator; we shouldnt be adding to that by having the news broken by a doctor wearing a Spider-Man mask and boxing gloves.