Hoping Against Hope, Letters

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 and 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 But then came the moment when those stories came to feel not just outdated, but like ancient history.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 ... A world that though very far from ever being perfected - remains the closest my country has ever come to anything resembling social equity.

Ophelia
John Everett Millais (1829-1896)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND]

As the years passed, I began to feel that the whole matter of the past was becoming unmentionable, particularly in front of the young ... 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...

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 principles upon which it was founded...

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...

(Zadie Smith, The Guardian, 2024)

An impassioned, articulate and reflective view of British society, past and present.

Letters

I'm hoping against hope (we've been here before) that on Friday, the miasma of greed, self-centredness and downright stupidity will have evaporated and we will have a government whose fundamental purpose is to support, serve and improve the whole of the UK and not just to rip the lead off the roof and steal the last lightbulbs. A government that genuinely means to roll up its sleeves and sort out the mess.

I'm from the generation of free orange juice and cod-liver oil, smaller scale secondary schools that weren't businesses but educational establishments, and hospitals where you saw physiotherapists as soon as - and for as long as - you needed, where patients lay in wards, not corridors.

Watching Rishi Sunak talking about his lack of Sky TV finally made clear to me what Marie Antoinette meant about eating cake. Well, it's definitely time for a change - this country deserves some hope.

(Barbara Kay, Wallasey, Merseyside)

Zadie Smith's superb, angry and telling article speaks of the £570bn locked up in offshore accounts by British residents. Rishi Sunak bleats about the Ukrainian war as a drain on our economy, but in 1946, after the second world war, the labour government brought into being the welfare state (what quaint, longed-for words they sound now). Smith's vivid evocation of its destruction by self-serving Toryism hints at the huge amounts that Labour will have to find to put these great losses right, from what sounds like an empty purse - except it isn't empty.

The billions that should fund the welfare state have been creamed off by privatisation and tax giveaways to a voraciously rich yet miniscule proportion of our people. Keir Starmer, you need to open and release this treasure chest - it could achieve miracles.

(Bee Hepworth, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex)

Zadie Smith's wonderful, accurate, sobering but ultimately inspiring article has made me hopeful, and hopefully had the same effect on many more people. We cannot succumb to nihilism. We owe the next generation a fight against inequality and the restoration of a more moral and empathetic society.

(Rhiannon England, London)