The problem with politics: ‘Everyone wants to be the kids in the back seat’

Zoe Williams thinks you should love paying tax. The Guardian writer and author of Get it Together, a polemic on how politics is failing us, thinks it should be a source of social pride. "People really snort at you when you say that," she says. "Younger people think it's the most ridiculous thing ever."

In the book she quotes the late political theorist Tony Judt on the subject: “No one has come up with a better way of aggregating individual desires to collective advantage.”

But more on tax later. In Get it Together Williams outlines all the ways contemporary politics is failing (in Britain but also much more generally). She looks at poverty, healthcare, the property market, privatisation, education, immigration, banking and the environment. That's a lot of stuff. "It does seem incredibly arrogant," she says. "How could anybody know enough about tax, immigration, finance and privatisation to say anything? In the end, the point of the book is to say to everybody that we're allowed to talk about this stuff because it affects all of us. Just because you're not an expert in privatisation does not mean you're not affected by [it]. Just because you're not an expert in tax doesn't mean you're not affected when Vodafone doesn't pay it."

Williams believes that, to paraphrase Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang, economics and politics are too important to be left to economists and politicians. She talks about the ways people are disqualified from having a point of view by dint of their class or alleged complicity in the system; the notion that “everyone is equally guilty” (or that, perhaps, “we all partied”). “There’s an idea that anyone who has bought a house is as guilty as RBS for extending billions in cheap credit and that anyone who has a car is as guilty as somebody who owns an oil field,” she says. “It’s a way of dampening down debate. If you’re not completely pure you’re meant to shut up.”

‘Class can’t be co-opted’

When she was younger she did shut up, sidetracked by an idea prevalent in the 1990s that class and equality were no longer issues. “It was complete bullshit,” she says. “In the end, class can’t be co-opted. If you were a woman or black or bisexual, whatever it is, capital could always incorporate you into its vision, but it cannot incorporate your class because it can’t survive without treating some people quite badly while other people live off their work.”

This is not, she says, how people want the world to be. She regularly travels Britain talking to people at gatherings, events and demonstrations for her weekly Saturday Sketch in the Guardian, and she finds that most people want to change the world for the better.

“But everybody thinks that everyone else is more right-wing than them,” she says. “They say, I don’t want to sound like a communist, or I don’t want to sound old-fashioned, or I don’t want to sound like a lefty, but I think there’s more to life than money; I don’t want to see my children ground down to the lowest wages; or I would rather my house wasn’t worth so much if it meant other people could afford to live.’ People are always a bit apologetic.”

This is because the political centre has drifted to the right, she says, with most parties enamoured with the “profit motive” and happy to demonise those on social welfare. “That’s the centre now,” she says. “Anyone who points out that it wasn’t the poor who created the recession, that it was the rich, is seen as extreme.”

Williams prefers a more empowering narrative, partly harking back to the more ambitious collectivist politics of postwar Britain. “What we need to do is rediscover that sense of ambition, [that sense] that your nation is a project, not just a place you happen to live.”

She knows this is easier said than done. Take the tax issue, for example. “I understand why a young person would say, ‘Why on earth am I paying this much on my 13-grand job when there’s no sign that the burden is being shouldered equally?’

“The problem with tax has gone hand in hand with our distrust of politicians, and I can’t in good faith tell you that you’re wrong to distrust politicians . . . So it’s about drawing accountability back to your local environment. If revenue-raising was much more localised and there was more of a sense that the people asking for our tax were the people we knew and voted for – and for a reason, not just because they weren’t as bad as the other guys – I think we would find it much easier to give up our tax gladly.”

She also feels that governments need to “divest out of working with anti-social companies”. In the UK context, she specifically mentions the contractor G4. “They should not be buying services from businesses and contractors who do not behave in a pro-social way . . . If we had a social imperative in social spending, that would remake the corporate landscape overnight.”

She’s impressed by new, popular left-wing movements across Europe (including the anti-water charges and debt-cancellation campaigns here) and new, more democratically minded business models, such as peer-to-peer lending (she mentions the peer-to-peer lending company Zopa) and business crowdfunding (she namechecks two energy-focused crowdfunding companies, Trillion and Abundance).

She worries about the seeming inescapability of “financialisation” and thinks we should strive to have our values represented in our financial choices. “I have all my money in wind farms,” she says, cheerfully. “It’s not much, but there you go.”

Hustled out of our inheritance 

In Get it Together Williams spends a lot of time explaining how citizens have been hustled out of their collective inheritance by the super-rich and ends by entreating her readers to go out and invest time (and, if they have it, money) in the issues that are important to them.

“[People think], Some day my prince will come, that the right party will come along and we’ll fall into its arms and vote for it and everything will be fine,” she says. “But democracy isn’t going to work like that any more. Everyone wants to be the kids in the back seat with the parents driving, but that means the people with the real political engagement will be the lobbyists and the vested interests who change the landscape in their favour.”

She’s optimistic. She thinks things can change for the better and are changing. She observes that anything that doesn’t resemble how things are already done is typically dismissed as “radical” by those who benefit from the status quo. She says: “Whenever you hear an idea that is radical and frightens you, look at the world as it is and think, It would be really hard to mess things up more than they’ve already been messed up.”

Get it Together: Why We Deserve Better Politics by Zoe Williams is published by Random House