‘Here comes the sun’: Zadie Smith on hope, trepidation and rebirth after 14 years of the Tories

wenty-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.”“It just doesn’t add up. I mean, if you didn’t have any money – then how’d you go to that fancy university?”I will never forget the gasp that went around that Barnes & Noble.

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 youBut these days I think that historical nostalgia should not be the sole preserve of the right. The left can also make use of it.

Going about the place giving readings, I meet a lot of young people and a lot of old people. A lot of black people and a lot of white people and a lot of brown people. A lot of straight people and a lot of queer people. Just a lot of everybody, in fact. It makes me happy that my books attract such a cross-section of people, and I love talking to them.

During my tenure in this self-appointed role of Ancient Mariner, sometimes I’d ask myself if I was irrationally attached to a nostalgic politics more suited to the past than the present. It’s true enough that I believe there are many things in’s Labour party that are worth revisiting and reviving, but I feel I am, in my nostalgia, at least relatively clear-eyed about what it is I miss.

That’s the dark secret about this version of Conservatism: it doesn’t even work. That’s the joke of it all. What we have at this point is an unstable and dangerous mix of Thatcherite ideologues – determined to finish the job of dismantling a postwar social compact they despised from its inception – and shysters whose short-term thinking is so profound that they haven’t even the political will or energy to turn Britain into that fabled, deregulated paradise-for-some: “Singapore-on-Thames”.

Source: Healthcare Press (healthcarepress.net)

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