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Zoe Williams: keenly aware that no one likes a preacher.
Zoe Williams: keenly aware that no one likes a preacher. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
Zoe Williams: keenly aware that no one likes a preacher. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

Get It Together by Zoe Williams review – a compelling call to political arms

This article is more than 8 years old

The Guardian writer’s bid to combat voter apathy and mobilise the left is laced with humour and insight

Apathy is now the big winner at general elections: in 2010, more than 16 million people who were eligible to vote chose not to, with turnout lowest among the young and the poor. Fewer and fewer of us see the mainstream political parties as our salvation, with less than 1% of the British electorate counting themselves as a member of the Conservative, Lib Dem or Labour parties.

So what new forces should fill this vacuum? Zoe Williams’s Get It Together, a whistlestop tour of today’s great leftwing causes, offers a clue. The usual criticism of books like this is that they revel in gawking at our problems, but make their excuses and leave when it comes to finding solutions. But Williams doesn’t wimp out, even when the answers are partial and imperfect: “Waiting for a saint appeals to a kind of leftwing purism, which has a lot in common with eco-purism (do nothing, unless you can do everything), but it’s suffocating, and defeatist, and a waste of democracy.” There are any number of campaigns and collectives worth your time. You just have to be willing to muck in with other people and to expend a little more effort than signing an online petition.

First things first, though. What do we need to fight against? Williams outlines a catalogue of grievances, shot through with case studies, statistics and her experiences. Take housing: she bought a flat in Camberwell, south London, aged 27, for £150,000 – and seven years later, sold it for double that. (That was 2007. A similar property would now go for £650,000.) Can it be fair, she asks, that her generation was the last to be able to afford a house before reaching their 40s? This isn’t just a London moan, she adds. Other regions might have seen less spectacular growth, but their prices remain equally unaffordable relative to average local wages. Extolling the virtues of renting won’t cut it either, unless we see reforms that adjust the power imbalance between tenants and landlords.

Elsewhere, Williams tackles the persistence of poverty in a rich society, the affordability of education, the depression of wages caused by globalisation, the regulation of the banking sector and, finally, whether we can stop destroying the Earth.

At times, the book can feel like an op-ed column stretched to marathon length, but the saving grace is always the clarity and levity of the writing. Williams is keenly aware that no one likes a preacher and even passages on tax policy are shot through with self-deprecating humour. (This is the most fun I’ve ever had reading a book that mentions the OECD.) She has the knack of rendering bitter and complicated arguments engaging and accessible: perhaps my favourite example is her assertion that the Rolling Stones’ decision to become tax exiles in France is why Exile on Main St is rubbish. Not only was the Cote d’Azur basement where it was recorded so humid that Keith Richards’s guitar strings kept breaking, but it’s where he became addicted to heroin after hurting his back in a go-kart accident. She blames the go-karting for the subsequent lost years. “Who, living a full life in the society of their own choosing, acts like they’re on a stag weekend organised through Groupon?”

Williams is a polemicist at heart, albeit one who prefers stats and sarcasm to tub-thumping and vitriol. Very occasionally, carried along on a wave of enthusiasm, I found myself jolted out of the narrative by thinking: hang on, is it really that simple? A passage praising the trade unions would be stronger if it were not so relentlessly positive (the words “Spanish practices” or “interfering in Labour party selection” do not appear here). A few chapters later, Williams decries free schools, set up by parents, before praising schools run as co-ops, set up by parents. There is no doubt a difference but it isn’t fully explored, leaving you wondering if the main problem with free schools is that they are championed by the “other side”. That said, the left doesn’t escape criticism when it lapses into the woo-woo to which it is uniquely prone: here comes Vivienne Westwood, “rolling conspiracy theories into the crowd like boules into a box of frogs”.

Overall, the overwhelming sense that shines from the pages is that Williams understands her subjects, and wants you to understand them too. If the Zoe Williams party were fighting the next election, no one would complain they didn’t know what it stood for.

Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman.

Get It Together: Why We Deserve Better Politics by Zoe Williams (Hutchinson Books, £14.99). To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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