Golden Hour #044: Toast with Jam

on competency and not settling for less

Hi friends,

It’s been an overwhelming week for those of us living in the UK, culminating in the sudden arrival of a new Prime Minister. The speed with which our constitutional monarchy is able to dispatch and install a new party into government will never cease to amaze me. Today I am grateful to live in a place where the handover of power between governments has unfolded without violence or jeopardy; this is not something to be taken for granted.

This is the first election I’ve participated in that has not resulted in a Conservative government. For fourteen years(!), the Tories have wrought unimaginable harm on almost every aspect of our society; from the NHS to schools, housing, prisons and the climate. Even our relationship to Europe has been irrevocably altered. All of us have been affected by the chaos, self-centredness and precarity that has defined Conservative rule. And yet the truth is that some of us have been more adversely affected than others. If you are a minority, child, carer or disabled person, it’s likely that your life has been made fundamentally harder by policies which were designed to achieve just that.

And so the feeling of relief which has been expressed by many commentators (including Zadie Smith) is entirely understandable. We now have a government which scrapped the Rwanda plan within hours of coming to power. That is a good thing. It also appears that people being appointed to the Cabinet have experience and competency in the areas they will be working in. Another good thing.

And yet competency alone is not enough.

In my opinion, that sense of relief (isn’t it nice that the adults are back in charge!) has far more to do with the horrors that we’ve witnessed over the past fourteen years than the promise of a Labour government. Having a competent government should not be noteworthy or cause for celebration, it should be the bare minimum. I want a government that has a genuinely alternative vision of what our society can become, and who will then chase after it. That means: lifting the two-child cap, recommitting to the original £28 billion climate budget and creating safe, legal routes for asylum seekers to come to the UK. After fourteen years, we, and especially the most vulnerable within our society, deserve nothing less. I will not settle for less.

The writer and academic Hannah Proctor recently wrote that during the 2020 Labour leadership eIection ‘I had a dream people came to my house campaigning for Keir Starmer chanting a hideous New Labour rewrite of Zoe Leonard’s I Want a Dyke for President called ‘I Want a Bread for Prime Minister’. When I woke up I wrote it down.’

I do want bread from this government. I want competency and diligence and boredom! But I want roses too. This call, for ‘bread and roses’ first emerged in the American women’s suffrage movement, when a factory worker called Helen Todd argued that:

Not at once; but woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life's Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice.

In her piece for the Guardian Zadie Smith likened the nation’s relationship to the new Labour government to a prospective love interest—’We keep anxiously checking our phones. Is this Labour party playing it cool? Or are we coming on too strong? Will it perhaps express its true feelings later?’. She’s not wrong about this. During the election campaign, Labour deliberately exploited a sense of desperation in the public, understanding that they wouldn’t have to treat us that well in order to get our vote. They figured they could get away with a bit of dog-whistle politics. The odd bit of pandering to J.K. Rowling. After all, our ex-husband treated us so appallingly that we’d just be grateful they are showing interest. No need to go above and beyond!

So as we welcome our new government, and ‘make it official’, let us not settle simply for competency, or even bread. Let us demand roses; for comfort and culture and kindness. For the things which it has been so difficult to even contemplate for over a decade.

Because (and here’s the truth!) we deserve nothing less.

Thanks for reading,

Grace