The select group of books whose titles have become better known than their content, or even their author, has a new member. Like 1984, which stands for totalitarianism and state surveillance, To Kill a Mockingbird, which represents racism and social injustice, Omer El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This has already achieved an iconic status. It is perhaps the final measure by which writers come to achieve an impact beyond their cold garrets, and literature becomes more than just a branch of the entertainment industry.
All is not well in the world of books. The other day, at a literary event, TANK’s editor bumped into an old friend whose first novel had made it to the top of the bestseller lists – it was abridged by Radio 4 and taking over bookshop windows, and everyone was reading it on the tube. Surely such success would translate into a modicum of financial security – but the lordly sum the friend had received as an advance? £750. At first, we thought the figure must be out to the order of a thousand – but no, the advance for a bestseller is now less than what might have cost her agent and publisher for the working luncheon or two during which one imagines they might have agreed the deal.
In offering a new writer such a miserly advance, the publishers do more than cheapen writing and writers. By adopting a spread-betting strategy, publishers are in effect declaring that their profession is extinct. Without a claim to understanding of what makes a good or successful book, such publishers deserve to be replaced by algorithms. Writers will keep writing even if no one pays them, but would anyone work in a publishing company for free? And who might be covering the cost of that lunch? The economy of book publishing – like much else, sadly – seems to be running on cruise control.
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In this summer’s English local elections, the two dominant political parties were trashed. The Conservative and Labour parties, respectively, lost 676 and 187 council seats. The majority of Tory and Labour losses went to Reform. The elections come at a time when the governing Labour party is enjoying historically low approval ratings, thanks to a combination of a program of fiscal austerity translating to harsh cutbacks of social services and negligible growth. Successive attempts at fixing the economic malaise have had little result. Since any real discussion of alternative economic policies are out of the question – the voters’ intentions are interpreted by the politicians and mainstream media as largely if not exclusively “concern over immigration”.
The civil war inside the Conservative Party has, since the premiership of Thatcher, been framed around issues of sovereignty as an acceptable way to discuss race and disguising latent xenophobia. That it continues unabated demonstrates that Brexit was only a red herring en route.
The political centre’s drift to the right has been steady and both parties have tried to outflank the extreme right by adopting its talking points. One tactical expedience at a time, their incremental effect has been a seismic shift in the social democratic foundations of the post-war consensus. Imagine if Boris Johnson or Theresa May had, in response to the Corbyn revolution inside Labour, started waving the red flag and singing the Internationale at the end of the Conservative party conferences. The fact that outflanking of the right seems like common sense and outflanking the left a comedy sketch is because the centre sooner betrays its democratic ambitions than veers off its increasingly doctrinaire economic orthodoxy.
Reform is a party personified by the clownish figure of Nigel Farage whose disproportionately large media footprint is an invention by mainstream media as part of the same outflanking exercise. Nigel is a stand-in for an imagined unwashed caveman, angrily pontificating reactionary mind barf over a warming half-drunk pint in some miserable pub in a northern town. In the British media, old clichés die hard.
So when Reform’s first regional mayor, Andrea Jenkyns – a former Conservative who wept when Boris Johnson left office – makes an overtly racist speech suggesting that tents, not hotel rooms, should be offered to refugees, the UK’s moribund prime minister has to go one better. Starmer aped Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, suggesting that these islands are overrun with “strangers”. When a Labour prime minister parrots rhetoric that was understood as racist and a sackable offence by a Conservative prime minister some 50 years ago, perhaps we shouldn’t be so concerned by the prospect of an incoming extreme-right party voted in by the great unwashed beyond the Blue Wall: we are already living with an extreme right-wing government voted in by the “enlightened” affluent south.
The UK political class has struggled to turn around a stagnant economy and all but abandoned any hope of setting a clear direction in geopolitical terms. The UK is zigzagging between the European Union it rejected and the US, which isn’t particularly bothered, politicians reliant on an old and stale narrative strive for power only to find that they are actors on an empty stage, a sparse script and waiting for Godot.
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Today, the New Cut in Bristol appears to be a natural feature of the geography of Southwest England, but it is, in fact, entirely manmade: a floating harbour space of some 7o acres. In 1805, it took an army of navvies armed with pickaxes and wheelbarrows five years to complete one of the engineering wonders of the Industrial Revolution. Even in today’s money, it cost a mere £50m, while its value to the economy from the 19th century to date is incalculable. Consider, by contrast, HS2, which, only the second attempt at building high-speed rail in the UK, aimed to extend the network to 300 miles. That project started in 2009 after a decade of consideration, with the aim of improving the lot of the very same northerners vilified as racist Reform voters. Initially budgeted at £32.7 billion (2012 prices), costs for Phase 1 (London-Birmingham) ballooned to over £66 billion: by 2024 the northern legs faced cancellation amid political and financial crises.
The story of HS2 is telling in so many ways. If we can’t compare the cost and efficiency of the UK project with similar infrastructural development in China, which has built 48,ooo miles as of last year – that’s the beastly communists for you – how about Spain? Despite the clichés of long siestas, Spain’s high-speed rail network exceeds 4,000 km, with an average construction cost of £15m per kilometre. HS2, meanwhile, is cited as costing somewhere between £200m and £300m per kilometre – as much as twenty times Spanish costs. HS2 is merely symptomatic: the UK’s productivity position is ranked 22nd out of 28 OECD countries in 2021, trailing all its G7 peers. The British political class – including the media – would rather drill into the cost-benefit analysis of keeping a family or migrants in a tent versus a hotel rather than something as complicated as the economy. Picking on trans people and immigrants is so much easier than answering for the railways or the post office or our myriad other structural problems.
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One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a searing work that interrogates the moral failures of Western liberal establishments and wider societies, in the face of the genocide in Gaza. Drawing on his experience as an immigrant and journalist who once believed in the West’s promises of liberty and justice, El Akkad delivers a deeply personal critique of how Western nations routinely betray their stated ideals.
The book is both a chronicle of disillusionment and a “heartsick breakup letter with the West,” exposing the hypocrisy, apathy and complicity that define Western governments and institutions, examining the ways in which the West’s self-image as a defender of human rights is undermined by its support for, or indifference to, real-time war crimes and systemic oppression, particularly in Palestine.
Despite the book’s unflinching gaze into this moral abyss, El Akkad’s book tempers his anger with the optimism of moral clarity. He refuses to succumb to despair; instead, the book is a call to moral reckoning and action. It’s a vision that seems to have come to pass sooner than El Akkad might have imagined. By the time Trump landed in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of May, the New York Times, Guardian and Economist – the people and organisations who manufactured consent for the genocide – had reversed their positions on Gaza. The New York Times columnist and dyed-in-the-wool Zionist war monger Thomas Friedman declared, “This Israeli government isn’t our ally,” and the Guardian and BBC who, for almost two years have followed sheeplike every explanation of the IDF, have begun slowly to reorient away from Netanyahu and his war-criminal-cabinet. Spring has come late for the flowers, buried under the rubble in Gaza. But deep in the frozen soil of humanity’s collective soul something stirs, buds begin to unfurl, shaping the question, “What did you do in the war, mummy?”. Masoud Golsorkhi