Moranifesto

by Caitlin Moran

  That’s the big difference between a want and a need, when it comes to using the market as your main metric. It doesn’t make any difference to the market how much you need something. The markets are blind to need. The markets are, bluntly, wholly unaffected if you die. Capitalism doesn’t register, anywhere, loneliness, anxiety, depression, homelessness, or death—unless they affect your ability to contribute to the economy.

  Here are other things capitalism doesn’t register—which it is wholly blind to: birdsong, informal support networks run on love, nonabusive childhoods, jobs with prospects, optimism, peace of mind, stories that change people’s lives, pop stars who inspire, pride, beautiful buildings, public spaces, neighborliness, and having somewhere nearby you can walk to, and sit, and feel content.

  And that’s why we know capitalism isn’t perfect—because humans do register an absence of these things, painfully and viscerally. Humans invented capitalism—but we haven’t yet found a way to make capitalism, in essence, see us. All of us. So far, only the socialist invention of the welfare state has done that—has specifically set out to address the nonprofitable needs of people, when they cannot fix their problems on their own.

  And so here we are in 2016—seesawing, roughly a decade at a time, between left-wing and right-wing governments; capitalism and socialism; wants and needs. Each one coming and largely undoing the efforts of the previous government, in a blunt, unwieldy attempt by electorates to find some kind of balance between the two systems.

  The thing about having all this information—all this connectedness, all this processing power—is that it should allow us to, finally, start being able to see what actually works.

  One of the most alarming things about the 2008 crash was a procession of worried-looking economists appearing on late-night news programs and debating what to do next. Half argued for Keynesian policies—half argued for austerity measures. But nobody seemed to know.

  To someone sitting on a sofa drinking a cup of hot Bovril, this seemed nuts. We’ve had nearly a century of both approaches now. FDR used state intervention during the Great Depression in 1932, the New Deal was one of the defining political ideas of our age, and we’ve seen a lot of free-market economics since—surely economists can learn from past experience and have some idea of which method edges it when the world teeters on the brink of financial collapse?

  I’m well aware there are a billion complicating factors that can skew the results either way—no one can be 100 percent sure exactly why some methods worked, at the time, while others didn’t—but we live in a world of fabulous processing power now.

  If you were to build a jet engine in the 1950s, as Paul Mason pointed out in PostCapitalism, you would design them on paper, stress-test them using slide rules, and construct full-sized templates on silk.

  “When we designed the tail fin of the Tornado fighter we did twelve stress-tests on it,” a veteran US Army engineer explained.

  Since the advent of virtual 3D mock-ups on supercomputers, however, the process has changed entirely: “With [the Tornado’s] replacement, the Typhoon, we ran 186 million [tests].”

  And all without a single thing crashing, or causing injury. Even if we don’t have the processing power right now to model the infinitely more complex structure of a global economy, we are surely not far off. And we would surely have it sooner if someone decided to pursue the idea.

  And you wouldn’t use such a thing just for modeling economic policy. You’d use it to model education, health care, social provision, housing, travel infrastructure. And the advantage you would have, in the modern age, is people. People who could interact, and input their decisions into this program.

  If it ran alongside Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, whenever someone went online they could be asked the questions the program is running that day. Let’s face it—people love doing this shit.

  It could also alert you to key pieces of information—such as “Britain is experiencing a huge shortfall of electricians”—thus allowing you to tell your child, who is planning their GSCEs, that they might want to change their choice.

  And once we had all this information about what things actually work—rather than political theories and tribal beliefs—then that is what we would form our new parties from. The first ever political party that would have run prototypes, and had peer-reviewed papers. We do this in medicine, and engineering, and in our leisure time—all plays get months of rehearsals and previews. So why not politics?

  We would have invented a Wikipedia of politics—an open-source resource to which everyone could contribute. An aggregation of everything we have learned, across the world—all being updated in real time, on a scale unimaginable for any government or business. Really, it seems extraordinary we haven’t invented it yet—it does highlight the data shallowness of something like Google, or Facebook. Every day we create as much information as we did in the years between the dawn of civilization and 2013. Five exabytes of data every two days. The average online citizen creates a data trail that, if rendered in zeroes and ones, would stretch to Mars and back.

  And yet, currently, we use this information to do little more than sell advertising. This is the ultimate weak spot of capitalism: capitalism. We are constantly told it sees the bigger picture—but what it does, instead, is simply make the picture of itself  bigger.

  Being of a minxish mind, I would call this huge resource—in size, a rival to Wikipedia, or Google—“God.” God’s purpose would be to constantly try and find the best of all available options, from around the world: suggested and explained by the people who’d invented it; the employees who’d made it work; the patients, pupils, and citizens who’d lived through its implementation.

  Just as now, on Amazon, one can peruse hundreds of different hosepipes on offer, and then see what the customer rating is, and the comments on the products’ flaws and triumphs, so we would be able to peruse educational models, legislation to curb sex traffic, planning regulations, systems of care for children and the elderly.

  This system would also defuse one of the most poisonous aspects of our current system: ministers being afraid to make decisions, or being pressured into making them after being lobbied by corporate interests or their drinking buddies. As a socialist, I enjoy the irony of this, but this system would allow market forces—in the role of citizens’ decisions—to finally come to bear on policy.

  “But, Cat, people would still lobby!” I can hear naysayers saying. “It would still be a system open to corruption—interested parties could swamp the site with positive reviews of things they have a stake in!”

  To which I would reply: yeah, but that happens anyway. At least with this system, you’ve got a far better chance of detecting it happening than with the current system, where it all happens in small rooms, closed from public view. Anyone reasonably proficient in IT would be able to notice what was going on, and track it down—and from their bedroom, rather than going through files in a basement.

  (As a sidebar, I would suggest that this model should be the one unions should adopt, if they wish to survive in the twenty-first century, and reinvent themselves for a modern working world dominated not by men in factories, but by women, and part-time workers, and employees with zero-hours contracts. Unions should become something not just to block management, but as a repository for ideas and innovation: helping their employers from the ground up, just as the working classes have done throughout the ages.

  The union movement needs to refind its intellectual roots—publishing papers, encouraging new kinds of membership and leaders. A union should come to mean the power of crowdsourcing—an organization with an unparalleled specialized overview of its industry, and a hive mind of millions. Something worth millions, to business—rather than something simply to be battled with, for the sake of the balance sheet.)

  (As another sidebar, I’d also invent a “Local God”—something dedicated to your area, which shows you what’s going on and how you can get involved—like a massive s
ocietal “To Do” list. You’ve got a Saturday morning free, you feel like you want to do something noble, you log on, and it lists all the things going on in your area: Some people are planting up the borders in your local park. There are five kids in the local care home who don’t have any visits planned. Your elderly neighbor, five doors down, has posted a request for someone to come and mend her door. A mum has suggested that you come and babysit her kids while she goes for a swim, in exchange for having yours this afternoon.

  No community-minded urge—no desire to do good—would ever be wasted. Local God would show you every place you could be useful, and make a change. Local God loves the fact that every human being wants to be good. Local God knows you don’t want to waste a minute of your life. Local God also probably works some kind of scheme where the more good you do—shown in your profile, in some kind of ranking system—the bigger discount you get at your local, involved shops; thus making any idea of a “Big Society” both actually practical, and of deeper use and value to the people engaged in it. It would put a financial value on doing the traditionally unpaid care work that disproportionate amounts of women and the working classes engage in, and make the whole system fairer. I’ve got to admit—I fancy Local God quite a lot.)

  So this would be the basis of a new political party—to take the working methods of science, medicine, technology, gaming, and art, and apply it to the formulation of policy.

  Obviously this—like many of the things here—will probably look hopelessly pie-in-the-sky and impractical, or weird, or demented, or just plain wrong. But I’m going by the principle that, when I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I thought, “Oh my God! The Guide is such an incredible idea! A small electronic tablet you hold in your hand which tells you everything you need to know at the press of a few buttons! Douglas Adams is a brilliant man—but clearly one who has smoked a lot of marijuana, and is definitely best off making up weird things in sci-fi novels. They could never invent such a thing.”

  But now, in 2016, I carry my iPhone everywhere, and it tells me what restaurant to go to; how to say “Is this consommé or a finger bowl?” in French; and make the Ron Burgundy–themed “Glass Case of Emotion” cocktail (muddled rosemary and peach, whisky, lemon juice). Sometimes you just need to throw your new, mad, invented balls on the table and see who runs with them.

  So, yes: this is a brief summation of all the things I’ve sat on the patio at three a.m., fired up on gin, and ranted about, as friends with slightly more political/economic/social grounding go, “But, Cat! This is drunken loon-guff! I would stop you right now with a few facts, but I’m worried that you will then return to your activities of an hour ago, where you were crying and saying, ‘Man, I miss Freddie Mercury,’ while singing ‘Under Pressure’ in the manner of a wolf being clubbed to death by a duck.”

  But then—and I’m going to be blunt about this—I think it is the solemn duty of every citizen to dream of mad futures—just as, a hundred years ago, they might have dreamed about votes for women, a black US president, being able to marry the person you love irrespective of their gender, heart transplants, and RuPaul’s Drag Race.

  The future wants you. Because that’s your eventual home. Like in Philip Larkin’s “Days,” we have nowhere else to live.

  The Future

  When you’re younger, you don’t care much about the future. That’s where all the old people will live. But it turns out that the world keeps on traveling forward, unstoppably, at twenty-four hours per day. And suddenly, BANG! You are the old people now—and it’s on you to make sense of the world, uncover truths, fight for better things. Steer the ship. You are the generation in charge of the world, now. This is all on your watch.

  This part of the book, then, is about that process: trying to understand what’s going on. Who made this future that we live in now? On what basis did they make these decisions? Do we trust their decision-making process? And, most importantly—do they care about the future yet to come? Do they know how quickly the next thirty years can arrive? Are they planning great, right things? Are they already looking 2050 in the eye and saying, “Let’s make sure you are better than where I stand now”?

  For me, one subject dominates this decade: migration. The summer of 2015 saw the greatest refugee numbers in history—sixty million on the move; boats full of people, escaping cities on fire. Perhaps things will have changed by the time you read this, but at the time of writing, the world does not have a proper plan to deal with this wholesale emptying of countries. Columns of refugees, miles long, walking down roads, carrying children—a whole generation going to waste; whole nationalities becoming like albatrosses, seen as unlucky, never allowed to land.

  But the summer of 2015 will be as a mere bagatelle if even the mildest predictions about climate change are correct. By 2100, 150 million will live on land that either will be so regularly flooded as to become unusable or will be permanently submerged. One hundred and fifty million on the move. What will we do? Build new cities—or build walls around the old ones? Will we welcome them in—or leave them in medieval camps on the edge of twenty-first-century cities? Remember, the places that will be flooded include Miami, London, Barcelona, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, New York . . . how we deal with Syrian refugees now is how others will be dealing with our grandchildren. Oh, the future! You are already asking us questions. Terrifying questions we must be adult enough to answer.

  But! There is hope! Because, as I explain, if we can invent New York, we can invent our way out of anything.

  I Love Pete’s Car

  However, we start with the little things, first. Me and Pete, in bed.

  It’s 11:01 p.m. Question Time has finished, and we have decided—as always—that we cannot face the indefinably weird This Week, starring Andrew Neil.

  I turn the TV off and curl around Pete’s back.

  “It’s our twentieth anniversary in February,” I say, sleepily. “Two decades since I first saw you! You were the first boy I ever met who made me feel normal. But at the same time, you were also the first boy I ever met who made me feel special. Isn’t it funny how that inherent contradiction lies at the heart of true love?”

  I snuggle up close to him. I am glad to have given him the gift of my spontaneous profundity—and at a time when most other couples would just be saying, “But why has Andrew Neil dressed up as an elf to talk about Europe? I don’t understand,” instead.

  Pete is silent.

  I smile, knowingly, to myself. Yes. Yes—there isn’t much you can say when your wife’s just been dead freaking wise.

  Eventually, however, Pete speaks.

  “And as well as all that ‘normal’ and ‘special’ stuff,” he says—almost as if he can’t help himself—“I was also the first boy you knew . . . who had a car.”

  It hangs there for a minute.

  “Are you saying that’s why I was really attracted to you? Because of the car?” I ask.

  Pete goes tense, in the way that he does when he’s scared. This is how he reacts whenever I say, “I’ve had an idea!,” or . . . well, mainly “I’ve had an idea!”

  “I want to make it very clear that was just a joke, and that I’m going to sleep now. Good night,” he says, closing his eyes.

  I let a whole minute pass.

  “Oh my God, Pete—you’ve just negated love!” I say. “You’ve just ended a day with Love Negation! That is poor relationshipping.”

  Pete exhales. I realize he has actually been holding his breath for the last minute. As if, perhaps, trying to die rather than have this conversation.

  “This is unbelievable. I’m not into cars,” I continue. “I’m famously not into cars. Remember when John bought that new Jaguar—and I wouldn’t even leave the house to look at it because Hello, Dolly! was on? And that was a fifty-grand, duck-egg-blue Jag. Back in 1995, you were just pimpin’ around in your mum’s red Peugeot. I don’t care about cars.”

  “I—”

  “I am, however, HURT,” I say. �
�As someone who is very deep, I am hurt.”

  There is another pause.

  “It’s not so much that you were into cars, back then,” Pete says—clearly keen to clarify. “It’s more that you weren’t into . . . walking around in the rain that much. I remember the first time I picked you up from your house. You got into the Peugeot with an expression on your face which said, ‘Wow—I can have love and not be on a bus.’ I was part of a package. It was me and the car. I’m being self-deprecating here.”

  I fall silent as I think back, to the start of our love, in 1995. I couldn’t drive, I had no car, and I lived very far from a supermarket. When I met Pete, everything changed.

  I can remember the drunken conversation I had with my friend Sian. Opening a bottle of Baileys, exclaiming, “Oh my God—he took me up the Big Sainsbury’s!” Then explaining that wasn’t a euphemism, and pointing at all the heavy, jumbo-sized tins I’d been able to buy—because I didn’t have to drag them back on the bus.

  I thought about the twenty years since—in which I’ve steadfastly continued not to learn to drive. The million times I’ve spent too long back-combing my hair, and Pete’s looked up from his laptop and said, “It’s too late for you to catch the bus—let me give you a lift to the Tube station, instead,” and shuffled towards the front door in his Crocs, jangling his keys.

  Him doing the school run twice a day, for the last nine years, as I have a lie-in “just this once” (every day for the last nine years).

  How, when we go out, he’ll end up giving a lift home to five of my drunken friends—all rammed in the back of his Ford Galaxy.

  How he’s the one who picks up the parcels from the post office, or gets bread at nine p.m. when we run out. Those endless, daylong drives back from holidays in Cornwall, where he’s exhausted, while I’m in the passenger seat, going, “Look! A hawk!”