Not all change comes from Westminster. Meaningful politics is about persuasion – which happens at grassroots level
I wrote a book in 2014 that had the shortest window of relevance not just of anything I’ve written, but of anything I’ve ever read. It was conceived at a time when it felt like were living under a Forever Coalition – that we would always have a government like this, and always talk about it as a compromise administration, a well-meaning patch-up job, when the reality was the opposite of that: radical, destructive, callous to a degree that many of us had never witnessed as adults.
What also looked eternal at that point in time was a Labour party one minute scared of its own shadow, the next imitating the coalition’s worst impulses, as if every fresh act of government xenophobia were a sign that the voters were crying out for more xenophobia. Ed Miliband’s “controls on immigration” mug hit everyone quite hard, no offence.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
