10 Feb 2013

Ian McEwan: a decade after Iraq, we’re still in crisis

The writer Ian McEwan has spoken of a “crisis of institutional failure” in the ten years since the mass demonstration against the invasion of Iraq that inspired one of his most celebrated novels.

This week marks a decade since the anti-war protests that form the backdrop to McEwan’s ninth novel Saturday, which won the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Remembering the march, which he describes as “a celebration of English eccentricity”, McEwan told Channel 4 News he took part “with a chip of a ice in my heart”.

He said: “I was writing down the placards and already trying to form in my mind how to describe this. It was source material.”

McEwan voted Liberal Democrat at the last election but said watching the progress of the coalition government “has not been happy”.

“It’s been painful to watch. I’d much rather politics would revert to some sort of left/right purity if at all possible.

My instincts would be that we are cutting too hard and fast and quickly.”

You don’t have to be a political revolutionary to feel that vast sums of money are still held by elites, untouched. Ian McEwan

The writer says revelations about MPs’ expenses, phone hacking by journalists and scandals involving the police and NHS have left him with the sense that Britain’s institutions are in a state of decay.

McEwan feels that tackling corporate tax avoidance is the key to restoring prosperity and a sense of social fairness, saying: “There are vasts pockets of money to be raked back into the Treasury from very wealth concerns that have largely been untouched.

“There’s a great inequity here. I think we have to change the rules – it’s as simple or as complicated as that.

“You don’t have to be a political revolutionary to feel that vast sums of money are still held by elites, untouched.”