The family of Polly Toynbee (1946) was famous. That way everyone always wanted to know what Arnold Toynbee was from her. He was her grandfather and in the mid -twentieth century a world -renowned historian. Not only because of his books, but also because of his many lectures and media performances. In 1936 he was allowed to interview Hitler, in 1947 he was once on the cover of Time. The fame of her grandfather made her proud of her as a child, she tells, but also led at a later age that people thought she, like him, knew everything about the history of all kinds of civilizations.
Her father Philip Toynbee, journalist and writer, was also known, albeit only in her own country, and also her great -grandfather Gilbert Murray, classicist in Oxford, was a prominent intellectual.
Two years ago, the British journalist wrote a fascinating memoir about her ancestors: An uneasy inheritance. My Family and Other Radicals. It was not to do her the fame of her family. “Arnold Toynbee is hardly known by history students nowadays,” she says, perhaps only with those who do something obscure as a historiography. “Older people have heard from him, while he was so famous during his life. That shows how quickly fame is declining.”
But whatever her ancestors share, and what does Toynbee do: they were all progressive, left or liberal, and opposed to the conservative British establishment. Those political beliefs were always taken over by new generations, by herself, her brothers and sisters, her children. Laughing: “I can determine with joy: no conservatives! Although my youngest grandchild is only 1, so that is a bit tricky.”
Polly Toynbee has sounded her progressive sound twice a week in her political column for more than twenty years The Guardian. As soon as the conversation is about it, she gives longer answers. Then she explains driven what she has written in her last columns. That, for example, the Brexit regretted must be reversed if, like the current Labor Government, you are eagerly looking for economic growth.
You still write two columns per week. I don’t want to do ‘Ageism’, but how do you do that? You are 78.
“I know! It is difficult, but that has nothing to do with age. The difficulty of writing columns is that you always have to come up with the right subject for the right day. I have enough material, but you always have to add something new.
“Every columnist will tell you: I sleep badly today, because tomorrow is the deadline, and I have nothing to say. What the hell this week? But in the end there is always something.
“Now I have a good feeling, because I know what I’m going to write in three days. Normally I am worried about Thursday or Tuesday, when my column is in the newspaper, and on Thursday I am already worried about Monday. You have to plan well, certainly with a view to the weekend. Monday morning it has to be finished, so Sundays are usually working days.”
And you don’t want Hamsterrad, you want to continue?
“Absolutely. I love it, I love research, find people to speak, bringing things together, placing a topic in a new light. And a column always has the same length, there is a certain rhythm in … I love it. I can’t say that it is a relaxed way of life. It’s not those columns about” they have to have. “
“Before my self -concept, my work is a very important part of who I am. That’s why I don’t retire. I would not know what to do if I didn’t write anymore. I still look at the world like journalists are constantly doing, in a predator -like way: is this interesting, can I do something with that?
‘I would not know what to do if I didn’t write anymore’
She hopes she can convince readers. About Brexit for example. Or about the Labor government, which she follows critically but also agreeing. “We have had terribly conservative austerity policy for fourteen years. We have waited so long for a labor government. The majority of my life has been under Tory regime, hey. So I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, and also look at the things they do well, such as the new employee rights. Quite radical, really good.” Labor can “maybe do one or two things that you don’t like at all, in many other areas they can also be pretty good. Guardian readers are very quickly disappointed, no labor government is ever good enough for them.”
Toynbee keeps a somewhat longer history in mind. In which, after a step forward, sometimes also followed a step back. She shares that with her family, she says. In all their political activism, she sees’ regularly a huge anger combined with long -term optimism: that you have to continue and persist, and you will get there. My great -grandfather fought against colonialism. He came from Australia, his family was horrified about the treatment of the native population. That was an ex -host of the United Kingdom, he was in the United Kingdom. position to take. ”
She read about it in the biography that was written about her great -grandfather, Gilbert Murray,, but such views were also transferred to the family. “This was how the family thought. My father experienced the time of decolonization. He worked for The Observerthe large decolonization newspaper: African leaders ran flat the editors. Rebel leaders, who were in the opposition in the countries where they came from. They later became president, often for life, and often they were not very good at what they did. But anyway: this was part of our lives, thinking about the colonies and the impact thereof. ”
Toynbee himself tried to become a politician once. In 1981 she was eligible for the Lower House, for a spin -off from Labor, but she just didn’t make it. She thinks she led a better life as a journalist than if she had had a political career, she says laughing. “The life of politicians is very tough. And it only takes short that they are in a position to be able to influence something. And once they are there, they complain: the Ministry of Finance makes everything impossible, we can do little.”
As a journalist, she was first a reporter for decades. When she started with it, she quickly realized that she actually “knew nothing.” She had broken down her studies, she had literary ambitions – her first novel was published. But on reporting for The Observer To a strike she realized that there was part of society that was totally unknown to her: that of the working class.
Toynbee comes from a time when the majority of the population is to the working -class was calculated in which nobody had it broad and most had had little training. The middle class, a smaller part of the population, was better off – it was not in income or in job security or social status. There were all kinds of gradations within this: the middle class consisted of rich entrepreneurs and well -earning doctors and lawyers, but also of simpler teachers and shopkeepers. Academics and journalists, the professions of her ancestors, were somewhere in between. That was her world.
Class and labor are themes that have always kept her busy. Toynbee was quite influenced by George Orwell, she thinks. He joined as a starting writer and journalist among the workers, to be able to write about them.
She went to do that too. For months she went to work in factories. She made packaged sugar and soap, made cakes and spent time in a blast furnace and a coal mine. “I could only have asked people about their work. But if you do it yourself, it not only results in a better story that people start reading much earlier, it also teaches you things that you would otherwise not have learned. If you don’t do the work yourself, you don’t know how heavy it is, how much a break can matter.”
When she started reporting on the industrial sector, and came to strikes more often, she was able to understand through her experience why something that seemed trivial for some was of great importance for workers.
“If I don’t write my column, nobody will die. But if someone does not repair a broken water pipeline, that’s a different cake”
In 2003, 33 years later, she again started doing all kinds of ‘crafts’. Jobs with a minimum wage, especially in healthcare and the service sector. She was a porter, cleaner in a hospital, telemarketer in a call center, remains, caretaker in a nursing home. To see what kind of life was possible with such work. Without the illusion that she could really know that, as a member of the middle class. “You have never experienced what it is like to worry about whether you get enough food on the table for your children. Or if you can’t pay a new jacket for them if it is stolen. You can check what it is like to make a certain budget around, you can make the calculations and then say how heavy it is. But you will never have that feeling of uncertainty about your life.”
In a sense, the work that the working class is doing is the real work, she suggests, unlike the jobs of her middle class family at universities and in journalism. “During Covid we experienced that as a society. Suddenly we were all working at home. But they were the people who took care of food, for medicines, and kept the electricity and water working. We respect the people we are completely dependent in the end. If I don’t write my column, no one will die.
Her left-liberal family full of activists sought equality, but belonged to a well-to-do, privileged middle class and that led to struggles and discomfort. Stories about class, says Toynbee, often about a path from poverty to wealth, from a lower to a higher class. “But people usually do not dare to write that they belong to the higher middle class, because it is too pleasant. It also took me ten years. I always got out of the way: explaining what privileges are actually, to people who are also privileged. Because most book readers are that, but they are not always the great advantage of the benefit of the benefit. Not just in your accent, but in your way of thinking, in your knowledge, and above all in your self -confidence, your assumption that everything is possible. ”
Why is it so genant?
“In a study they have sometimes asked the higher educated to which class they belonged to. And almost half said: working class. Because they wanted them to have earned their place themselves. But what turned out to be: many of them had higher educated parents. And we misunderstand how much you get in the lap.”
Toynbee is aware of what she has received. She knows that what she has achieved is not just her own merit. If only because she had many chances that others did not get. The inequality in that area has increased again in her life. She could go on for hours.