Back to basics by Anne Booth

Things feel pretty bad at the moment in our national life, and it feels too often that  basics like honesty and honour and integrity and compassion and also sheer competence are missing from many important areas of public life.

But all the things that are missing in some areas, are still present in others. There are still wonderful books to celebrate , wonderful people to admire, and wonderful words to amplify.

There are still brilliant teenagers who care about justice and who call adults to account. 

And this gives me Hope. I even dare to feel hopeful that maybe some of those brilliant teenagers who protested and organised legal challenges against the unfair exam grades, and spoke so articulately on the media, were influenced, even in little ways, by the children's books they read when they were younger - books which had happy endings, where children had agency, where bad things were challenged, where people weren't cynical, and where the basic goodness of some things were celebrated and taken as a given. I was so impressed by the students who had received good grades themselves, and had got into the universities they wanted,  but were still outraged on behalf of, and  campaigned for, and alongside,  their friends.  They knew that there was something even more important than their own individual success.

So this makes me want to keep writing, to be part of the writing community and to keep writing books which tell and remind children (and any adults reading them) (and ourselves who write)  that it is right to believe that  there ARE basic human values to celebrate and uphold, that love IS better than hate, tolerance better than intolerance, that the presence of fairness and truth and tenderness and bravery and imagination and love are all vital in order for a story - be it in a book or for a nation or a world - to have a truly happy ending. I want to be part of the work of giving the children of the future the tools they need to cut through the injustice, cynicism and lack of honesty they will sadly encounter in the adult world. I want them to expect the basic standards of goodness and fairness in the world in which they grow up, and to be outraged and protest whenever they don't find them, for themselves and also for others, rather than to despair. 

I want to acknowledge that for some children there have just been no happy endings. I don't know what to say in the face of a refugee child drowning in the sea, and children 'disappearing' from refugee camps. I don't know what to say about all the awful things in the past, present and future, but I just know that in order to have the strength to make things better, to write or campaign or save or change the world, we just have to go back to basics and look for love wherever we can find it, be it in children's books, religious texts, or the company of good people. The more we spend time in the company of love-liness, the better equipped we are to notice whenever it is conspicuously absent.

So thank you, my fellow writers, and the illustrators we are lucky enough to work with,  for creating beautiful , truth-full worlds and characters to give us -  children AND adults -  strength and hope, and the tools to recognise both the presence and the absence of love, and the inspiration and basic values to act on that knowledge. Thank you publishers for publishing such books - and please keep on doing so. The world needs to get back to basics, when the basics are lovely and true, and I am proud to work as a writer for publishers who celebrate such values.