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We have to head towards a world in which everyone has a fair chance in life. So, if I was in the position of ruling the world, I would try and ensure that everyone has that fair chance. It should be the right of every citizen of the world to have the chance of a job, bring up a family, have democracy, have human rights. That should be the right of every citizen—all 7 billion of us. Only the extreme right would disagree, but that doesn’t make it easy to do.
Let’s take the democracy bit first. It of course needs to be built into every country. Some people increasingly seem to pit democracy against stability. So they will vote for more stability and less democracy, which is unfortunate. Then there is Donald Trump’s “alternative facts” thing that he’s coming up with, the hateful things that are said from his administration or his Twitter account. This is happening right now in front of us. You know we thought that we went through this in the 1930s, so we shouldn’t be back to this.
It seems more like chaos than stability when Trump falls asleep while tweeting “covfefe,” which doesn’t even mean anything—that is bizarre. But it’s good to have some attempt at humour in the world of politics because politics, real politics, is actually as complicated as it looks, and it can get very dry. Is everyone in the country watching Prime Minister’s Questions, glued to the screen? I don’t think so. It’s in a Westminster bubble.
As for human rights, they need to be more important than religious rights. Religious freedom, yes—for the practice of religion. But you must not have religious doctrine because that kind of dogma tries to overturn human rights.
Extremist politics—religious or otherwise—is beguiling because it’s so simplistic. It says: leave the European Union and everything will be fine. We’ll go back to the economy that we had in 1973—which they think was so fantastic. It’s one-or two-idea politics. Hate the immigrants, leave the EU and everything will be fine because we’ll be outside the single market and then what? It actually doesn’t make sense. I do think that Brexit hate and Trump hate are out there. They give permission for people to use hate. I’ve been attacked in the streets; and hate crimes are on the rise again.
But this is just the end of a chapter. If you look at the last 10,000 years of civilisation, human rights do gradually go forward. Ireland had a referendum and got marriage equality passed—that’s amazing. They’ve got a gay prime minister at the moment who’s half-Indian—that’s amazing. So, you know, you win a few you lose a few. But if common sense ruled the world, we’d win the lot.
As told to Jay Elwes. Eddie Izzard’s new memoir, “Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death and Jazz Chickens” is out now from Michael Joseph.
