If I ruled the world: Sandi Toksvig

The trouble with ruling the world is that as a right-thinking, left-leaning sort of person my first move would be to organise my own overthrow. I’d want banners painted and people mobilised to prevent my dictatorship, no matter how benevolent. While I was waiting for the crowds to gather, however, I can’t claim that the power at my fingertips to do a little good would be entirely resistible. I suspect I’d start slowly. Perhaps dabble first in the arts.

In these depressive times I feel we are more than ready for a replication of the depression-era American Federal Art Project. Started in 1935 as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the scheme spent eight years bringing art into the everyday life of communities across the United States. Hundreds of artists were employed to give exhibitions and classes and to this day some of America’s most significant pieces of public art hail from that time. If we’re going to sit around unemployed we might as well make the place look nice.

I’d turn the walls of hospitals into art galleries. The NHS may fail but at least we could spend our time in the waiting room invigorated by something more interesting than a poster about the Heimlich manoeuvre. While I was on the arts I might have a think about television. There is a curious desire on the part of most broadcasters to focus only on corralling young people into their audience. I don’t know why. My home is littered with youths who on the whole don’t watch television because they’re too busy. I’d start making programmes for the older person who can’t be bothered to go out and possibly even the ones who’ve read a book.

While I was at it I’d require a rethink of the way politics is presented on the box. When a million people marched through London against an illegal war and nothing happened they began to switch off. They knew that their opinion didn’t matter. The greatest enemy of democracy is apathy so we need to reach out through interesting and lively political programming with (and this is a crazy idea) fewer men pontificating and more women discussing.

Indeed we need to rethink politics. No politician would be allowed to represent her or his community until they had had a life. No one should decide how the rest of us might live until they have spent 30 years working in the real world. There would be no “career” members of parliament and some matters would be removed from the political sphere. I would appoint a non-party children’s commissioner. How is it possible that Britain, which is a kindly nation, has one of the worst rates of child poverty in the industrialised world? What were we doing while the proportion of children living in poverty grew from 10 per cent in 1979 to 30 per cent today? The Kids Commissioner (Camila Batmanghelidjh from the charity Kids Company would be perfect) would have the right to review all legislation that impacts on youngsters.

I’d be on a roll now. Anyone who had worked for more than a quarter of a century would be given a paid year off. There would be a 10 per cent tithe on all City of London profits. The print media would be made to behave by being required to publish all corrections in the same size and prominence as the original offending article. Once a month the whole world would have a day without mobile phones and the money saved would go to those who have suffered in the mining of coltan, the mineral needed to make our wireless world work. There would be refuges and hospitals paid for the estimated 420,000 women of the Democratic Republic of Congo who are raped each year in an epidemic of violence that is being conducted on women’s bodies.

To prevent the violence at all I would institute a worldwide rule that only grandmothers could join the armed forces. By now I’d be giddy with it all and making slightly arbitrary decisions—Michael Gove would be banned from expressing an opinion on anything and once a month I would turn out all the lights so we could look at the stars. After that I hope the crowds would overrun my palace and I could go and have a lie down knowing there was so much still left to do.