If I Ruled The World: James Holland

Throughout history, it's always just a small handful of people that ruin it for everyone else. My experience of life is that the vast majority of people are fairly decent, upstanding people. It’s only a few handful of wrongdoers who ruin it. I would much rather that everyone was nice rather than most. Be respectful, be nice, don’t murder people, don’t be adulterous, be a decent type.

I don’t know exactly what the answer is here but we need to work out how to better look after our planet. Within the UK there’s talk about being net zero by 2050, but that doesn’t include our footprint around the world, that just includes within the UK. It ignores the fact that almost everything around the world moves by ship or by aircraft. And these use gargantuan amounts of dirty diesel. So doing trade deals with Australia at the moment, which the UK has just done, doesn’t seem to be an incredibly sensible idea.

In the west, about a third of our food just gets chucked away. There’s millions of people around the world who aren’t getting anything like enough food. It’s just wrong. And on top of that you’ve obviously got global warming, which is a massive worry, and rising populations. Individuals can take some responsibility for how we treat our planet, but there’s a bigger picture, and it needs to be looked at with a greater sense of urgency, otherwise we’re going to be in big trouble.

This one is a bit outrageous but I would stop referendums. We have a parliamentary democracy, so you have a chance to vote for your MP and for the party that you want. I think referendums are not really a good idea, particularly when they’re as close as the last few we had. So I’d stop referendums.

I’d advocate cricket around the world. It’s a great team sport, and also a great tactical sport. There’s so much nuance to it. I think the world would be a better place if everyone played cricket! In fact I think we need more sport in general. For example, for 400 million pounds you could build 100 hybrid football pitches which are effectively all-weather pitches so you can play football even in winter when it’s dark and wet.

Just think what that would do for youth, for people in inner cities. You want to you want to encourage people to move away from gangs and so on, and find an outlet for teenage passion—a sense of belonging, aggression, competitiveness—and football, cricket, whatever it might be, I think is a perfect way to do that.

I think these are troubling times and I don’t think there’s enough emphasis on defence. We can help our own financial situation in the UK at the moment by putting in some defence orders. If we had factories building 105 millimetre shells, which are the most predominant source of projectile, we would create jobs and bring in taxes. I think the need for strong defence is badly misunderstood. It’s currently something like number 14 on the public’s list of priorities, and it should be number one or two really. These are dodgy times. 

We need to really think about the amount of fishing we do at the moment. It’s incredible that in the late 19th century the coastal waters around Scotland would have been absolutely crystal clear. That’s because of the number of rock oysters. Rock oysters filter something like 60 litres of water a day. There used to be millions of them so all the water was crystal clear, and there was more wildlife and more sea life. And now they’re not there anymore, primarily because of dredging and polluting the waters. So we need to be more careful on that front and regenerate our coastal waters. 

The Savage Storm: The Battle for Italy 1943 by James Holland is out now (Bantam Press, £25.00)