Then, now, and where next?

 

From Giles Wilkes, Ashes to ashes, The New European , July 6-12, 2023.

 

“By many modern measures, the early 1980s was a rubbish time to be  a British citizen. Hooliganisms (sic) and rioting  were rife.  Teen pregnancy was high and still rising,  homophobia and racism were common.  Crime had increased all the way through the post-war period.  Everywhere reeked of tobacco and car engines spewed lead.   Deaths on the road were much higher  -  drunk diving was more prevalent  and set belts did not become compulsory until 1983.  Inner city blight was a real problem  ( a worse one I would say , than the sky high rents we suffer from today.)

Were it a question of  who enjoyed the better lives, I would never swap the 1980s for today .  I like music streaming, social liberalism and the internet, have no problem with high immigration, and really hate tobacco smoke, unemployment and casual racism “

I take issue with some of this.  The 1980s don’t seem to me to be all that long ago - I’d be more interested in contrasting today with the 50s (when we still had still had birching and hanging, same-sex relationships were illegal, children born outside wedlock were stigmatized as bastards).  And I don’t remember crime being all that much worse in the 80s.  But the contrast does warn us to be careful of thinking that the past was all that  golden..  In so many areas life is better: we have progressed, even if there is still a long way to go.

Later in the article Wilks admits that “. . .in one crucial regard I would pick the 1980s over the 2020s.  Britain was once a place  that could imagine progress and drive towards it.”  I agree.  Any trace of optimism has been replaced by cynicism.  We have lost confidence not just in our parties but also in our political system.

Further social progress in particular  is under attack by the right’s  clever use of their PR machine to describe any advance as “woke.”  This was cleverly illustrated in the “Doonsbury” strip cartoon in last Friday’s Guardian (14^th July) in which a media reporter, questioning a right-wing politician who parries all questions with “Woke!” defines  “woke”   as “being alert to discrimination and injustice.”    Does that mean, asks the cartoon, that they’re in favour of discrimination and injustice?  A good response, I think, and one we should use.

A refreshingly accurate picture of the UK’s true place in the world is given by this “blurb” which appeared in my in-box this week to advertise the New Statesman. “George Eaton, our senior editor, has interviewed David Edgerton, a historian whe key work – The Rise and Fall of the British Nation (2018) – has currency in today’s Labour Party. Britain, he argues, has little hope of being in the front rank of nations any longer, and should stop acting as though it is. The horizons of our politicians need lowering, and focusing on “a politics of modesty and a politics of improvement”. HL “We had a lot of talk not just about ‘Global Britain’ but about a ‘science superpower’, a real sense that the UK is not just a special nation by virtue of its history but that it is stuffed full of entrepreneurs. What’s happening now is a reaction to some of that; all of those promises have revealed themselves to be essentially false.” For Edgerton, the danger of a melodramatic account of British failure is that it leads to deluded dreams of British rebirth. “It is an intellectually fatal position to take. Behind declinism is an appalling top-dog-ism: if we get it right we can regain our proper place in the world. “The UK accounts for 2 per cent of global manufacturing and 2 per cent of global R&D. You’re not a science superpower if you do 2 per cent… You can’t go around claiming that in seven years’ time the UK is going to be a climate leader or a leader in green tech, it just doesn’t make sense.”  I couldn’t agree more, and Labour in this regard is almost as guilty as the Tories.  Let’s stop pretending, cut out all references to “world leading” and just aim for modest competence.