The 1970s used to be the decade the British preferred to forget. This concerted mass amnesia was understandable; the period was after all one of rampant inflation, chronic industrial unrest and a mounting sense of national doom.
Yet suddenly the 1970s have become an object of nostalgia. Thirty years on, they are forever being re-appraised and re-visited, with a BBC television series about a time-traveling detective, Life on Mars, which vividly recreates the period’s ambience, proving especially popular. What makes this new fixation with the 1970s disquieting is that Britain is once again a place with a whiff of doom in the air: In some subliminal way, the unstable Britain of thirty-odd years ago perhaps seems to mirror the edgy Britain of 2007. The ever-present threat of terrorism, the relentless rise in violent assaults and gun crime, the news (according to a United Nations Children’s Fund report) that great numbers of the nation’s children feel far less cared for than their counterparts in other developed countries — these are only the more salient factors making for a resurgent British mood of foreboding.
The sense of foreboding is perhaps all the more acute for finding limited public expression. It is true that the grim UNICEF report about British children has occasioned no little hand wringing on the part of the media. Newspaper pundits have had much to say about the appalling implications of the finding that a high proportion of the nation’s children do not regard their peers as kind or helpful: It is indeed a devastating indictment of the record of Prime Minister Tony Blair, the New Labour leader who came to power in 1997 promising to make education, and thus the well-being of British children, his top priority. Nevertheless, the official message remains that, in a material sense at least, Britain is thriving and that Blair is entitled to boast about the success of the British economy, which has enjoyed an unprecedented period of continuous growth, sustaining a buoyant housing market and employment levels that put Continental neighbors like France and Germany in the shade. If there are social problems, they are mostly, the British public is endlessly reassured, problems of success, the price that Britain is paying for having embraced the US-style market economy, with all its benefits in terms of stimulating individual enterprise.
That the Blair government has been able to ride out crisis after crisis is largely because the British economy is indeed thriving. It is true that this prosperity has been fueled by vast public and private borrowing, and that it has been accompanied by dramatically widening socioeconomic divisions. It is also true that it has been to some extent bought at the expense of admitting incalculable numbers of immigrants to Britain, many of them willing to work long hours for minimal wages. Yet if Britain’s economic success is brittle, it is for the moment real enough to enable Blair — terminally discredited though he may be over the Iraq war and much else — to retain some faint semblance of credibility. What the Blair years have underlined is the shaming truth that a British leader can behave with breathtaking lack of principle and even get away with prosecuting an illegal (and catastrophic) war — just so long as house prices remain high and Britain’s affluent classes do not find that their living standards are threatened.
Meanwhile, at a private level, there is a growing feeling that Blair’s Britain is irretrievably dysfunctional, a country where life has become a matter of sauve qui peut. Denied much in the way of a public outlet, this disaffection is finding expression in marginal forms. Hardly noticed by the mainstream media, the paperback polemic, Time to Emigrate? by the former Tory Minister George Walden gives eloquent voice to widespread current anxieties. An intellectual and former diplomat who became minister for higher education in the Conservative administration of Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, Walden served in a government which believed it had found the antidote to the “British disease” and which laid the foundation for the deregulated “enterprise culture” on which the New Labour government of Tony Blair has so effectively capitalized. Now, however, Walden evidently wonders whether the Thatcherite medicine — the wholesale privatization of the British economy — really did furnish a long-term solution to Britain’s problems, necessary though it may have been at the time. Addressed to a grown-up son and daughter-in-law, his book is an outpouring of highly intelligent pessimism about the British future and was prompted by the discovery that they were thinking of joining the 5 million disillusioned Britons who have said goodbye to their native land in recent years.
Walden’s prejudices — he brings no great sympathy to his discussion of Islam — are sufficiently apparent. But in the main his diagnosis of Britain’s ills is sobering stuff. Everywhere you look, he writes, there’s a nervy feeling of impermanence. He suspects that the post-imperial British are behaving like a reckless widow and wonders if there isn’t a new swashbuckling spirit, a bit of the old “death or glory” mentality, at work among them. What does it say about today’s Britain that it is a place where a billion pounds a week are being blown on gambling? For Walden, the question is whether the British economy’s underpinnings anything like as sound as Blair and his ministers maintain? Or is Britain like one of the houses you see on film with a view over the sea that looks idyllic — until the camera pans wider and it turns out that what appeared to be a fetching residence in a superb location is actually perched on the edge of a cliff. The irony, as Walden notes, is that, according to opinion polls, millions of people all over the world rate Britain as the most desirable place to live.
Walden saves his most scathing remarks for the Conservative leader David Cameron, who may before long become Britain’s prime minister. He argues that the privileged Cameron and his expensively educated circle offer a depressing illustration of how stiflingly class-bound Britain remains. He sees them as a “bunch of savvy upper-class operators”, the kind who used to be found in the city and who are now just as likely to work in the media.
Cameron’s own background was as a communications director in commercial television where he promoted programs like Hollywood Women and A Woman’s Guide to Adultery.
Walden remarks that it is bad enough when one of society’s fortunate sons foists moronic television on the ill-educated; but when — in pursuit of his political ambitions — he expresses ostentatious concern about failing state schools and affects to believe that life is not all about money, he stands revealed as a “Janus-faced, light-weight, upper crust political spiv”. It follows that Walden sees little hope for Britain with this glib, image-mongering political playboy as its leader.
In Walden’s eyes, Cameron — like Blair — is a creature of the gimmicky celebrity culture that is sapping Britain’s moral and intellectual resources.
That talismanic figure of national folklore “John Bull” personified the vaunted old British virtue of blunt common sense. Emblazoned with the Union Jack, Walden’s book demonstrates that at the beginning of the 21st century the ruddy-faced old yeoman is still in rude health.
