It’s hard to maintain much optimism about British politics. The structural faultlines look too great to be surmounted.
Something’s going to have to give – probably in the midst of the huge constitutional crisis we look to be heading into this autumn. One or more
General Elections, another referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union,
another Scottish independence referendum, a border poll in Northern Ireland –
they are all set to divide us in the years to come. Instead of getting on with
maybe making schools and hospitals better, Parliament will be tearing itself to
pieces over the constitution, just as it did in the 1880s and the 1910s. It’s depressing
stuff. Where once Prime Minister Winston Churchill bellowed ‘advance,Britannia!’ at the moment of victory in 1945, our leaders now squeak out a
litany of retreats into the obscurity to which history will surely condemn
them.
But look out beyond the politics, and the country is not
actually on fire. That’s something important to remember when writing about the
apparent state of crisis in Westminster and Whitehall. Yes, growth is slowing,
but it’s still there. True, wage increases are only now taking us back to those
halcyon days of 2007 and 2008 when we thought that the economy might expand
forever – but there is wage growth. Yes, we face a climate emergency. But the
United Kingdom is doing its bit. It’s on target to meet its Copenhagen
commitments in the short-term, and it might be able to hit its targets in the
medium- to long-term as well. Indeed, the Government has just legislated to take us to net zero carbon by 2050. The planet is in trouble, but the UK is at
least trying to do something about it.
We can in fact look back at lots of crises that seems
just as bad, at the time, if not worse. The summer of 1940 was an immeasurably
more acute crisis – not that it’s much relief that Britain's armed forces aren't now in full retreat from fascists who wanted to crush the country's entire way of life. Narrowing in a
bit more to the comparable disasters of the post-war age, the Suez Crisis of 1956 was an unmitigated catastrophe that saw Britain’s diplomatic position completely
obliterated in just a few short weeks – and which claimed the lives of 16
British servicemen. The country often seemed on the brink of ungovernability in
1972-73, especially given the chronic breakdown of civil order in Northern
Ireland. In 1976, the UK was forced into painful austerity by the
International Monetary Fund, while in 1981-82 Britain’s cities went up in
flames as unemployment and poverty soared.
Our present crisis is in most respects nowhere near as
acute as it seemed during those previous disasters. Employment growth is
strong, indeed puzzlingly so, and it’s concentrated in full-time permanent
jobs. Inflation is very low, though it’s crept up a little as the pound has
been hit by Brexit uncertainty. Mortgage and interest rates remain in their
historic troughs. Things are very, very hard indeed if you rely on any element
of Britain’s fraying welfare state, and public services (particularly those run by local councils) are beginning to run into the sands. But for most people, in
most places, things are just about okay. They go on living their lives, their rich,
dense, detailed, multi-hued, familial, variegated, fascinating, comforting,
challenging, infuriating lives – just as they did during the Depression and the long post-war boom alike. Life goes on, and seems to have been getting better,
at least in so far as long term trends in self-reported happiness tell us
anything.
Consider the latest instalment of that magisterial text
of post-war social history, 63 Up. Ever since 1964, and for the most part
helmed by filmmaker Michael Apted, these documentaries have heralded the ups,
downs, sideways and diagonals of normal people from all walks of life. And what
have they been doing? Getting on with things. You can watch one of the first episodes here (it aired as 7-Up), and ITV has recently shown the latest in the serial. If you want our advice, you should go and watch these right now, and maybe
catch up with the rest of the series, but the point we’re trying to make will
hopefully stand whether you’ve seen these programmes or not.
There’s cabbie Tony, doing okay for himself; Nick, who
became an academic in the United States, but who is now very, very ill; Bruce,
who used to teach in some pretty difficult schools, but who latterly moved into
the independent sector; Lynn, who held onto her job as a children’s librarian
through change after change at the council, but who’s sadly now died; Paul, long
troubled by being brought up in a children’s home, who’s since moved to
Australia; John the barrister, now doing good works in Bulgaria, his mother’s
native country; and the star of the show, Neil (above), once homeless in the Highlands,
but now serving as a lay preacher and a Liberal Democrat County Councillor in
Cumbria.
They might not have been splitting the atom. They may not
have been storming the beaches on D-Day. They haven’t been living a glamorous
high life with the elite, like John Maynard Keynes, choosing to spend his
health on what he saw as his mission to save the British economy. None of them
have won a gold medal. It’s not been that kind of heroism. But they have been living
heroic lives nonetheless: teaching kids from tough backgrounds, taking the
mobile library out, raising money for orphans in Eastern Europe, serving the
community as councillors, coming to terms with their own struggles with the
past and the present, building new lives in new nations, bringing up their
children. It is here, and not in what passes for the directing mind of the
political nation, where true leadership lies.
We may well all have been let down by those fraudulent
pipsqueaks who have the temerity even to use the word ‘leader’ in the face of
such citizens. But their endeavours continue to inspire, even all these years
after 1964 – that year of Labour’s
re-election among hopeful talk of that ‘white heat’ which would reforge the nation itself. Our ‘leaders’ are in retreat. But Britannia? Well, Britannia advances.
