by A. N. Wilson
The relationship between crime and narcotic abuse was evident, but the political class did not dare to draw the obvious conclusions. Prohibition of drugs in Britain had been no more effective than had been the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the gangster era. In both cases, the criminalisation of the substance merely made the suppliers into barons, figures of power. Had any government had the courage to decriminalise drugs it would at least have been able to deprive the pushers, the pimps, the suppliers small and large, of their power and money. It would never do so, for fear of the popular press. When Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of North Wales, said that the recreational drug ecstasy was ‘far safer than aspirin’, he spoke no more than the simple, scientific and statistical truth.6 Yet every teenager who died as a consequence of taking an ecstasy tablet while out clubbing had died an avoidable death; and the popular press would not allow the politicians to forget it.
Regrettable as drug-related deaths were for the families concerned, it was the social menace posed by the drug users who did not die which was noticeable in early twenty-first-century Britain. The use of crack cocaine soared. From 1985 to 1987 cocaine-related hospital emergencies rose from 23,500 to 55,200.7 The need to satisfy the urge for crack was as intense as the effects of the drug itself: the resulting rise in crime was simply consequential, but, as the medical statistic just quoted shows, as well as the nuisance of a million stolen purses, smashed car windows, the vandalised phone boxes, one has to take note of the time and money at Accident and Emergency units expended by doctors and nurses on these individuals.
Nor was cannabis, the recreational drug of preference for baby boomers and the middle classes, as safe as its adepts hoped. Fifteen percent of cannabis sold on British streets in 2002 was skunk, a super-strength resin which, medical opinion said, accounted for a quarter of all cases of schizophrenia in 2007. The 15 percent of 2002 had soared to 80 percent in 2008. There were an estimated five million cannabis smokers in Britain at this date.8 That is a lot of people risking, not the slow wits and silliness of the Bob Dylan dopehead generation, but the outright and seemingly incurable madness of the skunk-minded. In such circumstances, the government’s vigilant attacks on cigarette smokers looked to some citizens like fiddling while Rome burned.
Comparable, and related, to the question of crime, and of the social alienation which it both reflects and brings to pass, is the whole story of immigration to Britain. Those who governed Britain in the first two decades covered by this book tended to be old men. They had grown up when the British Empire, whatever virtues it had possessed, was ingrained with racialist ideology. The chief thought in their minds, once the immigrations from former Commonwealth countries began, was of racial contamination. The rival ideology was the optimistic idea of multi-culturalism, which by the end of the period we have been considering had been largely abandoned by some of our social engineers. Trevor Phillips, for example, Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, announced in April 2004 that multi-culturalism was no longer ‘useful’ because it ‘encouraged separateness between communities’. On a day when British Muslims were holding one of their regular protests and burning the Union flag outside Regent’s Park Mosque in London, Phillips said, ‘What we should be talking about is how we reach an integrated society, one in which people are equal under the law, where there are some common values’. Against the ‘extremist’ ideas of the radical Islamists, Phillips proposed that there was an urgent need to ‘assert a core of Britishness’. Being British meant that everyone, including the Muslims, had to ‘work by the rules of British people–and that excludes terrorism’.9
The advantage of the ‘multi-cultural’ idea was that it enabled everyone to feel at home in their own language, religion, dress codes and eating habits without being imposed upon by the government. It was, after all, successive British governments who had allowed, or actively encouraged, immigration over the previous half-century; happy to do so when it provided cheap labour in an expanding economy; worried by the number of brown faces it might assemble in one place in such towns as Leicester or Bradford; and only noticing several generations later that behind the brown faces and the statistics were actually human beings with sets of beliefs, religious and political attitudes which might not sit easily with modern British secularism.
How do you impose ‘a core of Britishness’ upon people who are only British in the sense of possessing a passport, and who perhaps do not want someone else’s so-called values thrust upon them? What are these values, in any case? ‘Democracy and the rule of law’ is the answer which some would give. Yes, but…As we have seen several times in the previous pages, and in the two volumes which preceded this history–The Victorians and After the Victorians–Britain was only ever a partial democracy. Its parliamentary system and its civil service had both fully evolved long before the franchise was extended to all adults. The General Election is an opportunity for the British electorate to express preferences, and to change the make-up of Parliament, but it leaves the civil service untouched, the police and the judiciary untouched. Only established or ‘acceptable’ political viewpoints are offered at the ballot box, and those who wish, for example, to be governed by greens, by communists, by fascists, by Islamic fundamentalists or others–and this represents a substantial part of the electorate if added together–have no chance, no chance whatsoever, of seeing a candidate with their viewpoint elected to Parliament. Even the Liberal Democrats, who receive a high share of the votes, elect only a few dozen members to Westminster.
Britain remained a country governed by those who thought they knew best. In the nineteenth century this was a coalition of aristocrats and the professional classes, with a growing professional civil service. In the last fifty years, the aristocracy was slowly replaced by a different Establishment, of university graduates and career politicians, who were no less adamant that they did not need too much advice from the headstrong populace. The populace might think it wanted capital punishment, or an escape from the bureaucracy of Europe, but the governing classes always knew better.
Confronted with the spectre of Irish terrorism in the period 1970–95, this Establishment contorted itself into any number of positions until Tony Blair had the brilliant idea of giving the ‘extremists’ in Northern Ireland what they actually claimed to want: namely, power. He made them share it, a Dantean joke which worked. It would be less easy to do the same with the Islamic terrorists, since it was not in the power of the New Establishment to reinvent the Caliphate and bring to pass an Islamic world government–even if the New Establishment were to want such a thing. So it fell back on the rather lame belief that it must assert Britishness–at the period in history when it was hardest to define what so nebulous a concept might mean. A substantial number of Scots, at the identical period, wanted to break up the Union, and they look, as we bring our tale to a close, as if they will succeed. If they do so, where will it leave Wales? Britishness is apparently not so desirable a quality that all the British want to share in it.
Nor could the British fall back, as could the Poles, for example, at a time of national identity crisis, upon their ‘core values’ reflected in a shared religion. Although the world in general appeared, by the end of our period, to be becoming more religious, there was not much sign of this happening in Britain itself. Indeed, the Church of England by law established never looked more like breaking up altogether in a series of Lilliputian squabbles. To the outside world, which did not share its preoccupation with the legitimacy, or otherwise, of homosexual bishops or female priests, these appeared ever more arcane.
In October 1972, when he was MP for Plymouth, Alan Clark went to the high school to give a talk to the students.
‘A girl, a slim dedicated Marxist, asked me why I was like I was, what motivated me. “Because I am British,” I said, “because I want to advance and protect the British people.” “So, what’s so special about the British?” she answered. “What makes them so different from everybody else?” Well
I could have answered that what makes them so different from anyone else, is the capacity they seem to have for producing at every level of society, people like yourself who ask a question like that.’10
Everything in history evolves, and one of the things which has evolved and changed in our times in Britain has been the concept of the nation state. It is regarded in all the circles to which Alan Clark alludes with smiling contempt or with actual abhorrence. President Woodrow Wilson’s idea, promulgated with some happy, and some disastrous, results after the First World War, was that peoples should express their collective identity by the formation of nation states. In our times, we witnessed the urge for such identity, in the Baltic states, in Central Europe, in the Balkans, in the Middle East. The concept of a Jewish homeland turned into the right of the State of Israel to exist as an independent nation. Two little strips of land on either side of it, occupied by Arabs who were formerly citizens of Egypt and Jordan (and before that of the Ottoman Empire) were deemed to be a suitable starting point for a Palestinian state, presumably as a quid pro quo. Montenegro and Bosnia and Serbia emerged in our times, not as independent states, wishing to escape the violence of history, but as would-be nations, as did Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia… And naturally enough, Ireland and Scotland had the same need to express their collective identity as nations. The dangers of nationalism, which hardly needed to be explained to Europeans after the Second World War, did not deter the Russians and the French from becoming more rather than less nationalistic as the era wore on.
But, Britain, and more especially England, was somehow deemed to be different. Although Gordon Brown spoke with eloquent lack of meaning or substance about ‘Britishness’ and ‘core vahlews’ and ‘British jobs for British workers’, voters could see through the rhetoric. He meant that if the Scottish nationalists were to succeed, his position, and that of all the other Scottish MPs at Westminster, would be untenable.
What he actually thought about Britain was revealed in a symbolic action which had been performed before he became the Prime Minister. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was responsible for coinage, and before he left that position he approved of a new set of British coins. For the first time since the reign of Charles II, the figure of Britannia had been removed from them.
The helmeted figure of Britain’s tutelary deity, clutching her trident as she sat with a lion at her feet, had first appeared on a Charles II farthing. It was at the time when modern British history was beginning. The country had been through a devastating civil war. Religiously and politically divided, it now came together in an era of extraordinary creativity. The Book of Common Prayer of 1662, the origins of modern science in the Royal Society, the architecture of Wren and, a little later, the political rationalism of John Locke, began the story of modern Britain. Britannia was its emblem. During the eighteenth century, as the country expanded, both industrially and colonially, Britannia became the symbol of its emerging self-identity. The separate quarters of the kingdom–Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England–were all one. The skills and arts of all its peoples contributed both to its colossal commercial success in the nineteenth century, and to its expansion throughout the world. Thomson’s old ditty ‘Rule, Britannia!’, set to music by Thomas Arne, was an anti-slaving song, which expressed the innocence, the exuberance, the confidence in their own rightness of the British people in the ascendancy.
Gordon Brown sent Britannia packing. It was a small thing, but it signalled the end which any observer had seen coming for decades, the strange dissolution of Britain itself, not merely (as Scotland’s independence seemed ever more likely) as a political entity, but as an idea. Britannia no longer ruled the waves. But this was not simply because her shipbuilding industry was decades-long dead, and her navy in decline; it was not merely because her last major colony had been restored to the monstrous and ever-expanding power of China; it was not merely because there was a European Union and a United States which were both bigger and more powerful than she was. It was because Britannia had, at some point during our times, ceased to exist. She had become a missing person. The families of such characters rehearse, over and over, the last day they saw their beloved daughter, husband, mother; how they waited for the return which never came. Such was the state of anxiety and heartbreak of certain conservative romantics as our times came to an end. They strained their ears and eyes for signs of a return: none came. For such as these, almost the most intolerable thing about the loss was that there were others in the family who, bloated by illegal narcotics and American junk food, sat in front of the television in the downstairs room and did not notice that she had gone.
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