A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  However, by 2009, the population exceeded 61 million, and the trend remains strongly upward. Concerns about the limits to multiculturalism and diversity, and about the success of integration, have become more pronounced, and have been exploited by the extremist British National Party, which became more prominent in 2009, doing well in the European elections that year.

  These concerns are driven not so much by the rise in population, acute as that is as an issue in the discussion of immigration, as by the willingness of a small number of Islamists to take part in murderous plots, such as the 2005 Tube bombings in London, that reflected a total alienation from British society; and by polls suggesting that many more rejected much of British society. Moreover, this alienation was not necessarily a matter of recent migrants, but, rather, a symptom of a failure on the part of their children to accept Britishness. This issue was given fictional form in Sebastian Faulks’ (1953–) novel A Week in December (2009), a state-of-Britain novel set in 2007, in which, while an Asian entrepreneur who has made money producing chutney for the British market and who argues that terrorism cannot be justified by the Koran, prepares to collect an OBE, his teenage son learns bomb-making through the local mosque.

  The consequences of the strong links between some immigrant communities and the Pakistani homeland underlined the question about whether the consequences of multiple identities could be as benign as they were in most other cases. This situation has had political consequences, not least because of debate over whether a multicultural society can work. In particular, it is unclear how far, if such a society lacks a strong common culture, it is compatible with democracy, which depends on the minority accepting broadly the wishes and lifestyle of the majority. Particular problems arise with education and health care, notably (but not only) of women.

  Declining Distinctiveness and the National Interest

  Multiculturalism also represented an aspect of an engagement with the outer world in which Britain seemed less confident and distinctive, and understandably so in a world increasingly characterized in terms of globalization. In many respects, Britain became more similar to the societies of Western Europe, although this is also true of societies such as those of Australia and Canada, and this similarity led to comparisons between countries, for example of the relationship of state education to multiculturalism in France and Britain: in France there is a greater expectation of conformity with state norms. The similarity of societies was a consequence of broadly parallel social trends, including secularization, the emancipation of women and the move from the land. Sexual permissiveness, rising divorce rates, growing geographical mobility, the decline of traditional social distinctions and the rise of youth culture were all shared characteristics. Deference, aristocracies and social stratification all declined.

  The result was a lessening of a sense of national distinctiveness, and this lessening played a role in relations with both the US and ‘Europe’, the two key poles of Britain’s engagement with the outer world. It became harder to articulate a robust patriotism to serve as a cultural basis for a clear-cut presentation of the national interest. This issue very much affected the politicians who followed Margaret Thatcher. She had many faults, but was clearly able to articulate such a sense of interest. If it was largely in terms of traditional assumptions and a conventional vocabulary, this was understandable; Thatcher was able to link the 1980s to the formative experiences of her youth and those of many of her listeners, notably the Second World War, its aftermath, and the last stages of Britain as a great power and an empire. The Falklands War of 1982, moreover, provided her with an opportunity to deploy a strong and uncomplicated patriotism.

  At the same time, her government proved far less successful in taking forward this patriotism for the next generation. To criticize successive governments for the consequences of a broader pattern of cultural development is misplaced, but politicians can be faulted for failing to understand the changes that have occurred and for assuming that nationalism is an automatic response. The results became clear after 1990 in the difficulty in articulating a coherent and commanding sense of national interest during the Major, Blair and Brown governments. Instead, there was very much an ad hoc quality to the discussion of policy over a wide range of issues, including foreign policy, military planning, immigration, human rights and other aspects of Britain’s relationship with the wider world. This situation is ongoing and affects for example plans for a Strategic Defence Review after the 2010 election, to follow the review of 1998, because it is clear that there is no consensus on the nature of Britain’s national interests.

  A lack of consensus could of course be found on earlier occasions, for example over appeasement in 1938, but it is striking that differences in policy in that case drew more on a widely held set of beliefs and assumptions about Britain, its interests and its role in the world, than is the case today. The range of factors responsible for this change links this chapter with the others in this book, because they include Scottish nationalism and large-scale Muslim immigration, but, however important and easy to attach blame, such separatist strands are not solely at issue. Instead, it is the fundamental cultural shift in the bulk of the population that is a key element, one addressed in the next chapter. A society that puts such a stress on individualism, in the sense of self-fulfilment, finds it hard to define priorities and policies in a competitive and difficult world.

  8

  TO THE PRESENT

  The narrative of ministries scarcely captures the fundamentals of political change in this period, nor its implications for society. Instead, the key point in this chapter is to link culture and politics, and to argue that the account of ministries, elections and government policies takes on much of its significance only alongside an understanding of broader themes in Britain’s development, notably the moods of public culture. The latter owe something to government action, particularly with the liberal legislation of the 1960s, and also to the activities of public bodies, especially the BBC, but it is wrong to see culture and society as simple products of such governmental and institutional action and direction. This is notably the case if a global perspective is taken, as that reveals a general trend. Indeed, it was a widespread shift in norms, beliefs and practices that constituted ‘the Sixties’ and their consequences. This shift can be linked to consumerism and democratization as key aspects of the general trend in values in Britain over the last half-century.

  It is important to focus on the 1960s as they were a key period of cultural discontinuity, a period very much seen in those terms, both at the time and subsequently. The 1960s certainly destroyed a cultural continuity and sense of continuity that had lasted very obviously from the Victorian period, and, in doing so, reflected the impact of social and ideological trends, including the rise of new artistic forms and of a new agenda moulded by shifts in the understanding of gender, youth, class, place and race.

  Society Before the 1960s

  Despite a feeling of uncertainty and dissolution after the First World War, as well as the new artistic and cultural forms of the 1920s, this transformation had scarcely been readily predictable in the 1930s. Then, the dominant collectivism (by modern British, though not 1930s Soviet, standards) of society and politics also had a strong moral dimension. This dimension rested on the long-established notion of Britain as a Christian state, one sharpened by concern about the unruliness of the public. This was not simply a political culture of conservatism for the left drew on a strong Nonconformist tradition that entailed a cultural puritanism directed against drink, gambling and self-indulgence and focused, instead, on exemplary self-improvement.

  Public morals and popular culture had for long been policed, but this policing was accentuated in the mid-twentieth century, because fears of subversion and the disruptive consequences of individualism influenced attitudes to practices that were not in the accepted social mainstream, such as drug-taking. Moreover, the pronounced stress on the collective culture and effort, whether in the shape of the
National Government (1931–9), the war effort (1939–45) or post-war socialist planning by the Labour governments of 1945 to 1951, led to an intolerance towards those who did not accept norms. Not filling in forms or not having a fixed address was a defiance of bureaucracy, but there was also a moral policing that criminalized habits judged unacceptable, for example drug-taking. Abortion, homosexuality, prostitution and suicide were all long-standing criminal offences, and actively treated as such by the police and courts; and consenting adults had therefore no privacy. Policing had a clear and well-advertised moral component, and politicians and newspapers actively pressed for the enforcement of these laws.

  The press drew on the treatment of these activities as criminal in order to underline their discussion of them as unnatural; and this created a context within which politicians discussed legislation, a context that was not simply, or even largely, that of Christian morality. As a result of legislation such as the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 and the Infant Life Preservation Act of 1929, abortion was a crime that led to prosecution, and early campaigners for publicly available contraception were also prosecuted. In light of the subsequent rush of legislative change, it is notable that Parliament for long resisted it. Thus, in 1960, the House of Commons rejected the recommendation of the 1957 Wolfenden Commission for the liberalization of the laws on homosexuality.

  Restrictive divorce laws affected marriage, child care and sexuality, providing a staple of gossip, community assumptions and plots for writers and dramatists; while censorship played a major role in what could be read, seen and listened to. Literary merit was no defence against charges of pornography, as Penguin Books was to discover when it published an edition of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, although the failure of the resulting prosecution proved a key moment in the breaching of the established moral code.

  Censorship of the theatre and stage by the Lord Chamberlain’s department, which was not abolished until 1968, served to maintain moral conventions on topics such as sexuality, abortion and birth control. Moreover, the leisure activities of the many were regulated by law, whether drinking, gambling or watching television. There were legal hours for drinking in pubs, and, in the case of gambling, no off-course cash betting, a measure, of course, that did not affect those with the leisure and means to afford to go racing. Such restrictions made criminals out of the large numbers who broke them, while also exposing social distinctions. In practice, the laws were broken, notably with backstreet bookies and with ‘lock-ins’ in pubs allowing drinking after hours.

  Force and violence played a role in the legal and social systems. Corporal punishment (beating with the cane, slipper or, in Scotland, tawse) remained common in schools. Young men were brought under the sway of the state through conscription, which was continued after the Second World War, in part in order to provide the manpower to defend empire, notably in response to the Communist insurrection in Malaya, but also in order to compensate for the loss of the Indian Army, and was not phased out until 1957–63. Although capital punishment – hanging – was imposed only for murder, the ability of the legal system to deliver such a verdict contributed to the sense of a powerful state with clear moral codes that it was determined to enforce. Attempts to end capital punishment, attempts that drew on liberal criticism, were unsuccessful. The House of Lords rejected abolition in 1956, although there were relatively few executions in the last years of capital punishment. These executions, nevertheless, attracted great public attention, not least because of some important miscarriages of justice.

  Culture Before the 1960s

  A similar emphasis was seen in much of the cultural activity of the period, although this conservatism is underplayed if the stress instead is on Modernism, the movement which aimed to make a break with the past and to find new forms and means of expression. Fashionable circles, notably the inter-war Bloomsbury Group associated with the writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), had little time for popular writers of the period, or for commercial mass culture, but, despite later fascination on the part of critics, Modernism had only limited popular appeal, certainly compared with many of the ‘middle-’ and ‘low-’brow writers of the period, and had little airing on the radio. The rising disposable income of the inter-war period, especially of the 1920s, the ready availability of inexpensive books, and increased leisure, helped the popular writers of the period, such as Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) and J.B. Priestley, as well as the sales of the works of earlier writers, notably Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

  A self-conscious Yorkshireman, Priestley had an interest in English character and valued ordinary people, but his distance from cosmopolitanism and his socialism did not make him a provincial drudge. Instead, he took forward the realist tradition associated with Dickens, a tradition that was despised by the Modernists.

  Another Yorkshire writer, the feminist Winifred Holtby (1898–1935), also offered a strong sense of place in her last novel South Riding (1936), a depiction of a Yorkshire community with a headmistress-heroine. This tradition of writing based on a strong sense of place continued in much of the popular novel writing of the later twentieth century, for example the works of Catherine Cookson (1906–99), which were mostly set in her native Tyneside. A sense of place was also seen in television dramas, for example ‘soaps’ such as Till Death Us Do Part, Coronation Street and EastEnders, and also detective stories set in particular locations.

  An inter-war musical equivalent to the success of traditional rather than Modernist forms can be sought in the popularity of the pastoral work of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger (1882–1961); which, however, was criticized by the composer and critic Constant Lambert (1905–51) as the ‘cowpat school’ of British music. Similarly, the music of Edward Elgar remained popular in concert programmes, gramophone record sales and BBC broadcasts. Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Sir William Walton (1902–83) were very different composers, yet each was seen by audiences as quintessentially ‘English’. They took certain elements of tradition, bonded them with foreign or modern influences, and produced something entirely fresh, yet seemingly eternal, the invention of tradition in action. Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending regularly tops Classic FM’s poll for popular classics. BBC broadcasts and concert programmes, for example those of the Proms (Promenade concerts in the Albert Hall), were also conservative in their treatment of foreign music.

  Moreover, many of the painters of the period produced portraits or landscapes that paid scant tribute to fashionable themes. In the inter-war years, the Royal Academy Schools were characterized by a conservatism greatly at odds with Modernism, while James Bolivar Manson (1879–1945), the Tate Gallery’s Director in the 1930s and a painter of flowers, was opposed to Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism. Works by painters such as Picasso could be bought in London galleries, but their wider impact was limited. In the Second World War the War Artists Advisory Committee, which sought to use painting to maintain public morale, had little interest in abstract and non-objective art, and, instead, sought to preserve a bucolic sense of national identity. It was only in 1945 that the trustees of the Tate Gallery in London agreed to the opening of a small room devoted to abstract art.

  Despite works by architects such as the Georgian-born and Continental-trained Berthold Lubetkin (1901–90), Modernism also had little impact in architecture in the inter-war years. Instead, pre-war styles, both revised classicism and Arts and Crafts, remained very strong, as in the Liberty department store in London.

  Much of the culture of the period was not designed to challenge established practice and social order. Although the independent-minded and free-living character of Harriet Vane in Dorothy L. Sayers’ detective novels was striking, not least for having sex before marriage, most popular female novelists, such as Agatha Christie (1890–1976), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) and Daphne Du Maurier (1907–89), focused on stable sexual and class identities. This was part of a conservative d
isposition that was very pronounced in the 1930s. Moreover, Du Maurier’s novels, such as Jamaica Inn (1936) and Rebecca (1938), had a particularly strong sense of place, a characteristic of much of the culture of the age and one that reflected both the interest in nature and location, and also the existence of regional voices.

  The 1930s also saw a rise in a ‘Condition of Britain’ culture – attempts to present the life of the poor and to do so in a way that emphasized hardship, although they also reflected and reinforced the social research of the time. These attempts, which drew on radical political commitments and a determination to vindicate the arts by showing life as it is, included George Orwell’s bleak description of working-class life in northern mining communities, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), as well as Walter Greenwood’s (1903–74) depiction of the harshness of unemployment in Love on the Dole (1933). As with much else, there were Scottish and Welsh equivalents to this literature, which influenced the attitudes that were to rise to the fore after the Second World War.

  The Second World War and its aftermath in the austere, regulated late 1940s, provided the occasion, if not the cause, for a shift to a new seriousness, notably with the bleak world depicted by George Orwell in his futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the harsh tones of the music of Benjamin Britten (1913–76) and Michael Tippett (1905–98), as in Britten’s opera Peter Grimes (1945). Architecture was now dominated by Modernism. The progressive style of the 1930s became an orthodoxy that was used for the widespread post-war rebuilding necessary after German air attacks, for urban development and for the new construction made possible by the investment in hospitals, schools and New Towns.