A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  No expert in industry, Priestley had a sharp eye. He describes the Blackburn Technical College, full of ‘industrious, smiling young men from the East, most anxious to learn all that Lancashire could tell them about the processes of calico manufacture’. They missed nothing, says Priestley, but smiled at their instructors and then disappeared into the blue. ‘A little later – for we live in a wonderfully interdependent world – there also disappeared into the blue a good deal of Lancashire’s trade with the East. Most of those students came from Japan.’

  In the potteries of Staffordshire’s Stoke on Trent, Priestley found craftsmen repeating designs which had been fashionable in Victorian times, and still more astonishingly, working on treadles and lathes introduced by Josiah Wedgwood in 1763. Each town in Britain looked different, smelt different and were full of different words, shapes, noises – because they did different things. Leicester was boots and socks, and typewriters; Nottingham was lace (its female workers were also famous for their lack of sexual puritanism); Bradford was wool, and strongly influenced by German Jews; Coventry was cars; Sheffield, cutlery; Dundee, jute – and so on. In 1933, there was a strong variation, a texture, to the nation that the decline of industry, together with the growth of consumerism and broadcasting, would soon wash away. Priestley understood this. Eventually globalization and capital’s search for cheaper labour which Priestley had spotted would wipe out the Britain he knew.

  Priestley inspired other writers, notably George Orwell who famously took the road to Wigan Pier (it does not exist) on foot, three years later, as well as photographers and early documentary film-makers who followed him deep into wrecked Britain. The grim condition of old industrial Britain was only tentatively addressed before the war. The coalmining industry, still key to Britain’s economy, was a mass of independent, under-invested companies, using technology which was hilariously old-fashioned by American or German standards. Britain’s miners worked with picks, wearing only trousers in stifling heat and near-darkness, for low wages and without any kind of job security. Back in the thirties, there seemed neither possibility nor prospect of any real change. This was just how things were. Yet evidence of catastrophic decline was piling up. Once, investment and innovation had been at the heart of British heavy industry. No longer. British ships, two-thirds of the vessels afloat before the First World War, were riveted by hand, outdoors, by a hyper-unionized and strike-prone workforce in virtually the same way as they had been put together in Edwardian times to take on the Kaiser. While other countries had changed, Britain had not. Protection and cheap money, then rearmament, helped in the short term. But the industrial problems of seventies Britain from Japanese competition to under investment were primed well before the Germans invaded Poland.

  As Priestley saw films, to his despair, replacing music halls, he predicted a country which would seem much the same wherever you are. Once inside a cinema, he pointed out, you could be anywhere from Iowa City to Preston. But it wasn’t just the films. Young people were experimenting with cocktails in the new American bars springing up across England. Old English songs were being pushed out by the American blues. ‘This is the England of arterial and bypass roads, of filling stations…of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor coaches, wireless…’ It is comparatively classless, with its cheap and uniform chain stores and its new industries – the electronics, synthetic fibres, light engineering and aircraft factories spreading around London and through the Midlands. Slough, a byword for the new, suburban, light-industrial and rather monotonous country taking shape, provoked one of Betjeman’s angriest poems. ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now.’ What had he against it? ‘Those air-conditioned, bright canteens / Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans / Tinned minds, tinned breath…’ Betjeman was a great snob and nostalgist but even J.B. Priestley, the self-described democrat and socialist, found something a bit too cheap about the new Britain: ‘Too much of it is simply a trumpery imitation…There is about it a rather depressing monotony. Too much of this life is being stamped on from outside…this new England is lacking in character, in zest, gusto, flavour, bite, drive, originality.’ Priestley calls it a third England and this global-culture England is far nearer the country that survives today.

  Many of the same trends were obvious in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland – but less so, since these did not have the fast-growing new industries of southern England and were even more buried in the dirt and stagnation of Victorian industrialism. South Wales with her archaic coalfields and steel industry was as badly hurt by the mid-war slump as anywhere in the United Kingdom, and considerably more militant than most of England. Scotland’s decline was equally obvious, from the shipyards of the Clyde to the sudden silence in Dundee’s mills. The Scottish poet Edwin Muir bitterly describes the small industrial town of Cathcart, now effectively part of Glasgow, in his Scottish Journey. He found ‘a debased landscape in which every growing thing seemed to be poisoned and stunted, a landscape which involuntarily roused evil thoughts and seemed to be made to be the scene of murders and rapes’. He comes across abandoned coal pits where along black slag paths ‘one would see stunted naked boys bathing in the filthy pools, from which rose a smell of various acids and urine’. In common with Priestley and Orwell, for Muir the answer was socialism and, like Priestley, he notes the Americanizing influence of film and radio on the people of better-off cities, such as Edinburgh. It is a commercial ‘bus-driven, cinema-educated’ age making the immediate environment – this town, that industry – matter less to how people behave. ‘The inhabitants of all our towns, great and small, Scottish and English, are being subjected more and more exclusively to action from a distance,’ he argues. It is a brilliant insight which well describes what will happen to Britain after the war was over.

  So, as the travellers of the thirties demonstrate, Britain was changing fast before the war. While the look of fifties Britain, with long ‘ribbons’ of semi-detached houses spreading out from the old cities, had been set in the age of Stanley Baldwin, American music and films were here long before the GIs arrived. There was a lightness and a brightness about thirties architecture and design that would be picked up, rediscovered and taken forward after the war into the fifties. Teenagers may not have existed as a named group in Britain, though the term was already being used in pre-war America, but people in their teens with money to spend on records and clothes and increasing independence from their parents were already a phenomenon in British cities. Chain stores were selling brighter clothes. Television sets were on sale, and starting to spread among the London middle classes. The texture of the country was changing. Britain was already becoming a slightly flimsier, less varied nation, a little more American and a little less British. This will be a major part of the story to come.

  Britain in her imperial heyday was a country which believed in small government, at least at home. Planning was the kind of thing sinister Germans and funny Italians got up to. Despite the pleas from writers the thirties were not a time when the majority really thought government could make things better. It is easy to feel appalled and bemused by the enthusiasm of so many reasonably intelligent British people for Mussolini and Hitler but there was more to it than cowardice and racism. There was an impatient yearning for government that actually worked – that ended unemployment, built big new roads, developed modern industries and, yes, made the trains run on time. Politicians as far apart as the socialist John Strachey, the Tory Churchill, the fascist Oswald Mosley and the old Liberal Lloyd George, all at one time or another found the dictatorial style something to be at least half-admired. The war made such errors so embarrassing they were quickly forgotten. The most fundamental thing the war changed was the political climate: it made democracy fashionable.

  But it did more. It convinced the British that their government could reshape the nation too. Like most victorious wars it raised the reputation of the stat
e. If the government could throw an army into Europe and defeat the most well-organized and frightening-looking military machine of modern times, then what else could it do? Was all the waste and lack of planning and general amateurism really the best the British could achieve? In the first of a series of famous BBC radio broadcasts during the war, given on 5 June 1940 after the chaotic near-disaster and last-minute escape of Dunkirk, Priestley called for the amateurism to stop: ‘Nothing, I feel could be more English…both in its beginning and its end, its folly and its grandeur…We have gone sadly wrong like this before and here and now we must resolve never, never, to do it again.’ It was time to ‘think differently’. That resolution, to do things differently in future, was the biggest domestic change brought by Britain’s victory. As we shall see, it was implemented in the worst possible conditions and had most unexpected effects.

  It didn’t, however, mean that we stopped fighting. The world after the war was still a world of war. From Greece and Cyprus to Korea and Malaya; from Kenya to the Falklands, Ireland to Iraq, Britain would always be fighting somewhere. The most serious enemy became world communism but shooting wars very rarely involved communist armies directly because of the risk of nuclear conflagration. They were more directed at rival forms of nationalism, liberation armies led by African, Asian or Arab leaders who would be idolized until they turned with depressing regularity into dictators themselves. Many of the colonial wars have almost slipped out of British public memory, though they were bloody enough.

  Today the country likes to see itself as a peacekeeper, an armed ambulance service, social workers with machine guns, rather than a natural belligerent in the old way. Yet the fighting has gone on even as the armed forces have shrivelled in size. Some of the ‘post-war’ wars caused huge political interest and argument, out of all proportion to their size, both making and destroying reputations. Suez, in which British casualties were just twenty-one, is rightly seen as a post-war turning point, proving how dependent and weak Britain had become. Without the reconquest of the Falkland Islands the Thatcher era might have lasted just a few years. The second Iraq war split Britain and ravened Tony Blair’s reputation. But Britain’s modern military history has been paradoxical. We cut back because the age of warfare is always about to end, yet in practice we keep fighting. We withdraw to barracks, mothball warships, announce a peace dividend; and then jump back out again. In spite of this, and in spite of the abandonment of National Service conscription in 1963, Britain has spent disproportionately more on defence than other countries of a similar size and economic strength. Only France has rivalled us. Money which could have gone on education, industrial support or more modern infrastructure has gone on aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and tank regiments in Germany. This has been done to keep Britain as a world player, which she still just is, though in almost every war actually fought, and certainly throughout the Cold War, she fought in the larger shadow of the United States.

  Throughout the post-war age Britain maintained an inner ‘security state’ hidden from public view, a living, unseen structure behind bland brick and stone buildings with a vast electronic ear to the ground at Cheltenham GCHQ. The work of MI5 and MI6 has been of unhealthy fascination to novelists, film-makers and conspiracy theorists, a continuing metaphor for Britain itself. In the late fifties and early sixties it was the uncomplicated pride of the 007 confections, followed by the seedy, betrayal-strewn wilderness of John le Carré’s novels and more recently the politically-correct, scrubbed young television drama Spooks. Behind the fiction, the secret state kept her counsel through the Cold War and has only recently let the mask slip a little. MPs, BBC employees, civil servants, judges and political activists were monitored, many having filed reports kept about them. The prime ministers, with the monarchical authority inherited from the seventeenth century, kept decisions and information away from cabinets and Parliament. These included the original decision to develop atomic weapons, and the incredibly complex and detailed network of bunkers and tunnels prepared for in case of nuclear attack. Inevitably, from the first atom spies and the first Aldermaston marches to the second Iraq war and the role of intelligence in the ‘dodgy dossier’, the security state has injected mistrust and worry into public life.

  Less often discussed is that the post-war wars also maintained a level of patriotism and an interest in things military among many British people – the ‘silent majority’, far from the media world. There has been a larger proportion of people connected to the armed forces than would otherwise have happened. National Service involved nearly two million men. The Territorial Army along with the various cadet corps in schools spread military influence far beyond barracks or dockyards. Something of the atmosphere of the Second World War lasted through decades of blanco’d belts, .303 rifles, air displays and the roar of V-bombers and English Electric Lightning fighters in the skies above us. The tone, the fabric, of life in post-war Britain has been more affected by war than perhaps we like to admit.

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  History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts. The story of the British in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War is a morally attractive one with much to learn from – a time of optimism and energy, despite apparently crippling difficulties. Politicians on both sides of the political divide believe that Britain will be important in the new world to be built and a great force for good. Returning soldiers and millions of civilians are determined to make up for lost time, to live happier lives. Patriotism is not narrow, there is such a thing as society, and the common good is not laughed at. Labour is promising a New Jerusalem and though no one is entirely sure of what that magical city might feel like to live in, it clearly involves a new deal in health, schooling and housing. In British film there is great energy and ambition. Designers and architects have brought over here plans originally drawn in Europe between the wars to create a brighter, airier and more colourful country. In science and technology Britain seems to have achieved great things which augur well for peacetime.

  There is a general and justified pride in victory, not yet much tainted by fear of nuclear confrontation to come. If people are still hungry and ill housed, they are safe again. If they are grieving, they also have much to look forward to, for the baby boom is at full pitch. There is much in the Britain of the later forties that would surprise or even disgust people now. It was not just the shattered cities or the tight rations that would arch modern eyebrows, but the snobbery and casual racism – even, despite the freshly shocking evidence of the concentration camps, widespread anti-Semitism. Yet overall, this was a country brimming with hope. In history, no quality rubs up as brightly.

  The great debate about the meaning of our post-war history has been, roughly, an argument between left and right. There are historians of the centre left such as Peter Hennessy who are generally impressed by the country’s leaders and get under their skin as they wrestled with dilemmas. Then there are those led by Correlli Barnett who emphasize failure and missed opportunities, at least until Margaret Thatcher arrives to save the situation in 1979. Everyone else struggles between these force-fields. And so what is my view? That we grumpy people, perpetually outraged by the stupidity and deceit of our rotten rulers, have (whisper it gently) had rather a good sixty years. Britain suffered a crisis in the seventies, a national nervous breakdown, and has recovered since. Britain in the forties and fifties was a damaged and inefficient country which would be overtaken by formerly defeated nations such as France, Germany and Japan. But the longer story, the bigger picture, is that Britain successfully shifted from being one kind of country, an inefficient imperialist manufacturer struggling to maintain her power, to become a wealthier social democracy, and did this without revolution.

  And shift she did, in the greatest scuttle in the world. British governments, Labour and Tory, duly got rid of the Empire. This meant the deaths of untold numbers in other continents – Muslims and Hindus caught up in
ethnic cleansing, the African victims of massacre and dictatorship, civil war and famine for the Arabs, Cypriots and many nationalities of the Far East. Britain, meanwhile, refocused on her new role as a junior partner in the Cold War, close to Europe but never quite European, speaking the same language as Americans, but never meaning exactly the same.

  Always, we have been a country on the edge. We moved from being on the edge of defeat, to the edge of bankruptcy, to the edge of nuclear annihilation and the edge of the American empire, and came out on the other side to find ourselves on the cutting edge of the modern condition, a post-industrial and multi-ethnic island, crowded, inventive and rich. The years before Thatcher were not a steady slide into disaster. Nobody has put this relative British success better than an American historian George Bernstein, who called his account of post-1945 Britain The Myth of Decline and who said of the years before the crisis of the seventies that ‘Britain’s performance in providing for the well-being of its people – as measured by employment, a safety net that kept them out of poverty, and improved standards of living – was outstanding.’ And this despite ferocious economic conditions.

  There is a danger of distorting real history with false endings. If one decides that the breakdown of the seventies was the single most important thing to have happened to post-war Britain, which shadows everything before and since, then inevitably the story of the forties, fifties and sixties becomes darker. Humdrum events dutifully rearrange themselves as ominous warnings. All the things that went right, all the successful lives that were lived during thirty crowded years, the triumphs of style and technology, the better health, the time of low inflation, the money in pockets, the holidays and the businesses that grew and thrived, are subtly surrounded with ‘yes, but’ brackets…guess what’s coming next. But this is a strange way of thinking. In personal terms it would be like defining the meaning of a life, with all its ups and downs, entirely by reference to a single bout of serious illness or marital breakup in middle age.