Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  One result must be that Britain will slither even further into a ‘politics of geography.’ Labour will be confirmed as the dominant party of the North and West, probably recapturing lost seats in Wales, while the South-East is reserved as the battleground for the Tories and the Alliance.

  Economically, the way in which unemployment has spread into the South-East, coupled with the steep fall in the building of council housing which might accommodate migrants, suggests that there won’t be an instant southward flood of families looking for work.

  One consequence, to be seen already, is that deprived regions will try to organise their own resources for development. Labour’s ‘Jobs and Industry’ pamphlet makes no mention of restoring the old central ‘distribution of industry’ apparatus. Instead, it proposes a network of regional enterprise boards, and seeks to ‘develop regions’ own capacity for growth.’

  Can Strathclyde or Tyneside hold their people and give them work by their own efforts? There is a lot to be said for nursing up what is native and well-rooted, rather than scrabbling for ‘branch factories.’ But these are regions with some resources. What rural enterprise board can give hope for the future to small hill farmers in Dyfed or Argyll?

  And there are other political implications. The economist Graham Hallett has written that ‘Great Britain, with no regional tier [he means full regional autonomy] and local authorities predominantly financed through Whitehall, now has the most centralised governmental system in Western Europe.’

  But it is not going to be possible to prevent ‘regional enterprise boards’ which are not dishing out Whitehall funds but finding their own money from seeking greater independence, and organising public opinion to back them up. The ghosts of devolution, regional and national, may soon be walking again.

  For, in the end, regional policy is about emotions. They are not just emotions of provincial chauvinism. They are memories of human unhappiness, of the loss of roots and self-respect, asking that beyond the right to work there should be a right to home.

  The poor and the good fires are all quenched.

  Now, cold angel, keep the valley

  From the bedlam and cinders of a Black Pentecost.

  [1985

  Settlers and Natives

  Stoke Newington is both a place and an argument. As a location, it is a quite small, mostly residential district of London, within the borough of Hackney and lying a couple of miles north of the City. As an argument, Stoke Newington is about how different social classes treat each other, how they use history and the past, and what Mrs Thatcher’s revival of ‘Victorian values’ really means.

  A foreigner – German, Italian, Japanese – would find it hard to see anything worth arguing about there. A very handsome park, a pretty church, narrow and congested shopping streets, rows of jerrybuilt Victorian houses jammed together so tightly that one can almost hear the squeak of an overstrained corset, blocks of featureless council estate flats, black and Asian mothers manoeuvering push-chairs along an inadequate rim of pavement. But along the back streets lie fleets of yellow builders’ skips, piles of sand protected from the rain by grimy plastic sheets. Stoke Newington is one of the focuses of London ‘gentrification.’

  It began as a country village. Then, from Queen Anne’s time, some fine houses were built for fine people. Defoe lived here and wrote Robinson Crusoe. A middle-class settlement took place, aided by speculative builders, in the nineteenth century: Edgar Allan Poe went to school in Edwards Lane, and Isaac Watts wrote his hymns here. Much of the Victorian bourgeoisie of London was buried in Abney Park cemetery, off Church Street, now a beautiful jungle.

  At the end of Victoria’s century, Stoke Newington began to ‘decline’ as the middle classes moved gradually out and left their villas to working-class families. The place became shabby, then decidedly poor. In the post-war years, West Indians arrived, Turkish and Greek Cypriots, Asians from many countries. And then, perhaps 10 years ago, came the first ripples of the London middle class, soon a tidal inrush of families buying Victorian villas, refurbishing Georgian façades, bringing with them their retinue of health food shops, delicatessens, ‘California restaurants,’ wine bars and – of course – estate agents’ boutiques.

  The incomers aren’t ‘wealthy’, by London standards. The rich are a mile behind them, slowly edging north through Islington. The Stoke Newington settlers are teachers, social workers, middle-aged media people starting a second marriage, the highly-educated young who prefer trading to the dole. Many are ‘elderly prima-gravidas’ – healthspeak for women having babies after establishing a career. There is a disposition to be leftish and ‘caring’: Hackney in 1983 was declared the poorest borough in Britain.

  Around the incomers and their mortgaged Victorian houses, there is decay and poverty. Some of the ‘locals’ – the West Indian families especially – stand up to these conditions with vigour. Others, the residue of a population whose most energetic members have managed to move on, are inert and often sullen about the social change around them.

  But what do the incomers themselves say about this place that they are taking over? Among them, I have met two remarkable men who proclaim powerful views. Though they live only a few streets apart, they have never met. They dislike one another’s opinions intensely.

  One is the writer and journalist Richard North. Influenced by the thought of Ivan Illich, North is an environmentalist who once edited the magazine Vole. One of the few who have actually read the work of Samuel Smiles, he sees the local population as a helpless group robbed of responsibility and initiative by the Welfare State. In a much-quoted Times article, he coined the scathing term ‘The Drabbies’ for other incomers who form part of the social work and local government apparatus: ‘people who tell others what to do and never meet their neighbours.’

  North blames ‘Drabby’ leftist authoritarianism for suffocating individual initiative and citizenship. He would like to see state education abolished, and people given money – ‘a high and accessible dole payment’ – to form their own independent schools and run their own neighbourhood services. Rejecting the categories of social class, he has come close to a Thatcherite outlook: ‘Margaret has headed this society towards enabling and entrepreneurship, and that is good, and there’s no way back.’

  He welcomes the middle-class immigration: what the place needs is ‘busybodies’ to reprove litter-louts, to harass cars parked on pavements, to organise children loitering on the street because their parents are working or don’t care for them, to cuff ‘the burly little goys in Clissold Park … when they insult the pale Hassidic families who go there on Sundays.’ For North, it is the ‘locals’ who really need the ‘hippy skills’ of the incomers: knowing how to brew their own beer or wine, or make nourishing lentil soup.

  The other voice is that of Patrick Wright, a young socialist intellectual who works for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. He is a disciple – if that is the right word – of Agnes Heller, a Hungarian philosopher who left her country in 1977 to develop her ideas on ‘the radicalisation of democracy.’

  In his book On Living In An Old Country’ (Verso, 1985), Wright delivers a biting attack on North’s attitude to Stoke Newington and Hackney. ‘What he appears to love … is the light that he himself becomes in the darkness of this place…. He expects to be loved by the people of the abyss, who will surely recognise the voice of their superior redeemer every time he opens his gifted mouth and “talks” to them. These are the narcissistic perspectives of a false Christ….’

  Wright is fascinated by the cultural assumptions of the incomers. The ‘superior redeemer’ angle to the people has its parallel in a fondly conservationist attitude to buildings and history. To justify their colonisation, the new arrivals uncover and declare a local past to their own taste: Robinson Crusoes, indeed, naming the parts of their desert island.

  Wheeling his infant son about Stoke Newington, Wright emits comment on every corner. ‘Neo-Georgian: the celebration of inequalit
y.’ Or, by a prettily done-up Queen Anne house: ‘This is not an opening of history to all, but a redefining of history in such a way that it is available only to the few.’ The older inhabitants of Victorian villa-terraces are now warned that they live in a ‘precious aesthetic unity,’ which they would violate if they put louvres in the windows or knocked out the bay windows to have a bigger front room – and, of course, such ‘vandalism’ wipes thousands off the value of houses which, 30 years ago, were unsaleable.

  In this way, the middle-class newcomers can claim to ‘possess’ Stoke Newington, past and present, to a degree which those who were actually born there cannot hope to match. The natives are even being culturally evicted from the cemetery. Their view is that it’s scandalous to let the graves remain hidden under the mass of bramble thicket and saplings. The incomers find Abney Park a romantic green refuge.

  My guess is that Richard North’s values will prevail – because the settlers will apply them to themselves. The enthusiasm of the first incomers for permissive, racially-various primary schools is waning fast now; soon there will be private fee-paying schools inculcating… Victorian values. And the English knack of restoring history into possessive ‘heritage’ will go on justifying the process. After all, it was the sharp ear of Patrick Wright which, as the Mary Rose was lifted from the sea, heard the television commentator celebrate ‘the first time we have seen her in 437 years.’

  [1986

  Caring Colonists

  ‘Internal colonisation’ sounds rather Sovietic. It suggests train-loads of red-scarved pioneers setting off from Moscow and Leningrad to settle in distant steppes, the planned movement of populations to occupy virgin lands. But in a quiet, slow, unplanned way, it happens within the United Kingdom.

  A few days ago, I went to see a very strange settlement indeed. Craobh Haven was the pioneering scheme of an English company, which set about constructing a new holiday town at a remote spot on the coast of mid-Argyll. A marina was built, a street of houses and shops, causeways joining off-shore islands to form a mole (an Iron Age vitrified fort was allegedly dynamited because it got in the way). Then the company went bust.

  But this is no mere plonking of cement chalets on a beach. A conscientious yet weird effort has been made to ‘respect tradition.’ Here, like an outdoors exhibition of Scottish architecture, is a film-set jumble of styles: pan-tiled cottages from the coast towns of Fife, crow-stepped roofs from old tower houses, tenement blocks with stair-turrets like the urban ‘lands’ of Scottish cities. All are colour-washed in contrasting pastel shades. Beyond the folly there opens out the azure of the Firth of Lorne, and beyond that again the mountains of Mull glowing silver with snow.

  As I stood there, several English people emerged from a ‘vernacular’ close and approached, thinking I was a liquidator. They weren’t giving in, they said. This place had a future. The 21 first settlers were forming an association. They would fight for Craobh Haven (which they pronounced ‘Kroove’ to rhyme with ‘groove’).

  If their surroundings were unreal, they certainly were not. There was something authentically, splendidly English about their busy, decent determination to get organised, to refuse to be done out of their rights, to ‘see something was done.’ If the original population of Argyll had possessed a tenth of that assertive self-confidence, I thought, the story of the land would have been very different.

  Over all the years that I have known this part of Scotland, there has been population movement and social change which – in the past few decades – became torrential. When I was a child, the people of Lorne and Knapdale were still partly Gaelic-speaking, with a mixture of Lowland small farmers who had settled as sheep farmers in the previous century. The ‘big houses’ often contained traditional Highland lairds, or their relations. I knew of two English writers (Orwell was briefly one), and an English insurance agent married to a local girl, and a few Polish ex-soldiers.

  Gradually, as car ownership spread and as the narrow roads which connected this beautiful land to the world outside were widened, new people appeared. Some were rich farmers from the South, others were well-off couples from England seeking houses for retirement. Then the young began to move in, full of the ideals of the English 1960s: potters, jewellers, neo-peasants, fish-farmers, craftsmen servicing the new yachting boom, or merely hippies.

  There was good in this, but bad as well. Small farmers were driven out of business by the wealth of aggressive incomers. The old had to move into town council housing, because the stock of cottages available for single retired people was snapped up for expensive conversion. Jobs promised on ‘leisure developments’ hardly materialised, as the contractors brought their own labour. There was the odd drug scandal, but above all a sense of alienation: that feeling that ‘our country is leaving us.’ Unease about the ‘white settlers,’ as they were called, contributed to the Scottish National Party victory in Argyll in 1974.

  Today, half the voices in the hotel where my uncle used to drink a meditative whisky are English voices – behind the bar as well. I would guess that English incomers now form a majority of the population of the Craignish peninsula, around the yacht harbour and holiday centre at Ardfern. The friendly Englishman who is doing up cottages for summer lets (£140 a week) introduced me to ‘the best dry stone mason in the district’ – a young man from Matlock, in Derbyshire.

  The settlers have brought a new vigour to the place. They are cheerful, enterprising and very hard-working. They even manufacture and sell their own images of Scotland to tourists from the South, from Celtic brooches and ‘tablet’ fudge to the matchless photographs of Scotland by the English genius Colin Baxter. Small industries like fish-farming line the shore, squeezing out the boat-moorings of the ‘natives.’

  But somehow the colonisers remain a colony. Incomers with jobs to offer tend to give them to their own kind, and there are now two largely separate economies – and separate social circuits. Expectations are different. The new people want the level of social service they were accustomed to in the suburbs of Manchester or in the Home Counties, and raise outraged clamour if they don’t get it. The old way of life, sickness and death in mid-Argyll asked for – and got – very little from the State. Too little, in my view. But to endure without complaint, and without dependence, was the Highland ethic.

  Another part of that ethic has always been hospitality. Nobody burns holiday cottages there, as they do in Wales, and incomers are made welcome even when the changes they bring are alarming. A culture is being slowly extinguished, but Gaelic was already much too weak in this part of Scotland to evoke anything like the organised resistance of the Welsh Language Society. And the young English colonists in Argyll belong to the ‘caring,’ environment-conscious generation. They rebuke one another for scraping the sea-loch floors until there are no scallops left, or for erecting inappropriate houses, or for slighting the prehistoric monuments of the Crinan plain.

  There are ironies in all this. Argyll, like most of Scotland, once sent its own colonists all over the world to settle Canada or conquer India, to command black and yellow labourers in tin mines, rubber plantations or tobacco warehouses in Asia and Africa. Of the eight children I played with as a boy, I think none is still in Scotland. Some are in New Zealand, others in Cape Town or Natal. Now the path to their old house is blocked by a Surrey-type ‘Private Property’ notice. Their own home territory has become, if not precisely foreign, at least no longer theirs.

  So a modest, remote place slowly turns into a playground, a ‘recreational area’ of ‘outstanding natural beauty.’ Tourism is not new here: relays of Victorian steamers once took visitors along the ‘Royal Route’ through the Crinan Canal to Oban. What is new is the idea of a place which exists only to ‘service’ other places, in which inhabitants are redefined as janitors.

  The hills remain, and the standing stones, and the grey-lag geese holding their noisy winter parliaments by the sea. But something is lost: a quiet-spoken, reflective, closely related community whose fore
fathers gave names to every piece of water or stone. In the time of Emperor Severus, a Roman fleet sailed prospecting through the Firth of Lorne. It has taken two thousand years for the Romans to return and settle.

  [1987

  Intelligentsia Wanted

  What is it about the English and intellectuals? The poet James Fenton wrote the other day that ‘it has often been doubted that we have, in England, such a thing as an intellectual life. Most of our intellectuals are imports.’ He went on to list some names, all imported from Central Europe, Ireland, Scotland or Wales. His English candidates were disqualified as ‘gentlemen-and-scholars’ or as ‘writers and men-of-letters.’

  This was intended as a gentle lament. But it struck me also as one more version of an old national riddle: an English intellectual is either not English or else, if his papers are invincibly in order, not an intellectual. The facts – the poor old facts – are that as many native intellectuals inhabit the lands between Berwick and the Channel as oriental cockroaches inhabit Charing Cross hospital. From Edward Thompson, fighting the nuclear state from the Left, to Roger Scruton, prince of the authoritarian Right. What is this pretence that they are invisible – or impossible?

  H. L. Mencken offered an American version of the riddle when he said that ‘the so-called intellectuals of the country are simply weather-vanes blown constantly by foreign winds, usually but not always English.’ Here’s an admission that England breeds the creatures. But, more interesting, here’s this refrain of ‘so-called.’