Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  After that, I found that my sense of privilege had come to pieces. It did not vanish entirely. I had a better education than most; I have seldom been badly hungry; I have never been out of a job or behind barbed wire. But my sense of awe at the Providence which had mysteriously allotted me Britishness -that had gone.

  The other day, I heard a BBC reporter talking about the Malaysian Communists. Some 600 of them have finally emerged from the jungle in southern Thailand and accepted the Government’s offer of a patch of land, a hut and a small grant of cash in return for living a peaceful life. They – or rather their fathers and grandfathers – first went into the jungle to begin their struggle, then against the Japanese, in 1941. There was a brief pause in 1945. Their leader, Chin Peng, was given the Order of the British Empire and marched in the Victory Parade through London. But in 1948, as Britain declined to grant what was then Malaya independence, they returned to the jungle.

  Nobody seems to know where old Chin Peng is. Some say he is dead. Others say that still, in some bamboo brake in the mountains, an ancient figure in canvas Badminton boots sits under a roof of plaited leaves and pens the ideographs of his military orders. After 46 years, he is the echo of a gunshot in the forest which makes the gibbons fall silent, a movement of the fronds when there is no wind, a footprint on the sandbanks of a deserted river.

  He failed. The great military effort of the 1950s did not liberate his country, which eventually gained independence as the bourgeois, multi-racial State of Malaysia. In 1960, a sort of peace was declared, and his bases withdrew to the remote Thai border regions. Some 6,000 of his men and women died in the decades of struggle.

  And yet, as Józef Pilsudski said, ‘to be defeated and not to give in, is victory.’ Chin Peng and his soldiers, cruel as they sometimes were, have won whatever it was that Lady Buder’s weary guardsmen won. It was a man of his who took away my own sense of collective moral superiority, something with which younger generations in this country are no longer concerned. The Chinese, however – and most of the Malayan Communists were Chinese – still have it. One may call that ‘Great-Han Chauvinism,’ racial arrogance or whatever one likes. It remains, in my sense of the word, their privilege.

  [1987

  The English Riot

  After a great riot, there is much to be cleared away: the rubble, the burned-out cars, the broken glass. But then, for weeks afterwards, there is work to do clearing away the thick layer of nonsense which sifts down like ash from the stratosphere upon us all.

  It is familiar nonsense. We hear that the fearful events at Brixton and Broadwater Farm were ‘mere criminality,’ that they were instigated by professional agitators (the old ‘stormy petrel’ theory which has attended every disturbance for centuries). We hear that it was all the fault of the police or, conversely, the natural consequence of harbouring an alien, ‘ungovernable’ race in British cities. We hear the tragic, understandable cry of a policeman: ‘This isn’t England!’.

  But it is. Rioting is at least as English as thatched cottages and honey still for tea. It is right to be appalled when young men – black and white together – burn, loot and rape and fight the police with petrol bombs, knives and guns. But it is badly wrong to conclude that we are entering unknown territory, that a violent break has been made with some ‘law-abiding,’ gentle past of plebeian Britain to which intellectuals like Orwell, Leavis, even T. S. Eliot, used to appeal.

  Before the organisation of a proper police, there were countless popular explosions, from the Gordon riots of 1780 which left over 200 dead in London to upheavals like the Reform riots in Bristol in 1831. People spoke then about ‘the dangerous classes,’ about ‘human vermin’ and ‘moral sewage.’ The London police were first issued with firearms in 1883, when 821 officers received training in their use. There was Luddism, the ‘Captain Swing’ movement in the countryside, the Rebecca riots in rural Wales.

  But in ‘modern times,’ within living memory, the tradition has persisted. This country was torn by violence in 1919, for example. First came the race riots against black seamen, which flared around all the major sea-ports. Then came the outbreak in Luton, when crowds burned the town hall with petrol; there were over 100 casualties and troops had to be brought in. The next month, the police went on strike in Liverpool, and there followed days and nights of fighting and looting, put down by troops who had to charge with the bayonet while tanks moved into the Scotland Road area. All through that summer, crowds of young people challenged and fought the police in London -in Brixton, Tottenham and Wood Green, among other places.

  There were unemployed riots in 1921, and much bigger outbreaks in 1931. In Manchester, the Army was called out in support of the civil power, and the police used high-pressure hoses against the mobs. In Glasgow, the police attacked a demonstration of 50,000 people on Glasgow Green, precipitating a huge riot in which there was widespread looting and the storming of defended tenement blocks.

  Behind these full-scale riots, potential violence simmered permanently in the poorest quarters of the cities. This was thought deplorable, but not a cause for panic. Sir Robert Mark, in his memoirs, remembers violent street battles in Manchester as he – then a plain copper on the beat – went in for an arrest. But to him there was something ‘cheerful’ about it. In such tumults, accompanied by drunkenness and looting at times, ‘a good time was had by all.’

  Rioting, in short, is one of the instruments of British political behaviour. It is a terrifying instrument, not often used, but it is the traditional resort of those who feel excluded and oppressed by the social and political structure under which – rather than in which – they live.

  Home Secretaries, by the nature of their job, are almost bound to overlook this. Douglas Hurd predictably said that all the riots were ‘the result of criminal action,’ but – as he observed in a striking interview the other day – he is emphatically not a Minister of the Interior. He does not ‘command’ law and order or tell the police what to do; his job is not much more than mediating between the needs of the police and prison services and the wishes of the Government.

  The nation turns to him for the first comment after a riot, but in fact he is only able to mention the problems it sets the police. Unless the Prime Minister chooses to utter, everything about a riot except its ‘criminality’ aspect will be ignored.

  I remember, a dozen years ago, meeting Sir Robert Mark in an Oxford college. Just as I joined the group around him, he was completing a thought. I caught only the last sentence which has, none the less, always stayed in my mind. He said: ‘You will see in the next few years that the police will be recognised as the most important social service.’

  An indefinable chill settled on me. On the face of it, this was a liberal thing to say: a promise of a new, caring gendarmerie whose task would be not only to repress the villain but to organise youth clubs, tend the single parent, suggest beneficial hobbies to the unemployed. For the Home Office, read the Ministry of Love. And, indeed, Sir Robert’s thought has now issued in the ideal of ‘community policing’ and other hopeful projects.

  I don’t want to insult all this effort when I say that the Old Bill remains the Old Bill, and the policeman’s lot is happier when he accepts that. The police is for enforcing law and order. It is not for alleviating the conditions which give rise to crime, a job for politicians. One of the nastiest features of Mrs Thatcher’s Government has been to abandon whole regions of social responsibility and dump the consequences on the police. The miners’ strike was one example, and the White Paper on Public Order (offering police commanders essentially political powers over demonstrations) was another.

  The ‘police as social service’ is interventionist. You go into bad areas, you poke about with good intentions, you come on naughty activities and then you have to do something about them. Much trouble has been avoided in the past by leaving ‘the dangerous classes’ alone in their burrows as far as possible; one thinks of ‘Campbell Bunk,’ that lawless antheap of old north London, w
hich the police only raided when disorder approached the civil war level. Ferreting about for suspects, let alone frightening ladies into heart attacks or shooting them, would have detonated Campbell Bunk like an ammunition dump.

  Much has been written about the history of British rioting. It tends to show that rioters are not all ‘scum’ or ‘criminals,’ and that they often have quite a clear idea about why they did what they did. After the fearsome disorders in Watts, California, in 1965, the blacks described their action as a ‘revolt’ and believed that good would come of it. The mood in Broadwater Farm, even after the atrocious killing of PC Blakelock, is one of defiant pride. They see the police (wrongly) as their enemy: now at last they have fought the enemy, and nothing will ever be the same.

  The last word can stay with Jerry White, a contributor to New Society just after the inner-city outbreaks of 1981. He wrote: ‘Riot has classically been a collective weapon of the politically powerless – to get those with power and wealth to share a little more and to take notice; to effect revenge; and to preserve traditions and rights from attack.’

  [1985

  Enforcing ‘Culture’

  The opera at Glyndebourne, in the Sussex Downs, is a very ‘civilised’ affair. Londoners who can afford the tickets go down by train to Lewes, wearing dinner jackets and evening dresses, and are taken on to the theatre by coach. In the interval, they picnic on the lawn out of wicker hampers.

  Invited to Glyndebourne the other day, I was among the last to climb into the already full coach. In our party was a young woman some eight months pregnant. She stood there in the aisle, and four dozen penguins sat there in their seats goggling up at her. I have to say that, in the end, somebody did get up and give her his seat, after prompting. But during that long, reluctant interval a thought came into my head: ‘You are uncultured!’

  I remembered this a few days ago at the Edinburgh Festival, where I took part in public debates with Soviet writers and journalists about glasnost, free speech and the idea of culture in general. The word Kultur set off from Germany in the last century in several directions, and – as it colonised eastern and western Europe – acquired different meanings. ‘Culture’ is about being well-read and going to operas and exhibitions. Kultura> in the Slav sense, is about all that but also about how it is assumed to make you behave.

  In the buffets of Polish railway stations, you often find a notice saying that ‘we do not serve those who are drunk or uncultured.’ To be uncultured – nekulturny in Russian – does not just imply that you have not read Shakespeare or Pushkin, or listened to the music of Penderecki or Borodin. It means that you vomit on the pavement or walk around in public with your flies open.

  The other day in Warsaw, I listened to a row in a taxi queue between a journalist saturated in vodka and a woman with a bag of shopping. The journalist was shouting about all the books he had written and the brutish ignorance of Poles who did not appreciate them. The woman told him to put a sock in it. The man replied at length that she was pretentious and a whore. The woman, at even greater length, soused him with Poland’s incomparable vocabulary of invective and, as she climbed into a taxi, remarked that all the journalist’s education had left him with a culture quotient of zilch.

  That woman would have agreed with me that the busload of Glyndebourne penguins with their beaks open for Mozart were uncultured. On the surface, there is something very attractive about the notion of culture which permeates all aspects of life, and something depressing about the idea that a man can close a great novel or take Bach off the turntable and be just as foul to his wife or ruthless to his clients as before. High culture which does not overflow into daily life is about as vital as a dollop of aftershave.

  But there are problems here. In the very first of these colums, I suggested that the word ‘civilisation’ was dead. The Third Reich killed it. ‘The idea that there was some necessary connection between Beethoven and benevolence, between Mantegna and mercy, collapsed as totally as the Frauenkirche in Dresden … It was supposed that something (of high culture) rubbed off. Auschwitz corrected that.’

  No general law exists which connects cultural diffusion – the level of literacy, the number of theatres per head of population, the total membership of poetry clubs – to noble and humane behaviour. I am not saying that nothing ever rubs off. Plainly it does. Now that few in England go to church, the reading of novels is probably the most effective training for emotional life -and for distinguishing between right and wrong. The electrician from Gdańsk, Lech Wałęsa, used to say warily that he had never finished a book in his life, but in 1980 it was obvious that characters and ideas from Polish literature were constantly prompting him and his colleagues in the Solidarity leadership. On the other hand, the Russians – who regard themselves firmly as kulturny people – behaved like wild beasts to German women in 1945.

  The hard-pressed faith of teachers in their job is usually based on the hope that the more boys and girls know and read the less likely they are to become vandals, thieves and muggers. It’s an assumption which can never be proved. Children from better-off families show better academic performance, have better job chances and more resources for blameless amusements. Pupils who do well and stay longer have less time to behave badly in the outside world. These are truisms, which don’t test that decent assumption which makes teaching bearable.

  But how would it be if the proposition were pushed a stage further – if schools were judged not only by their teaching but by the behaviour of their pupils? Just that is suggested by a document circulating in the Department of Education, which has come into the hands of the Observer.

  This is a ‘discussion document’ offering a quite new way of assessing the performance of secondary schools – or, as the paper puts it in Thatcherese, their ‘value for money’. It is time, the author says, to do away with ‘inert performance indicators’ like mere achievement in education. ‘It is acknowledged that a major deficiency is that the outcome measures [sic.] currently available are limited to those based on examination achievements.’ Social behaviour must be taken into account too.

  The document suggests that police files on the pupils should be used as an ‘indicator’ of a school’s fitness for investment. Figures for truancy, lateness and absenteeism will also be fed into the computer. So will the proportion of pupils taking part in extra-curricular activities, and even the number of school-leavers from the previous year who ‘have an active interest outside work.’ Local opinion on how the pupils look and behave on their way to and from school will be another statistical ‘indicator’ of what value for money the State is earning.

  Some people who have seen this fat-headed proposal think it smells of Fascism. That is overdone. To me, it is a perfect example of the ambiguity of Thatcherism: on one side, all the rhetoric about free choice and small government, but on the other side a rapid and highly authoritarian increase of State power.

  We hear a lot about how parents should run the schools and also be responsible for the behaviour of their children, in the Victorian way. Here, however, we have a plan to penalise schools, not parents, for what pupils do outside them. Schools would have to enforce not only Mr Kenneth Baker’s State-defined ‘core curriculum,’ but a police definition of good behaviour as well.

  The practical impacts of such a policy are easy to foresee. Schools in poor areas would become poorer. The concept of a ‘good school in a bad neighbourhood’ would be lost. Worse, though, are the political implications.

  A wider view of ‘culture’ which reaches from music and literature to street manners is alluring. But that is the business of society, not government. States which use party members to enforce low-level kultura are called totalitarian. States which propose to use school teachers as auxiliary gendarmes patrolling private lives are merely stupid and uncultured.

  [1987

  ‘Don’t Be Afraid – and Don’t Steal!’

  Thomas Masaryk, the father of Czechoslovak independence, once gave his people some ad
vice, as in 1918 they faced the alarming prospect of taking over responsibility for themselves. And it was alarming. Czech nationalism, even on the eve of independence as the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire began to fall apart, was not the incandescent, totally confident variety. With many Czechs, it was what Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien has called a ‘low-intensity wish’; they wanted independence, but were not certain how much they wished to pay for it. Certainly, they did not wish to get shot to pieces for it, as they had at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1621, when Bohemia lost its liberty, or in 1848 when the Prague revolutionaries were bombarded into surrender by the guns of Windischgraetz.

  They were not badly off – the Czech level of industrialisation and the standard of living were much higher than those of the Hungarian or Polish subjects of the Austrian Empire, and in some ways higher than those of the German Austrians. The Czechs felt that they had a lot to lose if it all went wrong. All round them in 1918, Europeans were killing one another with relish, waving this flag or that. It was all dangerous. Czech nationalism had been pretty moderate, concentrating on culture and the language but not pressing for much more than devolution. In Vienna, the Czech deputies in the Reichsrat shouted and filibustered, succeeding only in making government more difficult. In Prague, Czechs broke German windows when it seemed safe to do so, or punched Germans at football games. It wasn’t noble, but it was, in its sulky manner, a way of life.

  But now the Austrian Empire was clearly going to collapse. The Czechs would have to take full State independence, willy-nilly. It had all been decided for them somewhere else, in committees of allied statesmen sitting with Czech émigré politicians far away in Paris, London or Washington. Later, Masaryk was to say: ‘The future must know how difficult it was to live in a nation which had been liberated but not yet educated for liberty’. But it’s all the more remarkable that they did catch up with that education so fast, making out of the new Czechoslovakia the most democratic, prosperous and stable republic of all the nation-states created after the First World War.