Neil Kinnock gave us bad history when he said that Mrs Thatcher was creating the conditions ‘in which Fascism flourished.’ It wasn’t political apathy born of unemployment that brought Hider to power, but the frantic politicisation of a ruined middle class, obsessed with ‘national treachery’ and ‘the Bolshevist menace.’
Our condition is bad, but quite different. The problem in Britain is not a Weimarish glut of politics, but a growing lack of faith in politics of any kind. As Alexander Herzen noticed in nineteenth-century Russia, a sense of irrelevance drives people into quietism rather than revolt; the ‘Superfluous Men’ in the autocratic years of Nicholas I offered no threat to the Tsar. In Britain today, the awful hang-over after the miners’ strike has intensified the feeling that combining and acting to bring about change is a barren form of activity.
When did it begin, this process of turning players into mere spectators? I first noticed it during the 1979 campaign over the devolution referendum in Scotland. The ‘No’ camp concentrated on one argument which was not so much basic as just base. They didn’t bother to denounce the policies a Scottish Assembly might follow. They said squarely that a parliamentary system in Scotland was wrong because the elected members and officials would have to be paid salaries, and money spent on representative government was – don’t we all agree? – money down the tube. It was a campaign against politics itself. And, though the ‘Yes’ voices were more numerous, it won a very substantial vote.
Many years ago, in British Columbia, I remember coming across a born-again Social Credit Premier named Bennett. Vancouver was a pretty innocent place then, and when the Bennett Government started throwing its weight about to the tune of slogans like ‘Progress, Not Politics!,’ and ‘We Prefer Criticism To Come From Within Our Own Ranks,’ there were only a few people who thought they had heard something like that before somewhere. Bennett’s was a businessmen’s government, banging on about free enterprise and every citizen’s right to hack down the forests. At the time, it just struck me as eccentric. But now I realise that I heard something like Mrs Thatcher before somewhere.
Anyway, ‘Progress, Not Politics.’ How much progress there has been in the past six years, and for whom, is debatable. But the retreat from politics is all too marked. One cause of it has been the teaching of successive Labour governments that politics meant only the redistribution of public and private wealth. It followed that when Mrs Thatcher and the monetarists locked away the wealth and closed down the apparatus for redistributing it, there seemed nothing much left to be political about. Especially in local government, most of our politicians have passed their careers arguing about how to divide up the cake. Suddenly, no cake.
Those who have enough originality to conjure up cakes without flour – like Ken Livingstone, that master of ‘imaginative play’ – are rare.
With the retreat from politics has come a new school of ‘spectator studies.’ First there was a fad for writing the histories of newspapers. Then there came the vogue for writing history through newspapers, the story not of what happened but of what we were told was happening. Northcliffe’s press version of the 1916 Cabinet crisis matters more than the evidence of state archives; the miners’ strike has already produced far more dissertations about media distortion than about what really went on at the pitheads or in Mr Scargil’s executive. ‘Manipulation is the message.’
Games with shadows and changing reflections threaten the citizen’s most elementary weapon of self-defence: memory. As episodes are presented, then dexterously whipped away and replaced with others, the sense of continuity is lost. It’s like settling to a whole evening of television: Brazil was good, but now it’s time for Bitburg and then we forget all that for the Scottish rates drama, up to the arrival of the Chinese Prime Minister. Suddenly, you discover that you have been asleep and the screen has gone blank. You go to bed with a splitting spectator’s headache.
[1985
Policing the Market-Place
The trouble about a free market economy is that it requires so many policemen to make it work. Six years into the reign of liberty inaugurated by Mrs Thatcher in 1979, there comes the Home Secretary’s new White Paper on Public Order. Another thick salami slice of traditional methods of protest is criminalised. Another instalment of unwieldy weapons is unloaded on the police, who will now be expected to ban or control the route, size, duration or location of demonstrations.
Mr Leon Brittan calls the White Paper ‘a libertarian safeguard.’ Alexander Herzen called that sort of talk ‘coherent rubbish.’ Laws which extend the State’s power to stop people doing what they want are sometimes necessary. But liber-tarianism is about letting people do as they please, on the cheerful assumption that what they please will please everyone else as well. A ‘libertarian safeguard,’ in fact, is a contradiction in terms.
And yet it’s a contradiction right at the heart of what is going on in this country. Try the experiment of contemplating those pretty words ‘free market.’ Probably you visualise a colourful street jammed with stalls; jolly vendors are crying the virtues of rock-hard tomatoes and lovely haddock, with an ear cocked to the offers next door, in case they are being undercut. How nicely it all works, as those who sell cheaply prosper, and those who sell over-priced goods that no-one wants are obliged to wheel their barrows away in shame!
But ‘free’? The truth about big markets is that they require big policing. There are people selling stolen goods, and people selling new potatoes which are old potatoes. There are pickpockets. And there are racketeers who take bribes and protection money, with the sanction of a nasty duffing-up, from those who want a stall in a good position.
Another point about markets is that they consist not only of buyers and sellers, consumers and producers, but of tomatoes and haddock. When we talk of a ‘free market economy,’ we should remember that while all of us are consumers, most of us are tomatoes and haddock and potatoes as well. How free in the labour market is a 45-year-old welder living in a council flat at Gateshead who has been made redundant at Swan Hunter? How free is a smoked haddock?
So it begins to seem a little less odd that a government which has so spectacularly withdrawn from economic intervention in the market-place should also be a government under which the State’s coercive power has made its most spectacular increase since the war. There were nearly seven times as many police bans on marches between 1981 and 1984 as in the preceding 10 years.
The miserable whitewash of last week’s parliamentary report on the Special Branch hardly conceals the ground-ivy spread of political surveillance in recent years. The slightly thicker whitewash of the post-Bettaney report on the Security Service tried to cover the fact, now familiar to anyone with a TV set, that a right-wing group within Ml5 had managed to switch the Service’s priorities from foreign subversion to the ‘inner enemy.’ The proliferation of phone-tapping and bugging has defeated Parliament’s attempt to discover its extent, let alone to reduce it.
And all this is not because mainland Britain is becoming more rebellious. In the post-war years, when the Communist Party reached its peak of popular support and when – for instance – the old Revolutionary Communist Party (Trot.) was laying down dumps of automatic weapons acquired from returning soldiers, the police manpower allotted to them was only a fraction of the forces now arrayed to snoop on the far Left. The militancy of the trade union movement achieved its high-point in the early Seventies, from which – the miners excepted – it has sagged away. The universities, fizzing 20 years ago, are now, to borrow from Sir Walter Scott, ‘as quiet as the grave, or even as Peebles.’
So this arming-up of the State is about something else. To say that the freer the market-place, the more police it needs, is only half the story. It is also true that if one kind of control is scrapped, another must be introduced; new liberty offered by one hand is promptly pocketed by the other.
If the Government withdraws from industrial disputes, that merely means that some other limb of the State will be
appointed to cope with conflicts left to boil over. The flat refusal of Mrs Thatcher and the NCB to talk to the miners was a sham gesture, for the job of preventing trouble was delegated to the police. And when they were ordered to force entry to the pits for strike-breakers, all police commanders in coal-mining areas knew what would happen. They and the mining communities paid a bloody price for that fake ‘non-intervention.’
So ‘small government’ really implies ‘big police.’ A police magazine took the point during the miners’ strike, when it asked: ‘Are we here enforcing law and order, or enforcing the Government’s policies?’ The same question returns with this White Paper. The ‘senior police officer on the spot’ is now to decide where demonstrations may take place (and if they may take place, if they are marches), how long they may last and -most absurd of all – how many people may attend them.
It’s not just that these are fussy and fatheaded restrictions on liberty, worthy of the Habsburg dynasty in its senile years. It’s not even that they won’t work in practice. It is that these decisions are political decisions, absolutely party-political decisions, on which Labour supporters would hold one view and Conservative another. Police officers have no business to regulate political life in this way, and they know it. They face a wretched choice: to ignore these new duties, or to behave like a party gendarmerie.
Foreigners might be forgiven if they thought that ‘English bobbies’ were being transformed into a ZOMO or a Volkspolizei. But what is emerging is not so much a police state à la polonaise or allemande as a disastrous and increasingly dangerous weakness in British institutions.
The English have never come to terms with the existence and nature of the State (I say ‘English,’ because the Scottish constitutional tradition is a Continental one and more realistic about these matters). There is no constitution, no doctrine of popular sovereignty; merely the archaic notion that Parliament is absolute and tells its state servants what to do in the name of us all.
But the other day a shaft of light burst into this attic of seventeenth-century junk which passes for British constitutional thought. There was a great kerfuffle during the Ponting trial, when the judge and the Attorney-General suggested that the interests of the State were whatever the Government said they were. Unfortunately, those gentlemen were dead right. The British State is not impartial but is the instrument of whatever group happens to hold power in society.
So let us follow this discovery to its conclusions. Let us be French and have politically appointed prefects to replace what’s left of elected local government. Let them, as delegates of Whitehall and the Cabinet, take political decisions about demonstrations and marches, instead of pretending that these are just pavement-clearing measures suitable for police discretion. And then, when we have admitted to ourselves how powerful and political the State has become, we will be in a better position to build modern and effective defences against that power.
[1985
Druids
I seem to have upset a number of readers, most of them Welsh, by pointing out the importance of forgery in the forging of a nation. Let me try to sort this out. I was not saying that nations have to pass an authentication test, like Hider Diaries, before admission to the UN. Their validity doesn’t stand or fall by the element of fakery or fantasy which goes into creative nationalism.
Painters of portraits depart, sometimes amazingly, from the precision of a photograph. Novelists are by definition liars. In fact, as Muriel Spark once remarked, they are also theological criminals of the worst kind, for they create human beings without the power to redeem themselves. None of this matters when it comes to judging the soundness of a portrait, a novel or a nation.
What does matter is that historical nonsense can get in the way of progress. A people which clings to a quite fraudulent vision of its own nature and the origin of its institutions is revealing that it is in bad trouble, that it is refusing to adapt to new conditions in case its whole social structure falls apart in a cloud of rust. Britain seems to me to be suffering from trouble of this kind. Accordingly, as this was the week of the Summer Solstice in which the Druids were forbidden to appear at Stonehenge, I have decided to write about Druids.
The first point, which still dismays some people in spite of the popularisation of archaeology in recent years, is that Stonehenge and the Druids have nothing whatever to do with one another. Stonehenge is a megalithic monument erected some 4,000 years ago by people whose language and beliefs remain unknown. The Druids, as far as we can make out, were a priestly caste common to the Celtic peoples who inhabited northern Gaul and the British islands in the centuries before and after the Roman conquest.
But the question of who the Druids really were and what they did is less interesting than the revival of the ‘Druid idea’ in recent centuries. Welsh, Irish and, to a lesser extent, Scottish cultural nationalism disinterred this pagan Celtic priesthood and invented suitable myths about it. Much more extraordinary, the English did so as well, although the Druids had no more connection to the Saxon-Norman tradition than they had to Stonehenge. The Druids and the ‘Ancient Britons’ were co-opted by the English as ancestors of the modern British State.
Virtues which were – and are – thought of as English were given pedigrees, back to the ‘dark groves’ in which priests, clad in white, sacrificed bulls with golden sickles. When Milton wrote to Parliament in 1643 to argue for a divorce law, he claimed that ‘it would not be the first, or second, time since our ancient Druides, by whom this Island was the Cathedrall of Philosophy to France, left off their pagan rites, that England hath had this honour vouchsaft from Heav’n, to give out reformation to the World … Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.’
There was some argument about whether heathens supposed to have burned people alive in huge wicker containers could properly be seen as precursors of the Church of England. But by the eighteenth century, the Druids were generally seen as pre-Christian Christians with a gentlemanly taste for the countryside and a passion for patriotic liberty. William Blake came to believe that ‘the patriarchal religion,’ including that of Jesus, began in England: ‘All things Begin and End in Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.’
When Labour MPs dedicated to pulling Britain out of the Common Market sing ‘Jerusalem,’ they are actually singing about the Druidic origins of Christianity. Blake’s mystical Anglo-centric nationalism suits them well.
Have we got the Druids finally out of our system? Certainly, with the exception of Wales, self-declared Druids are thinning out. Since 1919, five different Druid bodies have lodged requests to celebrate Midsummer Sunrise at Stonehenge, but only one – the British Circle of the Universal Bond – seems to survive. The Ancient Order of Druids, a secret society established in 1781, enrolled the young Winston Churchill at a ceremony in 1908, and is still going. Apart from that, English Druidism seems to have faded into the woolly paganism of the Peace Convoy.
But in another sense, we are still living in Druid country. Everything in England, in order to be good, has to be ancient. This attitude has two results. One is the unfortunate assumption that what is ancient is therefore good. The other is the habit of pretending that institutions and rituals invented rather recently are part of the Ancient British fabric. In the dim, hallowed places where Britain worships itself, many of the bones in the reliquaries are made of celluloid or even polyester resin.
The ‘age-old pageantry’ is often newer than living memory. Many royal rituals, including much of the coronation service, are concoctions, and the uncritical reverence for royalty is not very old either. With a few exceptions, the orders of chivalry are Victorian. The English rural landscape, so ‘immemorial,’ would make Milton suppose himself in a foreign country. Parliament meets in the replica of a Victorian chamber, but the nature of party, Cabinet and State have little to do even with the nineteenth century.
This modern Druidism (this habit of assimilating the new into the old) can be seen as a wonderful cap
acity to adapt without pain. But Britain pays – increasingly – a penalty. The mania for continuity is obscuring the difference between what is new and what is not merely antique but thoroughly worn-out.
Curiously enough, the only British institution not considered to have venerability is the economy. This leads to what, in my view, is the fundamental misjudgment about this country: ‘Britain has the finest institutions in the world, but they find it hard to function properly just at the moment, because our economy doesn’t work.’
The truth is the exact opposite. The reason that Britain’s economy doesn’t work is that British institutions are in terminal decay.
The decay is at its most advanced in the proudest institution of all: in Parliament. At a time when state power is stronger and more pervasive than it has ever been in years of peace, the citizen has less power to examine and to fight against official decisions than in any other democracy.
England in the seventeenth century experienced the first modern revolution. Parliament destroyed the absolute right of kings, but took the doctrine over itself. This doctrine of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament reached its full, absurd stature in the Victorian age. It has become as much of a Leviathan as the divine right of kings, preventing the emergence of any doctrine of popular sovereignty, of any constitution which puts the people and their charter of rights above Westminster.
A Parliament which claims it has total power cannot, rather naturally, face up to the fact that the state machine has now escaped its control. It cannot supervise an economy. It cannot share power with its subjects, or imagine anything except the House of Commons which could represent them or defend their rights against power. It cannot imagine being overruled by a Constitutional Court. Like an animal, it cannot think about itself.
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