One striking aspect of the business is its language. The matter of who shall own Wesdand and who shall be blamed is to a great extent conducted in the language of ‘I am more pro-American than thou.’ Again, I am pretty sure that this is deceptive; for all his current rhetoric, Mr Michael Heseltine’s past record makes it unlikely that he went berserk for the sake of European military industries. But for some reason, he and other politicians have translated their rage into a loyalty competition over the American connection.
There are younger fogies who defend the unimpeded play of market forces on Wesdand (so long as they can impede the forces they don’t want in the market). They proclaim that to oppose the Sikorsky bid is an ungrateful, xenophobic insult to our mighty American partner. Then there are those older and more cunning fogies who tell us that the true loyalty to the United States is quite the opposite. In Washington (they say), people are yearning for Western Europe to end its tiresome dependence on America by building a separate capacity to defend itself – even if that means a touch of protectionism which might incommode the odd American corporation.
The second argument is an endearing, disingenuous old whore. It has been around for years. It is, beneath the pious nonsense, the ancient British hankering to manoeuvre the United States out of direct influence on British political and economic affairs while retaining – even increasing – America’s obligation to defend these islands if they are under threat. It is something out of ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ – the Americans should stay in the pantry until they are rung for, when they must present themselves fully equipped and at the double.
And one understands this very well. Who doesn’t remember Dubcek saying that a democratic Czechoslovakia would be a better partner for the Soviet Union, or Jacek Kuron arguing that a ‘Finlandised’ Poland would offer Moscow a stable friend and a prosperous neighbour? (No, I know that Republicans don’t put Democrats in labour camps.)
Sincere or not, the way British governments talk in public to the United States has grown increasingly servile. Assent to ‘Star Wars,’ assent by silence to American policy towards Nicaragua which Britain might have softened. In private, the language is quite different. Certainly, our policy imposes a basic dependence, especially since Britain’s deterrent ceased to be ‘independent.’ But do the Americans require all this fawning? Or can it be that the chorus of loyalty is really meant to drown voices of dissent at home, to impose a loyalty test by which patriotism is defined by ritual homage to the ‘special relationship’?
A queer article by Roger Scruton appeared in The Times last week. He complained that criticism of the United States as an ‘imperial power’ was now spreading to sections of the Right. Wicked voices suggested that Britain was a ‘dependency’ or ‘client state’ of America. The truth was that ‘the British Empire lives on in America, just as the Roman Empire lived on in Byzantium, although in a form more vital, more industrious and more generous.’
So we are really they, a dependency of our more generous selves. This reminded me of the old Welsh assertion that America was really British because the Indians spoke Welsh, proving that they were descendants of Welsh colonists brought there by Prince Madoc three centuries before Columbus.
Before Americophilia as mad as that, reason falls silent. Scruton adds, incautiously, that Harvard University is ‘a bastion of European culture.’ Yes, but against what? Against the Iroquois? Or against an ‘actually existing America’ which is not British and not even very European any more, but setting off down tracks which no longer look like paths broken for Europeans to follow?
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
I see cerebrotonic Scruton in this poem of Auden’s, extolling an Anglo-America which would never have existed even if no Italian, Irishman, Slovak, Pole or Jew had reached Staten Island.
In a less fantastic form, though, this way of looking at the relationship is quite common. Up to about 40 years ago, those who governed the British and told them what to think inhabited a blob-shaped mental world. It comprised the Home Counties, London south of the Park, Westminster and the Inns of Court. Now, after decades of Fulbright grants and academic exchanges, their descendants inhabit a world shaped like a dumbbell. At one end, the Home Counties, etc., then a long, thin bit, then another blob consisting of Washington DC and some habitable bits of Manhattan and New England.
The rest of the world, outside this ‘civilised’ dumb-bell, is dark and potty. It speaks foreign languages; it suffers rather disgustingly; nobody can spell its statesmen. Dumb-bell people feel as uneasy in Prague as in Glasgow. When they say ‘Europe’ they mean Dorset, Tuscany and Vermont.
I find as many dumb-bell people among journalists as among politicians. The number of news editors who take their opinions from American magazines, if not from the copious bulletins of the US Embassy, seems to grow rather than to decrease. If Britain were ever to change course, even into a mild version of non-alignment, these ‘cadres’ would feel that their country was leaving them.
To criticise this Atlantic provincialism is to be accused, most comically, of ‘xenophobia.’ Philip Norman wrote a raging article the other day against visitors who still found the United States a place of ‘excitement and energy,’ and overlooked the ‘bureaucracy, the snobbishness, the obscene medical system and the beggars’ that impress him there. My point is not about the way the Americans manage themselves, but about the way the British manage their dependence upon the United States.
For we do live under an imperium, if not an empire. Few great powers have imposed a lighter tax in obedience than the Americans levy on us, and most people here still accept the general bargain of dependence in return for protection. But a client state we are.
This is a relationship which can be lucidly managed, but only if we keep a clear head. It is an arrangement of self-interest, not – as the Westland language implies – a mystical marriage to be kept holy by flattery and insincere obeisance. After all, the British might one day decide to go a different way. And it would be a pity if the dumb-bells jumped off into the Atlantic.
[1986
Thatcher’s Dream
I had not quite realised, until I saw Mrs Thatcher on television last Wednesday, that she intended to remove what she calls ‘socialism’ from Britain altogether and for good. This was my mistake. She has said this on several occasions since the 1983 election although never, I think, with the pertness she displayed last week.
Out will go the carpets and curtains, whose faded red ‘does not go with the British character,’ to be replaced by pastel shades which match rather than contrast. Mrs Thatcher means to do the place up in the American manner, with two coordinate parties both committed to ‘freedom under the law’ and to ‘the free enterprise system.’
One may laugh, scream or gape. But that is what she says. Let’s avoid the argument about whether the Labour movement in this country is properly to be termed socialist or not. When Mrs T. says ‘socialist,’ she means ‘Labour.’ She does not wish simply to defeat the Labour Party. She means to demolish it, and to throw its structure, institutions and ideology into the skip.
What country does she think she is living in? Scotland, to start with, is plainly not part of that pays imaginaire; it returns a majority of Labour MPs which grows at each election and will be larger still next time. Is it that nameless country which is England south of the M62 motorway between Hull and Liverpool, containing about 90 per cent of the British Tory vote? But in that land too there are great enclaves – presumably foreign and un-British – who do not find Labour policies alien to their traditions.
But the ‘what country’ question isn’t about geography. It is really addressed to Mrs Thatcher’s assumptions about what sort of society we live in now and what its real inheritance from history is – social, economic or moral.
Stalin used to talk about ‘non-antagonistic contradictions,’ mea
ning roughly that if workers in the Soviet state rebelled against their bosses, their revolt could not be a genuine class struggle. Mrs Thatcher, similarly, assumes that our real ‘contradictions’ have been ironed out; that the weak no longer have any inherent need to combine against the strong.
She does, at least, admit the need for some form of parliamentary opposition. But who will be the ‘Democrats’ to her ‘Republicans’? Shrewd commentators – Anthony Bevins on the Independent, Adam Raphael on this paper – draw out her logic to imply that there should be two parties: her own Tories and the Tory ‘Wets.’
These fantasies are released on ‘actually-existing’ Britain: scarcely a society equal enough, prosperous enough, fair enough or free enough to divide its needs between a Tory Tweedledee and a Tory Tweedledum. This is not just a matter of the North-South divide, or of appalling unemployment. For those lucky enough to retain a job, Britain is a low-wage economy in which most manual workers reach their earning peak in their early twenties. Outside the middle-class professions and the bureaucracy, there is no ascending escalator of rewards which slows down only as retirement approaches.
It is my belief that a historic explosion of middle-class wealth and purchasing power is very close, especially in London. Almost nothing suggests that this will flow into productive investment, spreading jobs or raising real wages. Instead, it will take place just as British governments are presented with the famous ‘poisoned chalice’: the burden of power at the moment when oil revenue fades away and leaves us with the shrunken, neglected remains of traditional manufacturing industry.
Wherever the proper ground for a pleasant partnership of free-enterprise parties, it will not be found in the 1990s. Britain is still a place of painful inequality which will grow worse, not better, just as we enter the economic rapids.
The first tugs and shocks of those rapids can already be felt. Mrs Thatcher complains – indeed, Mr Kinnock complains -of the fanatical, stupid excesses of some Labour local authorities. These are no more than the mirror image of her own ‘conviction’ politics. They emerge at a time when, for all her talk of ‘freedom under the law,’ the coercive power of the State against the citizen is being expanded – by new police powers, by authoritarian changes to the law – on a scale never seen in Britain outside war-time … or since the Peterloo years. Impoverishment, repression and dogmatism do indeed invite a political ‘realignment,’ but hardly towards the laissez-faire consensus dreamed of by the Prime Minister.
Then there is the proposition that ‘socialism’ is in some way un-British. This reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s almost pathetic insistence that Soviet communism is not an adaptation of Tsarist patterns of rule and obedience but their opposite: a non-Russian imposition devised in the alien minds of Germans and Jews.
If Mrs Thatcher were saying that Muscovite communism is alien to Britain, few would disagree. If she were saying that the ideology of the Labour movement is un-British, on the other hand, then a moment’s glance at two centuries of working-class struggle would render her remark too silly to discuss.
But what she means, I think, is that collectivism with a levelling ethic, encouraged by State action, does not fit with her idea of the sturdy British individual. This thought is not so much nonsense as a fragment of widespread mythology.
The only particle of truth here is that the English (to be specific) have never developed more than an ambiguous relation to the idea of the ‘State’ – which they still confuse verbally with terms like ‘nation’ and ‘government.’ Socially, however, the British in recent history have shown a preference and talent for collective behaviour which is without parallel in Europe.
This has ranged from ‘macro’ to ‘micro.’ At one end is the phenomenal capacity for patriotic mobilisation, shown most recently over the Falklands war. At the other is – or rather was – the cohesion of families and groups of families asserting some control over their living conditions. In between lay the infinite web of associations for collective action: combinations, craft unions, church-based organisations, leagues for this or that, societies for every conceivable serious or frivolous purpose, sport groups, boozing clubs, informal savings and benefit circles, silver bands and pigeon fanciers.
Out of this universe of collective experience – acquired in what is still casually called an ‘age of individual enterprise’ -came two very simple ideas. One was that unity is strength. The other was that, whatever the nobs say, one man is as good as another but usually needs help to make that manifest.
The atomisation of British society is producing apathy rather than enterprise. Reviving that old collectivism is what Labour is really about. One could wish that that party were less blindly patriotic, and more imaginative about ways to harness that social cohesion, but Labour is undeniably attached to the roots of British attitudes. Meanwhile, Mrs Thatcher really must stop behaving like the late Walter Ulbricht of East Germany who–in Brecht’s taunt – wanted to dismiss his population and appoint another.
[1986
Last Leader
After crossing the river, the little band of Palaeolithic hunters huddled together shivering on the far bank. They were cold and wet, but they still had their flint-tipped spears. Men and women together, side by side collected dry brushwood at the top of the sandy shore and tried to start a fire. Here at least the ground was firm, unlike the flat swamps of the south bank, and in the distance ahead they could see a line of northern heights, shaggy with forest. There should be deer there, perhaps a mammoth. The fire took hold and warmed them. Soon the group was spreading out and – without regard to colour, sexual preference, age, size or creed – beginning to gather the nuts, berries and tubers and to share them democratically, once more in balance with the environment and with one another. And as the evening shadows lengthened, the first members of the species Homo Erectus to arrive in London fell to their normal diversions, or ‘what we would consider a life of idle luxury -music, dancing, relating to each other, the constant flow of conversation’.
So Ken Livingstone might imagine the first inhabitants of the GLC area. They call him a Trot, but there is much more in him of a far older generation of palaeo-socialists. For Livingstone believes in a social version of the Fall, in a State of Nature and – almost – a Garden in which human beings lived with one another, innocently, equally, without private property or surplus, without stress, in balance with nature. In a long conversation with John Carvel, far the most astonishing and winning part of this book, he lays out his own Livingstonian anthropology. These wandering bands did not know war, as the inhabitants of the nuclear-free zone of Lewisham shall not know war. They were ‘a very together, well-organised and sophisticated proto-culture’. Everything that we are today has emerged from the hunter-gatherer tradition. ‘All of our ability, the development of our intellect, all of our early culture grows out of those kinship groups operating overwhelmingly in a co-operative way… The hunter-gatherer is what humanity is.’
So far, so Fourier, or Rousseau or St-Simon. The most interesting question about state-of-nature Utopian thinkers is where they insert the Fall and what they consider to have played the serpent. Ken Livingstone has no doubts. It was the introduction of agriculture, the Neolithic revolution ‘twenty thousand years ago’, which ruined everything. For a start, it accelerated the growth of population until the ecological balance collapsed. ‘Hunter-gatherers have a basic diet which means you can’t wean children easily. It’s all hard, scrunchy stuff. There’s no animals’ milk or mushy foods.’ And with the junk food of planted crops came the creation of wealth, surpluses, hierarchies, technology.
‘If you look at the way the City of London works, it is operating in exactly the same way as the most primitive of those societies based on agriculture…. The basic motive force is greed and exploitation, which is there from the start once you move away from that co-operative group. We haven’t learned to cope with surpluses and distribute them without greed becoming the major motive factor and the desire for power over
others. I do not think that is a natural state for humankind to be in.’
This is all fearful heresy to those – like myself – reared on the work of V. Gordon Childe, whose Marxist version of the natural state was located precisely in the world of Neolithic agriculture, perceived as a non-competitive, co-operative and equal society bonded together by kinship and by the need to give and receive food surpluses to relieve crop failure. For Gordon Childe, the ‘origins of inequality’ were to be found in the invention of metallurgy, creating, out of the families who possessed the secret, hereditary castes which would eventually develop into a primitive bourgeoisie with all its attendant vices of greed, privilege and war.
But then Gordon Childe, as a Communist, took a basically optimistic view of history. His metallurgical Fall might have wrecked the ‘undifferentiated substantive’ of primitive farmers. It was, however, the first ‘contradiction’ in a dialectic which would in the end create equality and co-operation at a higher synthesis – the victory of the industrial world proletariat. What is fascinating about ‘Red Ken’, so much a child of the Seventies, is his pessimism. A man who does not see history as in at least some sense a progress will never make a recognisable Communist, whether Stalinist or Trot. Talking, or rambling on, to Carvel, Livingstone derides the whole idea of progressive evolution, biological or social. ‘It’s there in the thinking of a lot of people around Stalin – the idea that man is getting better, that we are part of this inevitable upward progress. We’re not really … We’re still trying to adjust to changes that came over us twenty thousand years ago.’ Well, it was there in the thinking of a lot of people around Karl Marx as well. But Ken Livingstone, a man for compassionate issues rather than ideologies who was brought up in south London suburbs rather than among proletarian terraces, simply points to the city around him as evidence of negative evolution. People now live on their own, surrounded by other isolated people. They do not gather tubers with their comrades, neither do they enjoy that ‘music, dancing, relating to each other, the constant flow of conversation’ which is proper to the species. ‘The isolation you get in society, particularly urban society, where people are frightened and embarrassed to turn to other people for support, means that we are living in a way which is completely at odds with the best part of fifteen million years of evolution which turned us into what we are.’
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