Games with Shadows

by Neal Ascherson

  In the politics of returning inequality, which is the theme of Mrs Thatcher’s eight years in power, London plays a spectacular part. Argument persists about the concept of ‘two nations,’ divided by wealth and political allegiance, and there are sensible warnings that it is misleading to see this division in geographical terms alone. It is not just in the North that an ‘underclass’ is expanding so rapidly. But it is in and around London, above all, that the new ‘overclass’ is appearing.

  Recently there appeared John Rentoul’s book ‘The Rich Get Richer’. Rentoul observes that there are really three ‘nations:’ the poor, the rich – and the super-rich, or, as he puts it, ‘the haves, the have-nots and the have-lots.’ His conclusion, rather unexpected, is that while there has been a sharp increase in differences of income in the Thatcher period, the differences of wealth have merely stopped decreasing.

  Before Mrs Thatcher’s victory in 1979, Britain had less income differences than most industrialised countries: the share of the top 1 per cent had halved since 1945. Now the income share of the top 10 per cent has returned to its 1960s level, rising from 6½ times that of the bottom 10 per cent to 7½ times between 1979 and 1983. The figures of those living at or below the Supplementary Benefit level were around 6.1 million in 1979. and are now almost 12 million. The size of Britain’s ‘underclass’ has nearly doubled, amounting today to almost a fifth of the entire population.

  Wealth, on the limited figures available, has not changed much in distribution. It is a basic but still astounding fact of British life that the richer half of the population owns all the wealth that is worth talking about. The average ‘marketable assets’ of the lower half were worth only £2,140 in 1984; the property of the upper half averaged £33,580. What has stopped, in other words, is the trend towards more equal distribution of wealth in the richer 50 per cent.

  But the scale of new ‘overclass’ wealth remains awe-inspiring. The top 1 per cent owns 177 times the average of the bottom half. Some wealth remains ‘in the ground,’ like the £22 billion held in family and discretionary trusts. Much of it, though -and this is the important change – is becoming more liquid and disposable, turning into straight purchasing power. The gigantic potential value of private housing in London and the South-East, accelerating at up to 100 per cent a year in some parts of central London, is now about to be realised in cash through inheritance. There are some 20,000 millionaires now, and – so Rentoul reports – about 280,000 people who can live off unearned income without working.

  It was a bishop who announced the other day that British society had evolved from the shape of a pyramid to the much more satisfactory shape of a diamond: large in the middle, but tiny at the top and bottom. That diamond, though it may be the Prime Minister’s best friend, is paste. A better image would be an Eiffel Tower, with the view and the big lights at the tip of the spire.

  Back to London. I have written before about the middle-class wealth explosion which lies ahead, based on housing values even more than on astronomical new salaries and perks, leading towards a city whose main employment is serving and servicing the rich. But what happens to those in between?

  How can services – including the central Civil Service – carry on in London faced with such inflation? How can their workers be recruited, and how can their employers, private or public, afford to subsidise them to live in London? Even the rich who wish to move into London have problems. The Reward Research Surveys consultancy estimates that a family living in a five-bedroom house will increase their annual outgoings by nearly £22,000 if they decide to work and live in Greater London.

  The wind is blowing already. Primary schools in the Inner London area have 400 vacant teaching posts which – even in times of unemployment – they cannot fill, and the ILEA is desperately recruiting as far away as Australia. A Yorkshire teacher earns £9,318 after five years to buy a semi costing £29,000, while a London teacher earns £10,428 towards the same house costing about £80,000. Many London boroughs and health authorities report the same shrinking of staff. One can predict ‘a catastrophic fall in education, health care and social service provision’ in the capital. Another way of putting it is this: Londoners who can’t pay will become ignorant, neglected, disease-ridden proles.

  In its informal, British way, London is becoming a ‘closed’ city as Moscow is ‘closed’ to all but a few immigrants from the rest of the Soviet Union. And this affects not only the social services but the Civil Service itself. Strategies of ‘London weighting’ subsidies or ‘excess rent allowances’ like those just increased by the Treasury are not going to be enough to keep the door open. Staff cuts, which reduced Civil Service numbers by some 100,000 in recent years, will not be enough either. The flow of new recruits into the central State bureaucracy from outside London is already diminishing. How can they afford to live there?

  But, of course, they do not really need to. Teaching and healing have to happen where people live. Administering, under the sign of the computer, can be done anywhere.

  The proper answer is Canberra, or Islamabad. It is transferring the capital of the State to a normal environment where its rulers can live at a normal cost. The English, however, will never agree to take Parliament out of Westminster; the permanent under-secretaries would rather die than lose their clubs. All the same, the whole of Whitehall could shift to Milton Keynes or Telford, leaving only the most senior, ‘political’ civil servants in London. Even the Foreign Office could go, taking the embassies with it.

  Labour governments have ‘dispersed’ fragments of the Civil Service around the country, but in the interests of developing the regions. Mrs Thatcher cut that programme down almost to nothing. But now, one hears, there is renewed discussion of such ideas in the Civil Service: this time, because London is growing unaffordable.

  The end of ‘London rule’ would be a moment of real progress. It would begin the break-up of centralised power. It would change the way the English understand their nation. It would slow the enrichment of the ‘have-lots.’ Best of all, though, it would start a long-overdue divorce between those who have State power and those who have private wealth.

  [1987

  The Land and the People

  Grow less food! A gramophone record which has been playing the same old tune in the background of my entire conscious life has suddenly been taken off. It was Dig for Victory and All Power to the War Ag. It was Step Up Milk Production, it was Clear Bracken for more cattle to graze. It was We Have the Most Efficient Farmers in the World, and eventually it was Build the Grain Mountain – and grow filthy rich.

  In the uncanny silence which has fallen, distant sounds and voices echo more clearly. The sounds are the slamming of doors, as bank managers refuse loans to ten thousand small farmers going bankrupt and as City fund managers climb into their Porsches to drive away from their agribusiness grain prairies for ever. The voices preach new gospels. Farmers must become countryside wardens. Their job is not to grow food but to keep the land looking pretty. Fields are not for crops but for golf courses, riding schools, ‘broad-leaf coppices,’ or even Barratt villages.

  The great farming crash is upon us, and the word ‘fallow’ is no longer pejorative. D. H. Lawrence once imagined a fresh planet without people, just ‘grass, with a hare sitting up.’ But this is not what fallow Britain will look like.

  Left to themselves, the fields would fur over with weeds, waist-high and then head-high. Bushes would be followed by small trees, and eventually – in most of lowland Britain – by dense and scrubby secondary forest. Much of this land would revert to waterlogged swamp, as field drainage broke down. It would be good for birds, but also good for rats, mosquitoes and accumulations of weed pollen to make the nation sneeze and to smother its gardens. In the dimness of the tangled underbrush there would lurk, like the debris of a forgotten battle, millions of abandoned cars, refrigerators and – especially -agricultural machines.

  This prospect terrifies the Government, the planners and the environmental
ists. This is why, as the subsidies wind down at last, they have invented this new idea of the farmer as museum custodian, whose duty is to preserve the look of the rural ‘heritage.’ The ancient motto of the Polish peasantry, using their scythes sometimes on the wheat, sometimes (attached to a pike) on Imperial Russian soldiery, was ‘Nourish and Defend!’ The motto of British farmers will from now on be ‘Prune and Pretend!’

  Writing in the Independent, Richard North points out what nonsense it is, anyway, to treat this countryside as visually unchanging: ‘it is in fact both man-made and a relatively recent invention.’ The hedge-pattern is not older – usually – than the Enclosures: the bare uplands were bared by a combination of ruthless forest-felling, the eviction of human beings and the ecological murder inflicted by sheep.

  And, incidentally, this new turn in farming offers sheep more damage to do. In John McGrath’s new show, ‘There is a Happy Land,’ which began its three-part run on Channel 4 last week, a Gaelic song proclaims ‘My curse upon the Great Sheep: where are the children of kindly folk who left me in my youth, before the country of Mackay became a desert?’

  This refers to the Highland Clearances, families driven out to make way for sheep. But the surviving crofters are now dependent on income from sheep themselves. As sheepmeat is about the only EEC rural product not in surplus, its support will for the moment remain. But that – for sure – means that British farmers will now bolt into sheep-raising as a last resort.

  The result is all too predictable. In a few years there will be a mutton mountain. Then sheep subsidies will be slashed in turn, and the crofters, in company with most small upland farmers in Britain, will face catastrophe.

  This is not what either the Government or the environmentalists want to happen. Their hope, in this entirely new period, is that smallholdings would increase and prosper as the big farms ceased to be ‘viable.’ To keep the countryside fit for townees to enjoy, the land would have to retain its population. A vision begins to take shape of happy cottage families, tending a few acres of organically-grown buckwheat or rye, serving cream teas to spectators as they milk goats in a demonstration byre, supplementing their income by letting the grown children commute to the nearest Japanese car plant.

  I don’t want only to jeer at this change of heart. A break with the traditional belief that agricultural progress means letting big farms grow bigger by driving the small farmers off the land is very welcome. But such a new policy would need a complete change in British attitudes towards the rural economy.

  In this country, with the exception of the Scottish counties subject to the Crofting Acts, the small farmer is unprotected. He faces the full blast of competition for land from big landowners, from incomers backed by City fortunes, from multinational agribusiness concerns, from state corporations like the Forestry Commission. Even if the price of land goes on falling, the strong will continue – a little more slowly – to consume the weak.

  A century ago, when the first Crofting Act was passed, Aberdeenshire had more crofters – tenant smallholders – than any of the Highland counties which came under the Act’s protection. Now there are almost none. The slaughter of the Great War, the agonising rural slump which followed and then the growth of uncontrolled capitalist farming in the past 30 years did for them. How may this process be halted?

  It requires a completely new deal, a decision that the small farmer must be assisted to stay on the land – as he is in so many European countries – by legislation. The tax system must be revised to encourage the transmission of smaller farms to the heir. The sale of such farms must be controlled, giving first option to other farmers in the same category and only exceptionally allowing large landowners or rich incomers to acquire it. A special land bank should be founded, offering cheap loans. Central heavy-equipment parks should be established, capable of carrying out the essential jobs like drain-digging and track repair which the small farmer can ill afford for himself (this was done during the last war). Above all, large farms and estates which don’t meet stiff criteria of good land use should be purchased and broken up for re-sale.

  Some years ago, the banker Iain Noble was driving through the Highlands and picked up an Israeli hitch-hiker. He pointed out various landmarks, observing that this belonged to Lord X and that was the property of Sir James Y. Finally the hitchhiker turned to him in bewilderment. What did he mean? How could a loch or a mountain ‘belong’ to anyone?

  This question, strange and then all at once not strange at all, worked its way into Noble’s mind. Not much later, he left banking to become the founder of a college of Gaelic culture and language in Skye. But if Britain is to be ‘fallowed,’ then we all have to understand that story.

  To halt agricultural growth is to call into question the sacredness of private property in land. Even when we now say that, suddenly, we seem to have a glut of land instead of too little, it’s the ‘we’ that matters. This is a rare chance to recognise that, in the end, the use of the land is a decision for the community.

  [1987

  A Scottish Temple

  Overlooking Edinburgh, near the summit of the Calton Hill, there stands a Greek temple. It was built in 1829 to house the Royal High School. In the 1970s, it prepared to be the home of a Scottish Parliament. But in 1979, Westminster rejected the result of a referendum on devolution, and since then it simply stands and waits for a final decision on its future.

  In the way that one places fiction and myth in real landscapes, I realise that for me this has always been the temple of Artemis in Tauris, where the exiled princess Iphigenia served as priestess. Below is the surge and smoke of a city, rather than the desolate waves of the Black Sea breaking on the foot of cliffs. But something is waiting to be rescued there, as Iphigenia waited until Orestes and Pylades came.

  The place isn’t always empty. Every so often, the Scottish Grand Committee – the Scottish members of the House of Commons – come and hold their sessions there; a Tory gesture to national feelings, and a queer, deformed shadow of what might have been. Although Labour has a solid majority, 41 out of the 72 seats, the Conservatives govern Scotland through Malcolm Rifkind, Secretary of State, and his team of Tory junior Ministers. The Grand Committee may talk, but may not vote or decide. Its chairman is a Tory; its debates are cut off promptly at 1 p.m. Many MPs do not bother to attend, or leave early to catch the London plane.

  Last Monday was different. The public galleries were packed, and demonstrators waited outside. Debating time was extended to 3.30, and a record number of some 45 Scottish MPs arrived. Not all arrived on time. In true ‘Scotrail’ tradition, the train from Glasgow left half an hour late and then was blocked by another broken-down train at Linlithgow. Nine MPs on board, including Donald Dewar, due to make Labour’s opening speech, contemplated holding their own debate on the railway Tannoy.

  This time, the Grand Committee was discussing ‘the administration of Scotland’: in other words, devolution. The Conservatives, the only party which remains steadfastly opposed to a Scottish Assembly, saw no point in this, but Labour – now more united than ever before in its demand for an Assembly with strong economic powers – got its way.

  The debate began in a predictable, depressing way: the politicians settled down to regurgitating the devolution arguments of the 1970s and blaming one another for saying ‘A’ on one occasion and ‘B’ on another. Finally a voice from the gallery bellowed: ‘Get on with the future!’ He was shushed and reproved, but after that the discussion picked up some quality. A piece of ceiling about nine inches square, apparently dislodged by the eloquence of Anna McCurley (Con., Renfrew West & Inverclyde), fell and narrowly missed a civil servant. This, too, was a reminder – that time for repairing Scotland’s structure is not unlimited.

  Labour made much of its 1984 ‘Green Paper’ on devolution, offering an elected Scottish Assembly powers over most internal affairs with the right to raise money through its own income tax; Donald Dewar spoke of ‘an exciting, important constitutional reform’
which would restore confidence to Scottish politics. The Tories said an Assembly would be expensive and useless, and pointed out waspishly that only 27 Labour MPs out of 41 had shown enough interest in devolution to turn up. The SNP said Labour’s Assembly would be too weak, a Westminster puppet; the Liberals complained that it would not be elected by proportional representation.

  Nothing could be decided; no conclusion could be voted. The five-hour debate on Monday was in many respects lame; those who came hoping to see visions of Scotland’s future got little more than the familiar sight of politicians justifying their previous utterances. But interest in self-government is rising again. Seven years after the fiasco of the Scotland Act, which was passed by the Callaghan Government but withdrawn when the Scottish referendum produced a majority in favour which did not amount to 40 per cent of the electorate (the infamous, ‘Cunningham Amendment’), the idea of a Scottish Parliament is popular once more.

  A poll last February disclosed that four out of five adults wanted some form of Assembly. More striking still, a third favoured total independence. These are very startling figures, a higher self-government vote than any recorded in the 1970s. But they have to be qualified. First, they do not reveal the urgency of the wish, which may be of low intensity. Secondly, party loyalty in Scotland is still much stronger than loyalty to a constitutional idea. One of the strangest facts in the land is that most of those who say they would like Scotland to break the 1707 Union with England and become once more an independent nation are Labour voters – supporters of a party doggedly loyal to the Union.